how we spent our summer vacation.

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Summer is my favorite. Always has been. I love the sun, the heat, the freedom to walk outside without the air biting my cheeks. The weather has made a huge impact on my days, both working with other people's kids and as a stay-at-home mom. Everything's so much more manageable when you can just throw your hands up and say, "Everyone outside! Now!"

After a long winter in southeast Michigan where it was often too cold to even go outside to play (negative wind chills, anyone?), I was so, so looking forward to warm breezes and blue skies. And this summer didn't disappoint. The universe may have delivered some of the worst of times this year, but make no mistake, there were some best of times, too. We didn't travel or sleep in or execute any huge house projects. We just summered. Took it easy. Relaxed. Drank each other in.


So...here's how we spent our summer vacation:

:: It was the summer of the backyard. We took full advantage of our backyard - on the new slide mound, in the sandbox, on the swings (usually with a "friend" - a stroller, a dinosaur, etc. - in the adjacent swing), in the little pool, at the music wall, and in the "Daddy garden." She'd eat anything from the garden as long as we called it a "Daddy" vegetable - Daddy tomatoes, Daddy peppers, etc. She learned to swing on the big-kid swing. She, like us, called the pathway to the park "mosquito alley." She explored and dug and fell down and made it hers.

:: It was the summer of language explosions. Rowan learned to speak in full sentences, to use language idioms ("Umm..." when she was pondering), and to play with language to make jokes. For some reason, she started calling me "Momany" (pronounced "mama-nee") and herself "Rowalee." She commands us: "Come see!" "Look at my tower!" She still clarifies with sign language from time to time - most recently, when we were at a restaurant and she was eating salad. She was asking for more dressing and did the sign for "get dressed," which I thought was clever and hilarious. She loves making us laugh and telling us, "Dat funny!"

:: It was the summer of lounging. We had some morning commitments - music class, a Parent & Child class, our regular library story times - but mostly, we could take our time. Rowan loved having picnic breakfasts on the front porch while we waited for the garbage trucks to come by:

:: It was the summer of numbers and letters. They're everywhere, and Rowan notices them everywhere. We started assigning favorite people to letters, and now she yells whenever she sees a familiar one - A for Anna, C for Carrie, D for Daddy, E for Emmett, F for Finny, G for Gramma and Grandpa, M for Momany, O for Obee, R for Rowan, S for Scarlet, and T for Tatum. She also discovered when standing at the edge of the pool that the number 3 turns into an M if it's sideways, a W if you're the other sideways, and an E if you're upside-down. As for numbers, she loves counting, and if you ask her how old she is? "One and a half! Almost two on Rowie's happy birthday!"


:: It was the summer of growing. Her pigtails are long. Her clothes are too small. (Except her shoes...her feet are a full two to three sizes smaller than her same-age friends' feet.) She now loves to pee in the potty when I change her diaper, although I wouldn't guess that she's anywhere near being potty-trained. (That's fine, I'm not ready for that quite yet, either.) And, telltale sign of toddlerhood, she adores pretending to be a baby...like, all the time. She actually distinguishes between real and pretend, and did NOT enjoy when I pretended to be her, sitting on Daddy's lap in the big chair and drinking her milk: "Rowie saaad. Mama just pretend. Rowie all better, drink milk."


:: It was the summer of swimming swimming swimming, and then swimming some more. We spent a ridiculous number of afternoons between naptime and dinnertime at my mother-in-law's neighborhood pool, and I'd say it was Rowan's favorite thing about summertime. Whenever I'd go into her room to get her from her nap, she'd sit straight up and say, "Gramma's biiiig pool?!" I loved being able to say yes. I thought she'd be nervous in the water, given her shyness in new situations, but she took to it like a natural. It didn't take long before she was going all the way under the water ("Jumping under," she called it) and splashing around like a fish.

:: It was the summer of evolving tastes and preferences. Her current favorite things in the world: Elsa, Anna, Elmo, Cookie Monster, jumping, swimming, letters, pickles, baby dolls, birthdays, Elmo oatmeal, and books (especially Pete the Cat, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, Curious George, The Paper Bag Princess, Frozen, Big Pumpkin, Pickle Things - any book that she gets to recite parts of). She'll tell us when she likes something, too - "I like dat song!" "I love dat pizza!"


:: It was the summer of singing. I remember wondering, in the spring, how and when kids start singing. It seemed like such a weird, far-off milestone. But now? Rowan loves singing full songs: Itsy-Bitsy Spider, It's Raining It's Pouring, The Wheels on the Bus, Happy Birthday, Twinkle Twinkle, songs from music class, Sesame Street record songs, etc. I might be the only person who can distinguish which song she's singing 95% of the time, but hey. The effort counts.

