Raquel lives in a suburb of Los Angeles called Whittier with her partner and her daughter Annabella, 16 months.  Her son Jackson, 18, is away at college.  Whittier  is one of those pockets of LA with a quaint uptown, brick lined streets, boutique shops and a lot of history.  They’ve lived there for 3 and 1/2 years. 

List three words to describe your home.

Comfortable, earthy, tranquil

What is your favorite room, and why?

That’s a tough one – I love almost every room in the house!  First I’d have to say the kitchen because we completely renovated it from the ground up so everything in there is a reflection of our personality and tastes.  I love looking at the kitchen from another room – it makes me smile.  The living room is another favorite even though it’s small – Anabella and I sit on the couch and look out the window at the garbage trucks on Thursdays.  I can see the kitchen and the dining room from there, which is probably another reason why I like it so much.  I also love Anabella’s room – we play or read books in there.  I love the Pali pieces – they’re so regal.  I could go through the entire house and tell you why I love each room!

What is your favorite item and why?

I have to say my Mac laptop.  Not only because it’s what keeps me in touch with the rest of the world but because my whole life is in there from photos to screenplays, poems and first chapters of the novel I’m writing.  I also love to buy online.  Of course it’s now an item I can mostly only use when Anabella is napping – so it’s become an item I love that’s become cherished because of the limited time I have with it.

My favorite household item would be my Cuisinart Smartstick (hand blender) I use it almost everyday since Anabella still prefers most of her vegetables blended.  It’s so easy to use and clean.

Favorite color in your house? Why?

Green like our walls and couches in the family room but in contrast with the brick red color of the fireplace and cognac color of the couch in the living room.  The green paint was called crocodile tears and I actually had a fireman comment on the color last week – he wanted to know the name so he could paint his house the same color!  I love the warm feeling of the earth tones – it reminds me of being in nature.

Describe your morning routine.

Anabella usually wakes up at 7am.  When I open my eyes I find her staring at me intensely as if she’s willing me to wake (which I guess she is!) and when she sees that I’m awake she gives me a big smile.  As soon as we’re out of bed she’s ready to play.  She has a game for every room in the house – even the bathroom.  The living room has become the romp room with her climber that has replaced the coffee table and her rocking horse.  The family room is now the music and art room – we keep a bucket of instruments for her to play with and the coffee table in there has her sketchbooks, crayons and colored pencils.  She’s recently discovered coloring with colored pencils and she likes to make strong lines and scribbles, which I then color in to create a collaborated Kandinsky-like drawing.  She loves drawing over my drawings!

In the kitchen she plays in the pantry, with the pots and pans and in her bottom drawers, which have her cups, plates and bowels she can stack and sort.  She loves to help with chores – she takes the broom and sweeps and loves to clean things with a rag – it’s very cute and I plan to remind her of this when she turns 13!  She also loves to do laundry especially unfolding whatever I’ve just folded.  She can be very silly – she likes to take underwear and put it over her head – sometimes she’ll wear 3 or 4 pair at a time like a scarf.  The office is her least favorite room because I won’t allow her to bang on my computer.  She keeps herself busy in there with the junk mail we keep in the wicker wastebasket or by looking at my old photo albums.

Anabella’s favorite room is hers of course since that’s where most of her toys are and all her books.  Her favorite thing to do is to look at books.  I’m so happy she’s becoming a bookworm like I was.  She’ll spend a good half an hour pulling books from her shelf and “reading” them.  Sometimes she’ll come to me with one and want me to read it to her.  She’s very specific about which book she wants me to read and which one she doesn’t.  If she doesn’t want a book she’ll shake her head no and grab the book and throw it on the ground.  We’re working on learning how to put the books back on the shelf.  Anabella has recently become attached to her baby doll.  She carries it around and hugs it and puts it in the doll stroller.  The other morning she handed me her doll with her bathing suit and she was very pleased when I put her bathing suit on the doll and last night we fed the doll some of her dinner – she thought that was hilarious!

On Tuesdays and Thursday mornings we go to swim class.  She loves swimming and seeing the other “babies”.  She can blow bubbles and kick when she’s on her back and she’s just starting to figure out how to kick while holding the kickboard.  Her favorite part is when we do the hokey pokey in the water and play ball – she’s a great catcher and is ready to toss it to the next kid with a big smile – the other moms call her smiley.

