I could point to a dozen different points that led me to the decision we’ve made recently, but for me, that’s the moment that stands out: there’s no poop on the street. San Francisco is beautiful, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but it has a serious poop problem, at least in my neighborhood. It didn’t bother me until I had a toddler who routinely bends down and pokes the sidewalk. Now it bothers me a lot.

Point #2: a friend of David’s from high school offered me a job. A year out, he said, but if I’m looking to move, he’s got one waiting for me.

Point #3: I really, really, really hate traveling to visit family over the holidays.

Which led us to a four-hour conversation along the National Highway that boiled down to: maybe we ought to move to Pittsburgh.

The Golden Triangle

I grew up about 50 miles outside of Pittsburgh, but my folks are both from the city. (Although, given that they’ve spent two-thirds of their lives in the country, they’re really from there now.) I said for the longest time I didn’t want to live in southwestern PA again, but I always added this caveat: When my grandmother’s generation is too old to vote, Pittsburgh’s going to be THE place to live. Over vacation, as I watched my grandmother crying as she held Gillian, saying she thought she’d never live to see the day, I thought: Hey, that time is now. Even the Washington Post thinks so.

That probably sounds pretty callous. But for a long time, Allegheny County was old–as old as Miami-Dade County in Florida–and often didn’t want to invest in the things that keep a city thriving. Fortunately, Pittsburgh’s businesses did well on their own: the Steelers could well be renamed the Bankers. Or the Doctors. There’s always been great culture there–Andrew Carnegie, robber baron industrialist extraordinaire, had a great sense of noblesse oblige, and built a handful of museums, and the local universities have taken care of the rest.

But I love San Francisco. I like our apartment–we worked so hard at it! But with the arrival of Gillian, priorities began shifting: I would’ve liked to have my mother around for the bedrest and the NICU and all that. We bought a Murphy bed to get back a few square feet of space. Eliza’s almost 2 1/2, which means she wants to run around. We have to think about the cluster-you-know-what of school selection in SF School District. And honestly? We just don’t have the energy to live in a space so small anymore.

There’s no closing the bedroom door to hide an unmade bed. Letting the dishes linger on the counter. Having a room where the kids leave their toys out, willy-nilly. Where a lot of people go into their basements for their Christmas decorations, we get City CarShare, hop on the freeway and go to our storage space. We install carseats every time we go anywhere by car. These are all things you know, especially if you’ve been reading this blog for a long time.

Here’s a confession: part of the reason I started this blog was to feel better about all those things. It’s OK. It’s no big deal. Sure, it’s a few extra steps, but look! We get to live in downtown San Francisco. I feel a little like we’re selling out–all this time we’ve spent talking about how urban small-space living is great, just fine, and what are we doing? Looking for a three-bedroom house with a finished basement and a real kitchen. But we’ve reached a tipping point: the sacrifices we’re making for our current living situation are beginning to outweigh the benefits. And when that happens, it’s time to cut losses.

The good news is, my company is not only amenable to me working from Pittsburgh, but they want me to start my own team there, a career opportunity that’s as huge as it is surprising. We’re looking at rentals for houses–real houses, with porches and garages–for the same amount of rent we’re currently paying. We’re looking at listings for homes for sale, and it’s not just lookie-loo fantasy shopping. The neighborhoods where we’re apartment-hunting are old, with walkable business districts, tree-lined streets and old brick arts-and-crafts homes. We’ll be able to give the girls a greener life. And we won’t have to count quarters every time we want to do laundry.

No, it’s not San Francisco. I’ll miss my friends here. And also the weather, of course–who’s insane enough to move to Pittsburgh in February? But my long dream-vacation in the city by the Bay has come to an end. And honestly, I have no idea what I’ll be blogging about once we no longer need to build a wall of shelves to hide away extra clothes. We’ll see.

They call it a Bulb Syringe Aspirator, but we know it's really the Blue Sucker of Hate.

It doesn’t take long for even a three-month old to see the thing coming and scream and squirm, forcing the apologetic parent to pin down the baby’s head and cram the spout up her nose, release the bulb, and then hurry to wipe away the goop that sucks out. As if that’s not gross enough, there’s no good way to clean the thing; we opted for running scalding water and repeatedly depressing and releasing the bulb.

When we travelled back East for Christmas, we didn’t think to bring it with us, which meant, of course, that the baby would get a cold and wake up screaming from lack of air. She’s hooked on the paci, you see, and without clear nasal passages, she has to breathe through her mouth; with a paci, she can’t do that. Which means she can’t suck on her paci, which means she can’t sleep, which means we can’t sleep.

