Happenstance, Inc.

Time for a Resuscitation?

2011-04-29T18:20:00.001-07:00

After having dropped off of the earth for well over a year, I now wonder.....anyone out there?

Claustrophobia

2009-06-29T14:54:00.000-07:00

Back up to the surface....for some air.......

I would like to write about a topic that's been on my mind quite a lot: why geese honk while they fly. This seems like a logical question, for after all, it's hard to run and scream at the same time. The only time I've seen that happen consistently is in an action scene in the movies. From this I must conclude that geese having been watching too many movies, and have grown a bit too melodramatic for their own good, or that they feel themselves always threatened.

Yes, I would like to write about that, but I can't, seeing the paralysis that is this dissertation, the fact that i think about it all the time (when I'm not thinking about the geese). I would be lying if I said that the last few weeks have been lovely. They have actually been horrific. I have spent many, many, many hours locked in a freezing cubicle at the public library attempting to have scholarly thoughts -- and more important -- scholarly organizational skills. And while I am meeting with some success with both, I feel like this experience is forcing every hardship, insecurity, inconvenience, and negative feeling onto my last nerve, which is. on. fire. all. the. time.

I am lovely to be around right now.

I actually cried today over it. I sat in my office while a babysitter corralled my screaming, happy children downstairs, and cried over the fact that I seem not to have the mental faculties to get this done as quickly as I'd hoped. How quickly is that, you say? I dunno. Like yesterday.

So bear with me. I'd ask you to bear for me, but that's called plagiarism, and it's not so cool. And besides, the silver lining is that I see the purpose in this dastardly exercise called "dissertating." It sucks, but I'm learning something.

Sigh. Back to the grind.

Absent

2009-05-26T07:09:00.000-07:00

That sure was a heckuva(n) absent spell, no? Forgive, darlings, forgive. Life took a turn into the crazy lane. But since life is always in that lane, what sort of excuse is that? None, really. Nevertheless, let me amaze you with a list of my busy-ness, aka, that which has transpired since I last wrote:

1) I taught my last course for the semester, graded a stack of papers (the majority of which deserved shredding and tossing into the compost pile, yet I care too much about my compost), and spent time doing the usual "quibbling with students about grades and doing senseless grade-related math" routine.
2) Micah, my most lovely little infant elf, turned one! Pictures, you say! Yes, I know, I know. I'm getting there. The time was nice, many family members came into town to celebrate, and unlike his older brother, there was no cake-puking post cake-gorging. I consider this a small, yet significant, victory.
3) Brian graduated with his MBA. I cannot tell you what a huge, major relief this is. Brian has been gone every other weekend (sometimes more) for the past two years doing this degree, and we see him little enough with his work schedule (Micah goes to bed 1.5 hours after Brian gets home from work, if this puts anything into perspective). So getting him back on the weekends puts everyone at ease. EVERYONE (**vein in my neck still bulging**).
4) I have agreed to teach a course on Islam in the fall in addition to the usual World Religion courses that I've been teaching, and I've been doing prep on that. Should be very interesting.
5) After the graduating and birthday-ing, we disappeared over the long holiday weekend to visit family in the Ozarks, which is always interesting. But more on that later.
6) And today? Today is the start of a new kind of busy-ness. What is it, you ask? I'm glad you inquired.

Today, I start my dissertation again.

The babysitter should be here in about 15 minutes, and with that I will pack my computer and some books, and I will vacate the premises, off to the library to attempt something scholarly. This is a big day. I would be none too melodramatic to say that I feel like this is a "first day of the rest of your life" day, as finishing this sucker could line up a lot of stuff that has been, well, unaligned. It needs to get done. And so I hope today is the start of that finishing process.

And thus I appreciate -- solicit -- your kind thoughts, words, prayers, petitions to deities and other spiritual powers, small gifts, and small bills -- ANYTHING to keep me going. I have never had anything dangling over my head this long, and to be honest, the dangling must stop! Of course, I must remind myself that I have never had three children and an unfinished Ph.D. before. But it is not like me not to finish something I said I would. So for emphasis, for dramatic value, for the sheer weight of the words, let me say it here:

I WILL FINISH!

Whew. Feeling better now. Time to pack the computer.

Note to Self

2009-04-14T08:04:00.000-07:00

Dear Self,
Please remember that, the next time that your children are invited to a birthday party/kid event at one of those inflatable jumpy-slidy-thing places, you should do the following:

a) First, please plan a workout regimen, ideally starting approximately 9 mos. before said party occurs. The reason for this is simple: your body is not used to being flung around, climbing intertube-like walls, and being slammed against inflated barriers at the end of very large slides. And your flexibility has begun to suck lately, too. So while being svelte and muscular won't fix the offense of being tossed around, perhaps you could look a little more proficient at inflatable kid boot camp. It's not so cool, after all, to be so winded that you can't talk after going down the slide, to come out the other end kissing the solid ground, rolled into a tight ball praying for the muscle spasm to stop. Or maybe while inside the inflatable, you could just flex one of your bodacious biceps and in looking at your muscles, everyone's glance will be pulled away from the glaring fact that you are beached atop an inflatable mountain with no hope of rescue crews anytime soon. In addition to the previously mentioned un-coolness, it is also not so cool to have been stranded so long inside the inflatable that to the three, four, and five year olds climbing over and on you, you have merely become part of the attraction ("Look, mom! I climb up this wall, I jump on that lady, and then I go down the slide!").

b) Second, and perhaps most important, please remember to wear your best underwear. Because everyone will see it as you climb into the inflatable jumpy-slidy things to rescue any number of children who at that moment are claiming that you are their mother. And because, when you're suffering the indignity of looking like the aforementioned beached whale, the "accretion formally known as Leslie", at least your undies will look pretty.

Signed,
Yourself.

The Pictures You Know You Long to See, Part 2

2009-04-14T08:02:00.001-07:00

This is, quite obviously, the appropriate use of your father's underwear.

The Pictures You Know You Long To See, part 1

2009-04-08T15:02:00.001-07:00

Cuteness.

This was a trio of (obviously) matching tee shirts given at Christmas by aunt Erica and uncle Darren, whose trip to a Disney establishment (if I remember correctly) prompted the purchase of these matching tees. Cole has shown some dismay at not being able to wear the "Thing 1" shirt (so that he would be #1), nor the "Thing 3" shirt (since he is 3 years old). Sucks to be in the middle sometimes.

Coffee

2009-03-26T10:10:00.001-07:00

Having just recorded my wish to avoid hemlock-laced coffee, I am now spurred on to share a realization that I had the other day about my overwhelming addiction to that most honorable beverage.

I say my overwhelming addiction to coffee rather than caffiene because I now believe myself to be over the latter. We spent last week in Springfield visiting family, and I chose that time when good coffee is hard, if not impossible, to find in the homes in which we were staying to get off of caffiene and handle the headaches while grandparents were around.

After all, my doctor had mentioned that caffiene was not a good choice for a migraine sufferer, as it is a well-known headache trigger. I wasn't entirely disturbed by this news, since I like coffee much more than I like caffiene, and I palate decaf relatively well. But I will admit being a bit confused by my sensitivity to caffiene. I really never drank more than two cups a day. Really. I mean, when I was pregnant I was always told that that was an entirely acceptable amount to drink (although I was always too chicken), and have been told by many other medical professionals that that particular amount of coffee was fine. Just two cups. So why all of the headaches? The jitters that came on even when I had eaten? Did coffee *gulp* hate me?

I was pondering this as I was dumping the (decaf) grounds out of my french press yesterday. In doing this I also thought about my habit of pushing the plunger only halfway down when I get the first cup, so that the second cup can continue to get really good and gritty and dark. And how I leave it in the press for a LOOOOONNNNNGGGGG time so that it's really, really dark. And how I like dark coffee so much that if it weren't entirely texturally gross, I'd probably eat coffee beans.

And then I realized that the way that I'm making coffee, I'm drinking what is probably the equivalent of 7-8 espresso shots at a time.

Yeah, that'll do it.

You Can Call Me Socrates

2009-03-26T10:02:00.000-07:00

I've decided that the problem with teaching is the grading.

I mean, showing up somewhere and talking for awhile is something that I do rather naturally all the time. Yes, the problem is the grading. And I suppose that it wouldn' t be such a big deal if I only had the students who write the extremely readable and factually correct papers all the time, but uh, none of us have more than a couple of those in any given class.

If we are lucky.

So in my fantasy career world, I am much more like a Socrates, with followers who come to sit at my feet, to hear what I have to say, and then we all engage in a rousing discussion. And what wisdom we come up with! How we resolve the world's problems! And there would be coffee, lots of coffee, and some sort of other yummy snack always around.

Oh, but not the "Socrates, you corrupted the minds of the youth of Greece, so we will kill you" part. Yeah, not so hot on hemlock in my coffee.

And this is why I keep grading.

A Clean Bill

2009-03-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you will join me in celebrating my clean bill of health, the call from the doctor's office that indicated that my brain was normal.

Or to paraphrase my mother, "Your brain is not normal. It's just not growing anything."

Thank you, mother.

I'm Done! With Galaga

2009-03-14T11:39:00.000-07:00

So I'm back home, having just been MRI-ed and otherwise traumatized. But interestingly, the MRI wasn't the majority of the trauma.

Yesterday's post, as you might remember, briefly discussed my anxiety over the MRI and its possible (but not probable) bad results. Shortly after writing that, in the 13.5 minutes when all three children were sleeping at the same time, I had a rather frightening "attack" of....something? The numbness in my face spread up higher than it ever had (up to my nose), and my fingers grew numb. This was followed by a rather robust headache within half an hour, which although uncomfortable, was, honestly, reassuring, as this is much more "migraine-like" than "scary stuff" like. I called the doctor, who seemed relatively settled that I wasn't having a stroke. After all, both sides of my mouth went up when I smiled! Yet despite the power of my symmetrical smile, I felt out of commission for most of the day.

So while I managed to get some knitting done and the dishwasher loaded (ACCOMPLISHMENT!), I spent most of yesterday being a slug. That night around dinner time, Cole started complaining about an earache. That is *never* good, and *always* means that an ear infection is brewing. Neither of my black market pediatricians -- ie, my ped. friends from whom I can mooch information and services -- have/can find their otoscopes, so one of these kind souls called in a prescription for a lidocaine solution meant specifically for the ears so that if this was what I thought it was, we wouldn't be up all night.

Well, we were up all night anyway.

Poor Cole was absolutely miserable. Just beside himself, really. He cried and thrashed and tossed and turned, pawing miserably at that left ear that just won't stop giving him trouble. By this morning he complained of trouble breathing. Where I had been content to see if the ear infection would resolve itself without a trip to the doctor, I was not so content with pneumonia (which he had 4 weeks ago), and we coasted into the doctor's office at 9:45, the earliest they could get us in.

Keep in mind that a babysitter was originally supposed to come at 10, and I was supposed to be at the hospital for the MRI at 11: 15.

The doctor's office moved surprisingly quickly, and after finding that Cole had double ear infections, and Micah had one too ( a very bad one, it turns out!), we left with prescriptions for three ears and two boys. We cut across the street to Target for what should have been a quick in and out prescription filling event, and I even told the pharmacist that we were in a terrible hurry and that if the meds couldn't be filled promptly we would go somewhere else -- that was fine, we just needed to know up front. I was assured that we would be in and out the door in 15 minutes.

So 25 minutes later we finally get the drugs, and I'm approaching a frantic state because the babysitter, who was waiting at our house, was 15 minutes away, and it was 11:00. And I had to be at the hospital at 11:15. In other words, best case scenario I would be 15 minutes late. So I called the babysitter, who met us at the hospital, and who took the kids to a nearby shopping center to feed and otherwise amuse them (I *love* good babysitters....*love* *love* *love*). And with that, having relinquished car keys, children, and vehicle, I went inside to get zapped.

The problem was that the receptionist checking outpatient people in was sloooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwww as molasses, so slow that she was still working on the same woman 25 minutes after I walked in. I attempted to remain calm and un-grumbly about this until the MRI people started calling down to her to ask if I was there. After all, I was supposed to be with them. Not to hold a grudge or anything, but I could have made it home from Target, fed the children, cleaned the house, planted some annual seeds, stood around to watch them sprout, and then made it back in plenty of time before she finally got to me. By then it was almost noon. And by then I remembered that in my rush to get Cole to the doctor, I had forgotten to eat. This might explain why I felt a headache coming on. Or maybe it was that I hadn't slept?

