Mabel Catherine the Gypsy Cabbage Patch Doll Moves on

Recently I had to part with an object I had been lugging around for far too many years, a Cabbage Patch Doll named Mabel Catherine that I had been given as a gift in 6th grade in 1984. I'm 41.

Mabel has moved with me from California to New York, to Colorado to Texas and to Illinois and in each new house or apartment she's lived in a box with her clothes and blankies in the dark, never to be unpacked or played with. That's no way for an adorable Cabbage Patch Doll to live. My husband told me (a year ago) that I should really give Mabel to someone who would play with her, that I should get "rid of that doll."

As a mother of two boys I couldn't pass Mabel on to my sons, so I searched around for friend's with daughters. Mabel went to a close home for a bit, but the little girl soon tired of her and I found Mabel back in my possession. Were we meant to be together forever? No, I would just have to expand my search.

Then several months ago another friend with a young daughter was on the lookout for baby clothes. I offered up the clothes WITH Mabel as part of the package. Both or nothing. She bit.

On a cold December rainy night I drove Mabel Catherine and her box of clothes and shoes and blankies to my friend's house. I took a quick photo in the car outside, one last look at my old pal. And then handed her off.

It's very possible this little girl who gets Mabel Catherine for Christmas will soon tire of the doll and I will find Mabel back in my arms, a little more used and bruised and that's fine.

It's occurred to me that one of the best parts of having possessions is giving them away when you are done with them, to grateful new owners. I took an inventory of what I possessed at 41 to bequeath friends and family - a Cabbage Patch Doll, and antique rocking chair for a child, some jewels. I'm going to work on giving away more and getting lighter like that guy on Craigs List who gave away all his possessions - that sounds fun and gypsy-like.

For now I hope Mabel Catherine is excited for her new adventures out of the box and into someone's life, she's been waiting so long for it!

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Thank you for reading my blog Evanston Newbie, a blog dedicated to helping you too fall in love with the City of Evanston, just like I did. If you have any questions or need to get in touch with me about this blog, Evanston, or anything else you can email me at thelisadshow@gmail.com. Also feel free to send me announcements about upcoming Evanston events and I will promote them here!

Top 5 Evanston Newbie Posts of All Time

You know how much I LOVE lists, so I put one together for you, Faithful Reader. 

Here's the Top 5 Evanston Newbie Posts - EVER! And if you can't read these on your tablet at the beach, print them out and leave them in your bathroom for house guests!

Top 5 Evanston Newbie Posts - EVER! 

#1 

Evanston Newbie Anniversary Series: 40 Lessons Learned Moving from El Paso, TX to Evanston, IL

#2 

Summer Popsicle Recipe: Coconut Milk and Mexican Chocolate

#3 

Evanston Newbie and Family take the $100 Whole Foods Healthy Eating Challenge

#4

Manifesto for the underemployed, not wanting it all and other thoughts on doing very little with your time

#5 

Warning: There is a whiskey distillery less than a mile from my home

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Thank you for reading my blog Evanston Newbie, a blog dedicated to helping you too fall in love with Evanston, just like I did. If you have any questions or need to get in touch with me about this blog, Evanston, or anything else you can email me at thelisadshow@gmail.com. Also feel free to send me announcements about upcoming Evanston events and I will promote them here!

April 27th is Love Thy Neighborday and I am totally celebrating it!

This will shock you - according to Pew Research the average American moves 11.7 times in a lifetime. Turns out I am NOT the only gypsy out there! I'm normal! But it also turns out I don't know my neighbors very well or very much. Although I do know at least nine families around our area, I should know more and that's why I am celebrating Love Thy Neighborday on April 27th.

Here's what I learned reading the Life Edited newsletter today:

The average American moves 11.7 times in a lifetime. One out of six Americans move once a year. This high mobility may have turned the institution of neighborly relationships from marriage to long-term dating or even brief fling. This situation was verified by a Pew Study that found fewer than half of Americans know most or all of their neighbors.

Neighbors are good (at least the ones that don’t blast music at 2am). They feed our cats, lend us ladders and cups of sugar and provide easy companionship. A strong tie with a neighbor is worth 1000 Facebook friends on the black market. But it’s tough to love our neighbors when we don’t even know them.

