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How to turn a thin utilitarian onesie into an adorable little mini-dress!

Ruffly goodness!

A little rockabilly one

Two more awaiting wearing...

...and modeled

and a variation with smaller ruffles and bias tape trim!

First, gather your materials:

• Your victim onesie – I used a Gerber 12 month onesie that comes in a 5-pack.  Fits my (admittedly monster tall) 2-month old perfectly
• Fabric (I used cotton seersucker but any cotton or cotton-poly should do just fine)
• Thread
• Scissors
• Ruler
• Pencil or marking pencil (I only had pencil, but it didn’t wash out as easily as I’d hoped, so I recommend a marking pencil if you can get your hands on one)

Your raw materials

Wash your fabric.  For me, it’s always frustrating to have to wait to begin the project, but I’ve learned over the years that it’s really worth it.

Wash the fabric

For the approximate ruffle size you see in the picture, cut two 9 inch strips of fabric that go the entire width of the fabric.  If your fabric is more than 45″ wide you may want to trim it at 45″ so you don’t have TOO much ruffle.

Two 9-inch strips of fabric

Fold each strip lengthwise with the right sides together. Stitch the long side with a very small seam allowance as shown here, making the strip into a tube.

Stitch your strip into a tube

Then, zig-zag the raw seam allowance flat – this means the fabric won’t bulk up when you turn it right-side-out to make your ruffle.  Of course, if you’re lucky enough to have a serger (hint, hint, Engineerboy), you can skip this step b/c you will serge this edge.

Zig-zag the seam allowance

What your finished edge should look like

After that you’ll have two tubes of fabric:

Fabric tubes

Turn your tubes right-side out and iron them flat.

Ironed fabric tubes

On each open end of the tube, fold the raw edge under to the inside of the tube (I did about 3/8″) and iron flat.

Iron under the raw edges of your tubes

Peeking inside to see the turned-under edge

Now you have the makings of your ruffles!  Lay them out on your onesie to determine approximately where they should go.  Safety note: I keep the ruffles low on the onesie, like a skirt, so that there’s no way they can flip up to cover her face when she sleeps.

Determine your ruffle placement

Once you figure out where you want your ruffles, mark a line on the onesie for where the top of each ruffle should land.  Remember to keep them at least 1″ apart so that you have room to sew both ruffles on the onesie without sewing them on top of each other.

Mark your ruffle lines

Onesie with ruffle placement marked. Beware: that graphite did not wash out as easily as I thought it would.

Taking your fabric tubes, insert one end inside the other.  Lay that down on the sewing machine and topstitch.  Now your fabric tube is a fabric cylinder.

Topstitch one end of the tube into the other end

Fabric cylinder!

Next come the basting stitches to make the ruffly-ness.   Set your machine on the largest straight stitch possible.

Set your machine on a straight stitch, with as large a stitch as possible

Then sew basting stitches around the TOP edge of each ruffle-cylinder (the top edge is the one without the lengthwise seam).  Leave a large seam allowance on this one; I did about an inch.  Remember not to backstitch!

Sew your basting stitches on a large seam allowance along the top edge of the cylinder

Pull on your bobbin thread to gather the ruffles (technically you should use two strands of basting stitches but heck one works pretty well as long as you pull delicately and don’t break the thread when you gather the fabric).  When you’re done you’ll have two gathered cylinders of fabric:

Two gathered cylinders of fabric

Starting with the lower ruffle, pin your ruffle onto the body of the onesie, aligning the top edge of the ruffle with the line on the onesie.  I aligned the seam of the ruffle (where you made the tube into the cylinder) on one side seam of the onesie. You may have to adjust the gathers to make the circumference fit the onesie.  The ruffle should be just slightly larger around than the onesie, but not a lot.