So after I was "processed"at the speed of a turtle, and had a hospital band placed around my arm (I really hate those. They induce such a patient mentality by their very presence), I went back to radiology. Where they reminded me that I would be having an injection of a chemical dye to make the contrast on the MRI better. Which is not compatible with nursing.

Are you kidding me? Could this have been mentioned BEFORE HAND?

So after I clarify with the radiologist how long this stuff stays in my system, and come up with a plan to hold off Micah for 24 hours, and look suitably grumpy over that lack of shared information, and then apologize for said grumpiness, explaining that my son was up all night with an earache, and then stood and wondered to myself whether I should have apologized, I entered the MRI room itself.

I'm telling you. It's exhausting to be me.

Happily, this MRI machine was much shorter than the one that I was in 10 years ago -- that one encompassed my entire body in a tube that made me pray and bargain with deities. But this didn't look nearly as bad. Next I was asked whether I wanted music, or earplugs? The MRI machine is, after all, extremely loud.

Here I was caught in a horrible catch-22, for the earplugs could easily give the feeling of being squeezed, confined; at the very least they could exacerbate the pressure that was in my head from the headache I had brewing. And believe me, when you're already facing being stuck in a tube, you don'twant multiple layers of other sorts of squeezing going on. On the other hand, music? What if it was too loud? Or just *awful*? She explained that the music choices weren't great, but here's the list that I remember:

Big Band
Frank Sinatra
Counting Crows
Tim McGraw
Enya
Johnny Cash

Quite an eclectic bunch, don't you think? I voted Enya.

What I did not know at that moment was that the Enya recording they were using was one that a friend had copied from another friend's mom from two separate cassette tapes that were partially unwound in 1985 but that someone had managed to put back together with a pencil and some ingenuity in 1986. So my muffly-Enya-d self was pushed into the tube. And by golly, it seems that either I was deaf during my previous MRI, or all of the claustrophobic anxiety caused me to completely forget the sound.

THE. SOUND.

You know, i'm sort of glad for the sound, because it was such a bizarre experience that I spent most of my time in the tube thinking about how I might describe it to you. Really. Words that come to mind include "air horn/air raid", "jackhammer" "construction in your house while you're trying to sleep", and my favorite "every sound from Galaga, happening right inside your head."

