I had a vision of my grandfather the other morning. The bottom of his feet, actually. His skin was so tan and leathery, but the bottoms of his feet were a pale yellow...
This vision arrived during meditation time at the end of my yoga class. I was lying flat on my back in shavasana, a cold lavender-soaked towel folded over my eyes, feeling relaxed and groovy. It's a lovely time; you're all sweaty and wrung out from being strong and bendy and focused for an hour, and then you finally get to relax and lay there, trying to empty your mind and just BE.
So I was thinking about my breath, or trying not to think about my breath and just breathe (I'm never sure which), thinking about how my breath just comes and goes without my having to expend any effort to make it happen. You never have to say, "I'm going to breathe now - here I go!" Your breath just happens, in and out, like the ocean. So then I started thinking about the ocean, and how the waves feel on your body, pushing against you indifferently - you know the waves will come and go whether you're there to feel them or not, and you know your breath will come whether you think about it or not. I remember how as a kid after my parents were divorced and we'd spend our custody-agreement-mandated eight weeks with my dad in Delaware for the summer, he would rent a beach house in Rehobeth for a week. I remember how if you spent all day in the water, the waves pushing at you, when you came home and got in bed at the end of the day, you could still feel the waves on your body. Lying flat on your back in your scratchy-sheet rental house bed, you could almost believe you were still in the water, feeling the surging and receding of the tide on your prone body.
And then I remember my grandfather. Pop-pop. My dad's dad, a retired engineer (the train kind) and WWII veteran. When my grandparents came with us to the beach, my grandfather, who went by Pete even though his given name was Stewart, would always float on his back while we played in the shallows. You could look out to the deeper water and see him there, bobbing up and down with the rise and fall of the waves. I say "floated on his back," but it was more akin to sitting in a recliner. His head was almost upright and his feet stuck up out of the water, their pale yellow bottoms a shocking contrast to the rest of his brown skin. He would rise up on the swell of a wave, grinning and paddling his hands at his sides, and then sink down and disappear in the trough between that wave and the next one coming in, only to re-appear on the crest a moment later. So strong, so vital - it seemed effortless, how he floated, and no matter how he tried to teach me I could never quite match his ability to ride the waves, relaxed and happy.
That's almost 30 years ago now. Pop-pop was in his 60s then, an active, interactive grandfather, the kind who talked to babies in gibberish they seemed to understand and made up stories about the golf-ball-sized lipomas on his arms - "I got so mad when I missed that birdie shot that I swallowed the ball and that's where it ended up!" He ran five miles every morning and every time he would take a sip from his glass of Laird's Applejack, he'd wince, then smile, and then say, "One hundred proof." He grew his own vegetables in a garden behind the house, worked on his vast model train display in the basement, and told us edited-for-kids stories about his scars and tattoos from WWII.
Pop-pop is in his 90's now. He's had Alzheimer's disease for about 15 years, as near as we can tell, and his wiry, tanned body has become a pale, whiskery, shapeless mass. The last time I saw him in the assisted-living home Mom-mom finally moved him to after caring for him at home for too many years, he was in a wheelchair, mute, his sweatshirt stained with food. He doesn't recognize anyone anymore, not even his wife, and he can't use the bathroom on his own or sleep in a bed without rails to prevent him from falling out. He is, in essence, an infant again, helpless and frail. His blue eyes are vacant. There's no Pete in there anymore.
So. Yoga. I lie on my back, in corpse pose, thinking about my grandfather, about his long slow decay and how difficult it is to mourn someone who's still biologically alive but mentally and emotionally not in existence anymore. Mom-mom sends birthday cards whose postscript reads, "Sweetie, pray for your grandfather to die."
I see the bottoms of his feet bobbing up and disappearing, bobbing up and disappearing.