Pin your ruffle to your onesie

Once your ruffle is pinned, slide your onesie around the arm of your sewing machine and stitch the ruffle to the onesie (remember to make your stitch length smaller than the basting stitches!).   For the bottom ruffle, I slid the onesie on from the bottom, so the ruffle was actually out to the right.  I sewed with straight stitches, aligning the right edge of the presser foot with the basting stitches.  Make sure not to stretch the onesie a lot when you do this, because the knit of the onesie is much weaker than the cotton ruffles – it won’t be able to bring those ruffles back into line and you’ll end up with a garment that makes it look like your little one has a hula hoop inside the onesie.

Sew the ruffle on, with your stitch being between the basting stitches and the top of the ruffle

Now you have a onesie with one ruffle!

Lower ruffle in place

Repeating the same process, pin the second ruffle on the upper line you’ve drawn on your onesie.  Pick the opposite side seam of the onesie to align the side-seam of this ruffle.  (This makes sure you don’t have a “droopy” side where both side seams live).  Then put your onesie on the machine (this time I put it on via the neck opening) and stitch.  Again, stitch the straight seam between the basting stitches and the top of the ruffle.  I aligned the left edge of the presser foot with the basting stitches.

Stitch your second ruffle on

Now all you need to do is use the seam ripper to take out the basting stitches.  It’s often easier to do this from the underside of the ruffle so that you don’t accidentally take out the stitches attaching ruffle to onesie.

Remove the basting stitches with a seam ripper

Et voilà, your plain utilitarian onesie is now transformed into an adorable and easy outfit with an attached ruffled skirt!

The final product!!

And here’s my little angel gamely modeling it for me!

Baby Bootsie in her New Ruffled Onesie

The color combos are endless, and it really only takes 1/2 yard or so of fabric to make this.  You can also dress it up by trimming the end of the ruffle with a coordinating bais tape or other fun trim.  Here’s my other favorite one – retro cherry print on pink gingham.  Next up is leopard print on a pink onesie!

Baby Bootsie in her retro rockabilly ruffles

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Welcome back to the Mynagirl Fashion report, resurrected after many years on hiatus!!  Baby Bootsie has been sleeping peacefully this evening, so I’ve been able to have a nip and quip at the fashion for the 2010 Emmys.  Thanks much to technical crew Engineerboy for giving us these gorgeous images armed with only a remote, a capture card, and some great timing.

Ladies in Nude

Pale neutrals and golds were a definite trend.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw	Mariska Hargitay
Jewel in Zuhair Murad	Claire Danes in Armani Privé
Claire Danes wears the serious sequins

Sofia Vergara from Modern Family brightens the trend a little with a golden yellow Carolina Herrera.  Engineerboy liked that the beadwork looked like the human genome project.

Sofia Vergara in Carolina Herrera

Golden girl

Glenn Close and her daughter wore matching pale patchwork-y dresses that looked like but presumably weren’t vinyl

Glenn Close and her daughter Annie in matching Rubin Singer

Heavy Hardware

There were a couple Greco-Roman looks, some more successful than not.   I have to say, while I like the cut of Kim Kardashian’s Marchesa column, it’s not very flattering on her. Update – I have become a convert of this dress after seeing some better camera angles on it.  I think Kim looks very statuesque and classic.

Kim Kardashian in a white grecian column

Kim Kardashian in Marchesa

Cool of newlywed Anna Paquin to honor and wear Alexander McQueen, but the gown is better up top than on bottom.  Honestly, it looks a bit like she accidentally tucked the hem into her pantyhose.

The Moyers

Anna Paquin in her Alexander McQueen

And I have no idea who this is (gasp.. should I?  Usually my trashy magazine reading serves me so well), but this is a fugly nightmare of a look on her.  The hair is messy, the dress is all over the place, and she’s so bony.  Do not like.

Hot White Grecian Mess

In the Navy

Dark midnight blue was definitely a trend.  I’m sure a lot of these dresses look great in person but they’re nearly as boring as black on camera.  At least some of the shapes were nice.