Here's what it was like:
~~~~~~~enya~~~~~~~ (muffled) sail away, sail away, sail away ~~~~~~~enya (static)~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
JACK HAMMER! WAKE UP! THERE'S A BOMB COMING! AND WE'RE TEARING DOWN THE WALL! JACK HAMMER! DUCK! YOU'RE BEING SHOT AT WITH COMPUTER GRAPHICS! ~~~~~~~~~~(static) enya~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After this interesting auditory experience, I entered the Galaga free world, to find, waiting in the parking lot, the lovely babysitter Lindsey with my three children. The two whose ears hurt looked like they'd been shot, but their spirits were decent. The third, who was scheming how she might get me to purchase a personalized diary for her that she'd seen while out with Lindsey, peppered me with questions about how much money she had saved, and how she thought such a purchase just *might* be feasible!

And with that, life went on.

Scared

2009-03-13T10:40:00.001-07:00

There is always a certain paranoia that accompanies the unknown, I guess, and at least in my mind, this paranoia proliferates under the influence of my very robust imagination. If there's anything that I do well, it's imagining worst case scenarios.

With that on the table, tomorrow I have an MRI to make sure that I don't have a brain tumor. I have been assured that I probably do not have such a tumor (or "the scary stuff," as my doctor as called it), and that the flashes of light and numbness in my face and lips that have come on over the past five months are more likely the result of "migrainous events" rather than uninvited tumor cells.

But it still leaves me a bit panciky and undeniably morose. After my doctor's visit the other day, during which I desperately hoped that she would find a very easy answer for these symptoms, I left feeling like things were spiraling out of control. FOR PETE'S SAKE? If "go get an MRI" means that things are spiraling out of control, what does actual bad news mean? That reason implodes?

Maybe. I'm hoping I don't find out. I'm also hoping that I become more of a realist, reign in my active imagination, get on with life today, and load the dishwasher. But for now I think I'll be content with drinking more coffee, knitting, and neglecting the children until they are either a) bleeding or b) screaming.

Now *that* is a rational plan.

A BAND OF ROBBERS!

2009-03-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

In response to a rash of overly-aggressive play, Cole's teacher informed me today that she was going to crack down on some of the overall negativity that has pervaded her little preschool room. I was assured that Cole wasn't one of the ones who was actually being aggressive to other people, but apparently he's quite the follower when it comes to angry pretend-play.

My tolerance for aggression and overall negativity in our house is low. I mean, superlow, sometimes low enough that I wonder whether I might not be letting our kids work something out that they need to express. So while I've attempted to be a bit more laid back about that, I will not back off on my feeling that pretending to harm or kill others is not acceptable, nor is saying things to others that is intended specifically to hurt them (either physically or mentally).

So today when Cole's teacher informed me of this shift in her classroom I welcomed the news, in part because it's really hard to get that under control in your own house when your child goes to school and, naturally, finds it very hard to resist playing such games with his peers who are doing it. "Consistency in discipline! You will be mine!" I thought.

With that, as we climbed in the car, it seemed a good time to address the loads of "I don't like you and I wish you weren't my brother/sister!" that we've been hearing quite a lot of lately. I mentioned that in light of the changes that were going on in Cole's classroom, it might be time to take on some of those same changes at home. After all, I commented, we are a family who wants to be known for the fact that we are helpful, not hurtful (this is the criteria that we often use when faced with a moral decision, btw.....). "We want to be known as the helpful Smiths, not the hurtful Smiths", I said. Then, attempting to drive the point home, I asked, "After all, if we're not helpful, what does that make us?"

At this juncture, I expected my daughter and elder son, who are both extremely good with the concept of opposites, and who are both known for their extraordinary abilities to pick up on subtleties far beyond their ages, to chime in "HURTFUL!", the natural opposite of helpful. For Pete's sake, I'd already set them up for the answer. And it was the ultimate no-brainer.

Cole had no response, looking at me with vacuous, tired post-school eyes. I'll give him that, he's always tired after school. But Annemarie, who never is tired when it's time to be, simply rolled her eyes as if she was too good for this conversation, and answered, "Robbers?"

Robbers?

Revelation

2009-02-28T15:29:00.000-08:00

I like our church. A bunch. And one reason I like it is that, unlike almost every other church I've attended in my life, it doesn't make me mad to be there. In fact, when we moved here we almost joined a church that I thought I liked because I felt at home there. But then I realized that the "at home" feeling was really the "pissed off" feeling. It had just become so normal to be pissed off that I mistook it for something good.

Yes, our church is a study in progessive orthodoxy, to put it simply. Led by a pastor named Heather (rather than someone named something like the Rev. Walter T. Glockenspiel, Jr. -- my apologies to the real Rev. Glockenspiel, wherever he is), it is openly committed to racial, economic, and cultural justice and diversity in a county known for its lack of all of these things, for its advocacy of separation of church and state (*sigh of relief*), and for the ways that it seeks to be imaginative and progressive and creative and open and interesting and intelligent. I *like* all of those adjectives. And it is still a flavor of Baptist, although you can probably guess that it's not exactly the conservative kind. In fact, it is precisely not the conservative kind, although it remains so truly respectful of the beautiful aspects of Christianity that it would be hard to call it anything but orthodox. So how's progressive orthodox sound?

Take, for example, a retreat that I attended this weekend, which was a lovely thing to behold in many ways. Good friends handled the music, which was lovely, and which was modeled after monastic chants. Children, cared for by babysitters (HURRAY! FREE BABYSITTERS!) bantered in and out, and were made a welcome part of all that went on. And everyone was glad that they were there. And some even told them so, personally offering them blessings and telling them how special they are.

We practiced praying and meditating with icons, colors, mandalas, labyrinths, and many other forms, and Jungian psychology, the Eucharist, scriptural meditations, guided imagery, God-as-female, and other items not so frequently discussed in Christian churches were happily introduced and embraced. And there was coffee (it was church coffee, so it tasted like dirt, but at least it was warm?), and good food, and I ate approximately 14 cookies.

And I brought my knitting and worked on a sweater while listening to the goings-on, and a friend leading the event remarked on the Benedictine nature of working with the hands as a religious affair, and everyone else admired the lovely Malabrigo silky merino that I'm working with, which in its variegated blue-green-yellow-purple self (something someone likened to a Van Gogh), is a prayer in color all its own. And the always terrific pastor Heather did what she usually does -- runs around, in, over, and under things and takes pictures -- and made sure that both my children and sweater made an appearance in the photos.

Yes, Heather is my friend :).

But I was arrested -- and I truly believe that there might not be a better word -- by a time that we shared this morning, during which we were challenged to take the theme of the weekend ("Brokenness and Blessing") personally by sharing with others the way that we wish we would have been blessed as a child, but weren't. There was also the other option of sharing how you actually were blessed as a child, but interestingly, few people offered that. It seems that everyone had a hurt to share. Now before you sigh and throw this off as another sappy excuse for Christian pop psychology, let me say that this time was led by a group of very educated theologians and otherwise intelligent and religiously diverse and aware people. In other words, this wasn't exactly a Christian Jr. High camp meeting, the success of which is almost always measured by how many people cry and subsequently get saved. No, that wasn't the ambiance at all.

My arrestedness was/is the result of one woman's utterance to me, a woman who I would guess is in her late 60s or early 70s, someone who undoubtedly has had sufficient time to have plenty of perspective on life. This was the first time I'd met her. This woman, K, revealed in an almost-whisper that she wished she had heard as a child that it was OK that she was a girl. Her dad had wanted a boy, she said.

And I sucked in my breath. Literally. And then I started crying.

I'm a semi-sobber, I will admit. This is a tendency that has grown since I've had children, since the world seems all the more tinged with poignancy and emotion. I could do nothing more at this moment, though, than to remember how scared I had been when, pregnant with Cole, I found out that he was a boy. Not to get TMI on you, but I didn't exactly grow up with the greatest healthy male role models. Or come to think of it, ANY healthy male role models. Marrying Brian didn't scare me, for some reason, perhaps because he's so different than any of my man-family. But producing a boy that would share the genetics of the man-family -- now THAT was a scary prospect.

But enough of that. Obviously I knew that there was a good chance of getting a boy when getting pregnant! I just hadn't internalized it. And for those of you who know Cole, and me and Cole together, you know that it is quite the love affair: he is a most sensitive, funny, and lovely person whose presence makes my life immeasurably wonderful. He is, in short, amazing.

But when he was a fetus, I was friggin' scared of him. In great part this was for what he might become ("the bad guys"), but in another way it was for the ways I might harm him if I couldn't pull myself together. Yes, for an instant it seems that I saw what might have become of Cole had those magical mothering instincts of mine not kicked in, the fear-made-flesh of all of my pregnancy woes made manifest in a 70 year old woman, the mourning that she experienced for an inadequacy that could never be fixed.

Now I certainly am not trying to make the woman out to be a basket-case -- she wasn't. She was a woman sharing what is, sadly, a rather normal sort of hurt. Would you be surprised to know that a very significant number of this group (ranging in age from 30s-70s?) mentioned their fathers as part of this lack-of-blessing? I for one, was not.

So thinking of your parenting in terms of what your kids need.....and the difference between this and what you give.......now that's an interesting exercise.

Superhero

2009-02-23T04:11:00.001-08:00

I often think of a clever thing that Jovi used to have at the bottom of her email, which went something like "I make milk. What' s your superpower?" The first time I read this I just rolled with laughter, primarily because it was so validating, so descriptive of that strange absurdity (is there any other kind?) that I felt when I realized that my body could single-handedly sustain each of my children for years, collectively. There is, in fact, a breastfeeding book entitled "How My Breasts Saved the World", and I must say that the title isn't anything if it isn't accurate.

I. CAN. FEED. ENTIRE. VILLAGES!

Okay, so enough of the power trip. I say all that, though, to remark on other superpowers that I have been more impressed with as of late. Don't get me wrong. The milk thing is major. But now that I'm on my umpteenth year of nursing, and have a fairly good handle on how it works, I am more amazed by my ability to do other things that don't make much sense to me at all.

Take, for instance, my superhuman sense of hearing. Perhaps other parents out there have it, but I never fail to be impressed with how I can hear the smallest bit of mischief going on in the most remote part of the house furthest from where I currently am. My "middle of the night" ears are also astounding in the fact that they can hear the smallest whimper through closed doors, 1 floor apart (Brian will tell you that they're not always well-functioning ears, since he had to rescue a screaming Micah from his crib last night at 4 AM when I didn't get up to go to him. Dude. I heard him. I just was refusing to move.)

And my sniffer is working pretty well, too. I can always smell a dirty diaper before anyone else, and lately I've been able to detect absolute micro-particles of baby powder with relative speed, mere seconds after one of the older children has opened the bottle and squeezed it hard, always one and sometimes two floors from where I am (Which reminds me to ask why we *own* baby powder, which is used for nothing but these powder bombs. And can be unsafe if you breathe it in. There's my obligatory health warning).

I can also do a host of other parent tricks, like predict the actual numeric value of a fever with the palm of my hand. But I am most proud of a pseudo-superpower, which I like to call "The Ability to See Through Children and Their Motives with the Speed of a Cheetah." It doesn't hurt that my children are rather transparent in their guilt. This is why I label this a mere "pseudo-superpower": they're terrible liars. Like their father.

This is good for me.

Off to brew my morning superpotion and ponder my greatness.

Communication Breakthrough

2009-02-23T03:48:00.001-08:00

I have this fantasy....a musing that's passed through my head on more than one occasion. In said fantasy I am in my car and I'm able to communicate with other cars via something akin to a mobile billboard, but I'm able to change the content at will. In essence, this allows me to "text" other cars from a "screen" attached to my car. It would be the way that cars talk, in other words.

Don't think about the safety issues now, my friends. Those are mere bugs to be worked out.

There would be the usual stuff you'd want to say to someone, the "turn your lights on" or the "Watch it, Buster!" or perhaps the "BABY ON BOARD!" that you already see on so many cars; in this sense, I suppose you could also liken this device to a completely dynamic bumper sticker. But in my mental world I always use this device to provide the world with a dose of completely profound social commentary and other glimpses of my all-around acumen.

Take, for instance, something I saw the other day. It was an absolutely bitterly cold day, with highs no greater than 10 or so degrees. Just really awful. In fact, it was one of those deliriously frigid days that made me think that it would be better to be lying homeless on the beach with a campfire and some canned food than to enjoy home ownership. But I digress. As I am prone to do.

Anyway, on this day I had to get out to the store, and had all three kids with me. After finishing the shopping and getting everyone piled back into the car (and believe me, three kids in coats/blankets are about 8 million times harder to get into the car than three kids without outerwear....), and breathing a literal sigh of relief that that chore was done, I saw something so startling that I laughed out loud.

Leaving the liquor store that shares a parking lot with the grocery store was a very large woman with tremendous bosoms wearing an even more tremendous fur coat. To give you an accurate picture, this coat was of the wooly-mammoth variety. Held one under each arm, football style, were two of those GINORMOUS wine bottles that I have always been convinced are just for display in liquor store windows; they literally scream "If I really am filled with wine then I am too large to pour and must be decanted into approximately 4,560 vessels! ".

Did I mention that she was sprinting across the parking lot? As much as a large body, tremendous bosoms, the pelt of a paleolithic animal, and a grand total of 10 feet of wine bottle allow?

Between the dark fur coat and the dark bottles, each one nestled to the side of the aforementioned ample bosoms, she literally looked like a furry, four-boobed animal running through the parking lot. She was flat out running, bosoms heaving, wine bottles-acting-as-two-more-boobs bouncing along.

Now yes, it was cold. And I can see the quickened pace as a response to this. But at this moment I desired the portable social commentary machine (gotta think of a better name for that) so that I could satiate this urge to scream something out the window about how all of that alcohol wasn't going to help with this cold situation. Yes, I could post that on the social commentary machine, or perhaps something about how you should not run with ginormous wine bottles, particularly when one is not so athletic as it is. Come to think of it, I don't think that you should run with regular-sized wine bottles, no matter your size or athleticism, but that's another day's blog.

