Operation Pink Herring

Life, elevated

Utah is a weird place.

When we decided to move here, Joel had visited once for his job interview and I'd visited once for work five years ago. (I have seriously neglected this blog since I had a baby, left my office job, and started doing 98% of my internetting on my phone but I am so grateful for the record of things past that it provides. Without this blog entry I would have zero idea what year it was that I went to Salt Lake because REALLY? FIVE YEARS AGO?, as well as zero proof that I actually HAVE worn that green corduroy jacket that I cannot seem to part with, even after lecturing Joel many times on his hoarding.) And even from that one visit -- during which I saw much more than I normally did on quick work trips because of the awesome tour Heidi gave me in her fabulous red beetle (RIP) -- I got the sense that Utah was an odd place. Weird and wonderful would have been my description, to rip off West Virginia's state motto. The mountains. The impossibly clean city. The... statue of a sphinx with Joseph Smith's face. Beautiful. Amazing. Weird.

Living here for six months has pretty much changed nothing about that initial impression except to deepen it, both in the wierd and wonderful categories. It's odd living in a red state when I've spent my whole life on the East Coast. Maryland had its fair share of rednecks to be sure, but Baltimore is about as liberal as a city comes. I stay as far away from politics as I possibly can (not just on this blog, but in real life too), but I didn't realize how used to living in a largely liberal bubble I was until I started seeing the billboards on the highway about how Obama is out to steal our retirement savings.  I don't think we're in Baltimore any more, Toto. I have not seen a single billboard for HIV or paternity testing since we moved, that's for sure.

I also cannot get used to seeing people who are not police officers walking around with guns clipped to their belts like someone else might have a cell phone. Utah is an open carry state. It is perfectly legal to bring your gun to the mall (which is where I first saw a regular-looking dude walking around with a handgun clipped to his belt in Macy's). A good friend of mine, a fellow stay-at-home-mom of a toddler, has a concealed carry permit for her handgun. Why, I asked her when she mentioned it. Why not, she responded with a shrug.

And of course, there's the Utah equivalent to "what exit are you from" New Jersey joke: "so, what number wife are you?" Oh, how hilarious. But it's true: everyone in Utah is Mormon. (Though I have yet to meet a single polygamist. Or see a single Home Plus store. It's like HBO just... makes stuff up or something.) I know MORMON is the first thing people think of when they hear the word Utah, but I kind of figured it was one of those exagerrated stereotypes, like the idea that everyone from New Jersey has big hair and everyone in Baltimore says "hon". Turns out, no. Everyone in Utah is Mormon. That's not a bad thing, because by and large Mormons are exceptionally kind, conscientious, family-oriented folks... but it is a bit odd to be a non-Mormon in the land of Mormons. There are Mormon temples everywhere. Like, probably five within five miles of our house. At the park you're as likely to overhear conversations about temples and missions as you are swim lessons or preschool. As a white middle-class very average lady, it's been strange and probably a good experience for me to see what it's like to be in the minority for the first time in my life.

There are some big perks to living in the land of Mormons as a transplant, though, as opposed to moving to another "regular" place. There is a cohesive non-Mormon community that made it almost too easy to meet new people -- which was one of my biggest fears about moving. I was expecting to spend a few months courting new mom friends and creepily handing out my phone number at the library just to stave off the crushing sense of isolation that can come with stay-at-home parenthood. Instead I found a mom's group specifically for non-LDS moms of infants and toddlers before we even moved. Since then I've found several other groups and made some great friends. It's been a huge, huge relief to find a network of other moms and kids to hang out with (this probably sounds very pathetic to those without kids, but dude. I love staying home with Hannah. I love it. As long as we don't actually stay home. The difference between counting the seconds until bedtime and looking at your watch and realizing oops it's 6pm, I need to get this kid home and in bed is having mom-friends to talk to). I miss our Baltimore friends, but love the people I've met out here. And I spent nearly a year handing out my phone number at story times back in Baltimore; here it was easy. Simply because we all have two things in common: we have small kids and are not Mormon in a land where most people are. So, that has been really great.

Plus, you can go to the grocery store or Sam's Club on Sunday and there is NO ONE THERE. No one. I normally go to the store during the week just because I don't want to waste precious weekend time on chores I can do with Hannah by myself, but dude. Sam's Club on a Sunday in Baltimore was something we did with a game plan and a map and emergency supplies. Just the parking lot was such a shitshow that it gave me panic attacks. Here? The store is empty. EMPTY. You can wander the aisles all leisurely-like, check out quickly, and then walk to your car -- which is parked in a spot not ten miles across the parking lot. Because everyone is at church! It's pretty wonderful. It balances out the fifty times I've tried to go to other stores on Sunday morning and found out that DURR THEY ARE CLOSED beacuse it is Sunday and everyone is at church.

