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The American Dream seems to have escalated into a race to amass as much square footage of housing as possible. It has been interesting for us to reverse that trend lately in the years when our peers are typically moving to larger homes as their families grow.

Our house in Portland was not spectacularly large. It was built in 1929 and was about 1,600 SF above grade with a 700 SF basement that we turned into an industrial-looking art/TV/office space. We also had a small one-car garage that was filled with gardening crap. When we sold the house in the summer of 2007, we had a humongous moving sale.

The rule: if it couldn’t be stored in our 1,800 SF rental condo then we couldn’t keep it. We did a lot of paring down.

When we moved out of the 1,800 SF unit in Portland, prior to our departure for Argentina, we secured a storage space in the US and tried to keep only those things that we couldn’t live without. (It shall be interesting to see how we feel about said stuff upon our return.)

In Argentina, we moved through several larger living spaces until we finally downsized to a 1,000 SF apartment, where we are living now, in a location we love. Observations:

• In general, since we have less space, we can’t accumulate and store as many things. On a positive note, we’ve learned to make due with fewer possessions — minimal kitchen implements, a lot fewer clothes, not as many shoes, a paltry assortment of toys and games…
• As a family, we can clean this apartment (I don’t mean straighten, I’m talking mopping, bathtub scrubbing, sheet changing, etc.) in about two hours. Couldn’t say that about the house.
• No yard work, which is both a blessing and a curse.
• Noise can be a bit of an issue. The kids have really had to work on acknowledging that they need to be quiet and respectful if someone is napping or on the telephone.
• There aren’t a lot of places to escape if people (as in other family members) are driving you crazy.
• The girls share a room and get along most of the time. Zoe still lobbies to have her own space when we get back to the States though. In general, I think the older child wants autonomy, but the younger sibling is happy to share.
• I would rather have space taken from bedrooms and bathrooms and put into the living/dining/kitchen. A well designed bathroom layout, even if small, beats an empty cavernous bathroom that seems the norm in the US now. Truly, it has been enormously pleasing to spend time in spaces that are thoughtfully laid out to function, even in very tight confines. A huge contrast to a lot of condos I’ve seen in the US.

We now feel that we could live quite happily with a lot less square footage when we return to the States. It will be interesting to look at housing through our downsized lens!

(Pictured above is the dining room from what now seems a behemoth of a house that we sold in 2007.)

If you follow my writing, you know that I’m a fan of weird analogies. Unfortunately, they require an explanation, so here we go…

January. Tom and I cannot wax poetic enough about our love of January. Before we had children, we thought it was a horrible month. Cold, wet, rainy, snowy, dark at 4:30 pm — positively depression-inducing. Once we had children though, we saw the primer month of the year through a whole new lens.

First, getting dark at 4:30 pm is a Godsend when you are trying to get your kids to bed. Since little ones have no concept of time, you can just shrug and say, “it’s time for bed” because it’s dark. Without a working knowledge of the clock, they just toddle off compliantly at 6:00 or 6:30 pm. Love that.

Second, January is like hitting the RESET button on a video game, only the game in question is our chaotic life. Usually by the end of the year we are a wreck due to Thanksgiving, parties, employees, Christmas, birthdays (there are a thousand in my family late in the year), anniversaries, etc. Then comes the respite of winter break, we get things under control, we rest and take time just for us. Then voila, everything is new again in January. A clean slate.

Mondays. Now, for you folks who don’t have kids, you may think this sounds anal, but your life as a parent completely revolves around The Schedule. If you get off The Schedule, then everyone is crabby, no one is well fed, everyone is tired…you get the picture.

Here in Argentina, our schedule is packed with homeschool, tennis lessons, regular school, horseback riding, birthday parties, sleepovers, socializing, sight seeing, exploring, blah blah blah. I think you can guess what is the only day that is relatively activity free? Monday!

Wonderful Monday, workout Monday, cook dinner Monday, write Monday, plan Monday, Quicken Monday, real homeschool (not some half-assed attempt) Monday, get the kids to bed on time Monday!!!

