A blog post — with lots of pictures! — about eating out with the boys in France, over at the Learning to Eat blog. Check it out!

Because Ericka is recovering from her cold, but I haven’t yet, I’m doing everything she’s doing today. Including this meme, even though I should probably be sleeping…

Four jobs I’ve had in my life:
1. Babysitter/mother’s helper
2. Hardware salesgirl
3. Fabric swatch cutter at Esprit
4. Permissions manager at a literary agency, a job which required that I call Maurice Sendak daily

Four movies I’ve watched more than once:
1. Manny and Lo
2. The Searchers
3. Big Night
4. Toy Story 2

Four places I have lived:
1. Tokyo
2. Oxford
3. Manhattan
4. Berkeley

Four TV shows I watch:
1. Mad Men
2. Top Chef
3. Project Runway
4. Weeds

Four places I have been:
1. The Philippines (does it count if I don’t remember?)
2. Moscow (ditto)
3. Barcelona
4. Toledo

Four people who email me regularly:
1. Libby
2. Elrena
3. My parents (one of whom has a blog)
4. Literary Mama editors seeking approvals on pieces they want to publish (and if any of you are reading this, I know I’m behind! you’re next!)

Four of my favorite foods:
1. chocolate
2. peaches
3. chard, sauteed with pine nuts and raisins (really)
4. homemade granola

Four of my favorite beverages:
1. milk
2. tea
3. water
4. red wine

Four places I’d rather be right now (at the moment, I’m sitting in the boys’ room waiting for Eli to fall asleep for his nap, so I’m not really complaining…)
1. out in the sun
2. back on the French barge with my family
3. in a bookstore
4. in bed

Four things I’m looking forward to in the next year:
1. Mama, PhD readings
2. taking the boys to my parents’ house (next week!)
3. finding a great publisher for Learning to Eat
4. watching the boys move on to 1st grade and preschool

If you read this, consider yourself tagged!

Ben’s never been a particularly terrific sleeper. He didn’t really sleep through the night until he was three, when we threw so many changes at him at once (new house! big boy bed! toilet training! baby brother! preschool!) that, clearly exhausted by all the upheaval, he finally started sleeping through. And for a time, his sleeping was pretty good, although I couldn’t really appreciate it (on account of the new baby), but I had my wits sufficiently about me to note it in my journal: “We’ve never had such a run of great sleep. If only I could sleep so well!”

Since then the sleep has come, and it has gone, and right now it is gone. He doesn’t fall to sleep easily, he doesn’t stay asleep. Occasionally we have tried charts and rewards for staying in bed all night, and have had varying degrees of success, but I think he just might not ever be the kind of person who sleeps from night to day without being awake in the middle of the night for a while. And I don’t stress about that too much because he gets it from me, after all (and a middle of the night cuddle from a warm kid isn’t so bad).

But the hopping out of bed every ten minutes for 2 hours after I’ve said goodnight drives me wild. I am not at my best mom self after much of that. So, inspired by Aliki‘s post the other about the other part of the sleep issue, we are taking steps.

Ben is beset by worries and bad dreams; most recently he has worried about being a passenger on the Titanic, or about falling off his bike during the Tour de France. So we’ve been talking a lot about worried thoughts and happy thoughts, and trying to switch from one to the other (again, who am I to parent him through this?!) And he likes to make lists, so we decided that a list by his bed, of good dreams, might be useful fodder for him to refer to when he is anxious. I suggested the first thing on the list, and then he got into the spirit of it and really started to dream big.

I think his prize for staying in bed will be making pain au chocolat.

The first time we’d tried to visit the Eiffel Tower, we traveled via the batobus, which offers a scenic ride down the Seine.

Too scenic, as it turned out.

We arrived at 7pm and faced lines that snaked from the entrance back and forth all the way across the plaza. We were without sufficient food or line distractions to survive the wait, so we risked – and faced – the boys’ loud and bitter disappointment by turning back and regrouping.

The next day was stormy and windy and Eli didn’t nap. We debated: on the one hand, the weather might be keeping the crowds down; maybe a tired boy would be a docile and patient line stander…. But probably not, on both counts. We stayed home and cooked dinner.

Finally, we planned our ascent of the Eiffel Tower like mountaineers plan for Everest. In this case, Tony and I were the Tibetan sherpas, and the boys were Sandy Hill Pittman, who show up and have every desire met, needing only to put their bodies where they’re told and not use up too much oxygen. I was grateful they didn’t want cappuccino (although come to think of it, at the base of the Eiffel Tower, that would be easy to provide).

We’d been advised that the lines are shorter in the late afternoon, so we waited until after Eli’s nap, hoping that the boys would be well-rested, the lines a little easier, and that we’d get up to the top and out before it was way too late for dinner (or even bed). We brought Eli’s view master and discs, Ben’s journal, 2 cameras (since Ben’s a big photographer now), and windbreakers in case it was cold at the top. More importantly, I spent Eli’s naptime packing up food:

carrot sticks, water bottles, baby bell cheeses, 2 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, 2 nutella sandwiches (never underestimate the motivating power of chocolate), 2 Z bars, and a ziploc bag of almonds and raisins. We set off at 4, arriving at the base at 5pm. Tony grabbed a bench with the boys while I staked out our place on line.