That my urge was to shout a *health warning* in this situation that otherwise contained so much humor value, that was so rich with other possible headlines to place on the social commentary machine, is but a mere indication of the fact that I'm both guilty and nice.

But you knew that.

Too Cool for School

2009-02-17T09:44:00.000-08:00

Annemarie has become obsessed with her looks lately, and this is both difficult and amusing for me. I have given the speech many times that it is more important to be kind and respectful of others, and to be happy yourself, than it is to live up to impossible and ridiculous social standards, and while she rolls her eyes at me and tells me she knows, I still sense inside that she is very, very much interested in looking like impossible and ridiculous social standards.

I am only heartened by the fact that she is still lacking in enough self-consciousness that she will run through the backyard naked if the situation seems to call for it (which sometimes it does, you know), or that she will be perfectly content to present herself to the public having dressed herself up in a melange of scarves, plastic firefighter gear, and Mardi Gras beads. These are the moments that give me some sort of twisted hope.

But then there are those days when the "I wanna look like that" bug shines through, and this morning was one of those mornings. I had picked out a perfectly nice looking outfit for her, and she shunned it in favor of something similar but a touch more edgy; you see, for reasons that are beyond me, Annemarie now seeks to look like a rock star.

The way that Annemarie mimics rock-stardom is by wearing a headband and putting on a pair of too short jeans that are torn in the knee. This is fine, and if we can continue to be "rock stars" in that way while avoiding the drugs, then I'm happy with this definition of rock star :). So after dressing herself in an outfit that she deemed more appropriate, she remarked:

"I look like a rock star. Like a teenager or a colleger. Do you think anyone will know that I'm in Pre-K?"

No one. No one will ever know.

Lactation and its Many Merits

2009-02-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

If you know me at all, you know that I am almost always nursing someone.

Let me be more specific -- I keep the nursing to my children, but since I've been nursing a baby/toddler for the past 5.5 years with only about a 3 mo. break in there, it's true that I'm almost always nursing someone. And that's a great thing, imho. Nursing all of my kids till they were around two is one thing I'm very proud of, and I'm not at all a shy nurser -- we nurse anywhere, everywhere, in front of everyone, in every circumstance. I believe -- strongly -- that even in this age where many people do nurse, the startling brevity of most nursing relationships demands that people who feel comfortable doing it pave the way for those who are still learning the lactation ropes. It's just that important to everyone's health and well-being, frankly.

You can thus understand the great admiration that I have for one of my students who, as the mother of a newborn, is so devoted to giving him her own milk that she slips out of class every two hours and sits IN THE NASTY BATHROOM FLOOR (I'm working on it....I'm working on it.....) pumping, in order that he might get the best food around. When she told me that he takes bottles only -- that he won't go to the breast at all -- I immediately started thinking of ideas to get him to the breast. Of course, I am her prof, not her lactation consultant, so I don't want to offer advice that may jeopardize or in some way make awkward our educational relationship. But as I found myself more inclined to think about latches than Hinduism, I got a bit tickled by lactation-consulting alter-ego who is not too far under the surface, waiting to emerge if this academic gig ever goes south :).

Lactation is also ever on the mind of Cole, who at the tender age of 3 still remembers nursing (he was weaned only a little over a year ago), and who thought he'd give it another shot when Micah was born 9 mos ago. At that point Cole didn't really seem to remember how to nurse, and after giving it more thought was rather amused by it. But Cole's love of nursing shines through. This is seen in the fact that recently, when I was knitting a very cute sweater (if I may say so myself) that is covered with bobbles in the front, Cole examined the sweater carefully, exclaiming "Mom! You're making a nipple sweater! A nipple sweater just for me!"

Disappointment

2009-02-08T11:23:00.000-08:00

I know I've shared in past posts that I dread it when the stomach bug comes to our house, but I particularly grow weak in the knees at the though of it disrupting big events that we have planned. After all, the pukes keep you tied to the house in a way that a drippy nose or hacking cough doesn't.

With that said, this coming weekend is my first weekend teaching -- and I only teach three weekends out of the entire semester. Missing even one of these weekends is, in other words, a major, major deal. I have double and triple planned babysitting, photocopying, and technology in the hopes that there is little that screws things up.

Today we had a birthday party to go to, and it was one that we were very excited about. It was a beach party planned for the middle of February, and the parents were planning to let the kids run around in their bathing suits in an overheated house to give the feel of sunnier, balmier places. Did I mention that this family has just moved here from LA? And that they're very cool and I already like hanging out with them quite a bit? And that that they live three blocks from us? Yeah, lots of good things.

When we arrived at said birthday party that dad casually informed us that one of their daughters (the party was for both girls -- their birthdays are a day apart) had been up all night crying and vomiting -- and this morning, too. And they hoped it was just a 24 hour thing, but they'd put her back to bed just in case. I started to get the cold sweats. Seriously. Then the little girl in question came down stairs, and dad directed her downstairs to play with all of the kids who had shown up for the party!

Ugh. Annemarie and Cole were already stripping off their clothes, ready to bare their bathing suits and join the fun. But I had to stop them; I had them put on their clothes, made a very uncomfortable speech about how we just couldn't get sick, and we headed for the door. And while mom was apologizing and trying to send us with cupcakes, trying to get the older daughter to hug each of my kids goodbye, Annemarie and Cole stood their with eyes welling with tears. Poor kids. I was a bit weepy myself: in part feeling the disappointment they felt; in other part with some small anger that no one had thought that this might be a good thing to warn us of before we got there, before we got ourselves mentally committed to the streamers and sunshine shaped balloons and the cupcakes with frosting that looked like the blue ocean with red gummy fish squished into their tops. And so with plans to reunite soon and re-enact the highlights of the party, we took off.

Was it over the top for me to go home? I don't think so. But I'm still feeling that terrible knot in the pit of my stomach over their disappointment.

The Greatest Weapon

2009-02-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

What a 3 year old boy with an influential older sister, currently into lotions and potions, says while pretending to be Spiderman:

"I WILL DEFEAT YOU WITH MY OILS AND SPRAYS!"

Pictures

2009-02-04T22:32:00.001-08:00

This is the picture of my children that I intend to have printed tomorrow, to hang prominently in our family room. And I love it. Not only is it rootin-tootin' cute, but it displays their personalities so well. Annemarie is so sunny, Cole is so enthusiastically quirky, and Micah is a bit more reserved, yet cuddly and happy.

In every "leaf" picture we've taken (this is our third year now) the colors of the leaves are just fabulous, but I love most of all how everyone's hair matches the leaves. So while we may have to wear a whole heckuva lot of sunscreen, our family's collective hair matches the autumn leaves...............................sigh...................................

College-Land

2009-02-04T22:21:00.000-08:00

Did I tell you that I got a little job?

I say "little" because it is the teeniest sort of teaching job one can have, in my opinion. I'm teaching a class at a nearby university; the class is happening only on three weekends (they call it "weekend intensive" -- uh, *yeah*), although it is a regular three credit course. Then next semester I'll teach the same weekend course again, paired with another traditional, 16 week semester course.

I'm really excited about this opportunity because it's my chance to get my head back in the game. But let me say from the outset that this isn't the same game that I'm used to playing, in the sense that the gameboard is much different. The university with which I am now employed is a very small, Catholic, liberal arts school -- like, less than 2000 students, I think. I never attended a school of less than 20,000, and as far as I know, I've never taught at one that had less than 8-10K. So a change.

And this small school mentality was extraordinarily evident when, upon visiting last week, I happened to schedule a tour of the library before I got my official paperwork turned in (which granted an ID and thus library resource access). So after having scoured their video selection for something I might use this semester, I realized that I wasn't authorized to check anything out.

This, however, deterred no one.

With no ID in tow, no NOTHING to show them that I was who I said I was, they created an account for me right there, and insisted that I take the films with me right then. And don't worry about bringing them back until the semester is over, or even later. They'll just keep renewing them for me until someone else needs them.

And parking permit? Oh yeah, we have those -- here's one. You can have it free. But no one really uses them. But I'm not supposed to tell you that because we're supposed to use them around here. And you don' t have any ID yet? That's not a problem. Don't remember your license plate number? Not really a big deal. Just call us next week.

Uh, me no understand your school. Me understand long lines and lots of monies to parking. Me understand onerous bureaucracy.

What I Learn From Knitting

2009-02-04T21:39:00.000-08:00

I have been surprised by this knitting thing.

Although I actually learned to knit several years ago (7 or 8, maybe?), it was never something that I liked very much -- it was mildly interesting and all, but I just wanted the sweater at the end. It reminds me very much of how i feel about running. When B and I lived in California, we both ran; he ran much, much more than I did. The furthest I ever ran was 7 miles, and I can still remember the feeling in my knees when I stopped -- that hot and swollen feeling. No, running was something that I did to be healthier and maintain my weight, to justify the affair that I had with both Ben and Jerry (**rampant eye batting**) while Brian was away at work. But for Brian it had become something therapeutic. And although he falls in and out of "therapy", as it were, it always holds that mental place for him.

So knitting is my running. And as I've become more involved with knitting, I've been amazed most by how willing I am to unravel something that needs to be redone, even if it means losing hours of work. I'm not happy about it, of course, but I realize that knitting in and of itself is meaningful to me, and so I'd be doing it anyway -- whether it's that same sweater three times over, or three different sweaters. I also started to learn when it is appropriate and good to improvise...and when it is not. And how the improvisation and the mistakes are, uh, often related.

I'd say that making mistakes is the most intriguing part about knitting, because my perfectionistic blood simply boils at the thought of leaving a known error. But over the past few knitting months, I have begun to recognize when a mistake is best left (it has no impact, or is perfectly hidden), as well as when it needs to be remedied. Although I've always known it in my head, I'm beginning to understand that it's better to take a few hours to fix a problem so that I don't have to wear it for several years. I truly think that when I learned to knit a few years ago that I was just too young to knit. Not chronologically young, of course -- I was in my mid 20s at the time -- but just too impatient, too uptight about the possibility that things might not be perfect.

And of course, there's the obvious stuff about patience and craftspersonship and pride in one's work and connection to the material base of our world. And these are all important.

But really? I think it's the yarn.

I used to get tickled at little kids and their hoarding ways; both Annemarie and Cole have stockpiles of stuff in their dresser drawers and pockets. There's always something stashed somewhere, which makes housecleaning and laundry constant adventures. They refuse to throw away anything. I was wondering to myself the other day why little kids are like this, and while musing upon this I stumbled onto my yarn stash.

Knitting folk refer to their stockpiled yarn as their "stash", and in recent months I've come to develop my own. Now i'm rather certain that's it's not nearly as healthy as Jovi's is, but it's substantial enough to see me through at least four or five more projects, not to mention supplement a couple that are already under way.

OK: Guilty confession time.

In the rather recent past I saw the stash as a rather superfluous and sorta silly thing, since after all, it' s not like you can knit with all of that yarn at once, you don't know exactly how much you'll need when you buy it, and if you used the stash rationale ("But it's ____brand, and it's just the color I want, and it's on sale!") for everything, you'd be the credit card's golden child.

But this is why I like knitting. The irrationality of stash building (the opposite of which is stash busting, btw) is so much like preschooler hoarding habits, I think. And it goes something like this:

It's pretty. it's soft. And if I just mess with it for a minute, it will turn into something lovely. And I just love to be around loveliness.

argh. Micah's awake. 12:10 AM.

Virtual Squared Reality

2009-02-04T21:34:00.001-08:00

I really should be sleeping.

After all, it's 11:34 PM, and Micah will be up in less than three hours. But dear blogging world, I have neglected you so terribly. And so I must, for you, shoulder more sleep deprivation.

Leslie: Martyr.

Actually, if we're going to be technical about this thing, I've not really neglected you if it's the thought that counts -- literally. Truth of the matter is that I think about blogging almost every day, and I'm constantly composing a new entry in my head. In fact, it occurred to me the other night that I've come to believe in a form of virtual reality that completely transcends those available to us today. Put another way, I believe in virtual virtual reality.

That's right. Virtual squared reality.

It's not just a parallel reality to the one in which we physically live, but a parallel mental reality to the parallel reality to the physical one in which we live, see????????

Sigh. Yes, I know. Too much caffeine again tooooooooooooooooo late in the day? Yup. I'll get along with proper blogging now.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

2009-01-19T13:04:00.001-08:00

On the way home from gymnastics and ballet today, I forced the kids to listen to MLK Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech, which was broadcast in its entirety on NPR. Yes, I know -- a three year old and a five year old aren't exactly the target audience that NPR was going for, but I was both emotionally and academically struck by the broadcast.

As a person who's written a fair bit on race and religion, and whose grad school education also focused on this, I was experiencing a certain amount of dissonance as I thought over the covert racist structures that are repeatedly duplicated and reinvented within American culture, yet I was also struck by the strides made, the fact that Annemarie and Cole (and undoubtedly, Micah with them) have friends of all colors and backgrounds and they think nothing of it. This was so unlike my childhood, which happened in a place that a sociologist friend tells me is one of the whitest free-standing (ie, not a suburb of a larger, more racially diverse city) cities in America.

Was it this dissonance, this concern for the hiddenness of racial structures everywhere, the awareness of my absolutely racist experiences as a child, that caused me to discuss the topic of racism with my children in the car? Annemarie was at first absolutely uninterested in the topic, and kept going on and on about how i had forgotten to pick up Craisins at the store. Cole, who is learning that winning my favor has much to do with patronizing my rants, reassured me that I should go on, because he was listening.