I'm trying very hard not to cry. I'm trying very hard to acknowledge my thoughts and then let them pass by like clouds in the sky. It's not working, and I'm silently shaking with sobs, tears rolling out from under the lavender-scented washcloth. There are of course other people in the room, other yogis and yoginis trying to relax and clear their minds, and I'm desperate not to disturb their meditation. I get a hold of myself for a bit, and then I see his feet again, feel the waves crashing on my prone body, and the shaking sobs return. I become convinced that my grandfather has in fact died, that I am having some kind of hippie woo-woo psychic connection to my Pop-pop as his tired spirit finally leaves his body, his strong healthy body that has lingered on so long after his mind has gone.
So I get up and leave the yoga studio. My teacher's eyes look at me questioningly, but I give him a feeble wave and sprint as silently as I can for the door. I run into the hall and into the bathroom, turn on the fan, and let the sobs come. The release is what I need, and it doesn't take long for the tears to run their course. I splash water on my face, pat it dry with paper towels, and rejoin my class.
When I get home I call Mom-mom. She sounds tired but happy to hear from me, and I mentally vow to call more often. Pop-pop is fine, of course, or as fine as he can be. Mom-mom confesses that she doesn't go to visit him every day because it's too depressing.
He's already gone.
Sunday, May 06, 2012
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
I feel the earth move under my feet
EARTHQUAKE!!!
EVERYBODY PANIC!!!
Or not. Although it is unusual to experience a magnitude 5.9 earthquake in Richmond, Virginia, it is apparently not unheard of, since that's what just happened.
I was sitting at my desk when the shaking started, and my first thought was that the kids were horsing around in the playroom next door. I was about to yell, "What's going on in there?" when I remembered that they were playing outside. Then I thought it was the spin cycle on the washer, because it had that rhythmic sort of chugga-chugga-CHUGGA quality to it, and I was trying to remember if I had put anything heavy (like a comforter) in that last load. THEN, finally, it dawned on me that it was an earthquake and I was like, 'Holy shit!' and ran outside to see if the kids were okay.
And they were. They are. We're all fine.
This was, by my count, my fifth earthquake. Or fifth that was big enough to really count for something, I guess. I lived in Southern California for seven years, and during that time there were countless little ones, little trembles that made you sort of cock your head like a dog listening for a whistle and go, "Was that...?" before you moved on with your day.
But the ones that I distinctly remember as Events are as follows:
1) Rawlins, Wyoming - I was in fifth grade, so it would have been 1984 or so. My reading group and I are all sitting around the half-moon shaped table, with our teacher sitting in the little cut-out on the flat side. She accuses us all, in turn, of being the naughty kid who is kicking the table hard enough to make it shake. This is tough for us, because in my reading group we are the nerds, the well-behaved Lisa Simpsons of our day, and to be accused of acting out is highly unusual for us. And then we all realize that it's actually an earthquake. (Which is highly unusual for Wyoming.) One of the walls of the school cracked, I remember, making a neat zig-zag right along the fault lines of the mortar between the bricks. Other seismic events that year include my parents' divorce, which I found out about from one of my teachers, when she asked me if I was okay, and I was like, "Yeah. Why?" and she told me. Gotta love a small town. (Or not.)
2) Los Angeles, California - The first of my three L.A. quakes (1999?) comes in the middle of the night, approximately 2 a.m. I wake up disoriented, wondering why my bed is moving one direction and I am moving the other. A couple pictures on my desk fall over and I realize what is going on. I rush out into the hallway where my grad-school roommate has just emerged from her bedroom. We smile goofily at each other and she yells, "Earthquake!" like a soccer announcer yelling, "Goal!" We are strangely giddy, as it's the first one for both of us since moving to Southern California, and it somehow doesn't seem like it's serious enough to warrant panic. A couple small aftershocks keep us awake the rest of the night, but other than that, nothing else really happened.