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That's the weird stuff. And then there's the wondeful.

Things here are so cheap. So, so cheap. I have never been a person who has a set grocery budget, but I have been using a meal planning service (The Fresh 20 -- LOVE IT) to help pull me out of a what's-for-dinner-oh-how-about-pasta-again rut, and along with the shopping list for the week, it gives you an estimate of how much the week's groceries should cost. Our total is always $15-20 below the estimate, which is fairly conservative to begin with. Hannah and I are on a two-week visit to my mom's in New Jersey right now and my eyes just about bulged out of my head when I saw the price next to a gallon of milk was $3.99. A non-organic, regular old gallon of milk at a non-fancy grocery store. FOUR DOLLARS. Milk, the thing we buy most often with a cereal-loving husband and sippy-cup chugging todder, is one of the few things I do know the price of off the top of my head. In Utah it's $2.00 or less. Even at Whole Foods.

Everything else is cheap, too. I laughed out loud the first time we parked downtown in a garage right on Temple Square. Parking is FREE for the first two hours. FREE. No money. After that? TWO DOLLARS AN HOUR. I used to pay more than two dollars to street park outside the public library in Baltimore. (Of course, that first time we were there I also lost our parking ticket and we ended up paying the maximum fee to get out of the garage. Luckily the maximum was only $20.) Swim lessons at the local, beautiful rec center are $12. A MONTH. Not $12 a lesson. $12 a month. I knew that things were cheaper out west, but it's one of those things that I just couldn't fully grasp until I saw the bills myself.

And then there's the mountains.

The mountains are everywhere. You cannot escape them. They loom over you when you drive down the highway and they peer in, impossibly close, through the windows in our house.

They're there when you're stopped at a stop light. They lurk behind the neighbors' houses. They tower over the Target parking lot.

I've stopped noticing them all the time, until someone comments on a photo that I post on Facebook about the view. Oh, yeah. That. That's pretty awesome.

Now that the weather has transitioned to full-on summer, we've been trying to get out hiking as much as possible on the weekends, while I still can*. There are tons of trails just a few miles from our house that have views of waterfalls and unbelievable mountain vistas.

It's an easy 30 or 40 minute drive up the canyon to reach the ski resorts, which all have impossibly beautiful, well-maintained trails. We can drive up to Snowbird or Alta or Brighton, get in a hike, and be back in time for Hannah to take her nap. It's amazing. It's everything we wanted.

I'm a little afraid of the winter, but spring and summer in Utah have sold me so, so hard. I love it here.

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*I have been kind of bummed that we're only able to hike on the weekends, since a bunch of my friends do mid-week hikes. But I need Joel to carry Hannah because 1) she weighs upwards of thirty pounds now, and 2) I can no longer buckle the hiking backpack around this.   

Surprise! (Or, uh, not so much if you follow me on Twitter, where I outed myself at about six weeks pregnant because a lady needs a place to complain about the fact that Wendy's does not deliver fried chicken sandwiches.) We're having another baby! It's allegedly another girl, though she had her legs pretty firmly closed during our ultrasound and since we didn't find out Hannah's sex until she was born I am sort of dubious of this whole science. You can see inside my belly? With that magic wand thing? Ask the baby what its name is while you're at it then, and save Joel and I some serious list-making.

The alleged Baby Girl Herring 2.0 will be making her debut on December 2, 2013 and not a moment earlier because I need my mom to fly out and watch Hannah and the weekend before is Thanksgiving and there are going to be no flights. So. That's settled.

A little backstory

Joel and I have been talking about moving west for years. We've been actively TRYING to move west for probably three years, and thinking seriously about it for more like five or six.

When we graduated from college we'd been dating about a year and were ready to move in together... but not quite ready to move AWAY together. So, we stayed in Baltimore. Because the market was good and we were sick of slumlord asshat landlords and because we are  a little bit crazy, we bought a house a few months later. We were 22. We decided to go with an adjustable rate mortgage that  would be fixed for the first seven years. Our reasoning? There was NO way we'd live in Baltimore for seven years. We'd be, like, 30. Ut uh. Not happening. 

Spoiler alert: we're 32 now. We just moved one month ago. Time flies, eh? (I feel the need to defend ARM loans, though. I hear people talking about them like they're synonymous with predatory lending. That loan ended up being fantastic for us, even though we stayed in the house past the fixed portion. We got a rate half a percentage lower than the going 30-year fixed rate in 2003, and then when it adjusted in 2010 and 2011 our mortgage payment actually went DOWN by several hundred dollars a month because rates were even lower. /irrational need to defend ARM loans.)