By 10:30 Anabella is ready for a nap so we read books and lay down together.  She sleeps for 2 hours on a good day.  If I’m really tired I’ll stay with her and sleep for an hour otherwise I try to use the time to get things done either on the computer or phone calls I need to make.  When she wakes up we have lunch together and then get ready to get out of the house.  She loves getting out even if it’s just to the store.  Some days we do errands and others we visit family (my mom and sisters live nearby).  We’ve done a few playdates but I wish we could do more — it’s tough here in LA where everyone has busy lives.  We hit the playgrounds in the afternoon as well – Anabella loves the playgrounds especially seeing other kids running around and having fun.  She’s very social for a 16 month old – she’ll go up to a kid and scream in their face in a playful way.  When she was younger Jacqui and I would walk or hike almost every day with her while she chilled out or slept in her BOB but now that she’s older she wants to be active most of the day so I don’t get to walk as much.  I’ve just ordered a Topeak bike seat for Anabella so I can strap it to my mountain bike and hit the bike path near our house.  It goes past my mom’s house, which is a good 30-minute bike ride each way.

What is in your fridge?

It’s kind of empty right now since we need to go shopping but… organic Silk, organic apples and lemons from our tree.  Anabella loves the lemon tree – we water it and check it every day and she loves to play with the lemons.

Do you recognize anything about your aesthetic style that reminds you of your mother’s home or your grandmother’s home?

Absolutely.  My mother and I have similar tastes – she’s a bit more daring or eccentric in her choices with color for walls and artworks that hang on the wall but we both love antiques and mixing that with other styles to create a unique look.  When we were re-doing the house my mom and I had picked out the same tile for the kitchen!

What do you pack for lunch for your child? Snacks?

My oldest, Jackson, is vegan and has sensitivities to wheat so I make him sunflower seed butter on rice bread or soycheese sandwiches on rice bread and trail mix with pumpkin seeds, soynuts and raisins, which he loves and granola bars and fruit usually.  He’s in college now!  Anabella is home with me and she’s just now getting into eating – she’s been a slow and picky eater and she’s still nursing but she’s now trying things like rice cakes with hummus (which Jackson also eats) and she loves the gluten free waffles with maple agave syrup and peach soy yogurt.  I make her “stews”, which I freeze in small containers – usually with brown rice, garbanzo beans, zucchini, carrots, spinach or yellow split peas with millet and veggies.  Anabella loves the usual things like bananas, applesauce and raisins but she also loves papaya, peaches and watermelon.  We all try to eat mostly organic in the house but I feed Anabella only organic foods.  We are all vegetarian and since I’ve had Anabella I’ve gone off dairy so Jacqui is the only one eating dairy for now.

Your child’s favorite activity, craft and or game?

Anabella loves to be outside.  We can be in the backyard just running around in circles and she’s happy so I don’t have to be too creative yet with that.  Inside we’ve tried to make our home as open to Anabella as possible so she has the freedom to explore, play and be creative without having to say “no” every second.  The family room is our art space and our last project was to draw on old paper bags to make wrapping paper.  At first she thought that was kind of weird but then she got into it – we collaborated and made some pretty interesting artworks – I felt bad cutting them up to wrap the presents!  Our next craft is going to be making Christmas ornaments out of dough.  I want to make her handprints into ornaments that will last so when we pull them out each year we can see how she’s grown.

What has being a parent taught you?

To be in the present moment.  Children are so much in the moment – and we as adults always tend to look to the future.  Watching Anabella do something as simple as trying to put a shirt on – the intensity of her attempts pulls me into the moment and nothing else is important.  Before I know it she’ll have figured out how to put the shirt on and that moment will be gone forever.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up all over the place since my mom was a real hippie.  We lived in an old converted school bus in the foothills of Nevada for a year in a spiritual community, we lived in India in an ashram and we moved almost every year from New York, to Miami to Los Angeles as we followed our mediation teacher.  I always felt like life was an adventure and it taught me how to be spontaneous but it was hard to always be the new kid at school.  We finally stopped moving when I got to high school – that’s when we moved to Spring Valley so I could go to the Waldorf School there.  That was the longest year of school I ever had since I didn’t arrive late or leave early.  I hope that we can provide Anabella with a sense of security that I felt once my family stopped moving but also a sense of adventure and flexibility – we hope to travel with her a lot.  I don’t want her to be one of those California girls who are obsessed with wearing the right kind of jeans.  There’s something about growing up in the northeast that keeps you grounded in reality.  But I probably shouldn’t worry since [my partner] Jacqui grew up in Jersey and I feel a close affinity to New York since that’s where I lived the longest with my family so we’re both pretty grounded.

For more information about Raquel, click here for her IMDB page.