3) Los Angeles, California - The second quake comes in 2000, during the day, while I am at work at HBO in one of the twin towers of Century City. The entire development team is sitting around the big table in the conference room having a meeting. The NYC branch of HBO has recently merged with the LA branch and all the NY execs have moved out to LA within the last couple months. When the quake hits, every single LA exec is sitting calmly at the table waiting to see how bad it will be, and every single NY exec is underneath the table, freaking out. The building is on rollers and is built to withstand quakes (the tower is triangle-shaped, which apparently helps in quakes because every wall has a stabilizing vertical beam exactly opposite it, whereas a square or rectangular building shakes more), but because we are on the 36th floor, there is a queasy sort of time-delayed swaying sensation happening. Like, the bottom of the building is moving one way, and 30 seconds later the movement ripples up to the top of the building and we sway in the opposite direction. That one went on for a LONG time, but again, it never really seemed like we were in terrible danger. After it stopped, the NY execs took the rest of the day off. The HR department instituted regular earthquake-preparedness drills after that and we all had the chance to purchase an earthquake "kit" at a special discounted price.
4) Los Angeles, California - The final big quake I experienced in L.A. was also the most severe. I had just recently found out that I was invited to the Emmys, and was in the mall shopping for a strapless bra to wear with my fancy dress. I had just come out of the dressing room in Victoria's Secret and gotten in line to buy my bra when the shaking started. There was a big fancy crystal chandelier directly above my head, and I remember staring at it and being amazed at how far horizontally it was swinging during the shaking. The suspending chain seemed to be almost parallel to the floor at one point. Bras and panties were falling off of the shelves, people were screaming, some dust started to come down from the ceiling, and I remember being like, 'Great. This is where I'm going to die? In a Victoria's Secret? Suffocated in a giant pile of lingerie?' That was the only quake strong enough to make me doubt that we would be okay. But then, the shaking subsided, everybody picked themselves up, offered each other some shaky smiles and just went on with their day. Other seismic events that year included 9/11, which postponed and then downgraded the Emmys from Black Tie to Business Casual, so I didn't end up wearing the bra, or the dress, at all. (I don't mean to be flippant or blase about September 11th, but I figure there's nothing I can tell you about that day that you don't already know.)
5) Richmond, Virginia - 2011. Ten years since my last quake, I almost don't recognize what it is. Now I kind of feel like I do when I see a couple or three highway patrolmen on the interstate in a short space of road, pulling people over for speeding. Does that make it more likely that I will see another one? Are they out in force, handing out tickets galore? Should I be extra careful to obey the speed limit so I don't get nabbed? Or is it less likely that I'll see another one, since I've just seen a few in a row? Is the probability of another one lower, because there are only so many highway patrolmen out there? Hard to say. Should I be relieved that my family has safely experienced a "major" quake here in VA and from here on out it will be even more unlikely that we'll get another one? I mean, this one happening at all was pretty fucking unlikely, right? Or does having one big one mean another one is now more likely to occur? (I mean, aside from aftershocks and all that.) Hard to say.
Maybe I'll dig out that old earthquake-preparedness kit.
Thanks for reading.
EVERYBODY PANIC!!!
Or not. Although it is unusual to experience a magnitude 5.9 earthquake in Richmond, Virginia, it is apparently not unheard of, since that's what just happened.
I was sitting at my desk when the shaking started, and my first thought was that the kids were horsing around in the playroom next door. I was about to yell, "What's going on in there?" when I remembered that they were playing outside. Then I thought it was the spin cycle on the washer, because it had that rhythmic sort of chugga-chugga-CHUGGA quality to it, and I was trying to remember if I had put anything heavy (like a comforter) in that last load. THEN, finally, it dawned on me that it was an earthquake and I was like, 'Holy shit!' and ran outside to see if the kids were okay.
And they were. They are. We're all fine.
This was, by my count, my fifth earthquake. Or fifth that was big enough to really count for something, I guess. I lived in Southern California for seven years, and during that time there were countless little ones, little trembles that made you sort of cock your head like a dog listening for a whistle and go, "Was that...?" before you moved on with your day.