And that, my dear readers, is why Monday is the January of weekdays.

I have been bewitched by the Chicago World’s Fair ever since reading Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. (They painted nearly every building white, hence the name.)

Did you know that the Pledge of Allegiance (sans mention of God) was written to celebrate the dedication day of the fair because “Francis J. Bellamy thought it would be a fine thing if on that day all of the schoolchildren of America, in unison, offered something to their nation.”

I discovered that the first Ferris Wheel was constructed for the Chicago event as an answer to the Eiffel Tower, which was the hit and lasting legacy of the previous world exposition in Paris. A call was put out to American engineers to “out Eiffel Eiffel,” only nothing was forthcoming until George Ferris conceived of his ride. The first Ferris Wheel “was a complex assemblage of 100,000 parts that ranged in size from small bolts to the giant axle, which at the time was the largest one-piece casting of steel ever made.” The ride was completed after the fair started, but was a huge success. Each car could carry about 60 people and they rode to a height nearly as tall as the highest skyscraper in Chicago at the time.

Who knew that fair administrators turned down Buffalo Bill’s act because they thought it wasn’t a good fit? Mr. Bill (really Col. William Cody) thumbed his nose at them and bought his own parcel of land adjacent to the official fairgrounds and performed his Wild West show and became a very rich man in the process.

Political machinations led to delays, which meant that construction on the 600 acre site did not commence until just sixteen months prior to Dedication Day. How they managed to pull off essentially building an entire city from scratch in less than a year-and-a-half, I have no idea. Keep in mind, there were over 200 classically designed structures, many of them among the largest buildings in the world.

Below you will find photos of the following: 1) recreations of the Pinta, Santa Maria, and Nina that were sailed from Spain to be present at the fair, which was also called the World’s Columbian Exposition in honor of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the good old US of A. 2) One of the Westinghouse alternating current generators that powered the fair. 3) The first ever Ferris Wheel!

One would think that this picture really says it all, unfortunately though, it doesn’t.

This morning, on a crisp fall day, Tom and I repaired to the balcony so that I could cut his hair. He gathered together the accoutrement and out we went. Because it was so cold, I didn’t want the house to get too chilly, so I closed the sliding glass door behind me. In the next millisecond, I realized that said door is self locking, which meant that in my fit of efficiency to keep the house warm, I had trapped us on the balcony.

After a momentary freak out, Tom hopelessly tried the other half of the sliding glass door…and it opened. (I can’t even begin to explain what a catastrophe it would have been to be trapped on a fifth-floor balcony with no phone right before it was time to pick up the girls from school.) The wrong side of the door is not self locking — who knew?

Then came the ill-fated haircut.

As Tom’s hair has started thinning, he has shifted to trimmer haircuts, which I don’t like because I’m sort of absentminded and I always worry I’m going to screw up. There aren’t many mistakes with scissors that can’t be fixed, not so with trimmers.

Anyhow, in the aftermath of almost being trapped on the balcony, I spaced and didn’t put the guard on the trimmers and instead, just plunged the straight trimmer into the back of Tom’s hair, cutting the weird swath you can see above. Immediately after plowing my row, I realized my mistake, but things were irretrievably ruined.

To try and recover, I had to mow his hair at the lowest setting so the contrast with the swath would not be as stark. Of course, as I was completing this hair-removal process, the trimmers died. We weren’t sure how to proceed next.

I decided we should move inside and we could attempt to use the trimmers while they were plugged into their recharging base, which worked about half of the time and resulted in a somewhat uneven cut for the rest of Tom’s hair.

Sadly, after giving him as much of a jarhead look as I could, the contrast with the swath was still pretty stark, so I had to use scissors to blur the edges a bit, which is why Tom’s swath looks rather mangy (we both decided that was better).

I’m sure you are trying to figure out why he remains married to me after all of these years? We can all but wonder!