So between the Craisins and Cole, I talked about who MLK was, why he was dead, what he believed in. Cole chimed in that the bad king Herod had killed him; I was struck by so much there, but said little except that I couldn't remember the name of the man who had killed him, but I was fairly certain it wasn't Herod.

At this point, we were silent for just a moment, just at the same moment that MLK spoke that he had a dream that little black children and little white children might hold hands some day. And I thought of how we had just left the gym where Annemarie and her friend Maggie, an African American, had just been holding hands during a rousing rendition of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" as they giggled almost uncontrollably, attempting to shake each others' heads off. That, after all, is how you warm up in preparation for gymnastics.

So I mentioned that to Annemarie -- that MLK had had a dream that she was now a part of. She stopped talking about dried fruit for a second, confused -- what had she been a part of? I explained that she and Maggie together was a sign of something good. She then told me that she guessed it had never occurred to her that Maggie was different in any way that would matter (she didn't say it lke that, of course, but that was the gist). Of course, she knew that her skin was different than Maggie's, but why would that make a difference?

I love how children's questions interrogate so much.

Head Lice: A Really, Really Good Time

2009-01-19T12:48:00.000-08:00

I must start out with a note about my survivor's guilt: our recent brush with head lice appears to have been so mild and so, well, convenient, compared to how it has gone for some friends, that I feel ashamed even speaking about it here.

But the topic of bugs in your hair is just so darn interesting.

We received a call the other evening, a few hours after spending half of the day with some good friends at a playdate, from the mother of the other play-ee. I could tell immediately that something was wrong. The mom, C, sounded very upset. It seems that her daughter, one of Annemarie's best friends, had been complaining about an itchy head for several days. And like most moms, she didn't give much thought to an itchy head, which can be and usually is attributable to a thousand other things (dry winter skin comes to my mind....).

Yet on that particular day that we played, and fairly soon after we left, the itchy head topic came up again at their house, this time with an investigation of said head. And being the responsible friend she is, C was calling to let us know that we'd officially been exposed to head lice. C's poor daughter was just crawling with them, it seems, and to make it worse, she has a ton of hair, which makes treatment very difficult. And did I mention that it spread to the whole family, as the little suckers (pun intended!) are so very prone to do?

So after hearing about the terrible trouble that they'd gone to in attempting to rid their home of the bugs (the laundry -- high heat! the vaccumming -- EVERYWHERE! the constant, constant, constant, sorting through hair to see if there are more eggs, more live ones, more....ugh), I ran to the drug store to get the lice killing shampoo so that we'd have it on hand if the bad guys appeared on our scalps, too. Must head them off (ANOTHER pun intended!) at the pass.

Now I won't go into what a ripoff that lice shampoo is -- 7.00 for an amount so small that you must purchase several bottles if you have long hair -- but I will say that I almost didn't use it after a first, cursory glance through Annemarie's hair revealed nothing. I typically don't like to dip my children's heads in pesticides, after all. At least not every day.

Yet as I was about to return the stuff, I decided to take another peek. And THERE, on ANNEMARIE'S head, was a LOUSE! Don't be fooled if you've never seen one. They are not microscopic. And while they might be fast, they are also not hard to see. It was a bug so large that if it were to land on me while I was sitting outside, drinking an iced tea, I would be aware of its presence and kindly ask it to leave. Particularly if it had plans to set up shop in my hair.

So after we confirmed that Annemarie was, in fact, hosting the insect world in her fine flaxen hair, we used the shampoo, and happily I can report that we've seen no signs of any creepy crawlies. Come to think of it, we never even saw any nits, presumably because we caught it early enough.

If this topic doesn't have your head itching right now, you're a little less than human.

Onto Mommy's Underwear and Theology

2009-01-19T12:41:00.000-08:00

WARNING: Not for the faint of heart. Mention of Leslie's underwear.

Have I told you about how Cole and Annemarie delight in playing dress up with our clothes? Undoubtedly this is something that all kiddos like to do, and it just so happens that we have a closet big enough that a kid can walk inside, and if strategically silent enough about it, close the door and never be detected in the process of tearing all of our clothing from their hangers.

On a day last week I "lost" Cole in the house -- which happens quite often -- and I found him in my closet trying on my thong underwear. I found this amusing on about 3000 levels (not the least of which included his comment: "Mom, your underwear is hard to get on. And it's really little"). At this Annemarie inquired why I had such little underwear. I explained the whole panty-line thing -- that women who wear form fitting pants don't typically care to show panty-lines, and thus they wear panties that, uh, don't have much to them at all.

Now I could see the wheels turning in Annemarie's head. Annemarie, the quintessential rule follower, had started to worry about whether *she* had panty lines. I reassured her that these were things that little girls did not need to worry about, and that for that matter, it wasn't really anything of any importance at all. Just an aesthetic preference I had.

So later that day, at lunch, she sat down at the table and said:
"It's OK to have panty lines."
me: "Of course it is."
A: "Sure. Even GOD has panty lines."

I told her that I wasn't sure that God wore underwear, so I couldn't vouch for that one. But I was sure that God wasn't against panty lines, so at least we had something we could feel certain about :).

A Prayer of Utter Penitence

2009-01-19T12:36:00.000-08:00

Oh gods of the blogosphere, do forgive me, a lowly blogger, who has failed in the simplest task of my position as blogger: recording my virtually useless bits of trivia with anything close to frequency. I pray that I get better in consistency and frequency of postings. I do not think you can do anything about the fact that my bits of trivia are likely virtually useless, so I will not bother your high holy selves with that one.

But if they could have high entertainment value, that would be great.

Amen.

Onto Something Else

2009-01-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

Jake has been a rather constant presence in my thoughts for the past couple of weeks, and after watching the Animal Control website like a hawk, I am now rather convinced that he is dead. As I believe I said earlier, this is actually a comforting thought to me. To know that he is not cold and hungry is something to take comfort in. His pen has been put up, and his dog bed and food bowls now occupy a place in the garage. I'm not ready to permanently get rid of that stuff yet. That's for later. I still have to call our wonderful vet to let him know. When Elle died Dr. McKee made a donation in her name to a local animal charity, and also sent us a sympathy card. I don't know if this is standard behavior, but it showed his -- and Elle's -- humanity. And since he took good care of Jake, I think this last call to him is fitting.

But onto other things.

Two funny comments escaped Annemarie's mouth over Christmas break. The first occurred when a relative headed for the backdoor of my grandparents' home with a cigarette dangling from his lips. This sort of act (ie, smoking) is sort of taboo to my rather Puritanical grandparents, so most everyone noticed it. Including Annemarie. You should have *seen* the look on her face as she turned to me and half hissed, half whispered, in utter health-conscious horror, "DID YOU SEE THAT MAN? (this is her second cousin, someone she's seen possibly three times before) HE HAD A SMOKING CHEMICAL IN HIS MOUTH!"

And another funny moment occurred when Annemarie reunited with her cousins, people she sees only about two to three times a year, but whom she talks about almost constantly. Our three nieces and one nephew are the cat's meow to Annemarie, and she takes great pleasure in receiving gifts that are like the ones they recieve, particularly matching clothes, so that she can emulate them as closely as possible. This, as you might imagine, has both its upsides and its downsides.

When together, they spend almost all of their time pretending something, and some sort of girly dress up ritual is almost always involved. On this particular night Annemarie and her cousins emerged from one of the bedrooms wearing their pajamas, and smelling strongly of a various blend of perfumes applied so heavily that pajama cuffs looked noticeably moist. As they all stood together showing off their jewelry -- and their overpowering smell -- I noticed how cute Annemarie looked among them. For while everyone else (ages 7 and up) was wearing two piece, shirt and pants pajamas, my Annemarie stood there among them in a set of pink, zip up the front footie pajamas, totally unaware of how young they made her look. The fact that she was oblivious was the icing on the cake. I wanted to weep motherly sap and shake her by the shoulders, begging her to stay this perfect little age, to be five forever, where she is still so unaware of so much. It was a delightful little display. And stinky, too. Very stinky.

Did I just dote on her adorable innocence? About 30 minutes later, when things got too quiet for my comfort, I found her and her cousins sitting on a bed, the three cousins engaged in their individual video games that they recieved for Christmas, with a disgusted, stinky, footie-jammied Annemarie sitting in the middle of them, her five year old job of applying lipstick displayed in a bright pink stain that was closer to nostril than lip. She was 100% pissed off that she was less than cool because she was less than video-gamed. "Why don't you ever get me video games, mu-THER?" she hissed my way as I entered the room.

Uh, excuse me, child? You're in footie jammies. You don't get to talk like that.

Perhaps an Obituary

2009-01-02T07:52:00.000-08:00

WARNING: DEPRESSING POST!

I've got to get this off my chest, where it has been sitting for about a week too long.

You may have read two posts ago that things in the Smith house were feeling a little tense, in part over 12 year old Jake the Dalmatian, who has been a constant presence in our house as long as we've been a legal "we"; in fact, it was two months after we were married that Brian and I called about an ad in the local Pennypower for a Dalmatian puppy. Being the sap that he is, Brian cut out that ad for safekeeping once we brought Jake home. We still have it.

The life and times of Jake have been interesting, to say the least. Jake's best friend/sister/wife (we could never tell.....), Elle, was ours two years before that, and for a very long time all of us made a home together, soon joined shortly by a couple of cats (my animal rescue instinct was strong and my resolve weak!). And thus there were six, two human, the rest somewhere in between.

While Elle was the wiley one -- always into something, and smart as a whip -- Jake was the dumb, cuddly one of the bunch. I don't mean him disrespect; really -- it's just the truth. Jake wasn't particularly oozing sense, but what he lacked in brain power he made up for in his very loving nature. Jake *craved* attention. And he never figured out that he wasn't a puppy, nor a lap dog. In fact, up until very recently, Jake attempted to climb into my lap. Jake weighs 60 pounds.

When Jake was six, we packed all of the Smith mammals up and moved them to California where I could work on my Ph.D. This is the specific point in time when I remember things going downhill for both dogs. We had almost nothing of a yard, and walking our two strapping dalmatians became a dreaded chore, as they were unpredictable with other dogs (dragging me along.....). Once, when I was pregnant, they pulled me over while I walked them. After this incident the regular walks stopped, which was sad for everyone.

But California also challenged the animal relationship in other ways, because living in a condo complex brought new animal worries as well. A dog that barked more than 5 minutes equaled a $100 fine for the owner; the same fine was issued if an escape happened. We lived in fear that our animals would do something other than sleep. Our garage became the animal sanctuary.

So it was with great anticipation that we expected our move to KC to resolve so many of these dilemmas. And for the most part, it did. Honestly, we never expected Elle to make it out of California. When Elle died last Christmas, we were both sad and amazed that a dog with such arthritis and cateracts (not to mention the victim of several strokes), could have made it as long as she did with her mind as clear as it was. Until the night she died Elle was mentally with it.

But not so with Jake. Elle died peacefully in our basement, where she slept. We both led Jake down to sniff her body, the only way we knew to let him know what had happened. Maybe his indifferent response was fueled by the fact that he already knew what was coming. After all, she had given us the enormous gift of dying on her own; we'd already agreed that if she was alive by morning we'd have to bring her to the vet to have her put down. Things were just that bad -- when your dog can't walk, and won't eat, it's all rather obvious.

While Jake seemed initially nonplussed about Elle's death (after sniffing her briefly he ran back upstairs as if nothing had happened), over the next few weeks and months poor Jake lost ten pounds, began to whine and cry almost incessantly, followed me everywhere, and started to sleep 10+ hours a day, in addition to the time he spent sleeping at night. In short, when he wasn't sleeping, Jake was sad and clingy.

And then the bladder incontinence began, the urinary tract infections that would never resolve, and closely behind this (no pun intended!) the bowel incontinence, and the bony growths that started to fuse his spine. While in the big scheme Jake seemed relatively unaffected by these things, from a cleaning perspective I was constantly flustered. But then his mind started to slip; what I knew was that over the past few months Jake's behavior closely mirrored Brian's grandfather's very recent demise to Alzheimer's. Jake had become irritable, absolutely unpredictable, forgetful. I could live with the fact that he was following me everywhere (even to the bathroom!), and I could begrudgingly clean up after him, but I couldn't take him parking himself in the middle of the kids as they played, and then growling at them when their play disrupted him. He has snapped at both of my sons.

This past Saturday afternoon -- a week ago tomorrow -- Jake disappeared from Brian's parents' farm, where we took him with us for Christmas. At one time Jake and Elle ***loved*** that place. It was pure freedom. Without Elle, however, I suspect that Jake saw the farm as nothing more than too much space, and he was constantly pleading to come inside. So perhaps you can understand my confusion and worry when, after being pushed outside because of his whining during Christmas dinner, Jake was no longer waiting at the door once the meal was finished. I don't know if he went off to die, as people say that dogs sometimes do. I really hope that's what happened. I had always thought that if there was any place that Jake and Elle should die -- a good death -- it would be on Brian's parents farm.

No, I am more concerned that he became scared and disoriented in the woods -- which stretch forever -- and that he is there now starving and thirsty. Or that some backwoods maniac is using him for target practice, which has happened. So despite doing everything I know to do, there is no Jake with us in KC. Between us Brian and I have spent hours in the woods calling for a dog that has never come. I have put up signs, put out notices, and searched that god-forbidden place -- the Springfield Animal Shelter, with its five day "limit" -- twice in person and about a million times on email. Oh, the animal shelter.....that awful place where dogs with empty bellies and scared eyes go, and most often never leave. This was my first time visiting one of these -- an actual "pound" -- and I left crying after both visits; the smell, the hopelessness was all too much.