We took a vacation to Washington and Oregon about five years ago and it just felt like... home. The mountains looming in the distance, the wet smell of the air. The impossible, teeming green-ness of the landscape. The relaxed west coastness of it all. It was where we wanted to be.

Ideally, we hoped to move before we had kids. HA. Obviously, that didn't happen. When it looked like it might take a long time to get pregnant, we threw ourselves whole hog onto the babymaking train and then surprise! It didn't actually take long at all. Soon I was lumbering around in maternity clothes and Joel intensified his job search. Every night. Every weekend. He spent thousands of hours on this never-ending project. Every once in a while he'd get a call or have a phone interview, but it was largely a frustrating and fruitless process. Still, we hoped to move before the baby was born. In fact, I believe Joel told me during one of my panicked THIS BABY IS COMING AND WE HAVE NOWHERE TO PUT IT speeches that he "guaranteed that we wouldn't be living in this house by the time the baby was born."

Spoiler alert: we were still living in that house when Hannah was born.

So Hannah arrived and our already cramped house seemed to shrink overnight. We really didn't have much in the way of baby stuff -- we just COULDN'T, there was literally no place to put it. We had to move Hannah's travel-sized bassinet to get into our wardrobe. I carried her travel-sized swing up two flights of stairs at night when it was time for bed. She had that swing and a baby papasan chair, and that was it in the way of baby paraphernalia. We sold a couch, TV, and TV stand to make room for her crib and a changing table/dresser combo.

And then a funny thing happened. Months went by and as I started to make mom-friends, I started to feel connected to the community. I loved being able to walk to the park and spend the afternoon there in the spring and summer. We walked to playdates. We had Port Discovery a mile away and The Science Center just a half mile from that. We hit the story times at two different libraries every week. Instead of feeling bitter about the inconveniences of city life that had worn us down and become increasingly bad over the most recent years -- mostly parking, but also the major uptick in both petty and violent crime -- I started to kind of... love it there. I can't deny it, I loved our neighborhood. Aside from the parking, I'd always loved our neighborhood but I really, really loved it with a kid. It was a fantastic place to hang around with a baby. 

But there was still the problem of the house. Our house was fine when we were recent college grads who had no furniture and no money to buy furniture and didn't mind eating meals at the coffee table anyway. But nine years, man. It's a lot of time. I was sick of eating meals at the coffee table by the time I turned 30. I was tired of having bikes stored in the living room and three Ikea wardrobes in the bedroom because the entire house only had one tiny closet.  And then we added a baby -- an entire extra human being with her modest swing and papasan chair and crib and changing table -- and shit got downright claustrophobic pretty fast. We had to move. 

I thought about just moving to a house that was better laid out and slightly larger in the same area. I thought about it a lot. I knew people who did exactly that, moving two blocks away from their old house. I thought about it even more when Joel's job search continued to go nowhere and Hannah turned one and suddenly we were not only still living in the house we were supposed to have moved out of before she was born, but I was sort of starting to think about having another baby. Not yet. Maybe not even for another year. But I could see just how fast a year went by, and really. There is NO way we could have fit two babies in that house. Not with the paper-thin walls and the creaky 112-year-old floors and the fact that I really, REALLY did not want to have a toddler and a newborn sharing a room. 

And... the crime had been getting terrible. Like, friends of mine being held up at gunpoint outside their homes at 6pm. Cars stolen. People being mugged during daylight hours. We heard someone pound across our rooftop at 11pm one night and later learned there had been a rash of break-ins on our block where the guy came in through the balcony door (most rowhouses have either a rooftop deck or rear balcony; we had both). It wasn't exactly stuff we could ignore and pretend that it only happened to drug dealers and idiot wandering around in the ghetto at 2am with hundred dollar bills hanging out of their back pockets.

More importantly, we didn't want to live in Maryland forever. This sounds kind of silly and possibly crazy, but we just both dreamed of living somewhere awesome. I saw this picture on Flickr years ago and I have remembered it ever since: a fantastic shot of a mountain taken in the rearview mirror of a car on the highway. That's what I wanted. I wanted to drive down the highways and see mountains in my rearview mirror. (This photo, actually. I can't believe I was able to find that in less than a minute. The internet is awesome. )

So, we needed to move. Out of Baltimore. I did not want to move out to the county and live the rest of my life in the Maryland suburbs. So the job search continued every night and every weekend, and in the meantime Hannah and I waited. We spent as much time as possible out of the house, both because the damn place was so small and because there were so many wonderful things to do. I woke up every day telling myself that our days in the city were numbered -- both in the good and bad way. When I wanted to scream because there was just nowhere to PUT anything, I told myself we wouldn't live in the house forever. And when I watched Hannah shriek with glee at Port Discovery or spent an absolutely perfect afternoon reading in the park while she collected acorns and pointed at dogs, I tried to soak it in and press those memories into my brain forever.