Whenever I talk about my time in junior/senior high school, attended on the Oregon coast, my husband and I realize that we had very different experiences growing up! The rural/urban divide can be seen as follows:

The Hack. Tom is incredulous that the hack, as we called it, was commonly utilized as a behavior modification tool at Neah-Kah-Nie Jr./Sr. High School until the mid 1980s. Thankfully, I didn’t experience this discipline technique first hand, but I do remember there being two paddles, both wooden with holes, that resided in the junior high and senior high principal’s offices. At the time, none of us really thought much of it, but friends who come from urban school districts always fall out of their chair when they hear of spankings in the school.

Sitting on Ice. Some student council hero had the bright idea to make each class president sit on a block of ice during a homecoming week assembly. The president who made it the longest would garner the most points for their class. I, unfortunately, was a class president for this event and we (I and my three other colleagues) sat on the ice, in shorts, for ages. It quickly became clear that no one was going to get off in front of the whole student body and be labeled the wimp who couldn’t deal with a little cold. After half the assembly had passed, and long since having any feeling in our asses, I negotiated a solution where we all rose off the ice simultaneously and split the points evenly.

When we went down to the locker room to change and warm our bootys under the hot showers, we were all greeted by the searing pain of huge blisters and ice burns from this little competition. We crawled into the back of the principal’s truck and were taken to the emergency room. The school administrators were very worried about a lawsuit. “If she’s dumb enough to sit on a block of ice for that long…” well, you can figure out the rest of my mother’s response!

Slave Day. When I was in junior high, they had a very politically incorrect fundraiser at the school called slave day. The point was to raise money by having buyers bid on a person, securing the right to be in charge of them for the following school day. I allowed myself to be auctioned at the behest of my friends on the student council, but only after I negotiated the right to refuse to wear diapers for whomever bought me. Unfortunately, my imagination was much too limited.

You see, I was a bit of a terror in junior high (I was nice, but I was uber squirrelly) and I hadn’t really thought ahead to the fact that a teacher might seek revenge by purchasing the right to haze me for a day. In fact, three teachers pooled their funds and did buy me — the gym teacher, the Spanish teacher, and the social studies teacher. Talk about sinking feelings and pits in the middle of the stomach.

I tried to avoid my tormentors by hiding out in the girls locker room when I arrived at school for my day of servitude. Unfortunately, they were ready for me, stationed at the exits to greet me when I ducked out after the bell rang. They dressed me in Coach’s shorts, an “I’m with stupid” t-shirt that had been in the boy’s locker room forever, a pair of Coach’s huge cowboy boots, and if memory serves, a set of rainbow suspenders. I had to wear a pacifier around my neck and whenever they asked me what flavor it was, I had to suck on it and tell them. I also wore this big decorative sombrero, around which they made me do a hat dance in the cafeteria at lunch time. They made me scrub some of the locker room floor with a toothbrush, I had to act out a donkey for a vocabulary word in social studies, complete with braying…the list goes on and on.

Please keep in mind that this rollicking good day of fun also happened to coincide with picture day for teams and clubs. During photos, I would hunch down in the back, trying to hide my t-shirt and hat head.

Needless to say, Tom doesn’t have any such stories from his suburban upbringing in New Jersey…he doesn’t know what he was missing!

Today, I turned 43, can you believe it? Since I have absolutely nothing profound to say, I thought I would share my birthday gifts from the girls that they worked on after they got home from school.

Zoe made the T. Rex origami head that she taped into a card so it popped up with a piece of candy in its mouth! (She wanted to make me the entire dinosaur out of paper, but it was just too advanced — Tom said the video to make the beast was crazy difficult.) Zelda made me a flower. Her card too had a candy offering (and they didn’t even try to pass off the candy they don’t like).

Rapacious dinosaur and a flower…Zoe and Zelda in a nutshell.

In an attempt to make Tom feel better about the fact that he didn’t make any of my gifts, Zelda noted, in his favor, that he did wrap his purchased presents with care, which she felt had to count for something! (By the way, Tom’s largesse was as thoughtful as usual — he’s so great at the gift thaang.)

All in all, I’m happy to report that the start of my forty-third year was lovely, quiet, and fulfilling.