But the ones that I distinctly remember as Events are as follows:
1) Rawlins, Wyoming - I was in fifth grade, so it would have been 1984 or so. My reading group and I are all sitting around the half-moon shaped table, with our teacher sitting in the little cut-out on the flat side. She accuses us all, in turn, of being the naughty kid who is kicking the table hard enough to make it shake. This is tough for us, because in my reading group we are the nerds, the well-behaved Lisa Simpsons of our day, and to be accused of acting out is highly unusual for us. And then we all realize that it's actually an earthquake. (Which is highly unusual for Wyoming.) One of the walls of the school cracked, I remember, making a neat zig-zag right along the fault lines of the mortar between the bricks. Other seismic events that year include my parents' divorce, which I found out about from one of my teachers, when she asked me if I was okay, and I was like, "Yeah. Why?" and she told me. Gotta love a small town. (Or not.)
2) Los Angeles, California - The first of my three L.A. quakes (1999?) comes in the middle of the night, approximately 2 a.m. I wake up disoriented, wondering why my bed is moving one direction and I am moving the other. A couple pictures on my desk fall over and I realize what is going on. I rush out into the hallway where my grad-school roommate has just emerged from her bedroom. We smile goofily at each other and she yells, "Earthquake!" like a soccer announcer yelling, "Goal!" We are strangely giddy, as it's the first one for both of us since moving to Southern California, and it somehow doesn't seem like it's serious enough to warrant panic. A couple small aftershocks keep us awake the rest of the night, but other than that, nothing else really happened.
3) Los Angeles, California - The second quake comes in 2000, during the day, while I am at work at HBO in one of the twin towers of Century City. The entire development team is sitting around the big table in the conference room having a meeting. The NYC branch of HBO has recently merged with the LA branch and all the NY execs have moved out to LA within the last couple months. When the quake hits, every single LA exec is sitting calmly at the table waiting to see how bad it will be, and every single NY exec is underneath the table, freaking out. The building is on rollers and is built to withstand quakes (the tower is triangle-shaped, which apparently helps in quakes because every wall has a stabilizing vertical beam exactly opposite it, whereas a square or rectangular building shakes more), but because we are on the 36th floor, there is a queasy sort of time-delayed swaying sensation happening. Like, the bottom of the building is moving one way, and 30 seconds later the movement ripples up to the top of the building and we sway in the opposite direction. That one went on for a LONG time, but again, it never really seemed like we were in terrible danger. After it stopped, the NY execs took the rest of the day off. The HR department instituted regular earthquake-preparedness drills after that and we all had the chance to purchase an earthquake "kit" at a special discounted price.
4) Los Angeles, California - The final big quake I experienced in L.A. was also the most severe. I had just recently found out that I was invited to the Emmys, and was in the mall shopping for a strapless bra to wear with my fancy dress. I had just come out of the dressing room in Victoria's Secret and gotten in line to buy my bra when the shaking started. There was a big fancy crystal chandelier directly above my head, and I remember staring at it and being amazed at how far horizontally it was swinging during the shaking. The suspending chain seemed to be almost parallel to the floor at one point. Bras and panties were falling off of the shelves, people were screaming, some dust started to come down from the ceiling, and I remember being like, 'Great. This is where I'm going to die? In a Victoria's Secret? Suffocated in a giant pile of lingerie?' That was the only quake strong enough to make me doubt that we would be okay. But then, the shaking subsided, everybody picked themselves up, offered each other some shaky smiles and just went on with their day. Other seismic events that year included 9/11, which postponed and then downgraded the Emmys from Black Tie to Business Casual, so I didn't end up wearing the bra, or the dress, at all. (I don't mean to be flippant or blase about September 11th, but I figure there's nothing I can tell you about that day that you don't already know.)
5) Richmond, Virginia - 2011. Ten years since my last quake, I almost don't recognize what it is. Now I kind of feel like I do when I see a couple or three highway patrolmen on the interstate in a short space of road, pulling people over for speeding. Does that make it more likely that I will see another one? Are they out in force, handing out tickets galore? Should I be extra careful to obey the speed limit so I don't get nabbed? Or is it less likely that I'll see another one, since I've just seen a few in a row? Is the probability of another one lower, because there are only so many highway patrolmen out there? Hard to say. Should I be relieved that my family has safely experienced a "major" quake here in VA and from here on out it will be even more unlikely that we'll get another one? I mean, this one happening at all was pretty fucking unlikely, right? Or does having one big one mean another one is now more likely to occur? (I mean, aside from aftershocks and all that.) Hard to say.