:: It was the summer of being messy. For sure. Pretty much every day. But, true to her Gorga heritage, my girl loved the clean-up just as much as the mess-making. Here she is trying to wipe up her driveway paintings with a wet paper towel:

:: It was the summer I learned that Rowan has a secret talent: pole dancing. She found poles everywhere we went and executed some fancy moves. Hey, someone's got to make the money around here. 

:: It was the summer of exploring our city. We made sure to hit up some of the best summertime (and just general) destinations that Ann Arbor has to offer: Nichols Arboretum, the Farmers Market, the U of M Matthei Botanical Gardens, the splash pad at Buhr Pool, the U of M Museum of Natural History, the Hands-On Museum, a million parks and playgrounds, the Huron River, Washtenaw Dairy, neighborhood ice cream trucks...

The Arb

Washtenaw Dairy

Botanical Gardens

The Arb, again

A Marilyn moment at one of the U of M Hospital courtyards
(with a dinosaur in hand, natch)

Ran through the woods to hunt down the ice cream truck

:: It was the summer of identifying emotions. And, for me, letting her feel them, even though sometimes I want to tamp down on the negative ones. Since Rowan processes so much through language, it helped give her names for her big feelings. Now she can tell me when she feels sad, angry, happy, scared, and (my favorite) frustrated (by stomping her feet and yelling, "I'm frustrated!"). 

Adult Swim sucks. I agree, Rowan.

All in all? It was a good summer. We flourished outside. We thrived in the water. We danced in the rain and laughed in the sunshine. Rowan's pigtails grew long. All these wonderful things happened, and my daughter grew and learned and love. And. And we also said good-bye to my mom. 

And now it's September. Rowan turns two in two weeks. There are some things I'm fine with taking a break from - sunscreen, loads of swimming laundry, and bedrooms that are sunny for hours past toddler bedtime - and it feels like a relief to let go of the season in which I lost my mom. 

So. Moving forward, welcoming autumn, and - as always - enjoying my sweet girl.

backyard music wall!

I did it...I finished one of my hundredty-thousand projects!

Our backyard music wall took less than an hour from start to finish, not including my two trips to the store for materials. Installation basically went like this: bring everything outside; nail everything to fence. 

...And I could just leave it at that and not over-explain every (easy and obvious) step. Yeah, right. Here's how it went: First, I gathered everything together.

All of these items are from the thrift store, except the two xylophones (a friend gave those to me), and some random things from the dollar store - the butterfly wind chime and bamboo wind chime (both towards the bottom left in this picture), two of the three mini-buckets (in the middle), the colorful spinning orb (at the top), and the two hanging butterfly decorations (on the right). At the thrift store, I found various pot lids and pan pieces, wooden utensils, a metal dish-drying rack, a hamster wheel, a flower-shaped photo display thingie, and a muffin tin. Oh, and a huge popcorn tin (not pictured here). It was around $20 total, and I used an assortment of nails and cup hooks from our collection in the basement for hanging.

I cleaned some of the items (and neglected others...possibly a disgusting mistake) and hauled everything outside to pick a section of fence to work with. 

Most of the music wall examples I found online featured items nailed to a freestanding section of fence - one that could be transported or removed if necessary. But what's the point of that, in our situation? We have a wooden fence (as opposed to vinyl or chain link) already installed, and we don't have any child care licensing issues, like many of the online examples, that might require us to move/remove the music wall. I can always just pry everything off if I need to, and I'm sure no one would notice the holes from the nails. So I chose a fence section and started hammering away.

It's not like me to not overthink a project, but with this one, I really just placed each item wherever it fit, and in it went. The hardest part, actually, was finding nails that weren't too long. Even the shortest ones I had on hand (1" roofing nails) were longer than the depth of the vertical pickets, so they'd poke right through. The other side of the fence is still technically our property (not park property for another six feet or so), and it's a tangle of weeds and trees, but I didn't want to worry about any little kids wandering over and scraping themselves on a rusty nail poking through our fence. Whenever I could, I nailed the pieces directly into the horizontal railings, which gave me more leeway with longer nails.

You can go ahead and Pin this shot as an example of high-quality landscaping. Go on.
#dirt #andpricklyweeds

Here are some close-ups, going from left to right across the length of the music wall...

On the left is a flimsy metal pan and pan bottom; then a hanging butterfly decoration that
doesn't make noise, but added some color; a hamster wheel; a butterfly wind chime;
and a metal dish-drying rack.

