I’m not really one for superstition, or tradition just for tradition’s sake.  I like to use birthdays as an excuse to make a cake, but not the same cake.  (So many fine cake recipes in this world, so little time, you know?)  There’s not anything that I must always consistently do or eat on Christmas, or birthdays, or whatever.

But last year — as in, one year ago — was the first year that I made two New-Year’s-specific food items, in the form of pizza sfincione on December 31st and black-eyed pea dip on January 1st.  I can’t conclusively state that they caused good luck in 2011, but last year was also the year of job success! for Pete and pregnancy success! for me and moving 1800 miles success! for the collective Jejune household, and those are three sufficiently significant points of anecdata for me to keep making the same pizza and the same dip every new year.  More importantly, they’re both quite tasty.

The last third of 2011 was a pretty quiet one for us; I have to wonder if one of the reasons why people have children is because it gives you such a convenient way to lend your passing years deep significance.  (Not that I’m griping about that, mind you.  But I’m guessing that the arrival of my firstborn sometime within the next month will handily overpower my memories of 2012, without me really needing to do much about it.)  And then much of 2012 will be dominated by me just trying to find my equilibrium amongst all of the newborn haze, and trying to discover the meaning of my (new) life once its daily rhythms are being dictated by the wants and needs of a tiny, crabby force who remains stubbornly independent from my own control and who has no respect for my desire for a certain weekly ration of knitting and reading time.

(That’s the yet-to-appear baby, by the way.  But Garth and Sebastian, man — they can be needy little independent forces, if not exactly tiny.)

So my goal for 2012 seems pretty clear: not to just tread water, or to do okay, but to keep stretching my comfort zone.  Even when it means endlessly transferring a small child in and out of the infant car seat, or losing even more sleep while at the apparently sisyphean task of doing some dissertating while taking care of a small child, or grappling with all of the additional apparatus and mental baggage that traveling with a baby entails, or sending out innumerable job applications for positions that I’ll probably never get, or finding my new landmarks.  (Or at least interesting places that are within a day’s drive from Dallas.)  To keep trying to go places, in other words, even when there’s a greatly increased risk of failure or in-public diaper blowouts along the way.

Not to mention learning to enjoy motherhood, with all of the loudness and unwieldy bodily functions that such a thing entails.

Here’s to another goddamn new year!

Materials: 1/2 yard Kaufman damask minky print and four spools of cheap ribbon for the blanket; 10 cotton prefold diapers, the aforementioned ribbon, and the leftover cotton prints from the bunting for the burp cloths.

Time: A couple of evenings, largely spent watching Netflix while pinning.

Cost: Let’s see — around $6 for the minky, $10 for the spools of ribbon, $17.50 for the prefolds, and $10 for the fabric.

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There’s no one foody thing that I always prepare for the holidays, but they really do provide a convenient excuse to try out recipes that I can’t otherwise quite justify making.

Like these chocolate mint brownies, which require $9 worth of York Peppermint Patties.  I know that’s not much in, say, Halloween candy terms, but I feel like it’s a big investment for an untested recipe that multiple reviewers say has an inexplicable tendency to become hopelessly burned.

Happily for my risk-averse self, they were easy to make and turned out just fine.  Deliciously fine, in fact.

(Recipe notes: given all of the reports of burning and warnings not to overcook, I set my oven 10 degrees cooler than called for, tented them with foil halfway through, and took them out precisely when the oven timer sounded.  And, after chilling in the fridge for most of the day, they were really perfectly done.)

The thing about this recipe, though, is that it makes for an incredibly heavy, dense batch of brownies.  So much so that we ended up chopping them into 1×1″ squares and storing them in gallon bags in the freezer.  (That’s a bread plate pictured above, not a dinner plate.  And gallon-sized bags, plural.)  And, as a result, they are currently challenging the Jejune household record for longest-lasting dessert — not because we don’t eat them, but because the quantity produced is just so ridiculous.

So, like it or not, I’ve got dessert covered until sometime around the New Year.  And honestly, I’m not quite sure how I feel about that, except to wish that this kind of work-to-tasty-result ratio were easier to duplicate for normal entrées: 20 minutes prep time!  Two bowls to wash!  Two weeks’ worth of dinner!

I am so lonely.  So lonely!  And tiny!  Allow me to stand just outside the open doorway and yowl my discontent!

I love you so much!  And your hand!  And the corner of this desk!  And this chair!  And the printer!  So much love! …Sorry, I should go over there and eat that small dust bunny before you remove it.

I am so lonely.  And tiny!  Why don’t you hear me yowl here in the hallway?