Maybe I'll dig out that old earthquake-preparedness kit.
Thanks for reading.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Everybody's working for the weekend
I, through the gracious consent of my husband and the superior knowledge of my friend Elena, was able to go on a two-day writing retreat this past weekend. E and I drove two hours and checked in to a lovely old Southern home overlooking the James River with grand porches running the length of the first and second floors. We brought our own food, our computers, and the essentials for clothes, etc. and then we did nothing but write, eat, pee and sleep for the next 48 hours. It was heavenly. (I also, with the assistance of Jim the Songwriter who was also there on retreat, retrieved a five-foot-long black snake skin from a tree outside my window and brought it home for Nolan. You know, like you do.)
I worked on my screenplay for Night Tour, which I had previously, I don't know, not abandoned, but stopped working on in any meaningful way about a year ago. And taking it out again and really trying to buckle down and FINISH THE FUCKER reminded me of why I quit on it before. It's a mess. There's a lot of good stuff, if I do say so myself, but there's also a ton of chaff, and it needs more than just a weekend writer's retreat to fix, sad to say.
I was thinking about it again because I recently sent it to a friend-of-a-friend (who I hope will now consider me also a friend) whose opinion I respect, and he really enjoyed it. He thought there was something worthwhile there, and it got me excited to work on it again and really try to make it work this time. So I dove back in, and spent a goodly amount of time re-acquainting myself with the world and the characters. I only wanted to write an ending, which it didn't (and still doesn't) have, during this retreat. I figured that was reasonable. Just finish it, however you can, and then go back and try to fix all the other problems.
And I couldn't. I tried, but what I ended up doing was kind of like a logic problem from a book of puzzles. You know, the ones that are like "Five friends live on Walnut Street. Tom lives in a red house next to the house with the tire swing. Mary's house is not next to Sally's house." and blah blah blah so you have to try to figure out who lives where. Doing that with my script. Trying out different possibilities. If I do this, what happens then over here? Can I combine these two scenes? No, because then that line of dialogue that refers to the other thing that happens will come too late. How about if I move this over here? Hmmm...
No! You know what it was like? It was like building a house out of Legos. Not the big chunky Duplos but the little intricate fuckers that only come in red, yellow, blue, white, green and black, with a big green plate to build it on. My screenplay was 3/4 of a Lego house, built really tall for some reason, with ragged edges of bricks and no fourth wall (no pun intended). So, looking at it from the outside after having been away from it for a while, it was like, "This should be a snap! It just needs to have those last few pieces tacked onto the end. Maybe stick a window in that other wall. No problem!" And I got all enthusiastic and ready to tackle it, and then discovered what most 6-year-olds already know: You can't just cut a window into a Lego wall. That's not how they work. First you have to take off all the pieces that are above the ones you want to remove. Then you have to smooth out the edges by pulling off all the pieces that stick out and replacing them with ones that end where you want them to in order to form the shape of the window. Then you put the top layer of bricks back on. And sometimes when you pull one brick out, three other bricks are stuck to it and you accidentally rip out a whole section when you only meant to trim. So it ends up taking a lot longer than you thought, and you keep fucking up the parts you don't mean to by taking out other pieces, and sometimes you don't even have a brick with the right number of dots on it - you need a six-er when all you've got are fours and eights. You know what you need to put there, but you don't have it, and what you do have won't fit.
Sigh.
So I didn't finish it. But I'm not giving up. I will keep plugging away.
Thanks for reading.
I worked on my screenplay for Night Tour, which I had previously, I don't know, not abandoned, but stopped working on in any meaningful way about a year ago. And taking it out again and really trying to buckle down and FINISH THE FUCKER reminded me of why I quit on it before. It's a mess. There's a lot of good stuff, if I do say so myself, but there's also a ton of chaff, and it needs more than just a weekend writer's retreat to fix, sad to say.