The first night it happened, we were at my mother-in-law’s, and I remembered that we still had the drug syringe that comes with baby Tylenol. That worked well enough for her to get back to sleep. But when it happened at my parents’, I realized I’d left the drug syringe in Washington, DC, and we had nothing to clear out her poor little nose. Tissues, Q-tips–nothing worked. Eventually, I propped my iPad next to her Pack’n'Play, tuned in the Koi Pond app, and the sight and sound of fish swimming through water was relaxing enough that she was able to fall asleep without her paci. That whole process took three hours.

So in the morning, I sent my dad into town to fetch a new Blue Sucker of Hate. Fifteen minutes later, he called home to ask a question: “Do you want the regular one or the electric one?”

I raised my eyebrows. An electric snotsucker? Buy both. I figured if the electric one didn’t work, we could go back to the manual one and we’d only be out $20. Thus we became the proud owners of the Graco Nasal Clear Nasal Aspirator, a product so excellent that they had to use the word nasal twice.

A friend of mine said it looks like the bugsucker in the Matrix, and he’s not wrong. (I tried to find a picture of the bugsucker, but all I found was a bunch of schematics of the actual bug itself.) But here’s the snot sucker:

Whoa.

Pretty easy to see how it works: stick the nozzle in the baby’s nostril, press the button, and the snot goes into the little receptacle, a process that is gross in the extreme. But here’s the kicker: when I tried it on Gillian, it made her smile. I switched to the other nostril, and she laughed. Eliza came over to see what the fun was about and wanted to try it herself. The only explanation, I think, is that the buzzing of the motor tickles their noses. Or something. But we managed to replace the Blue Sucker of Hate with the Happy Fun Sucker of Joy, and I’m OK with it either way.

It does the job well enough, although if you have any stubborn mucus the motor begins to overheat a bit (which means you can smell a train transformer). There’s a little button that plays music, which we haven’t used simply because the damned music doesn’t turn off until it’s done playing, and we know how I feel about off-switches on children’s toys. The nozzle and receptacle come off easily for cleansing, and it takes two AA batteries.

I love this thing. I’m going to buy it for every baby shower I attend in the future, and may even buy them for people I know who’ve recently had kids. It’s got all the things I love in a baby gadget: it makes sense, it’s not too expensive, it comes with a travel bag, and best of all, it takes an otherwise horrid task and makes it almost pleasurable. For the baby, at least.

One of the best parts of visiting Grandma, of course, is Grandma’s apartment. David’s mother is a bit of a pack rat, and so her apartment is a treasure trove of ancient wonders: David’s Curious George doll (which has been put in time-out, had his diaper changed, taken for a stroll and fed); original Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls; a town block set that was Ann’s as a child.

The favorites this year, though, have been (what else?) a sparkly elf, whose name is apparently Sneezy, and this divine book of sheet music, which has become our bedtime story.

I don’t know who edited it, but I’m pretty sure that this wasn’t how Noel was spelled, even in the year MCMXXXVIII.

And on this dreary December day in Washington, DC, we took some time to do something I didn’t do growing up: decorated Christmas cookies! My mother loved baking cookies, but baking was always her escape time into the kitchen, so we didn’t do much decorating ourselves.

The search for cookie cutters unearthed all kinds of goodies, like this sifter and these baking cups.

Eliza took charge of shaking salt and pepper onto the cookies.

Grandma’s oven even has a special window where we can watch the cookies bake.

I hope you all enjoy your Christmas cookies as much as we did!

That is, when he’s not actually, you know, near her.

We got in a visit to Santa at Westfield mall in Union Square, where Santa sets up shop under a gorgeous dome. In years past, it’s been a typical affair, where we pay $16.95 for two keychains and a 5×7. This year? Free! Except that it was free because Microsoft is desperate to sell its new photo product, Fuse, wherein you can take your natural, kid’s-squirming-on-Santa’s-lap photo, and splice it with several other takes, so that generations from now, your grandchildren’s grandchildren will see only perfection where there ought to be holiday reality.

So it was a little like a timeshare: we’ll offer you a free visit to Santa’s lap, but you have to sit and listen to a ten-minute pitch for a product you don’t want, but you happen to already own anyway because you just got Windows 7.

Despite the elf’s best attempts to let me cut-and-paste my children’s heads, I opted to go for the first take, intact and off-the-cuff. Daddy was a bit hungover from celebrating Grandpa’s birthday the night before. Gillian understood that she was sitting on Santa’s lap like she understands algebra. And Eliza, well–she politely declined.

It's what we call her "baby chimpanzee" mode.

Merry Christmas, Microsoft!

That–and other recent child-related news–reminded me of an infamous story from my childhood, commonly referred to as The Time The Girls Played Chicken on the Highway. “Chicken” is an overstatement; at 4 and 6 years old, we weren’t drag racers by any means. But here’s the basic story.

We were about this age.