I love your lap!  It makes me roll over backwards in ecstatic pleasure!

Why do you grow tired of stopping me from rolling onto the floor with both of your arms?  I love you!

I love this freshly-opened can of brownish liquid!  So fervently!  Why is it now dribbling down your shirt?  Can I smell it?  What’s it taste like?

I am just so happy to be in your lap that I must stick my butt in your face!  Butt!  In the faaaaace!

I love your unborn child!  Allow me to again attempt to balance my considerable bulk on top of him!  Head-bonk time!

Sorry, I just have the sudden need to thoroughly groom this shoulder.

I love your book!  The Italian is my very favorite!  I love it so much I… I just want to bury my face inside its spine and take a little nap on its pages!  How did you know that page xxix of the introduction is my favorite, too?

You know what I love most about your laptop?  This corner of the screen!  No, this corner!  No, it’s definitely this side of the keyboard!  Did I ever show you how perfectly the “1″ button is shaped for my chin?

You know the one thing that will make this “1″ button even better?  A tiny drizzle of drool.

I am so happy that we’ve been able to spend this time together!

Materials: 1.8 skeins KnitPicks City Tweed Aran/HW in Romance, a bit more Aran-weight brown cotton yarn, four wooden buttons, cheap felt, and some embroidery floss. Pattern: Baby Sophisticate.

Time: A couple of weeks.

Cost: $18.

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I suspect that Pete’s taken to subtly rearranging the silverware basket whenever he goes to put something in the dishwasher.

He referred to himself as “Commander of the Spoon Phalanx” the other day.

One of the things that constantly comes as an honest surprise to me is just how presumptuous literature about birth and parenting is.  Everything, even your crunchy-hippie-attachmenty texts, assumes that the parenting unit consists of a married birth mother and a father, which… really?  We’re not going to allow for same-sex couples, adoptive parents, unmarried parents, or single parents at all?  I know a ton of them, yet they simply don’t exist in the universe of parenting literature, which is disarming — like as soon as I give birth, my world will be transformed into a vision of lily-white heteronormativity.

There’s also still a heavy reliance upon the ol’ comic chestnut that fathers are all cloddish oafs.  “Let Daddy change a diaper once in a while,” one book encouraged me (before I threw it across the room (metaphorically speaking, it was from the library)), “even if he puts it on backwards!”

Whoa.  Neither my husband nor I have ever changed a diaper.  Between the two of us, my husband is by far the more mechanically-minded, and, I imagine, will apply himself the task of perfecting the most efficient and structurally-sound diaper change with vigor, whereas I will probably be more in the trial-and-error / “eh, good enough” camp.  But, you know, he is a man!  Without all of those womanly mothering instincts that will serve as my biologically-ingrained spiritual guides through diaper application!  Ha, ha, ha — of course he’ll put the diaper on backwards like a chump!  I also expect him to bring home a recliner and discover a heretofore unrealized penchant for beer and football while he’s at it, because, according to the experts, that’s just how dads work.

Lastly, my (admittedly very limited) experience with baby clothes indicates that baby boys get decked out in images of sports and dogs.  Sports… well, that’s a durable trope, but why dogs, exactly?  Where are all the baby onesies embellished with cat decals?  Are cats somehow deemed emasculating, even for an essentially sexless infant?

This really only leaves me with one choice.  Defy the dominant paradigm!  Dress your baby in feline imagery!

I found this set of magnets online yesterday, and immediately decided that they were the best things ever.  I don’t even know if I can get them shipped to the U.S. yet, and I’m already debating between the virtues of magnets or buttons.  Magnets would allow me to engage in Montreal-related nostalgia whenever I open the fridge, but buttons would mean that my baby would have one precociously pretentious diaper bag.

No, this isn’t going to be a post about my tight bond with the city of Montreal, or wanting to move back to Wisconsin or Quebec.  (I mean, if Pete’s college decided to up and relocate itself to either of those two places, we’d follow in a heartbeat.  But one rewarding, teaching-centric tenure-track job in a collegial liberal arts environment is a rare and handy thing in what’s inevitably referred to, in dismal and ironic tones, as The Current Academic Job Market.)  In North Texas we stay and settle for the foreseeable future.

But those pithy little distillations of the city-via-Metro-architecture make me wonder how I could construct the cultural and aesthetic equivalent for where I am now.  The names and images of local Sonics and Targets?  The abbreviations for local farm-to-market roads, with grass and cattle?  The awesomely earnest new business development styled as a dead-on accurate replica of a Croatian village, complete with stone bell tower next to unfinished parking garage?

You know, I really need to get out with my camera more.