And you can actually, officially, sign up and celebrate the day in style at http://www.good.is/neighboring or you can just wing it and talk to your neighbors.

So if you live by the Dempster Street CTA stop in Evanston, I look forward to meeting you on April 27th, neighbor!

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Thank you for reading my blog Evanston Newbie, a blog devoted to covering my family's move from El Paso, TX, to Evanston, IL, in 2011. We arrived in June 2011 and several people have pointed out that I am no longer a "newbie" and should start some other blog. But I disagree and want to keep the "newbie" status for a while longer, maybe five years and for several reasons. #1 - there are many Evanston families who have lived here for generations since the town incorporated in the late 1800s, so in comparison to them, I am very much a "newbie". #2 - I firmly believe this blog is a good branding tool for the city of Evanston and it's the least I can do to thank our new town for being so AWESOME! If you have any questions or need to get in touch with my about this blog, Evanston, or anything else you can email me at thelisadshow@gmail.com.

Sunday Breakfast: 6 boys, 24 pancakes, 3 minutes, 1 HUGE milestone

Warning: For those of you parents reading this who used to attend Pancake Saturdays, you are going to cry big crocodile tears mostly because like never before, you are going to miss ME and those quiet hours on Saturday morning when I would take your children off your hands for several hours and leave you to do laundry, nurse a hangover, make out with your partner, whatever you used to do. Know that I miss YOU too, and am crying with you.

When we lived in El Paso we used to host a Saturday morning social event for neighborhood kids called “Pancake Saturdays”. Adults were invited to drop off their children around 8 a.m. and pick up them up around 11 a.m. (that same day) and were discouraged from coming inside for coffee, as it was a “’kids only” thing. Between 8-11 a.m. (in no particular order) my children hosted up to 8 friends in our home and without any adult supervision (aka micromanaging) they played games, watched cartoons and hosted a pancake breakfast, all I had to do was make 40 pancakes on the skillet in my kitchen in my jammies.

Some of our fondest memories of El Paso are of Pancake Saturdays. Of course now that they don’t take place anymore my children have romanticized the breakfasts talking about the hundreds of children who attended and the buckets of candy I distributed. But the truth is, Pancake Saturdays were always small and totally sweet and catered to the neighborhood.

Our last year in El Paso the breakfasts didn’t occur as often as Saturday mornings got eaten up by organized sports. We talked a lot about having Pancake Saturdays but they just sort of stopped and me and my children missed them and then we moved. Would we ever have them again?

The first thing you need for Pancake Saturdays is a group of friends then you need the space to feed the friends breakfast. Upon arriving in our teeny tiny apartment it was obvious hosting more than 2 children for breakfast was out of the question and we really only had one friend who was a kid and her mom didn’t like her eating the pancakes I made and instead wanted us to try the healthy kind. We decided to table Pancake Saturdays.

And then just last month we moved into an apartment with room to host more than 4 diners in the kitchen or the dining room – my spirit lifted at the chance to host anything! And what did we host first? A pancake breakfast! It was totally on the wrong day (Sunday) and was part of an all-day Axis and Allies tournament that catered to 10-year old boys not necessarily neighbors, but we finally hosted a pancake breakfast and it felt so awesome. As is the case with the most of the milestones we experience in our new life, I find myself over analyzing and obsessing about every detail. I ask myself questions like “How does today’s milestone compare to the one in El Paso?” “How are these children different than the children in El Paso?” “Are my children looking homesick and sad?” “Do these pancakes seem dry?”

And as I sit and obsess, I look at my children for guidance and they seem to be so calm, not at all carrying the burden of overanalyzing every minute. But who knows with children! Sometimes they don’t talk about a thought or feeling for several months or even years. Sitting there eating pancakes at our kitchen table with 6 friends, my children looked calm and didn’t at all seem to be picking up the screaming message in my head that was blaring “THIS IS THE FIRST PANCAKE BREAKFAST WE’VE HOSTED IN OUR NEW CITY, ISN’T THIS INSANE?!?!?!” (Could you for one minute imagine being my child?)