I was thinking about it again because I recently sent it to a friend-of-a-friend (who I hope will now consider me also a friend) whose opinion I respect, and he really enjoyed it. He thought there was something worthwhile there, and it got me excited to work on it again and really try to make it work this time. So I dove back in, and spent a goodly amount of time re-acquainting myself with the world and the characters. I only wanted to write an ending, which it didn't (and still doesn't) have, during this retreat. I figured that was reasonable. Just finish it, however you can, and then go back and try to fix all the other problems.
And I couldn't. I tried, but what I ended up doing was kind of like a logic problem from a book of puzzles. You know, the ones that are like "Five friends live on Walnut Street. Tom lives in a red house next to the house with the tire swing. Mary's house is not next to Sally's house." and blah blah blah so you have to try to figure out who lives where. Doing that with my script. Trying out different possibilities. If I do this, what happens then over here? Can I combine these two scenes? No, because then that line of dialogue that refers to the other thing that happens will come too late. How about if I move this over here? Hmmm...
No! You know what it was like? It was like building a house out of Legos. Not the big chunky Duplos but the little intricate fuckers that only come in red, yellow, blue, white, green and black, with a big green plate to build it on. My screenplay was 3/4 of a Lego house, built really tall for some reason, with ragged edges of bricks and no fourth wall (no pun intended). So, looking at it from the outside after having been away from it for a while, it was like, "This should be a snap! It just needs to have those last few pieces tacked onto the end. Maybe stick a window in that other wall. No problem!" And I got all enthusiastic and ready to tackle it, and then discovered what most 6-year-olds already know: You can't just cut a window into a Lego wall. That's not how they work. First you have to take off all the pieces that are above the ones you want to remove. Then you have to smooth out the edges by pulling off all the pieces that stick out and replacing them with ones that end where you want them to in order to form the shape of the window. Then you put the top layer of bricks back on. And sometimes when you pull one brick out, three other bricks are stuck to it and you accidentally rip out a whole section when you only meant to trim. So it ends up taking a lot longer than you thought, and you keep fucking up the parts you don't mean to by taking out other pieces, and sometimes you don't even have a brick with the right number of dots on it - you need a six-er when all you've got are fours and eights. You know what you need to put there, but you don't have it, and what you do have won't fit.
Sigh.
So I didn't finish it. But I'm not giving up. I will keep plugging away.
Thanks for reading.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
No one to tell us no, or where to go
One thing that's been on my mind a lot recently: children.
"No duh,* " I hear you saying. "You're a stay-at-home-mom, Caroline. Of course you're thinking about children."
And you would be right. I do think about children a lot. (Although most of the time when I'm with my children I'm actually thinking of other deep, meaningful, important things, like 'When can I make an appointment to get my eyebrows waxed?' and 'I hope my UPS package comes today.' It seems I have to go away [and get away] from my children in order to have them return to the forefront of my thoughts. Which is what I did this past weekend - go away, that is - and as such I pined for my children as though they were gone forever.)
But I'm talking specifically about the NUMBER of children we have, which is two.
And that question that friends new and old (and well-meaning/pushy family members) ask you with increasing frequency:
"Are you done?"
Meaning, "Will you be having any more children?"
And I don't really have an answer for them.
KB has mentioned several times that he is quite happy with our quota of offspring. Two's good for him - we've got the heir and the spare, so to speak. I think this is a common position for the breadwinner in the family (if your family is so structured). They are worried about the bottom line, and three kids are more expensive than two kids.
Me? I am not so sure. Part of me wants very much to have another child. I am one of three, KB is one of three...it feels like the right number, the perfect number, the magic number. (Right about now, you should have De La Soul's "Three Is The Magic Number" stuck in your head...you're welcome.)
[Also, to be honest, I would like to have a girl. I've written about this in the past, and my want/need to have a girl has not waned. I have a good relationship with my mother, for the most part, and I'd like to have a daughter in my life. I like the idea of a built-in female friend and of having someone I can mentor. Of course, I also tell myself that maybe my very need is the reason I shouldn't have a girl child - my idea of what it's going to be like (and why I want to have one) is probably not going to line up with reality all too well. And having a child should be about wanting to bring another person into the world, whomever that person may turn out to be, not about my own personal yearnings. Right? Plus there's no guarantee a third baby would be a girl...]