And then one day Joel got a call. For a real, in-person interview. In... Salt Lake City. Utah was definitely on our B-list, with the places that we figured, hey can't hurt to apply... but we're not really sure we want to move there. He went on the interview and we were excited, but sedated. We'd been down this path of getting hopes up only to have nothing pan out before. Plus... Utah? Did we really want to move to Utah? Should we hold out for Oregon or Washington?

Spoiler alert: he got the job. And we decided you know what? Fuck it. This is our chance to live somewhere awesome. We're moving to Utah.

I miss the city with the heavy pain of distance and nostalgia. Moving day was a little harried and I didn't really get to say a proper goodbye to the place where Joel and I first lived together, where we got engaged, the place we came back to after our wedding and honeymoon. The house we brought our baby home to. It breaks my heart a little bit that Hannah won't have any memory of living there.

But now we live here. And it's pretty amazing.

 

Exodus

I used to think blogging was really hard when there was nothing much going on. Just the same old same old, nothing much to report.

Turns out it's even harder, at least for me, when there's lots of stuff to talk about.

So!

This lady turned one! There was cake.

And then she turned 13, 14, 15, and 16 months old. Lordy, I guess it's been a wee bit longer than I thought.

She walks, she runs, she dances. She puts shoes and diapers on her stuffed animals and buckles them into her carseat. I remember saying when she was nine months old that I just could not imagine a kid being any more fun. Guess what? It gets more fun. She kills me.

The one thing she doesn't do is talk. Not a single word, not ever. I'm not really worried because she signs, and signing babies are just the cutest. Especially when you ask them "more what?" hoping they'll elaborate on the ubiquitous demand for MORE MORE MORE and they stop, think for a second and then sign "more... PLEASE."

The second and third things she doesn't do is give up bottles or pacifiers. But I'm ignoring that for now because: 1) teeth. OMFG THE TEETH. They never stop with the being assholes! This child has never shown interest in a single toy designed for teething babies, but she will chew on keys, cigarette butts she finds on the sidewalk, and her personal favorite: styrofoam packing peanuts. So! When you see her with a pacifier in her maw in 75% of the pictures I post on Facebook, just realize that it is better than seeing a picture of her with four cigarette butts poking out of her mouth NOT THAT THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED. Except yes it has. 2) she is already sleeping like crap, which should be downright illegal after months of fantastic nights of 12+ hours of sleep and predictable naps, which lull parents into a false sense of security and causes them to lose all the powers of functioning in the world on very little sleep that they develop during the newborn months. I realize that complaining about her waking up 2-3 times during the night between the hours of 6:30pm and 6am sounds absolutely laughable to people still on the waking-up-every-ninety-minutes schedule. But the other day I was trying to veg on the couch during her (too-short) nap, and I went to the search function on Netflix and typed in "netflix". And was then surprised when no results were displayed. Goddamnit Netflix, FIGURE OUT WHAT I MEAN. I had absolutely no recollection of what show I was trying to find. That's what a few weeks of waking up several times a night and starting the day at 5:15am will do to me nowadays. So I'm not even THINKING about taking away bottles or pacifiers until we're all good and settled in our new house.

Oh, did I mention that we're moving? To Salt Lake City? Um, yes. That is happening. 

Joel drove away from our house in Baltimore on December 28th. Sad, surreal, strange. Thank goodness my brother was staying with us at the time, helping us paint and pack, when Joel left or I would have lost it. Instead I lost it when my brother drove away later in the day. And then I survived fifteen days of solo parenting with no car. In the middle of winter.

 

It wasn't pretty. Hannah learned to fend for herself while I dozed on the couch (STOP WAKING UP AT 5:15AM) or packed boxes. I learned not to care about messes, because OMG. The mess created by solo parenting + not enough sleep + too small house + no car + winter + can't go outside + boxes everywhere + has anyone seen the vacuum + OH, JUST HELP YOURSELF TO A SNACK SURE THING GREAT JOB NO NEED FOR A BOWL.

Hannah and I stayed behind in Baltimore for a few weeks to finish packing and getting the house ready for sale. Movers arrived last Monday, and when they finished loading the truck we all bundled into my mom's car and retired to our country home (aka my mom's house) in New Jersey. 

Goodbye, Baltimore. It was good knowing you.