Tonight we made a very embarrassing trip to the Carrefour, where we filled our basket with lovely processed American carbohydrates. We were completely sheepish at the checkout aisle as we unloaded our imported crap food for weekend indulgence: Pepperidge Farm cookies (Milano, Nantucket, and Brussels), Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, and some Nestle choco puff cereal…I know, it’s horrible. And don’t even get me started about how much it all costs, because, well, it’s imported!

We have more goodies on the way from the US as well — some wonderful fabulous friends in BA (thank you Tim and Lori) just returned from a stateside jaunt and brought us back peanut butter, soy butter (for Zelda, who has nut allergies), and hair dye for me (f*#king aging)!

Viva la import products!

Zoe, Zelda, Tom and I attended our first 3D film today (well, actually, Tom did see Jaws 3D when he was younger, so I guess he doesn’t count). We went to a screening of Monsters vs. Aliens.

We arrived at the empty theater in the afternoon, collected our 3D glasses, and bought massive amounts of junk food and a Coke, in the hopes of keeping Tom awake. The glasses were not what I expected, they were actually a darkened “Men in Black” style shade, which looked hilarious on the girls. The tinted anteojos also provided cover for Tom when he fell asleep during the movie, which he invariably does while attending children’s cinema, only this time, it was the snoring that gave him away!

I was impressed with the effects, the 3D experience was pretty neato. We all enjoyed eating too much candy and popcorn (note to self, when Zoe’s exhausted, don’t feed her sugar). The movie, well, it was okay.

A last note on dubbing/subtitles here in Buenos Aires: US releases are in English with Spanish subtitles, unless it’s a kids movie, where the reading thing can be a problem, which means the movies for little people are dubbed. I was gratified to learn that I could fully comprehend a film targeted to the younger set!

With our withering brain mass, we can’t remember exactly when we bought our MacBook Pros, suffice to say Tom’s was probably sometime in 2006 and mine in 2007. For the most part, we have been very happy (I was a Windows convert), but I do have three rants (of course):

The first knock is that this computer runs incredibly hot; so much so that I can’t really compute for any length of time with it on my lap. It has actually gotten to the point once or twice where I have taken it off my legs and peeled down my pants to see if I was mildly burned. In fact, Tom has taken to grabbing the ice packs I use on my knee and placing them between his limbs and the computer if he is going to have it on his lap for awhile! Ridiculous.

The second knock is the speakers, which are set to a level the bionic man would have trouble hearing. (I suppose the engineers did this because speakers generate a lot of heat, see first rant above.) We’ve noticed the biggest problem with older movies purchased on iTunes; for instance, the Karate Kid (Xmas present for the kids) is literally impossible to hear. We have used Audio Hijack to boost the speakers a bit, which helps somewhat…

The third knock is the wireless, which apparently suffers interference from the metal case around the computer and doesn’t work well if you are in any sort of challenging wireless environment. This was very apparent during our summer travels. Ian, who had the newest Apple out of the three of us, a MacBook with a white case, practically had a satellite link. I usually encountered medium to low signal strength if Ian could connect easily. And Tom, well, he would get zippo, zilch, nada, no signal at all unless he was seated right next to the router. (Talk about Tom being frustrated!)

Original Photo Before Heat Colorization by Flickr user TheRealGrudge used under a Creative Commons license.

…this is what it would look like!!

The girls are generally very opposed to my sharing anything about them on the blog (so of course, I love to threaten to write about them, particularly when anything embarrassing happens in their lives). Their reticence to star in the blog does not stop them from making suggestions about possible topics though.

Today, Zoe opined that a post was the perfect forum to let everyone know about the game she calls the “addicting helicopter game.” (One of their favorite past times is finding new video games to play over the Web, and we are constantly astounded at how many new offerings they discover.)

Anyhow, Zoe somehow roped us all into playing this game tonight, each of us trying to supplant the other’s high score. Tom is currently the record holder, but I still have a few minutes left to play before going to bed…

UPDATE: Current high score in our house is 1214. Anyone score higher?