It didn't help anything that after my "lost dog" post on Craig's List, one day later a Dalmatian actually showed up at the shelter. I've received 15 or so emails from CL's readers who've been kind enough to pass on that information. The picture on the shelter's website looked absolutely nothing like Jake, not to mention the fact that that dog was a female. But still I had to return to make sure that there wasn't any chance that this was my Dalmatian; I couldn't leave Springfield with the sliver of a chance alive that the picture was just off or that they had inadvertently typed "F" when they meant "M". And the animal control people were very kind to me as I stood there and cried, looking at what was either a very young or very malnourished female Dalmatian with matted hair and wild eyes. Every dog there looked like a victim. And none of them was Jake.

So here we are, with dog bowls everywhere and table scraps with no one to eat them. I have put the dog bed in the garage. I don't want to get rid of that stuff yet. I just can't. Most of all, I'm so selfishly overwhelmed by the fact that I wasn't the best mother to him that I could have been; after our human kids arrived he admittedly took some neglect. My guilt over this is, of course, now a little too much to bear. But wherever he is, if he is still with us, I hope that he knew that we loved him. Pure and simple.

A Christmas Miracle

2008-12-21T15:30:00.001-08:00

Here are the three most remarkable people I have ever -- and probably will ever -- meet. No offense to all the rest of you remarkable people, of course. It's just that you can't wear plaid this well. And you know it.

Tough Times

2008-12-21T14:42:00.001-08:00

These are tough times. Tough times with tough choices.

In the past few days things seem to have gotten a bit tougher, in many ways.

The first way is the one that we all know about -- the money way. Brian came home from work a bit stoned from it all; the company's not doing well. At all. And while he still has his job, he's not sure how much longer there will be a company to go to. It wouldn't be a laid off thing -- it would be a "whole shebang goes down" thing. So while we're thankful to have what we've got -- a job -- it's not a particularly stable one at the moment. And in just a matter of weeks they will finish paying his tuition, which they promised to pay almost two years ago. We're just praying that those few weeks go by without comment, that the payment is made, and that we're not responsible for the remaining *gulp* ten grand.

But all of this anxiety over the job future sparked a different sort of anxiety in our house, when Brian broached the topic of moving. Leaving our fair city. Well, let me back up a bit. I like where we live rather well, although if I had my druthers I'd be somewhere a bit bigger, with a Trader Joe's, and with slightly less dramatic winters. **Where** is global warming when I need it?????????? On the bright side, though, we have a house, church, and friends that we love, I have a little teaching job lined up, and we have great schools. Our family, filled with all sorts of ailing people, are close enough to get to in an afternoon but not so close for unexpected drop ins. Our children love and are close to their grandparents -- a real plus. And generally speaking, we're happy here.

But this job fixation caused Brian to do that often unhelpful thing: looking at how green the other guy's grass is. And this sparked an awareness of how much more he might make elsewhere, how much more interesting the opportunities might be. And I cried.

I cried because while I'm not sure I want to be here forever, I certainly know that I don't have it in me to move now. Because there's so much labor that he doesn't do in a move that ends up being mine, and mine alone: looking for schools, for churches, for friends, for doctors, for dentists, for.............. Indeed, the story of the last eight or nine years of our life has been moving somewhere, Brian traveling with work or being so tied up in work that I barely see him, and I tend to the details -- for years, it seems. And sometimes that is truly how long those details take.

I cried for the kids' lovely little preschool, for the ice cream shop within walking distance of our house, for our church filled with lovely, caring, insightful, and interesting people, for the guys at the hardware store down the street who've worked there for 30 years and who know the answer to everything, for the three huge, huge, huge oak trees in our front yard, for the hundreds of plants I've planted to make our own little Eden. And for telling our kids that they can't see their grandparents much anymore. And for approximately 10,000 people here.

While that conversation is somewhat resolved, and while neither of us now anticipates a move in our near future, it did make me wonder what a good criteria for moving on -- in anything -- really is. Brian pointed out that fear is not a good reason to stay anywhere, and with this I must agree. But I'm also struck by the fact that having all of the good things here that we love and appreciate and are thankful for in some way each day is so much more than many people have, that it's almost something of a snub to turn your back on that. In fact, I have reminded myself many times when I get cabin fever that the "California Leslie" -- the one living in a small condo with a child, no backyard, no room, and a public sidewalk so close that we sometimes had to turn up the TV in our own living room to hear over the sounds outside -- that person would be beating down my door now to trade places. And it was to get all of the things that I now have.

So here I am. We are. And where we will be for awhile, I bet. I hope. I think. Frankly, I'd be more certain if we could get that Trader Joe's situation resolved.....

In other traumatic and thought-inducing news, our dog Jake has taken a turn for the worse. Jake is a 12 year old dalmatian whose sibling/wife, Elle, died almost exactly one year ago. Jake hasn't been the same since. He constantly whines or barks, sleeps all the time, won't let me out of his sight, and has growled a few times at the kids. As you might imagine, this just about sends me over the edge. But it's not as easy as just separating them, for Jake wants to be with us -- just not all of us. And when Jake is inconvenienced in any way now, he barks. Incessantly. Through and despite a bark collar.

And did I mention that he's both bowel and bladder incontinent -- usually I'm cleaning up dog pee or poo once a day -- and that he appears to be senile, too? And that he's got a back condition that causes him some moderate (although not severe) discomfort and that occasionally causes him to fall?

And that despite this he appears to spring back to his old self about every third day and chase squirrels in the yard?

Sigh. Tough times. Made even tougher by stepping in dog poo in your own house.

Three Posts, One Day

2008-12-15T10:20:00.000-08:00

I'm very cool and appear productive. I completed three posts in one day. See below, pretty please. And if you're reading this, let's count this as the fourth post. :)

Paradox

2008-12-15T09:55:00.000-08:00

I spend considerable time thinking about how hard it is to be a mother.

I imagine that part of this fixation is centered on the fact that, before I became pregnant, I never really saw myself as anyone's mother. And frankly, I'm not all that hot on kids. I ADORE my own, of course, and I am amply amused and loving towards other kids now. But in the recent past I was one of those people who saw kids as irritating future adults. Or in the case of some of them, future irritating adults.

Perhaps this disconnect is also rooted in the fact that my pregnancies with Annemarie and Cole weren't exactly planned. With Cole it wasn't all that big of a deal -- after all, we had already received our "parent" badges in the mail and had our child-regulating software installed on the computer. But with Annemarie I faced a world of fear. In fact, every time I have been pregnant I have had this nagging little voice pop up that wonders whether I will like this one. Of course, I always like them. Adore them. The sun rises and sets by them. I would throw my body in front of bullets, cars, projectiles, and anything else flying towards them without any thought at all. And this is something of the miracle of parenthood. That I could become that mother.

But this is also where there's trouble. Parenting is the job that has no down time, no hours off. NO vacation. It overtakes everything. And it is incredibly monotonous at times, always demanding, very often mundane. It leaves you on your hands and knees very often -- picking up playdough, cleaning up milk, puke, spaghetti, dirt. It is very often thankless. And repetitive. OH THE REPETITION! And the self-defeat! Do you know how many times a day I pick up this family room just to have it look just as earthquake-like by dinner time? Yes, I know you probably know.

So I completely understand those who argue that parenting is difficult precisely because of the hard, thankless work it involves, work that often yields few immediatley visible results. And I used to think that is why it's hard, too. But I've changed my mind about that lately, mainly because the more I think about it, most jobs worth doing involve repetition and thanklessness, and all of the things that I've just discussed.

No, I think the reason why parenting is so hard is because of extraordinarily difficult work of living with such a mental paradox. How unthinkable it is to **plead** with the clock for 8:30 to roll around every night just to get a break, just to find that by the next morning a part of me has missed them for 10 straight hours. How I can be so tempted -- and often give in -- to yelling at them to stop any number of behaviors when I want nothing more than for them to live free of yelling (uh, mostly :)). How often part of me wants to physically WRING THEIR NECKS one minute, but to be confronted, even floored, by how I love them so much that it hurts, how I would give anything to protect them from pain, wrong, and unhappiness.

It is the paradox that's hard. I can think of no other job that entails such a schizophrenia.

Nativity

2008-12-15T09:35:00.000-08:00

We have a nativity set that I really like. It's a beautiful hand-painted thing that has tidbits of scripture from Jesus' multiple birth narratives inscribed on the various characters. And it's also been the source of a secret family dispute.

You know I'm a bit anal, right? A bit on the control freak side? Well, every Christmas time when I pull this sucker out, I like to arrange the characters just so (*pleased smirk*). This activity is also accompanied by a protracted lecture about how this is not a nativity set to touch, and if someone else's hands want to touch a nativity set, they can go play with their Fisher Price version. The set where, in its original state, the Fisher Price people forgot to include Jesus.

Stupid Fisher Price.

But anyway, after arranging the characters just so, I noticed Annemarie fiddling around with it one day. I was amused by her behavior. She is, uh, like me in that she's a bit on the perfectionistic side. Actually, all of the verbal children are like this -- it's Cole, after all, who cries when his banana breaks, and who gets wound up when the orange is not properly peeled. (Note to self: save for adult children's therapy). Anyway, Annemarie had arranged all of the characters, who are in prostrate or other sorts of adoring positions, in perfect lines around the Baby Jesus. I put them back in the way I arranged them to see if she'd notice. By that evening, they were back in their parallel lines. This went on for several days, with us secretly stealing away to rearrange the nativity set. It had turned funny -- really funny; one of the things that I love about her present age is how she's really understanding humor, and that even the most serious things can have a genuinely amusing side to them.

So it was in this spirit that I got tickled today when, upon entering the dining room (the natural place for a holy family's resin replica to be stationed, of course) I noticed that the nativity characters are all huddled together. They look like a holy football team, with Jesus as their coach in the center. But then I pictured Jesus being like any other football coach, screaming at the team -- Baby Jesus sweating, ripping off his headgear, and spitting in the faces of those shepherds who wouldn't drop their friggin staffs to catch the ball.

Ok, now I'm thinking holy thoughts.

Bag O' Wrinkles

2008-12-15T08:56:00.001-08:00

Anyone need four free tubes of Maybelline Great Lash Mascara?

Last week, and the week before that, Brian made the trek down to Little Rock, Arkansas for a business trip. While I think even the good people of LR would admit that while the place is nice, it is no booming cultural metropolis, yet in the business world is it known for being the home of none other than Maybelline, drug store cosmetic giant extraordinaire. And it just so happens that Brian's company has some relationship with Maybelline.

So one night last week Brian found himself at dinner with a bunch of Maybelline executives and their wives (my first question was about how much makeup they wore -- B said plenty....). After the dinner he was presented with a pink and black tote bag full of Maybelline products to bring home to the little woman.

Now obviously I say that with some dripping sarcasm, being a person credentialed to teach college students in Women's Studies classes everywhere about the chains that are cosmetics. But I will be the first to admit that I have a love/hate relationship with makeup. After all, I grew up in a place where being female meant that you wore makeup. I also have a mother who takes a solid hour to get ready in the morning, who still owns various sizes of curling iron, and who puts cuticle oil on every night. So I *know* what to do with the makeup if it reaches my little, cuticle-raggedy hands.

Having said that, however, I am a person of minimal makeup married to another person who doesn't like makeup and who finds it fakey and inessential. I admire this about Brian -- and also the fact that he taught me how to blow my nose while hiking by simply turning the head, pressing the other nostril in, and blowing as hard as you can.....

But lest I digress, the essence of my problem with makeup is that I don't mind looking like me -- after all, that's who I am -- but I do mind looking tired. And gray haired. And like children have beaten the life out of me. All of which are somewhat true. And I sense that makeup can help me out of that conundrum. For instance, I was somewhat bothered the other day when, having risen early enough to actually shower before dropping the kids off at preschool, Annemarie's teacher remarked that I looked pretty that day. The only difference was that I was actually wearing makeup.

I took my dissonance to the car with me. Annemarie adores makeup -- she'd put it on all day long if you'd let her, and I try to figure out how to strike a middle ground on that; I don't want to squash her style (meant in the most generic sense, of course), but at the same time, I certainly don't want her overly concerned with her looks or with the sense that she is inadequate. Enough people comment on how pretty she is now that we have a hard time redirecting her thinking back to how being kind, loving, smart, and helpful are really much more admirable traits. And so I told myself that, all while checking out whether the lines around my eyes, and THOSE DARK CIRCLES were as bad as I thought they were.

This IS the "natural look", I told myself. Even as a child I remember reading ads in the newspaper for makeup that talked about getting the "natural look", and I wondered why you had to manufacture something natural. And of course, the entire problem is that women have been told that their "natural" state is something not even naturally theirs. For all of the Women's Studies talk about the cultural constraints that women have faced being depicted as "nature" against the male "culture", here we have an example of women being even insufficiently natural.

Remind me to write on this someday, willya?

But back to the pink and black tote bag. It returned home from the Little Rock trek with contents unharmed. I dumped them out on the bed to find literally hundreds of dollars of skin care products before me -- the bag was not filled with makeup, but with lotions, wrinkle creams, eye creams (OH, THE EYE CREAMS!). Oh yeah, and several tubes of mascara. But mostly the face-erasing lotions.

As I sorted through the stuff, a certain irony struck me. Here Brian had gone to dinner with people he didn't know, who in an act of cultural gift-giving -- meant as ultimately polite -- he had been given a rather expensive assortment of cosmetics, a gift that only had meaning in as much as my face is inadequate as it is. And this is my current 33 year old face, which is certainly not that old and really isn't all that wrinkly, either. So really, it was like these guys were saying, "Brian, here's a big honking pink tote bag. Inside is the stuff to fix your wife's face. Because we all know that she doesn't look right."

Now those of you outside of the Women's Studies world are likely groaning and slapping your heads right now, telling me to get off my high horse.

I CERTAINLY WILL NOT! My super wrinkle-serumed, eye-creamed self WILL NOT!