Lea Michelle in Oscar de la Renta

Jane Krakowski

Julie Bowen in a navy column

Purple People-Eaters

Emily Deschanel in purple ruffles

Emily Deschanel in purple

Christina Hendricks looks like a refugee from Dancing with the Stars in her maribou-adorned lilac mermaid gown.  Oh it’s Zac Posen, that’s why I don’t like it…

Christina Hendricks from Mad Men showing some serious skin (and what's underneath)

Jane Lynch is a little more pulled together in amethyst taffeta:

Jane Lynch, supporting actress nominee in an amethyst one-shouldered gown by Ali Rahimi

Lovely taffeta shape

Classic (or Boring) Black

Boy were there a lot of boring black dresses.

Carrie Ann Inaba in black

Black Tea Length Taffeta and Tulle

..and another black dress

...and another. Kate Gosselin also in black.

Eva Longoria spruces up her basic black column with chandelier earrings and an athlete as her accessories.

Eva Longoria and Tony Parker

Edie Falco wears YAOSBD, yet another one-shouldered black dress.  Yawn.

Edie Falco in black

Statement Jewelry

I especially loved a lot of the statement jewelry at the Emmys.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus rocks the green earrings (chrysoprase perhaps?)

Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Padma Lakshmi wears a great glittery column necklace

Padma Lakshmi and her statement necklace

Glittery column necklace

Jewel wears some cool large earrings

Jewel in her Jacob & Co jeweled earrings

Lea Michelle’s collar necklace is out of this world!!

Lea Michelle's amazing collar necklace

... and an extreme closeup

Although not my absolute favorite, KK’s big bracelet was pretty fun as well.

Kim K rocks some criss-crossy diamond bling

Julia Ormond is safe from evil laser-wielding bad guys with her gilted Wonder Woman cuffs.

Laser-deflecting goodness!!

Hmmm, we wish you hadn’t

Keri Russell chose vintage and it just didn’t flatter her unfortunately. I want to like it because it wasn’t boring black but wow, it just didn’t fit at all.

Keri Russell in ill-fitting vintage

yeah... no...

January Jones sports the rocker chick black nail polish with a truly unflattering Versace.  It kinda looks like diner seating.  Or plastic plates.  Or the liner to an above-ground pool.

January Jones in Versace

January Jones in that keerazy Versace

Commentator Maria Menounous wore a glittery thing that looks… at first glance… kind of pretty.  Then she turns around.  She makes sure to turn around.

Maria Menounous...

...wears a...

... really backless dress

Lauren Graham sports a truly shapeless dress.  Wow, not doin’ it for her.  And you can’t even say it probably looked better on the hanger, that thing’s a drapey mess no matter what it’s hanging on.

Lauren Graham in shapeless color blocking

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The proposed site of the so-called 'Ground Zero Mosque'

I blog this morning feeling quite thoroughly American.  I have taken paid time off from my stressful but cushy job where I work from home for a corporation halfway across the country.  Engineerboy is manning the homestead while some electricians work their electron magic on our old 1940’s-wired cottage.  I’ve taken refuge at a local coffee shop, chilling in the air conditioning with an espresso drink, a blueberry muffin, and Wi-Fi.  I’m humming along to the Garbage song that’s softly playing in the background.  Baby Bootsie is snugly snoozing and strapped to me in the that marvel of upper middle class parenthood engineering, the Baby Bjorn Synergy.  The only other patron of the coffee shop is a retired grandfather who chats with the coffee shop owner about how he comes here every day for coffee and Internet access because he doesn’t want to pay AT&T $50 for broadband at his apartment, then he proceeds to head out in his brand new Mercedes. 