The road that runs in front of my house is a secondary road; to most folks, it’s more like a tertiary road. It’s essentially a logging road, and it connects to the main road at a wicked blind curve. The road continues into our local baseball field and playground, so I crossed that blind curve hundreds, even thousands, of times in my childhood.

The first time I ever crossed that road, I was four. Possibly five. I left the house in search of Samantha, my older sister; I think it must have been autumn, because I was wearing my blue jacket. Like in any childhood story, my real memories are mixed up with the stories I’ve been told, but I do know my first clear memory was walking up the road, looking for Samantha, and seeing her standing at the edge of the highway. (Any road with two yellow lines painted down the middle qualified as a highway.)

I knew she’d gone past Mrs. Ferguson’s, and that we never went past Mrs. Ferguson’s. But I soldiered on; she was Samantha, so it had to be OK. When I asked her what she was doing, she said four words I’ll probably recite on my deathbed:

“I’m playing traffic school!”

And then she instructed me to run across the highway, which I did, unquestioningly. She told me to run back, so I did. This probably went on for some time, and my next very clear memory is of standing on the yellow lines, in the middle of the road, and of a car coming around the bed and slamming to a halt in front of me. The driver looked surprised. It was Mrs. Brezovsky, the mother of my BFF. I ran to my sister’s side of the road.

At this point, things get fuzzy for me, so I’ll let my parents tell the story. “I got a call from Mrs. _____, who said, ‘I think your girls are playing chicken on the highway.’” That’s my mom. Then my dad chips in: “I hauled ass up the road and smacked your asses all the way home, crying,’I love you!I love you! Don’t ever do that again!’”

I don’t remember getting spanked, but I remembed that Dad spanked me, and why, and up until recently, that was the moral of the story: Dad NEVER spanked us, and when he did, by God, we remembered why and never made that mistake again.

Now that I have kids, though, I take a different moral from the story. You might be surprised to know that it’s not “never let your children out of your sight.”

Rather, the lesson I take from this is (and pardon my vulgarity): What the fuck is wrong with people? Let’s go over my mom’s part of the story again, in finer detail: a neighbor looks out her kitchen window, which overlooks a blind curve on a road where the locals regularly exceed the speed limit by thirty miles an hour. She sees two little girls, 4 and 6, or maybe 5 and 7, running across the road. Stopping on the yellow lines. Running back. And her first action–in fact, her ONLY action–is to pick up the phone and call their parents. Check that: look through the phone book, find their number, and call their parents. No running out the door to stop them; not even any shouting from the front porch. Just a phone call.

We lived a good city block’s distance from the curve, I should add. At least five minutes, probably more, passed between her seeing us and my dad making like The Flash. In that time was, I think, when Mrs. Brezovsky reflexively saved my life.

Pretty nasty, eh?

And what was Mrs. _____ doing in the meantime? I don’t know. Maybe tending to her sick mother. Maybe watching The Brady Bunch. Probably watching us from her window.

Which brings me full circle: If you see my kids about to hurt themselves, feel free to say no. If you see them in a life-threatening circumstance, you have my blessing to scream at them, loud enough to make them cry, if need be. You can even, say, make physical contact if it means pulling them out of moving traffic.

I can’t always be there, so I’m depending on your help, OK? I promise, I’ll return the favor someday.

We have a power strip for every outlet, an extension cord for every power strip. Cords run along our wainscoting and hanging bar, along the floors and doorjambs; half of the time spent on decorating in our apartment involves hiding cables. So when someone from Applecore contacted me and offered to send a few free cordkeepers for review, I said YESPLEASEANDTHANKYOU.

Of course, that was months ago, right when I started back at work, when I thought I’d have more than five minutes a week to think about blogging. The good news is, we’ve had plenty of time to test out and implement the new cord-keeping system.

The concept is pretty simple: the Applecore is shaped like (you guessed it) an apple core. It’s made of silicon (I think), and has two notches to lock the cord in place. They come in a variety of colors, and when I brought home my bag, I realized the first drawback for us: they’re adorable, and therefore they look like toys. As electrical cords are not a desirable plaything for a toddler, I realized we’d have to implement them out of reach.

See the blue guy?

You can see the cord problem in Eliza’s room. Our orange art backdrop hides the extension cord running up from the floor, and into that one cord, we have to plug the fan, the white noise machine, and her nightlight. Attractive, no? I used the blue, small-sized applecore to wrap the thin white noise cord. It worked well enough.

Place #2: The bottom of the extension cord, hidden behind a nightstand.

Ah, tape. Pretty, no?

This was a medium-sized applecore, and I probably could have used a bigger one. The notches for the cord were just a wee too small for the flat cord. But it certainly cleaned up the space and prevented me from needing to tape more cord to the back of the art backdrop.

