While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

i ♥ this memory.

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https://www.ubackdrop.com

For Valentine’s Day I give you a photo I took with one of my favorite Sarasota loves. (Remember Ricci?)

It was 2005. I was newly single and living in my first apartment.

We took it using self-timer and two tea light candles. It took more than a dozen tries to get it right and by the end of our little shoot the carpet was splattered in wax. It took hours to scrape clean.

What I learned that day: lighting a heart on fire is easy. Capturing it forever is another story.

It was sooo worth it, because now I have this picture and every time I look at it I feel like I’m 23 again, fearless and on the verge of everything.

—

PS. So you know how I was crying the blues about schlepping my kid into restaurants? Well, Ricci is on assignment in West Africa right now and she brought along her 16-month-old daughter, Amelia. Now THAT’S what I call brave.

The (low) key to my heart

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https://www.lilybridal.co.nz/collections/all-wedding-gowns

Me and the Mr. are featured on my gal pal, Meg’s blog: Mimi + Meg.

It’s just a little Valentine’s Day post, a gift-y guide kind of thing, designed with Meg’s super snazzy touch.

Upon reading what I wrote I was struck by how utterly unglamorous we are.

Really? Our “couple time” is spent watching Wipe Out and eating french fries? Where’s the ROMANCE? The RAPTURE? Rummy? RUMMY? Ah well. At least there’s champagne and face cards. On especially steamy nights, we use our Golden Girls deck. You heard right. The cards came with the show’s 25th anniversary DVD collection.

Anyway. Let’s forget our lameness for a second and return to Meg.

Damn girl was profiled in The Washington Post last week. How sweet is that?

Keep up the excellent work, my trendsetting friend. Your dogged ambition, excellent taste and clever design skills are paying off. You deserve the recognition.

Now. Any advice on how I can get the Lance featured in the St. Pete Times (ugh, name change) Tampa Bay Times?

It’s not like I don’t know anyone in the newspaper business.

—

PS. Wedding photo by ubackdrop.

Crawlout Shelter: Baby Cave

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This used to be The Man Cave. It’s now The Baby Cave since the word nursery is kind of weak. I realize that “cave” implies that our child has fangs and bat wings, but in our current vampire-obsessed culture I think he’ll blend just fine.

The room is 90 percent finished. When my dad comes down in June, he’ll install white chair rail between the beige and green walls.

The crib was a gift from my parents. There’s (of course) a ridiculous story behind the purchasing of the crib, but I’ll save that tale for another day. The rug is from Ikea. I LOVE IKEA. And yes, I always think of Ed Norton’s IKEA rant in Fight Club when I’m aimlessly wandering the store’s tidy/handsome apartment displays.

[Crib = Babies R Us. Rocking chair = Cracker Barrel.]

I still need to replace the mini blinds with white cordless shades. I haven’t decided if I’m keeping the green valances. My mom made them for The Man Cave a couple years ago and they seem to match the room’s current reincarnation, so we’ll see.

I take zero credit for the paint job and crib assembly. Last month, I escaped to my Oma and Opa’s place in South Sarasota County for a weekend away with my sister. When I returned two days later to a freshly painted cave and expertly assembled crib, I got all weepy and sentimental.

With each new step I take with Joe, I fall deeper and deeper in love. I’m a lucky lady.

[Paint = Benjamin Moore in aventurine green and interlude beige. Inspiration behind color combo = Eddie Bauer.]

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A garden variety valentine from my Oma

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The sweetest Valentine’s Day gift I’ve ever received came today in the form of my Oma, who pulled into my driveway this morning with her Ford Taurus stuffed with two dozen bags of red mulch and her trunk full of plants.

She was a German workhorse on a mission.

Basically, my front yard has looked like hell for a year.

Joe and I have been so busy and broke lately that the last thing on our minds is landscaping, not that we don’t curse our grass-less front yard and dead potted plants every time we walk from our cars to the front door.

The first year we lived in this house I lovingly tended to the plants and shrubs. Two years ago, my mom and I planted fuchsia petunias that flowered so big and brilliant the neighbors stopped to admire them.

Remember last year’s vegetable garden? The thing went bust midway through the spring. We ended up with a handful of cherry tomatoes, two deformed bell peppers and one cucumber. We’ve yet to plant another garden, or even one patch of marigolds (Joe’s favorite flower).

I’ve been slacking in the horticulture department. Big time.

Enter my Oma.

She’s a master gardener with two green thumbs, two green pinkies and two green toes.

She could grow a bed of orchids in a leaky bucket in the corner of a dungeon. That is if she had a dungeon.

The small yard surrounding her park model offers few landscape opportunities, which (I think) has made her stir crazy.

SO … today she arrived at my house with enough mulch to carpet the neighborhood and enough ferns and flowers to manicure a golf course.

I had several appointments and various phone interviews, so I was in and out of the house and otherwise occupied all day.

By the time I returned from my last appointment, she had filled all my empty pots with pansies, planted small sprouts of greenery where dead scraggly bushes once crept, laid more than a dozen bags of mulch and replaced the batteries on all my burned-out garden lights.

The funny thing is, I’m not even sure she knew it was Valentine’s Day.