The whole scene embodies a lot of what is unique, slightly ostentatious, but ultimately lovable about America – the coffee shop owner happily offering free Wi-Fi to entice the locals to spend time with coffee and muffins, my husband and I fixing up our crappy old war cottage one paycheck at a time, me getting my choice of whole, 2%, skim, rice, or soy in my latte.  Even among the cushy capitalist trappings, it’s down home and small town and very friendly and sweet.  The paintings on the wall are from our favorite local artist (the same who did the Donkey family tattoo marathon session when the G-I-R-L turned 18, paid for in trade for us doing his website).  The New York pizza shop that connects to the coffee shop (Who has a combo pizza shop / coffee shop?  This place, that’s who) recognizes me when I call, just by the pizzas we always order (“Hey, were they cooked well done enough for you last time?”). 

As I sit here sipping coffee and periodically stopping to smooch the snoozing Baby Bootsie, I ponder the outline of the New-York-skyline-with-Twin-Towers painted on the wall of the pizza place with a “Never Forget” plaque.  9/11 was a shattering day even for those of us not in New York City, especially for those of us young enough not to remember other where-were-you-when-it-happened events of pivotal violence – the unreal kind that we had always grew up dispassionately watching happen elsewhere on the global news.  On 9/11 it took me all day to get hold of one of my college friends in New York City, and he’d spent his whole day frantic until he’d finally located his sister who’d been scheduled to take an employment drug test in one of the Trade Center buildings that day.  I watched the towers fall on live TV from the snack room at work.  I was working for ExxonMobil at the time, and I was afraid for any workers at the downtown Houston office; what an appetizing target the headquarters of the world’s largest American oil company might present to a group interested in attacking outposts of American imperialism. 

I know that I, not being a New Yorker, not having personally lost anyone in the Twin Towers or the Pentagon attacks, do not have the same visceral relationship with that tragedy or the Ground Zero site imprinted that day with the terror of the thousands of souls who perished.  But even knowing I can only witness the debate on the current proposed “Ground Zero mosque” as an interested party rather than a member of those directly affected, I am astonished and ashamed at the opposition I am hearing.  The politicians who categorically oppose it are – at best – gently abandoning our core American beliefs in a misguided attempt to spare pain to non-Muslim New Yorkers, or are – at worst – consciously and maliciously fanning the current anti-immigrant terror-baby flames that so easily ignite the tinderboxes of fear in the minds of perhaps otherwise sensible Americans. 

If local efforts to block the construction of the mosque are successful, it will be a travesty of how America should work and in direct opposition to one of the core beliefs that makes our country unique and admirable.   It is because we defend unpopular religions that we are the country we are.  The right of my neighbor to say things that irritate me (or practice religions I don’t like) makes this country so great, not just because it protects me when I want to say something that irritates my neighbor or practice a faith that she finds objectionable.   This setup, inconvenient or emotionally charged though it may be on an individual basis, ensures the wonderful rich marketplace of ideas and perspectives that makes the U.S. the country to desire to come to, rather than one to escape from.   We generally like to have a lot of options in that marketplace, even if not everything is to our taste.  I mean, sure, pop-up ads are annoying, but at least we don’t make Google filter our traffic, right?

I hope constitutional precedent and cool heads will prevail on this topic.  After all, nothing’s more patriotic in America than upholding the rights of someone to do or say something you don’t like.

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Gimme my $3.50 matinee ticket price back!!

What a terrible waste of an afternoon out of the house!  At least we ate sushi.

When the ad campaign for Drag Me to Hell came out a few weeks ago, I was cautiously optimistic.  Over the years, Engineerboy has educated me in the way of Sam and Ivan Raimi: Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, and even Army of Darkness.  Hilarious, silly, fun, campy, sly horror.  Classics.  I’ll watch them any time they come on cable.  Who can resist … uh… deciduous molestation, anyway?  And Raimi’s a big-time director now, and the three Spidey films to his credit have given him the stick in Hollywood to go back to his old schtick.   

If only he had. 