We didn’t make it out without any tears (from Eli, when I started walking down a flight of stairs holding his hand rather than letting him hold the banister):

But, we made it up, we made it down, and we made it back home, our backpacks empty, four and a half hours later.

cross-posted at Learning to Eat

There were many things we loved about our two weeks in France. I got to meet my long-time computer friend, Susannah, and her family; Ben got to practice his newly-acquired French (which was charming except when he was frustrated with us, and would shout a begrudging “D’accord!”); we all got to eat lots of ice cream and crepes and nutella and pain au chocolat.

But perhaps our favorite thing about France was the carousels. It seemed like every park, every plaza, practically every wide spot in the road had a carousel plunked down in it, and the boys rode them all. They learned to distinguish between up-and-down horses and rearing-back horses; they learned to look for leather belts that weren’t too worn down to buckle (because those rearing-back horses reared waaaay back!); they learned that sometimes it’s pleasant to ride the carousel on a bench swing, or a stationary, climb inside (rather than climb aboard) animal, or even a bench.

In Paris, we found carousels outside Sacre Coeur and in the Tuileries, and in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The one near Sacre Coeur was double-decker, the first we encountered (though we went on to see them in Montpelier and Avignon, too):

The carousel in the Jardin du Luxembourg doesn’t look like much; it’s not as sparkly bright and bejeweled as the others. It’s a single decker, rather small and delicate, there’s no music, and the animals, who are all sorely in need of a fresh coat of paint, don’t move up and down, or rear back, they just sway genty back and forth.

But none of that matters, because here, after the carousel operator checks each rider’s buckle and gently pats each animal’s head, he hands each child a short wooden stick, and as they spin round and round, picking up speed as they go, they get to try to catch a brass ring on the end of their stick.

The kids love it, and the parents all cheer their kids on — suddenly carousel-riding became an exciting spectator sport, and we all had a ball.

Mama, PhD is just starting to make its way out in the world, and yet my attention is split between that and my new book project, Learning to Eat, which I’m co-editing with Mama, PhD contributor Lisa Harper.

As the book proposal makes the rounds, we’re blogging about feeding our kids. Right now, our summer travels have us writing about learning to eat in Hawaii, in Paris, and on airplanes, but eventually, we’ll get back to where it all started: the kitchen, the playground, the dinner table.

Come join the conversation!

It was good to get home yesterday, after a long and emotional day (two airplane rides, Evan Kamida’s beautiful memorial service, and one big earthquake), to find that all my guys had remembered Tony’s and my anniversary.

Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to get anniversary cards from one’s children, but they just like to celebrate. Perhaps, even more, it doesn’t make sense to get a card in the shape of a famously sunken ship, but the boys just like boats right now (if you’re having trouble telling the two boats apart, just remember that the Queen Mary has 3 smoke stacks, the Titanic has four. I did not know this at the beginning of the summer).

A Titanic love, is how I’m thinking of it.

Months ago, the lovely and talented Gail Konop Baker, a former Literary Mama columnist, invited Elrena and me to guest blog at The Debutante Ball, a group blog for writers publishing their first book. It was a fun post to write — and I hope a fun post to read! Here’s an excerpt from “3,000 Miles, Two Writers, One Book:”

Meet over email. Of course; you live, after all, 3,000 miles apart, but it helps our relationship get into writing right away. We are literally words on a page (screen) to each other for the first year of our collaboration (we don’t even talk on the phone!) It doesn’t hurt that we meet via Elrena’s submission to the section of Literary Mama that Caroline is editing at the time.

Meet when one of you is pregnant. This helps get the conversation personal, pronto, as Caroline cautions Elrena that she might not get back to her very promptly with edits.

Don’t always stick to the point. We know we are both writers, and mothers, and if we’d stayed on topic it might have stayed at that. Instead, we digress into breastfeeding and parenting and graduate school and ivory tower life — and friendship. And then, ultimately, a book.

Click on over to The Debutante Ball to read the rest!

We’ve published three terrific new columns this week. I’m particularly grateful for the sensitive, sadly timely Me and My House:

As I nurse my son, I think about women as priests, as deacons, and I think about women who lay no claim to such titles, but whose lives show forth the same devotion. Women who gladly give of themselves in the service of others. For the past few weeks I haven’t needed to venture outside of my house to find a community of people to care for me; women have brought the Body of Christ to me.

Click on over to Literary Mama to read more.

I learned yesterday that Literary Mama columnist Vicki Forman‘s son Evan died suddenly, and I have not been able to think of anything else since.

Vicki and I have never met in person, though we’ve exchanged writing and music and were looking forward to doing a reading together next month. I never met Evan, or his big sister, or Vicki’s husband, but I got to know them all a little bit through Vicki’s gorgeous writing. Now, somehow, Evan is gone and the writing is all that’s left. It’s a wonderful tribute to her strong and spirited son, but oh, Vicki. . . I wish you still had your boy.

I’ve posted a note at Literary Mama, where readers can send a note to Vicki and contribute to a memorial fund in Evan’s name.