"Vitamins Go in our Mouths, Not In Our Underwear or Armpits!"

2008-12-11T17:51:00.001-08:00

I just said that. To real people.

Hobby Hell

2008-12-10T07:56:00.000-08:00

I am attempting self control right now. We'll see how long it lasts. What I really must do today -- and what I told myself I would do last night -- is finish up the introduction to my dissertation, move on to the next partially completed chapter (they're all partially completed -- and therein lies the problem), and pronounce myself amazingly productive. STUPENDOUSLY PRODUCTIVE!

I think I'd take any sort of productive, even without the adjectives.

What I was compelled to do last night instead of work on my dissertation (which I told myself I would do last night since I didn't do it yesterday during the day......) was knit up a cute little scarf with some cheap cotton yarn that I procured from the hobby and craft hellhole, Hobby Lobby.

Let me tell you again how I feel about the place. Hobby Lobby = Hell.

I feel the liberty to equate the two because Hobby Lobby, while very attractive on the outside, sucks you into its irrationality; overrun by shopping carts driven by half-crazed soccer moms with fake nails, filled with fake metallic poinsettia stems (the shopping carts, not the soccer moms' nails), the place seethes holiday excess. I mean, it SEETHES. And it makes you think, just for a moment, that maybe everyone else is onto something -- that you really do need 48 metallic red poinsettia stems. That is the logic of this place.

I went there originally because I needed to get a cheap, small Christmas tree for Cole's room, one that he could decorate in any way he wanted. Annemarie has had this for several years, and not suprisingly, he wanted one as well. They love to go to sleep by the tree's light, and I love to watch their faces as they decorate it. Justification had. I also needed some cheap-ish picture frames in which to place a most lovely xmas gift to myself and Brian (which I shall tell you more about later, since the grandparents are getting the same thing, and you never know where in the virtual world these grandparents might be lurking. Pesky grandparents.). And finally, I had heard mixed reviews about a certain cotton yarn that Hobby Lobby exclusively sells, and I thought I'd pick up a skein to see how it knit up. For 2.99, it was worth a shot. The yardage isn't bad, either.

A list of most noble pursuits, no doubt.

Perhaps it was that I was there with all three kids in a place filled with breakables, perhaps it was just this friggin holiday season, or maybe it was the realization that Brian was leaving the next day for an out of town trip, and that any sort of chaos that I experienced (or, rightfully, initiated) by my presence there might be what I could anticipate experiencing for the duration of his trip; WHATEVER IT WAS, by the time we left I was frazzled, Cole had my fingerprints permanently embossed on his wrist, and Annemarie was fretting, which she does when things get tense. The long lines, the Christmas tree that was in stock, not in stock, get out of the line for it, get back in another one to buy it.

Not cool. By the time we were done with our torture, I felt like I'd sold my soul. Now how to get the soul back....I hear it's hard to knit without a soul. We'll see how the cotton holds up.

Ah, but back to my dissertation. That's what I'm supposed to be doing now. And, uh, not blogging......

Boundaries

2008-12-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

It was an interesting Thanksgiving.

Just a couple of months ago Brian's grandfather died, having fought that terrible disease, Alzheimer's. Brian's grandmother is in bad physical shape herself, and the couple hadn't lived in their home in several months. Ella, B's grandma, is in a full time care facility now, and will never return to her home. She can't go to the bathroom unassisted, and is clearly confused at times. She can't walk. There's just no other way around it.

For several months the somewhat painful conversations about who would get what have transpired. This was not new territory -- Ella is one of those elderly people who has been announcing her impending death for YEARS, and who has tried to die on us several times now. Perhaps this explains why I've heard her parceling out their stuff on more than one occasion over the past decade, long before she and Rathel (gpa) grew so ill. She has a knack for fatalism.

But it was new territory this past weekend in the sense that stuff was actually leaving their house; her words were coming true. Brian and I were long ago told that we could have a deep freeze, which is a great gift for our very hungry family that likes frozen stuff from Costco. It also made us look like the Beverly Hilbillies as we took it home, driving three hours with a trailer and a big upright fridge strapped to the back of our Suburban. To top off the image, we also had a healthy stack of firewood on board, and our suitcases, so if we'd just had the rocking chair and a corn cob pipe we could have headed straight for Hollywood.

But humor aside, and back to Rathel and Ella's house, we were told to take a peek to see if there was anything that we wanted from the house. I was very pleased to recieve the stuff that I did -- some crocheting supplies, lots of kitchen implements that I didn't have. But there was something kind of creepy about it all, like a boundary transgressed, that we were taking stuff from a home whose inhabitant was not gone -- just displaced. For a moment it felt like theft.

In her more rational days Ella would certainly have *wanted* her family to take and use her things-- she was a child of the depression in the most literal sense, and I imagine that it would have driven her nuts to think of good things going unused. But I understood what Brian's parents later said almost implicitly-- that we shouldn't mention to her that we've taken stuff from the house when we visited her at the nursing home -- because I had had something of that same sense myself.

In fact, I felt like I had pushed the limits of the boundary earlier at her home, when my cat-like curiosity brought me to look in their bedroom, where I found in a dresser drawer a really cool, *hilarious* handkerchief that listed pictures and calorie content of many common foods. Clearly never having been used, it was a crisp little square stuffed under some jewelry boxes. It looked as if it had never seen daylight. But when I rounded the corner and arrived at their closet, something sort of, well, spooky, came over me. Perhaps it was that the closet light didn't work. But I think it was more that clothes, garments, *bedrooms*, are so personal. Shoes lay in the floor where their wearer had last kicked them off. The garments hung sadly on hangers, looking not unlike how they do now on elderly frames. It would not be too dramatic to say that I felt like I was violating something. Had everything been neat and tidy, perhaps I wouldn't have been so bothered. But the house was lived in; it was inhabited by real people. And this was their stuff.

So I am the new owner today of a hefty set of kitchen items, which is great. And did I mention how great the deep freeze is? Freezalicious! But I also have a handkerchief that I was told to take, which apparently everyone thinks has no sentimental value to anyone. Strangely, though, it doesn't seem as funny as it did before.

REVIVED!

2008-12-02T12:32:00.001-08:00

I'm back! After a short run-in with insanity, which had as its centerpiece a trip to our hometown for a Thanksgiving feast with the family, we have returned, mostly safe and sound. In fairness, the insanity part was not caused by the family, but was a pre-existing condition exacerbated by the unpacking of five people upon our return. Now *that* is insanity.

Now onto other things. I have about a million things floating through my head, but I shall start with first things first: I have been tagged for a meme by my dear friend B. And in honor of her most glorious blog (www.noodleroux.blogspot.com), I shall also list seven random things about myself. Yes, you note, I did this just a few blog entries ago, having previously been tagged. However, since I have precisely fourteen interesting and random characteristics that describe me, this exercise shall be neither boring nor in vain:

1) Did you know that I was homecoming queen? Like, really. And what is even more miraculous/interesting is that I was hard core on the debate squad when this event transpired, having *given*up* the ever-popular drill team two years earlier for the rhetorical gifts. So despite my sacrifice, the dream was still alive.
2) I am 33 years old and I require no visual assistance to get around, ie, no glasses or contacts. However, at my eye appointment today, when I told the optometrist that I've been having some problems with light sensitivity, she recommended some weak reading glasses with tinted lenses. What does this mean? I've gone from nothing to grandma in a mere 3 hours.
3) Brian and I have been married for 12 years, together for 15, and the anniversary of our first date just happens to fall on our first child's birthday -- she was born exactly 10 years to the day, and almost the minute, if you don't factor in the time zone issue. Needless to say, our dating anniversary gets much less attention these days than one big girl's birthday, but at least I've recorded it here for posterity.
4) Dont' kill me when you read this -- but after every baby I have, I seem to get smaller, to weigh less -- to shrink, in essence. If I stick to the childbearing plan of that woman in Arkansas, who is expecting her 18th child (SERIOUSLY!? How does *one* uterus do that?), I will soon be microscopic. But seriously, it's the breastfeeding.......oh yeah, and the running after the other children I already have while I'm breastfeeding. It's the combination of the two that's just *****MAGIC******
5) I cut and color my own hair, and have done so for the past 10 or so years. Why? I wonder myself, sometimes......
6) I consider myself a foodie, and really not picky, but there are some foods that I absolutely cannot palate, foods that almost everyone else seems to like. These include watermelon, cucumbers, mayo, and pumpkin pie. Yes, you read that right -- I don't like pumpkin pie. And generally speaking, I am not a fan of fruit pies. I only recently started eating raw tomatoes. Strangely, I will eat almost any vegetable in at least some form, but I can't say the same about fruits. Hmmmm.
7) My knitting and crochet obsession has blossomed, and I now find myself going to bed at night dreaming up new designs that, unfortunately, I do not know how to execute. I can just see sweaters -- that's all. I am proud to announce, however, that like the rest of the knitting world, I officially have a STASH(!) of yarn. I was able to hold out and show some restraint in the yarn hoarding dept. until dear Jovi sent me the link for a rather good yarn sale...and....sigh.......

Diseased: The Sequel

2008-11-19T18:57:00.000-08:00

First off, if you haven't read the previous blog entry entitled "Diseased", it might be good bedtime reading, as well as context for what I'm about to say here. In other words, give that a scan first.

But having said that, let me tell you that I appear to be the latest casualty to the stomach bug, my most hated illness ever (well, my most hated *relatively benign* illness ever, of course). But as I was pulling out all the stops in the pity party, Annemarie came upstairs where I was having a quite moment to myself knitting, having the chills, its partner fever, and watching the very nice PBS special on the British Monarchy.

Annemarie had remarked earlier today that when you want to give a sick person a kiss (because, you will remember, she rightly pointed out when she was herself sick that sick people need kisses most of all), you should do it on the forehead, so as to give them a kiss in the most hygenic manner for everyone involved. So when she arrived up in our bedroom, right during the part in the show when the Queen tries on the crown to make sure that its 2.5 lbs of encrusted jewels isn't too much for her head, I anticipated that such a kiss might be part of her visit. But what I did not anticipate was how excited she was to give it to me, how eager to help, how her eyes sparkled with the clear sense that she was helping her mother and making her feel better. She even patted my head. My funky-haired, crownless head.

So in a moment of sappiness that I'm sure will be repeated time and again on this blog, let me tell you how thankful I am for the stomach flu tonight. Of course, perhaps my thankfulness stems in part from the fact that I'm already feeling much better, and I may help myself to a birthday cookie (it's Cole's birthday, and I didn't feel well enough to be a part of the special cookie decoration.) But I think the catalyst for this thankfulness was my sweet daughter who was eager to practice caring and concern, and that just makes me gosh darn proud. :) Having now learned my lesson, I give the bug permission to exit my body. Uh, gently exit, please....

Dry your eyes and get on with your day, now.

Diseased

2008-11-18T16:46:00.001-08:00

Please forgive the rant in advance, but this day is not happening. Not without some documentation.

As I type this the smell of Lysol is in the air and my fingers are cracking from the loads of hand sanitizer that I've slathered over them. Today is one of those days that I dread all year long. Here's the background:

On Monday (one week, one day ago), Cole woke up seemingly well, but half an hour later was grabbing his head in pain, howling, complaining of an earache. Two hours later at the doctor, his first ear infection is confirmed.

Both big kids went to school the next day, Tuesday, none the worse for wear -- I mean, we had our usual runny nose that lasts from September to March, but nothing remarkable.

On Wednesday morning Annemarie woke up with a mystery fever (almost 102) but no symptoms. So she was home with me and Micah, and we ran errands. Even less work done than usual.

On Thursday night Cole went to bed seemingly fine, but woke in the middle of the night vomiting. His fever was also about 102. I was suspicious that this was an ear infection refusing to resolve, rather than the stomach flu, since he kept saying that his stomach never really hurt.

Friday AM -- exactly 24 hours before his birthday party -- the fever is gone, and I'm breathing a sigh of relief, feeling like we can have this party in good conscience. That night after he runs around it's up to 100, but hey -- it's not the 100.3. His nose and Annemarie's noses are running like sieves. I'm considering strapping a bucket under their chins at this point.

By Saturday morning, the day of the party, everyone is seemingly well. This is wonderful, and we have a great party. I don't worry about infecting the masses for a moment. But that night, Cole's eyes start weeping like he's got pink eye.

By the next morning, Sunday, Cole's nose is like a garden hose, his eyes are flowing all sorts of junk, and he feels awful. Just in time for our family's dedication at church. We stood up there with Cole looking like we'd just hit him in the eyes before we got there. Sunday night Annemarie's eyes joined Cole's, and Cole's started to back off a bit.

By Monday morning they both are still goopy eyed, so we skip ballet and gymnastics, our two fun things to do on Monday mornings. I call the doctor that AM to confirm the differences between pink eye and eye drainage from a cold -- we seem to have the latter (shew!). I experience false security. After a day of mayhem and his nap, Cole awakens with red spots all over his body. I call the doctor again, and they tell me to suspect an allergy to the antibiotic, to start some benadryl, and to call them the next AM to report back.

By this morning -- Tuesday -- Cole is absolutely, positively, 100% covered in red spots. They are on his scalp, his eyelids, his feet, in between his fingers. And they're not terribly itchy, but they are irritating enough that he has the urge to claw at them. I call the doctor, who wants to see him, and discover that he has some sort of viral rash AND that his ear infection never resolved AND that his other ear is now infected. As we're leaving, I notice that Micah's eyes are beginning to ooze junk.

By the time Brian and I rearrange our lives to get Cole to the doctor and Annemarie to school, then Annemarie picked up from school, Micah's eye is so terrible that it's swollen shut. And he seems to be miserable. Everyone goes down for a nap, and for a moment I have the sense that we might be over the worst of it.

Then Annemarie wakes up, and I sense that she's acting strangely. I can't quite pinpoint it. She insists that she feels fine, but not 10 seconds after saying that, starts puking everywhere. The WORST ILLNESS OF ALL! in my opinion. So after I clean everything/one up, spray everything down with Lysol, second guess what i've touched, and spray again (emptying the can), I give my "please tell me when you feel bad! WHy didn't you tell me?" lecture, to which she responds, "I was afraid you'd be mad."

WHAT? ME? MAD? Crazy, maybe. Mad, no.