Drag Me To Hell isn’t a fun, campy Raimi flick.  It isn’t even a straight-up good fright of a horror movie.  There elements of each are there, but you can’t just toss frozen beef and an uncut carrot into a pan and call it stew.  Nor can you splash some wine and lob a cupcake in the pot and hope it makes a whole meal.  A movie’s only campy if you commit to it and have some humor.  If you play it straight, even a little bit, the campy parts become lame.  At the same time, you lose your ability to do effective horror if you kowtow to the current market and, pardon the vulgarity, pussy out with a PG-13 rating, unless you’re really really creative.  

And this movie wasn’t.  Give me some exploding intestines, give me chopped up brains, if it’s straight up horror I’m okay with it.  (Although the best horror movies show some of the least, à la Jaws and Aliens).  But seriously?  This stuff?

Spoilers, blah blah blah…

A gypsy curse, really?  A fortune teller?  A girl who’s thin now but used to be fat as a kid?  Animal sacrifice?  The “I’m a Mac” guy?  (Actually he wasn’t bad with what they gave him to work with). 

I won’t even bother to detail the plot to great length, it’s so pedestrian.  Aspiring-career-girl-not-good-enough-for-rich-boyfriend’s-family, bank, gypsy, foreclosure,  tough moral decision, curse.  It’s exactly what you expect of throwaway PG-13 marketed-to-teens crappy-ass pseudo-horror dreck.  The soundtrack is obviously ominous to a fault, with omnipresent screeching Eastern European violins.  The girl hears weird sounds but oh it’s just a rusty gate.  On the path to her $2 million dollar rusticly completely furnished adorable house above the LA hills.  Oh but wait it’s the wind.  Oh wait it’s really the ghost of what must be the devil, because it’s a shadow with horns.   Oh, it breaks windows.  Yawn.

Then here comes the stuff that I couldn’t watch, the only way you can make PG-13 horror: the gross-out crap.  Ok, maggots,  fly in the sinuses, kinda creepy, we’ll allow it.  But the old lady’s body spewing embalming fluid all down the girl’s mouth?  (From which girl stands up shocked and marvelously un-spewed-upon).  Blood flying from her nose and spraying a 7′ radius?  Eyeballs popping out and the girl swallows them?  If this isn’t camp then what the hell is it?  It’s just stupid!

There were some Raimi trademarks, even sadder to see them so awkwardly used.  The low-but-fast-moving point-of-view of evil, the synth/doubled evil spirit voice, the suspended-in-midair possessed body hurling insults, an inanimate object suddenly animate and giving little squeaks as it’s “killed”… all trademark, all horribly out of place in a purports-to-be-serious horror film.   Throw in some humor, throw in a little Bruce Campbell, something, and this movie goes someplace fun.  Where’s the disembodied hand under a bucket with “Farewell to Arms” sitting on top of it?  Where’s the “Who’s laughing now?”  Where’s the mumbled misremembered incantation for the Book of the Dead? 

If I want serious horror, I’ll watch 28 Days Later.  If I want camp, I’ll re-watch Evil Dead II.   This movie could’ve been either but in trying to be both it was neither.  Personally, I wanted to love it because of the trademark touches that felt like they were honoring me as a true fan.  But honestly this dreck could’ve used a little more tuning and tinkering time in the workshed.  Better luck next time, boys.

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• 10 stalks of fresh asparagus, top 4″ cut off (two 2″ sections will blend better)
• 1/2 carrot
• 1/2 ripe banana
• fresh orange juice (highly recommend Tropicana Valencia or Simply Orange — anything not from concentrate)
• splash of raw kefir
• 2-3 frozen strawberries
• Turbinado raw sugar to taste

Blend the hell out of it and drink it like a shot.