Along the top of this little section are xylophone pieces hung on individual nails; a spinning
wire orb thing for decoration; and a muffin tin. In the middle is a cake pan. Along
the bottom is a popcorn tin and three little tin buckets (AKA percussion section).

Next to the muffin tin is a bamboo wood chime; a metal pan with a ripply bottom;
another hanging butterfly decoration; and a weird metal flower thing that I think
was originally meant to function as a photo holder?

And all the way at the end we have our "drumsticks" (a whisk with a wooden handle
and rubber whisk-ers, and four wooden spoons), along with a hollow metal
ring that came from a cake pan.

And here are some close-ups of how certain pieces are installed, since I had trouble figuring out methods on my own - I definitely had to refer back to the example pictures I found!

There are more things I'd love to add - pieces from a stubborn xylophone that I just can't dismantle; longer metal wind chime pieces; and a wider assortment of "drumsticks" - but the great thing is that this can be a dynamic work. We can add to it if we find something cool, or remove pieces that get rusty or broken or gross from being exposed to the elements. For now, though, it's done.

And Rowan digs it.

Her favorites are the big popcorn tin (you can hear her say "LOUUUUD!" in the video as she makes a beeline for it), the butterfly wind chime, and the hamster wheel. And, since I know you're wondering, no, our neighbors don't hate us (not because of the music wall, at least). First of all, believe it or not, it's not actually that loud. Maybe when she gets bigger and has better coordination, she'll get louder, but right now her "music" basically blends in with the general noise from the adjacent park. Second of all, Rowan is only one and a half...her attention span isn't very long. So if that popcorn tin is making your brain rattle, just hang on about five more minutes, and then she'll be (silently) making mud pies in the grassless wasteland that is half of our lawn.

Negligent lawn-tenders though we may be, we're loving transforming our backyard, little by little, into a variety of play pockets. With the park right on the other side of our property, I never thought we'd want or need to do much to our own backyard in the way of adding play places - but sometimes it's nice to be outside with Rowan and still be in our own space, you know?

She's not complaining, that's for sure.

Next up is finishing the slide mound, as soon as I can find time to reacquaint myself with my miter saw when Rowan isn't either right next to me or asleep. So, in about seventeen years.

hey, wanna go to the thrift shop with me?

All right. All right all right all right. I am less-than-tentatively stating that winter is OVER. Tulips are pushing through, thunderstorms are in the forecast, I can't find Rowan's snowpants, and there are sand piles in the kitchen from tiny shoes. In other words, time to shift from indoor house updates to outside projects!

I went to a local thrift shop (Value World in Maple Village) this past weekend to find odds and ends for our outdoor music wall. I had to go there twice, actually, because a red wok lid that I really wanted wasn't properly tagged, so they made me come back the next day, once someone had priced it. (Store policy. Which I get, but really? It was a cracked wok with no power cord. I'll give you a buck.) So it took two trips - plus a run to the Dollar Tree next door - but I did find some perfect pieces for the wall...along with so much more. Come see...

Oh, hey, you three. First thing I ran across at the shop - these folks just chilling together in a plastic bag, representing what can only be described as the world's most awkward threesome. The dude on the right is trying to mask his bougie upbringing (see: Day on the Yacht striped shirt and capris, both from JCrew's summer line) with some hipster touches (see: goatee, jean jacket). He's stoked to gain bragging rights for hooking up with post-Prince-Eric Ariel (see: legs), although the threesome is actually his cover so he can get with Ariel's boyfriend, Mr. Shimmerpants on the left there. Shimmerpants is increasingly bitter because Ariel keeps threatening to turn back into a mermaid if they don't have a threesome with Bougie Hipster, whom she's clearly crushing on. No one wins in this plastic bag threesome, people. No one.

Ah, a Twilight lunchbox! I mean - why is this even at a thrift shop? Who doesn't want an Edward Cullen metal lunchbox?! Oh, wait...I think I see the issue:

It's only approved for AGES 14 & UP. Some poor fourteen-year-old out there was torn between finally being old enough to be trusted with a metal lunchbox (um?), only to realize she was also too old to be seen in public with a metal lunchbox (and not yet old enough for it be considered ironic). Girl, all I can say is that I feel your pain, because soon I ran across this:

The Baby-Sitters Club Mystery Game!! I was obsessed with the Baby-Sitters Club growing up - owned nearly every single book in the series, plus Specials and Mysteries and Little Sisters and whatever other genius spinoffs Ann M. Martin churned out. (I was a Mallory who deluded myself into thinking I was a Dawn, which was just so Mallory of me, don't you think?) This game came out right around the time I graduated from middle school, which was also when all of my BSC-smitten friends declared that they were officially too mature to read those loser baby-sitting books, let alone play the game. So I never played it, never got to spin the mystery wheel or move my Stacey game piece around Stoneybrook. (But I KNOW you bitches were still reading those books when we were in high school. "Oh my god, you guys, a Baby-Sitters Club book! How babyish. I'm just going to see how dumb this new one is. It's so dumb. Yeah...it's really...babyish...and...LAY OFF ME, I'M READING.") Oh, Baby-Sitters Club Mystery Game: the Twilight metal lunchbox of the 90s.