After I explain that I could not possibly be mad over something like illness, I go into why that sort of information sharing is important -- so that we don't kiss people who are sick, so that we don't eat after them, etc. Then her eyes well up and her lip quivers, and she reminds me that I kissed her right before she took her nap. "Momma, I still need kisses even when I'm sick."

The motherly knife of guilt twists in my heart.

All this, and it now appears that I will have to miss my own doctor's appointment tomorrow for the almost certain ear infection that I have, which has persisted much too long.

Thank you for attending my pity party. I will attempt to come up with crafty, handmade party favors once my cracked and bleeding hands recover.

11-19-08
UPDATE! I ended up making it to the doctor after all today. I was told that I needed to have my eyes checked, that there's chronic fluid behind my ears, that I also have chronic vertigo. Oh yeah, and that the light I've been seeing is the recurrence of my migraine auras. So while Annemarie and Cole are feeling much, much better, their mother is dizzy and blind -- and thanks to her overconsumption of coffee, is slightly dehydrated. And Micah, bless his heart, has super oozy eye and appears to feel like a squished bug. There's nothing like having your infant son smile at you when you enter his room, peering at you through the slits of his eyes that manage to barely open despite the matted mucus that sticks them together.......

Family. Its Size, Shape, and Scope

2008-11-11T09:38:00.000-08:00

I overheard Brian saying something to Annemarie the other day that just about knocked my socks off. Usually Brian and I are on the same page when it comes to parenting, in almost everything. It's a very, very good thing. But what astonished me was hearing him discuss siblinghood with Annemarie, during which he said:

"So do you think you'd like to have a little sister?"

WHAT THE? I compromised my usual restraint (ok -- it's not restraint, but it was the *desire* for restraint that I compromised) when I screamed out, in front of her "WHY ARE YOU SAYING THAT?" And in my defense, I did practice restraint when I told the little man in my head who was telling me to strangle him to shut up for a bit so that I could see whether Brian was posing a rhetorical question or leading the witness. That does, you know, determine the severity and length of punishment.

But for many small children, rhetorical questions are nothing but reality itself, so upon reminding myself of this, I resumed my battle cry. You see, we have three kids. One of them is but 6 mos old. The others are rather small themselves. No one is yet in elementary school. All require some level of assistance getting dressed. Two need some help with toileting/diapering. All three need help when it comes to eating, and one of those three is still receiving 95% of his nourishment from me.

When I was pregnant this last time-- having been pregnant or nursing or both for almost the past six years straight -- I was miserable in a way that I had never before experienced. I mean really, really miserable. My entire body hurt. I was at the chiropractor every week to help my hip, my back, my...you name it. Every time I was pregnant I got sicker; every time I grew more tired; every time I was able to sleep less. When I was still in the hospital with baby #2 -- in fact, after having just delivered him with no pain meds -- Brian and I struck up something of a conversation about how a third child would not be out of the question. But all throughout the baby #3 pregnancy, I had a feeling that this was the last one. And when he was born, I had the feeling that our family was complete -- all members accounted for.

Catch my drift?

So perhaps it seems the ultimate betrayal of my own position that there was a lingering tinge of sadness when I interjected into that conversation to push my position that this was the last one. In his defense, Brian concurred, but you could tell that there was a bit of ambivalence there, as well. Brian's position on the matter is that having children is such a wonderful experience, one that brings us such immense joy, that any child that ends up with us would only be a good thing. But at the same time, Brian was quick to remark that he realized that we couldn't go on having kids forever just because we liked having kids. Thank you, Brian. I do not want to end up like that woman in Arkansas who's pregnant with her 18th baby. But I know what you mean.

While I am relatively (very) certain that another child is not on the horizon, I am equally certain that the decision to stop having kids can be an emotional one. A wise friend whose children are grown remarked once that she underwent something akin to grief when she and her husband decided that two was enough. It wasn't that she wanted any more -- I understand this -- it's just that there is something so magical about the process of waiting for and raising a young child that a part of you must undergo a "coming-to-terms" with the knowledge that that magical time must end. This is put into sharp relief particularly when your small children get big enough and verbal enough that they catch a serious case of sassy.

And do we have sassy. And eye-rolling. OH THE EYE-ROLLING!

So while my youngest is still young enough that we have a baby around -- and thus don't feel like we're missing out on the magic of infancy -- I do anticipate a time in the future when we will have to come to terms with the fact that that stage of life is over. It might be a bit emotional.

But then again, we'll be sleeping more, too. As eyes roll all around us.......

Six Points of Randomness

2008-11-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

My dear friend Jovi has challenged six of her friends to a random personal fact-puking contest. Here's my purge. Thanks, J! It was fun!

1) I do not, as a practice, kill bugs that are in, on, or around my house, my person, or my children. What this practically means is that we own no flyswatters, and I have a healthy catch-and-release program going during the summer months when the backyard door is continually open. The one exception to this rule lies with those bugs that are a) vengeful and are clearly looking to attack (some wasps), which can be a big deal for a family with a history of sting allergies (ours), and b) looking to suck my blood (mosquitos, ticks, and fleas). I have no tolerance for blood-sucking of any sort, in fact. So if you're in my house and you're going to suck my blood, prepare to be squished. I won't like doing it, though.

2) I am a clean freak. However, I've lately had to relax my standards for the sake of sanity. This standard-relaxing drives me just about as nuts as the stuff piling up around here, though, so maybe that's a counterproductive move. Interestingly, I was not always a clean freak, and only acquired this habit upon marriage to Brian, who is rather tidy himself. As an industrial engineer by training, Brian has been known to periodically reorganize the refrigerator so that it's a more efficient food receptacle. ****heart****

3) In all things color, I tend towards featuring no more than one to two (occasionally three) bright or dominant colors in a room or on a body, surrounded by varying shades of neutrals, but particularly shades of brown, white, black, and gray. I have always found this to be a good rule of thumb when putting clothes on bodies and stuff in rooms. You gotta have both, but not too much of either one. And *why*, you ask, was I just thinking about this? Well, because a) I just bought a new lamp, b) my awesome friend Becky just gave me a 1930s settee, and I'm thinking about its reupholstered future, and c) I still, occasionally, wonder what it would have been like had I pursued that college whim of dropping the liberal arts stuff and going into interior design.

4) I was a member of a professional clogging team for almost 10 years, during my elementary/jr. high/early h.s. years. I have the scar tissue lurking under my kneecaps, as well as the calves, to prove it. Oh yeah, and I got the moves..... :) And did I mention that I had gold nameplates on above the heel on each of my clogging shoes?

5) I am a list maker, but not only that, a person keenly interested in the process of categorization. This is why I am loving this exercise. It's also why my paragraphs often contain lists (see above and below). In fact, I sometimes tend to see random, ordinary things in terms of their ability to be documented in some sort of hierarchy/list/chart. Put another way, when I walk into a situation, I often look for infrastructure. Not that lists and categories are necessarily the same thing, but the two do often go hand in hand............Now that's sounding a little OCD, no? :)

6) I miss California.

We moved to KC from California, where I was doing round #2 of Grad school. Although it was an amazing experience, I was eager to leave to be closer to family, to be able to buy a house, and because it never felt very comfortable. I suspect much of this lack of comfort had to do with the fact that my husband worked in NY most of the time we were in CA, and thus I was alone *A LOT*; I lived 45 minutes away from most everyone I knew in CA (and thus I made few close friends while we were there); and I found myself raising our daughter almost by myself for the first year of her life (again, in a place with few close friends and no husband around 5+ days of the week). But there is still something about the place that I miss desperately. I think often about the beach, the surfers, the smell.........

Consistency, and Other Stuff

2008-11-08T15:32:00.001-08:00

So, like, uh, it's hard for me to blog with the consistency that I'd like. My apologies in advance to my adoring fans. All zero of you who officially follow me at the moment :).

So after the Barbie trauma of the last post, I have attempted to resurrect the conversation about Barbie and bodies and the like that I failed to properly address before. I said something like, "You know, the reason why I wasn't a fan of your Barbie comment the other day was because the people who make Barbie dolls don't make them look like real people's bodies. And because your body is real, I want you to look like Annemarie looks, not like a Barbie looks." I also tied this into our "no character toys/clothes/shoes" discussion -- I have a rule that, as much as possible, we don't buy stuff that has kid characters plastered all over it. Why, you may ask? Well, for about a zillion reasons. First, if they want me to advertise for them, then they can pay me. Second, I'd like Annemarie, Cole, and Micah to feel happy to be Annemarie, Cole, and Micah, and not Barbie, Dora, or Elmo (although we do have bit of him around). And third, most of that stuff is just plain ugly.

Annemarie churns this through her brain, and responds with, "So you don't want me to be a character. You want me to be me?" Right! I'm thinking we're getting somewhere! Then she says "And because you really just want me to look cute as me, not cute as Barbie?" Wait a minute, now......so we embark, again, on how "cute" is not the highest achievable goal. This may take some time.

In other news, Cole, Mr. Snugglebug himself, climbed into bed with me the other morning, and with a grin on his face said, "Mommy, I LOVE you............and I LOVE granola, too."

yep. It's me and the breakfast cereal.

Mental Traumas, part 27

2008-11-03T15:38:00.000-08:00

First, the Halloween pics that I mentioned. Aren't they just the cutest! Olympians and dogs. Now that makes you want to sing "We Are the World," doesn't it?

So I've had two very interesting things transpire in my psyche over the past couple of days.

Wait -- I just reread that, and hopefully more than 2 interesting things have happened in my psyche. Let's just say that there are two that are blogworthy.

The first happened yesterday, when I was at the grocery store. The cashier was a college-aged-looking kid whose nametag revealed that he happened to be named Micah, the name of my 6 mo. old son. Before it could occur to me that old Micah (as I shall call him) may not have any interest in young Micah, I said something like, "Whadya know! I have a son named Micah! I bet you don't run into a lot of people with that name, do you?"

Old Micah grunted an indecipherable response back, but it was enough that I knew that my chitter chatter was both boring and beyond him. I was someone' s self-identified mother, attempting to engage him. It was.....aging. It also caused me to have momentary, but life-altering, flash-forwards (approx 20 years or so....), wherein young Micah attempted to address me with the same "Leave me flippin alone, Ma!"demeanor. But in my imagination, I wrestle young Micah to the ground and, with spit drops flying in his face from my venomous lips, I verbally reenact the gory details of his birth so that he *knows* how I have paid for him.

Actually, with the exception of this varicose vein above my left knee, there's no lasting damage that I can come up with now. But I will make some up when the time comes. Oy. And it will remind him that I will NOT BE PRESUMED IRRELEVANT!

The second trauma transpired a couple of days ago when Annemarie, after being told that she could not wear summer clothes outside on a cold day, erupted into a tantrum. Her meltdown was fueled by the fact that she was tired and hungry, no doubt, but I was particularly bothered when she screamed "But I won't look cute if I don't wear that. I want to LOOK LIKE A BARBIE!"

Shudder.

I wanted to scream back, "But honey, we're feminists in this house! And one of the major reasons why we're feminists is so that no one ever has to feel like they have to say what you just said!" But that's hard to get through the brain of a five year old, so I made something else up, something that i can't remember now but that was no doubt insufficient.

Second shudder. Jovi, weren't we just talking about this? Third shudder.

In other news, please don't leave a rotisserie chicken on the counter with the lid off. Your cat may eat it. So we're having spaghetti.

Hallelujah! It's (not so terribly expensive) gasoline!

2008-10-30T14:40:00.000-07:00

So today I spent 1.98/gallon on gas, and you should have seen the look on people's faces when I did a happy dance and gave a whoop right there at the gas station as I filled my nasty, honking Suburban up (cause you gotta have somewhere to store 124 kids, right?) for FIFTY FOUR DOLLARS. Shall I say it again? FIFTY FOUR! At the height of the recent gas "crisis", for lack of a better term, I had hit 100/fill up.

There are tears in my eyes right now.

In unrelated news, the older kids' Halloween outfits turned out great-- pictures coming soon (when I figure it out :)). They are Olympians this year, and are wearing suits that I absolutely love because they were a) cheap, b) reuseable, and c) required no makeup. Just some matching sweatsuits, some laurel wreaths made out of a cheap silk greenery stem, and some even cheaper gold medals picked up from US Toy for less than .50 each. Success!!! The funniest part of it is that Annemarie chose to wear her leotard under her sweatsuit so as to portray the image of a swimmer (for perhaps obvious reasons, she looks like a gymnast, but I've not mentioned this -- who wants to burst that bubble?). When people ask Cole what sort of Olympian he is, his response has been to simply hop on one foot, his newfound skill.

So bring on the trainers, people! oh yeah, and let's rally for singular-foot hopping and gymnastic swimming to make it to the Olympic lineup soon. Cole and Annemarie are on their way!

2008-10-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

Perhaps in my first blogpost I should explain the name of this blog. Since I had my first child five years ago, in the middle of a Ph.D., and just about as far from my family as I could get while still remaining on the continent, it seems that most everything that has transpired has been at least 50% out of my control. And that may be optimistic.

It's not that I'm complaining, for after all, everything has turned out amazingly well -- really. We've had two more kids, I'm working on my dissertation, and we live in a place that we like very much and we get to see our family often, as well. The problem -- or more accurately, the confusion -- is that despite having been in this very chaotic, yet joyful situation for five years now, I'm still not accustomed to the randomness that pervades each day, the utter spontaneity of my children, the sense that no matter what project I undertake, it can be undone in a matter of minutes by otherwise well-intentioned juveniles. Part of this confusion, no doubt, stems from the fact that I am a creature of habit whose control-freakishness borders on the pathological at times.

But at the end of the day, if the choice were mine, I think I'd still choose the random happenstance, despite the cognitive inconvenienice. Why? Because this happenstance is the result of living with people who have an endless capacity to find almost everything interesting, who find the ordinary to be rather extraordinary, and who don't spend much time in mindless worry. Happily, things are already this way, so there's no choice on my part involved. I just hope to be able to appreciate the happenstance as long as I have it.