Generally speaking: they’re fine. They’re colorful, inexpensive and clever enough in their way, and I like that they come in a variety of sizes. They work better than velcro cable ties, but I don’t know that they’re superior to the Cable House Cord Organizer, which hides the cords a bit better. Or the Cordkeep’r, which I find to be extremely useful, although not as attractive.

I think their best use would be for small items, like iPad or headphone cords. And at this time of year, when we’re dealing with even more cords and cables for the tree, it’s a good small investment that won’t break up the look of your decorations.

But I’d need to buy quite a few more of them to tackle the mess behind our television set.

Aren't we in a wireless world already?

We don’t have a nativity now. It’s not because of religious reasons. I’m not particularly religious, but David and I grew up Catholic, which means that we both have a deep respect for and love of idolatry in all its forms. Rather, we’ve never invested in a nativity scene because we just don’t have room for it. Nativities require display space; we have a coffee table that triples as our dining room table, Eliza’s drawing board, and a general catchall.

When my mom offered to buy Eliza the Fisher Price Nativity Set, I said sure. David objected to it on principle (“Baby Jesus by Mattel?” were his exact words) but I figured it’s nice to have around: the kids can play with it, it can live on the floor or stashed in a corner, piled up, and they’re perfectly safe for gnawing. Plus, it’s the best kind of toy for a small place, in that, five weeks from now, it’ll get boxed up and sent to the storage space for the year.

"Baby" she can say. We're still working on "Balthazar."

Of course, it plays music and lights up when you press on the rooftop angel. But it does have an off switch. And this morning, when Eliza asked to play with her other favorite toy, I realized we had an opportunity for what is now my favorite visual gag, ever. If I adjust the lighting and set it up proper, it might be our Christmas card this year.

Does the stable have free HBO?

Even so, I wasn’t about to not decorate. Eliza’s two now, which means she’s starting to really get it. She points at trees and says “Christmas!” Actually, she points at anything shiny and says “Christmas!” Which is fortunate, because that greatly stems the tide of Grinchiness that’s been edging in.

So yesterday David headed to the storage space and I headed into Union Square to do a little shopping. Last year we bought a lovely artificial wreath, and I decided then that I would allow myself one Christmas decoration indulgence per year, working up to, eventually, a real tree and a train set. Who knows when that will happen–the train set, especially, is on our When We Have a House List–but in the meantime, a little item here and there, a really nice Thing that will make us smile? In ten years we’ll have a wonderful collection of holiday joy to unwrap every year.

OK, that’s all BS. In truth, I went into Gump’s a few weeks ago, when they started setting up Christmas decorations, and this little gem stole my heart. In the ensuing weeks I’ve built myself a pyramid of rationalizations to justify spending $90 on a little Christmas trinket just because I’m so delighted by it. But aren’t you, too?

The little train is blurry because it's going around and around!

The volume knob actually controls the volume. Not only does the little train go around, but it plays a medley of Christmas tunes. Eliza, of course, is as delighted by it as I am, which adds another block into The Great Pyramid of Rationalization.

She woke up at 7 AM this morning–90 minutes early–and the first thing she said was, “Christmas!” as she ran into the living room to, I presume, make sure that everything was still where she’d left it. When she saw that our little silver tree still stood as proudly as it can, she climbed on the couch to turn on Santa’s train. My little Cindy Lou Who, who is no more than two.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

So this year, I upped my game, and made her a beautiful multi-layer, multi-shade, green organza skirt to wear as Puck. The first time I put her in it, she shrieked and cried, and now she cries when she sees it. Organza is itchy, you see. And the loss of four hours of my life so depresses me that I can’t post the picture yet.

I racked my brain for a few weeks, and then decided to go matchies with Gillian. This was Eliza’s first costume, in 2009.

The hair is hers. The eyebrows are not.

Since then, I was in a play that required this shirt:

Image and t-shirt from ThinkGeek.com

A family of redshirts! We’re all doomed together, at least.

I started Eliza’s costume with a red leotard purchased online from a dance company. I fabric-glued ricrac to it, and with the help of white felt and a black iron-on patch, made the insignia. Fabric glue made the costume almost complete.

All I needed was the collar. Until I realized I’d glued the insignia to the back of the leotard.

Note that the leotard is, indeed, backwards.

Off came the insignia, and back on it went. And then, not wanting to wait for a trip to the fabric store, I bought a $10 “velvet” vampire cape at Walgreen’s, whose fabric was thin and stretchy. Perfect for a leotard. Sewed it in place in under 10 minutes.

Put it on Eliza… and the stretch in the leotard placed the insignia somewhere around her spleen. Off it came. Back on it went.

A trip to American Apparel later, and presto! Black tights and a red skirt, and we had Toddler Uhura to go with Baby Redshirt.

Special thanks to Dottie of ModernKiddo for hosting us for trick-or-treat in Alameda!