Moving on.

You can just go ahead and file this treasure under Things I'd Never Buy From A Thrift Shop, Or Even Just Take For Free, Actually: a torn lifejacket that's missing a buckle on one side. "Dude, this was only a dollar twenty! Score!" Yeah, $1.20 + your LIFE.

Please, please, someone tell me what this is. Because if there's actually a machine out there that turns jellybeans into a smoothie? Well. Let's just say I can cross that life goal off the list.


It was here that my maiden voyage to Value World was cut short...mostly because I already had everything I needed for the music wall (a hodge-podge of pots, pans, and hamster wheels), and I couldn't justify lingering in the aisles taking photos of creepy doll threesomes. But I really wanted that red wok that had been improperly tagged, so I drove back the next day. Spoiler alert: They ended up pricing the wok at $4.21, which was about $4.19 more than it was worth. I passed on it. I could've just left the store then, but that's the lure of thrift shops...there's always the possibility - nay, probability - of as-yet-discovered awesomeness. 

For example:

Super-dirty stuffed jellyfish the size of a couch cushion, anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Check out this 90s-tastic Draw 'n' Fax toy - with real working lights, sounds, and motor drive!! Actually, I guess it might've been fun for playing office...it's just sad that the company was so psyched about the toy's ultra-modern features: Push button to automatically advance paper! 6 dial tone sounds! Safe-play battery operated! Kids these days would wonder what the hell a fax machine even is. And a dial tone.

I actually kind of loved this Cookie Jug. Found it in my pictures and am now really regretting not picking it up. Might be time for Thrift Shop: Take Three pretty soon here - also because I need to follow the continuing saga of these three, who showed up in a completely different bin on the opposite side of the store during my second trip:

Their positions, just like their relationships, had shifted over time. Bougie Hipster (whose dress shoes I'm only now noticing) fell for Post-Prince-Eric Ariel when her hair fell away from her face, revealing that she was probably not even Ariel at all. They're moving to Boulder and plan to start homesteading after Bougie Hipster's parents shell out for his graduate degree. Shimmerpants was disgusted by his willingness to do something he didn't feel comfortable with and is hiding his face in shame. Or maybe one of them pulled the ultimate Dutch Oven, and his upturned collar is an act of self-preservation. The world may never know.


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All in all, my thrift shop ventures yielded tons of treasures for our music wall - and the few things I still wanted (wind chimes, mostly), I found at the dollar store next door.

Yeah, I know, my neighbors are going to haaaate me. Hopefully Rowan will feel most inclined to make "music" while they're at work all day. Oh, I also scored a vintage wooden baby doll high chair and doll cradle, and an old Magna-Doodle that Rowan will love. Total cost? Around $20. Making Macklemore proud...and making me so so so excited for the sweet weather on the horizon.

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P.S. You're always welcome to come to Target with me, too. If I'm good enough for Lorde...

on such a winter's day.

I mean, seriously. Last year this time, all of us in southeastern Michigan were up in arms about the Polar Vortex. Our collective shock over the negative wind chills flooded my Facebook, canceled all plans, closed schools - multiple times. This year? We're just like, oh, it's four degrees out right now. That's not too bad. At least it's sunny. I forgot the term "Polar Vortex" and kept referring to it as an "Arctic Freeze" when the furnace guy came yesterday. He seemed a little confused about why I kept referencing a movie theater frozen drink. Sorry, guy. Brain too cold to remember words.

But! J.J.'s birthday is in a month, and every few years, it's seventy degrees on his birthday. SEVENTY. DEGREES. So there's hope. Until then, I find myself dreaming about throwing windows wide open to feel warm, fresh air; of taking a leisurely walk through the neighborhood in fewer than five layers of clothing; and, most of all, of playing outside with Rowan...for as long as we want, doing whatever we want, without the constraints of bitter temperatures or icy sidewalks or snow so deep in the park that I literally can't carry her to the swings.

With that in mind, I have big plans for our backyard this summer.