Of course I learned a few things about my children and their new friends despite all the over-analyzing I was doing. Here are just a few things I picked up on;
1. Both of my children are so much more patient than I am when it comes to making friends
2. Boys do talk, they talk so much
3. When left alone, children problem solve with words (I sort of knew that already)
4. Six children can play together for up to six hours without video games. Imagine?!

It feels so great to still be learning so much from our move, I didn’t anticipate that would be such a huge part of it. And it also feels so good to carry over old traditions and make them new and unique to our new city and life. I am grateful to have children who are open and patient, they are both making me that way every day. And who knows, maybe we’ll switch it up and host Pancake Sundays from now on, we had such an amazing first run.

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Thank you for reading my blog "Evanston Newbie", a project that I am using to chronicle my new life in Evanston. Do you have favorite Evanston bakeries, bike shops, events that you can recommend? Send me an email at thelisadshow@gmail.com and I will post my review on this blog. -Lisa Degliantoni

Mom, I've lived in 5 houses and I'm only 10. Isn't that a bit much? -Older Son

One of the most complex issues that has surfaced surrounding our move from El Paso, TX, to Evanston, IL, was how to justify the move to our children. We didn't need to move, we wanted to move. In fact I wanted to move, just like when I wanted to move from San Diego, CA, to New York, NY, and from Brooklyn, NY, to Durango, CO. Telling children that you want to walk away from comfort, a good job, awesome friends, a lovely home, etc., is illogical.

My good friend Maura tells me to talk to the boys about the move, explain to them the benefits but both boys look at me with blank faces when I wax poetic about public transportation and many different languages being spoken on a city block.

What my children want and what my husband and I want is rarely the same thing and this move was not something they wanted, but they went along with it and only now, six months later, do I hear grumbling like in the title of this post.

But as always, and their therapist can hear all about it later, this move was about my marriage, my future and ME and I had a hunch it would benefit all that plus my children. Six months into it, I feel incredibly vindicated as both my husband and I are working at jobs we love, our children are attending one of the best public schools in Illinois (Go Dewey!) and lots of friends and neighbors have opened their hearts and homes to us without doing a background check. (Phew)

So as I look at my son as he awaits a good response to "Mom, I've lived in 5 houses and I'm only 10. Isn't that a bit much?" I can't help but just stare back at him in silence, pondering how well this will prepare him as he moves to a new middle school and moves to a far away university and moves to a far away country to follow his love after college. He'll be ready and happy to move and change because his parents taught him at the young age of 10 that moving is growing and like William Butler Yeats said “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”

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Thank you for reading my blog "Evanston Newbie", a project that I am using to chronicle my new life in Evanston. Do you have favorite Evanston bakeries, bike shops, events that you can recommend? Send me an email at thelisadshow@gmail.com and I will post my review on this blog. -Lisa Degliantoni

Postcards: Announcing our new address while throwing the U.S. Postal Service a bone all thanks to an ugly divorce and cross country move

My friend went through an ugly divorce and gave away items that reminded him of his ex-wife, many of the items now decorate our walls and spin on our record player. In addition to records, butterfly collections and art, we scored a postcard collection housed in a Romeo y Julieta cigar box. Most of the postcards in the collection are from European castles and Norwegian landscapes, he didn't explain the collection, but it's all very random and eclectic.

One theme in the collection is 3D postcards all printed in Tokyo, Japan, and purchased at the Asahi Trading CO. N.Y.C. There are seven total, and some of the them reveal images in the background if you move the postcard from side to side. For instance, a bull rips off the dress of the Spanish dancer, revealing a bare chested woman looking quite surprised! (My grandfather Guido Degliantoni, a collector of dirty old man stuff, would have loved it.)

In our recent move to Evanston, we had the chance to touch everything we owned and decide if it was worth packing in a Penske Truck and moving across the country to our new home. We made room for the postcard collection and will use it to announce our new mailing address. Announcing our new mailing address using such an antiquated medium will hopefully encourage our friends to use the postal service, which could use the love.

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Thank you for reading my blog "Evanston Newbie", a project that I am using to chronicle my new life in Evanston. Do you have favorite Evanston bakeries, bike shops, events that you can recommend? Send me an email at thelisadshow@gmail.com and I will post my review on this blog. -Lisa Degliantoni