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• Fresh raw kefir
• Frozen strawberries
• Fresh strawberries (if available)
• 1-2 tbsp Naturally More peanut butter with wheat germ and flaxseed
• 1/2 ripe banana (or frozen banana chips)
• mini-handful of fresh oats (i.e., Quaker Oatmeal – not the instant kind – uncooked)
• frozen miniature chocolate chips
• Turbinado raw sugar to taste

Man this one is so good.  It’s my favorite so far

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• fresh raw kefir
• frozen strawberries
• 1/2 banana (frozen slices or fresh) – just make sure it’s RIPE
• 1-2 tbsp of peanut butter
• raw sugar to taste

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• Fresh unsweetened kefir
• 5 – 10 frozen strawberries
• 2-3 fresh strawberries (optional)
• 1 tbsp or so of peanut butter
• raw sugar (Turbinado) to taste

If you don’t like peanut butter (Engineerboy considers it food of the devil), orange juice is good in there instead.

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Marie, Marie, How Do Your Kefir Grains Grow?

For those of you who know me or even casually see my updates on Facebook, you know that I have become somewhat of a Kefir nut lately.

Kefir, for those of you who don’t know, is a dairy-based fermented concoction that’s created by a complex microbiotic culture when the culture is immersed in fresh milk.  More on Wikipedia, more on this guy’s Kefir site.  It can refer to the grains — the little colonies that do the fermenting — or the finished product, which is a bit like yogurt but with more live “stuff” in there and a thinner consistency.  So, you can — if you have access to a reasonably upscale grocery store or a mediterranean market – get Kefir in its final form, or you can ferment/grow it yourself with live kefir grains.

I’m certainly no expert on it yet, but I am a convert.  I used to make smoothies with it when we lived in Houston (and our local Kroger carried such things) but recently here in Brenham my yoga teacher gave me my own batch of live grains and now I’m a Kefir-making goddess!!  I “harvest” it every day or every other day — it’s easy to control by storing it in the fridge for a bit to slow down the fermentation or leaving it out on the counter to speed it up.  You can also vary how much milk you give it.  And the colony grows!  So now I have enough to share (and at least four people lined up to inherit some live grains from me).

I make smoothies at least twice a day and it’s an amazing food source.  I feel better, I have a lot of energy, and it’s really satisfying… I’m not hungry after a Kefir smoothie.

If you’re a health-foodie, definitely check it out if you haven’t already.  And try to get some grains of your own!!  The fresh stuff is for sure the best.

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Riveter? Check. Cure cancer? Check. Housewife? Check.

Human history has seen very few widespread, dramatic changes the likes of which occured with the Industrial Revolution.  The most profound social effect of this is arguably the female influx into the labor force (precipitated, in the United States at least, by the two World Wars), and follow-on women’s liberation movement. Prior to the 1900s, most abrupt changes to the human situation involved physical disaster or nasty, fast-moving microbes.  Thus having minimized much of the destructive natural-world forces via a “perfect storm” of industrialization, sanitation, automation, and mobilization, America could move up a rung on the Maslow Hierarchy and focus on productivity, fulfillment, and equality.  And America’s women could start stepping up and carving out more options from society than housewife, mother, maid, or prostitute.

A child of the 70’s and 80’s, I grew up with Women’s Lib safely tucked in near-recent history and girls being able to grow up to be just about anything they darn near pleased, at least as far as I remember. Not that gender roles didn’t exist — they surely did, especially in Texas. Boys play football; girls are cheerleaders. I had lots of friends whose moms were homemakers. My mom, bless her soul, wouldn’t let me own a Barbie or watch MTV because of the “unrealistic image” both projected of women. 

Probably my sharpest stinging personal memory of gender-role-infliction came in my High School Algebra II class when I was 14 (by this time I lived in Kentucky).   The demon of last-name-alphabetization and higher-math-class-demographics had me not only as the only sophomore but also one of very few girls.  I tended to constantly raise my hand in class — an annoying trait to be sure that will never win you the love of your high school peers, but it beat sitting there bored out of my skull when the teacher continually asked for an answer to a problem and then stared, painfully, into the classroom horizon’s sea of slack-jawed apathy.  So I was a nerd and proffered the right answer a lot in my math class.   After a particularly whiz-bang class period with lots of such participation, the jock-dickhead-popular-boy behind me asked witheringly, “Why do you even bother being smart?  You are just going to be somebody’s housewife someday.” 