When we first toured this house with our Realtor, we walked in the front door to find green carpeting, the ninety-two-year-old original homeowner playing her baby grand piano, a semi-open floor plan - and the backyard of our dreams. I was half-sold when we saw the open kitchen/family room; I was beyond sold when we looked out the windows and saw the backyard. Huge space, full of mature trees and bushes, a sweet little bench in the back, and bordering a neighborhood park with swings, a climber, tennis courts, a basketball court, and a ball field. Seriously, our Realtor practically had to hold us back from wantonly signing a mortgage agreement on the spot ("Let's at least look upstairs, guys..."). 

Horribly blurry pic of how it looked back in the day. Basically, overgrown

with plenty of dead patches and invasive species. But green! And OURS!

As awesome as it looked originally, we've had to put a lot of work into it. (Story of this house in general.) We dropped a pretty penny to have professionals take down a dead pine tree and remove seven kajillion buckthorn bushes (an invasive species that, unfortunately, made up a significant percentage of our yard's greenery...oops). We went away for a weekend in 2012 and came home to discover that a nice neighborhood volunteer group had removed all the invasive species from the park...AKA, removed the green border between us and the park. I'm thankful that they worked so hard, but without warning, there was no longer a natural demarcation between the park and our property (in other words, nothing keeping small children/horny teenagers/pooping dogs OFF MY YARD, DAMMIT). Basically, it went from Picture 1 to Picture 2 without our knowledge or consent:

Hey, there's the little shed we built a couple years ago! ...And

there's THE ENTIRE PARK, all up in our backyard.

So we had to put up a fence. I found a style I liked at Lowe's, and we had the unbelievable good fortune of discovering that our friends were selling the exact fence pieces we wanted at a very reasonable price. The fence went up...but a few other problems remain. Every year, by mid-summer, we have about a dozen enormous ant hills scattered throughout the yard. Each one is about a square foot of "dead dirt" - no grass left, just ants and their dirt hills. We've tried all sorts of remedies, from boiling water to ant killer pods that you plant in the anthill. Some work, some don't, but either way, the grass is dead in those spots for the season. Other backyard imperfections? Our grass is patchy everywhere; we don't treat it, so it usually dies in July; we have lumps and bumps everywhere from rodent tunnels and/or decaying walnuts; there's for sure a pet cemetery in the southeast corner; there are poisonous berries; blah blah blah. I get so overwhelmed when I think about everything we probably should be doing to the backyard, which is why we haven't really tackled any of it (except building a shed, installing a fence, and planting a garden...all J.J.). 

I'd love to make the backyard really fun for Rowan. (And not full of deadly berries.) J.J.'s dad built her a swing set last summer out of leftover fence pieces, which is wonderful. We inherited a sandbox from the next-door neighbors. And, of course, we have the adjacent park. But I have a few ideas floating around my head that I hope to implement. Well, actually, I have dozens of ideas (stone paths and tree stump fairy houses and treehouses and...), but only a few that I want to start with this summer. For example...


A Music/Sound Wall
We had a music wall in the garden at the child care center where I worked, and I lovvvved the idea. In fact, I love that garden set-up in general, and this totally reminds me that I need to talk to a certain teacher there and steal some more ideas from her! Anyway, this music wall is such a fun idea, and a great way for little kids to both explore sound and get some energy out in a perfectly unstructured way. I think I would attach our "music" items right to our fence (is there some reason not to that I'm just not thinking of?), so I need to start collecting some secondhand pots, pans, lids, and wooden spoons. What else could I put on there?

from here

A Green Fort
Now that I think about it, there's a green fort in the garden at work, too. Isn't it a cool idea? I would've loved this as a kid. The directions in the link below seem easy enough, even for a black thumb like me. I want to give it a shot. The grass in our backyard is such crap already anyway; if I mess up a big patch with a massive bean fort fail, it'll pretty much just blend in.

from here

A Hula Hoop Hideout
And, finally, an idea that's cheap and easy, just the way I like it (ahem) - hula hoop hideouts. Rowan might be a little too young to appreciate these this summer, but who knows? Worth a try, and we have plenty of perfect branches to test out.

from here

So for now, I'm just going to ignore the massive amounts of tree-trimming that need to happen...and the bare soil everywhere...and the ant colonies that threaten to rise up alongside the pet zombies and take over the neighborhood...and instead focus on some fun plans for my cute baby.

And you know what's going to be so awesome? That first day when the sun is shining and the temps break fifty degrees, and all the neighborhood kids start swarming the sidewalks and swings, and the parents go all Sound of Music and dance through the baseball outfield, arms outstretched Julie Andrews-style. Ahh, fifty degrees sounds amazing right now. Okay, TWENTY degrees sounds amazing right now. Just a few more weeks...