—

Bleeding heart photo by Simon Whitaker

Flashing my boob tube

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It just occurred to me that after all that bellyaching over our nuclear bomb TV, you might want to actually see what the flat panel squawk box looks like.

Here she is, boys. Sexy, huh? She’s winking at you. She’s bending over just slightly to pick up the remote. Her screen is shiny and her buttons are pert. Just look at the shape of her! Her casing is so sleek. I dare you to turn her on.

See the vase of half-wilting yellow roses? Joe gave them to me for Valentines Day. Sometimes (often times) he’s much more romantic than me. I had forgotten about Valentines Day. My friend Kat was staying with us that weekend and her flight left V-day morning. So around 9ish, I woke up and headed to the airport. Joe was still sleeping (duh), so I kissed him on the forehead and slipped out the door.

When I returned around 10ish, I figured he was still asleep and didn’t even NOTICE that his car wasn’t in the driveway. (Sometimes I’m a covert sleuth. Sometimes I’m an oblivious douf.  On this particular morning, I was the latter.)

I was home about five minutes before the front door flew open and Joe walked in carrying a dozen yellow roses and a 25-oz. BAG of Reese’s Cups. Those of you who know me (and those of you who only know me a little) know that PEANUT BUTTER AND CHOCOLATE PUMPS THROUGH MY VEINS.

I didn’t toss the yellow roses until March 10. The Reese’s were gone in less than a week.

Nana never sucked it in.

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Mail from my Nana is the best thing on earth.

She likes to write me letters on tree bark and toilet paper.

Last month I scribbled her a Valentine on a maxi pad.

In return she sent me this note with a magazine clipping inside.

The note reads:


Hello Heidi–

Just had to send you this article that I received from Aunt Shirl. Oh, how true it is! I certainly remember my first “rubber” Playtex girdle. Several of my friends were sold on them. They flattened your tummy, but pushed the excess up to your boobs. Really a tight fit. It would get mighty uncomfortable, especially if a girl had a large stomach and hips. God, what we didn’t do to try and look glamorous. Nowadays the girls go panty-free!

Well, I just had to get this to you for your Lance. I think it’s an article everyone will enjoy – I certainly did. Have a great week and say hello to Joe for me.

Love,
Nana

The magazine clipping, if you can read it:

And Nana’s trademark cursive of course.

Lance spreads some love.

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My boyfriend keeps hitting the snooze on his radio alarm clock.

It’s how he wakes up every morning before work – to 20-second blasts of 1980s pop songs.


“Do you come from a land down under? Where women glow and men plunder? Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear the thunder? You better run. You better take cover.”


Me? I’m usually in my office by then, drinking Timmy Hos coffee out of an Artvoice mug.

Who would’ve thought when I swiped this Artvoice mug eight years ago from the dimly-lit, alt-weekly newspaper I interned at in Buffalo, that I’d be sitting in my office, in my house, in St. Petersburg, Fla., sipping Timmy Hos in a blue nightgown and red slippers?

“Buying bread from a man in Brussels.
He was six-foot-four and full of muscles.
I said, ‘Do you speak-a my language?’
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich.”

Although Valentines Day has come and gone, I’m going to put this post up now before it totally gets away from me.

Since I still feel like the new kid on the blog block, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to introduce Lance to some friends, which I did by following new peeps on Twitter. I hadn’t set out to befriend only mommies on mommy blogs, but apparently Lance likes moms.

“Lying in a den in Bombay.
With a slack jaw, and not much to say.
I said to the man, ‘Are you trying to tempt me
Because I come from the land of plenty?’
And he said …”

Not being a mommy, I didn’t think I’d be drawn to mommy blogs (oh, and to one pseudo-daddy blog), but upon further reading, I found myself oddly captivated by these men and women and their child-rearing highs and lows, the likes of which I won’t get into. That’s their job.

Suffice it say, reading mommy blogs has kept me equally awestruck and birth-controlled.

Jill over at Modern Mommy Blog, is a 29-year-old social worker whose New Year’s resolutions include ingesting fish oil every day and avoiding alcoholic beverages. I think it’s refreshing that she broke both of these promises by Super Bowl Sunday, because in my opinion, cutting alcohol out of your life while introducing your body to fish oil sounds grim.

Jill has a one-year-old daughter, and is rooting for Kate Winslet in the Oscars. She entered herself in a Valentines Day contest sponsored by Linda, a scrapbooking, stay-at-home mother-of-three in Mississippi.

On Valentines Day, Jill, the Modern Mommy, spread a little “bloggy love” my way by posting about Lance on her blog, which was so solid of her.

So …

In the spirit of paying it forward, I recommend Modern Mommy to those of you who have children/are about to have children/might one day have children/are parents to pugs (or other such animals)/can appreciate a network of supportive family-friendly folks even if you are crass, self-indulgent and light-years away from having children/enjoy a pretty blog layout with meaningful posts/appreciate good advice and loyal webships (web friendships.)

Oh, and Joe finally woke up around 9:30 a.m., throwing groggy daggers my way in Pat Benatar’s battlefield.

“We are young, heartache to heartache we stand.
No promises, no demands …”

—
PS. My father gave my mother 1,600 lb. of corn for Valentines Day. After receiving such an awesome gift, she helped him lug the corn bags into the basement to dump into their corn burner hopper.