Shocking as the statement was, as deserving of a “fuck you” as ever a comment deserved, I sat there mute.  Navigating high school on a daily basis is taxing enough without having to defend your gender and whether or not you’re allowed to use the brains you happen to be born with.  My defense blessedly came from another boy in class — sweet, friendly, not-very-good-at-math Jimmy Flanagan, looking as Irish as his name implies — who asserted I’d probably end up curing cancer.  So in 1988 in Kentucky, I at least had the option of curing cancer or being a housewife.

Once out of Kentucky and out of high school, career-gender-limitations really did drop away — or at least you were supposed to act as though there truly were no differences or barriers.  The politically correct 90s had definitely drummed out any explicit institutional barriers to females advancing in previously testosteronic fields.  But for every academically brilliant girl I knew that was pursuing an advanced chemistry degree, there was one who didn’t know how to put gas in her car because “if she just stood there looking cute some man would come help her do it”.  Actually, that was the same girl (true story).  So while the institutions weren’t allowed to treat us differently, we XX’s were allowed to act differently when and if it suited us.

The 90s progressed and I checked off the boxes for “middle class white kid” on my scoresheet, finishing college and getting an entry-level job at a huge insurance company.  I soon discovered I liked programming and got to be part of the tech boom in the 90s, hopping and salary-skipping up to a crappy consulting firm, then a big consulting firm.  By the time the tech boom had withered, I’d still found a niche as a money-making independent mercenary contractor. 

In this decade/century/millenium, I have settled nicely into working for a hosting firm where Engineerboy also works.  I love my job — it’s challenging, tiring, and frazzling as hell but for some reason I can’t envision doing anything else with my professional life that doesn’t involve an unexpected windfall inheritance.  Over the past couple years we’ve shifted to working from home 99.9% of the time, and even moved out into a small town about 90 minutes’ drive from the office.  It’s a sweet situation when you can choose the right spot to live and you don’t have to worry too much about where your “office” is. 

So my daily life now stands in sharp contrast to much of middle-class working America.  I spend 22+ hours a day at home.  I interact with my husband throughout the workday as well as in the evenings.  Our conversations are an interwoven mix of shared work chatter, house & home chit-chat, and any other random topic (news/politics/celebrities) that occurs during the day.  When our meeting schedules align to give us a mutual break midday, we share lunches as well — either a trip out to a local restaurant or a couple homemade sandwiches and maybe a half-hour break in the living room to watch South Park.

Over the years sharing this wonderful shared insular life working from home, I have realized that this is actually how the human unit is supposed to function.  The Industrial Revolution which brought us the amazing advances in sanitation and mobility and economics also enacted profound changes on the family, and maybe not for the better.  Although I’m certainly not waxing romantic about an epoch prior to the flush toilet, it does occur to me that back in the day when a family man’s options were farmer or merchant of his family-run store in a smallish town, his family probably spent more time together than they do now.  That what we think of as “normal” now — where we spend 9+ hours a day away from the ones we love and provide for — maybe isn’t really that normal given the course of human history.

I can’t tell you the number of people who have looked at me askance when I say that my husband and I work for the same company and thus spend most of our time together.  Many remark outright that they themselves couldn’t possibly do that.  Which I find odd — I mean, if you liked your spouse enough to marry her, shouldn’t you be willing to be around her most of the time?  Personally, I think that working with my spouse, at a common endeavor, sharing the same space, feels absolutely like what humans have evolved to do and how we should function if at all possible.

I’m glad the Industrial Age’s wheel has turned a full revolution and landed back where families have the ability to be home-based once again.  And although my job may not be curing cancer, at least I can have a challenging, fullfilling career, and be a housewife.  If you have the chance to do the same, I highly recommend it.

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