I recently turned 36 years old, which, while not technically ancient, is getting up there in terms of ease of procreation. If I were to have another child now I would be dubbed a woman of Advanced Maternal Age and subjected to extra rounds of fun pre-natal testing events that weren't deemed necessary when I had Miles and was a spring chicken of 34. Amniocentesis, anyone?
So part of me feels like, if we're gonna do it, we should probably do it soon. It's not going to get any easier, both in terms of the actual conception and pregnancy, and also in terms of how tired we're going to be when the baby is a newborn. (See what I did there? I started talking as if it were already a foregone conclusion. I should have said "how tired we would be if we had another newborn.")
Another argument in favor of getting on the stick (so to speak) sooner rather than later is that I often feel now, as a Stay At Home Mom, that my life is not my own. My life is almost totally devoted to the care and feeding of two small human beings, and when that starts to change back into a more half-and-half situation (i.e., when both boys are in school part or most of the day) I'm not sure how willing I'll be to return to the land of the enslaved after having a brief taste of freedom. The real world! Adult conversation! Working on my writing more than once a week! I can...almost...touch it...
Of course, the flip side of that argument is that maybe after I've had a couple years of more regular, reliable "me time," (god how I hate that phrase) in the mornings while the boys are at school, I'll feel more relaxed and groovy and ready to handle another baby. So maybe we should wait. Who knows?
Or maybe we shouldn't have another baby at all.
My trusty brain likes to remind me of things like massive, crushing sleep deprivation, varicose veins and unwanted C-sections after 36 hours of labor. Sibling rivalry, carpooling and endless dirty diapers. Toilet training. Spit-up. Post-partum depression. Massive, crushing sleep deprivation.
Do I really want to put myself through all that again? I had Nolan a year almost to the day after KB and I got married - we didn't have a lot of together time before we had kids, and our marriage could certainly use some Us Time. Another baby will bring up all the old "Whose sleep is more important, yours or mine?" arguments that pit us against each other, instead of reminding us that we're on the same team. (Him: "I'm a doctor! People's lives depend on me! What if I'm sleep deprived and I make a mistake and someone DIES because of me?" Me: "I'm a mother! Our children's lives depend on me! What if I'm sleep deprived and crash the car and we ALL DIE?")
Essentially, I think it comes down to a war between my head and my heart (or perhaps my head and my ovaries.)
The desire for another baby is strongest when I'm doing something like putting Miles down for his nap, and Miles is doing something lovely like falling asleep on my shoulder and snoring softly. Then all the More Baby! cavewoman hormones cascade through my system and make me KNOW, for sure, that I definitely want another baby. It will happen. How can it not? Babies are lovely and I want another one.
And then, an hour later, I have to wake Miles up from that same nap even though he's not done sleeping because it's time to go pick up Nolan from school. And he's cranky. And we get in the car and drive 20 minutes and I forgot to bring milk or a toy, so he's miserable. And then we come home with Nolan and they start fighting. And I have to cook dinner while holding a 25-pound toddler in my arms who's screaming because his brother won't let him play with his Transformers car. And when KB (finally!) gets home we try to eat together and have some conversation before the boys start to fall apart and we have to split up, one parent per kid, and wrestle them into and out of the bath and into PJs so we can get them to bed before it's time for US to go to bed. There's no room for a third kid in that scenario, is there?
It's like my mom always said about having three kids versus two: You have to switch from man-to-man to zone defense.
Sigh.
No easy answers. I'm stopping there because Hey, Guess What? It's time to go wake up Miles and pick up Nolan from school!
Thanks for reading.
* Total linguistic tangent - why do the phrases "Duh," and "No duh" mean exactly the same thing? Shouldn't they be opposites? Am I exposing my grammatical ineptitude when I use "No duh," like people who say "irregardless" when they really mean "regardless?"
"No duh,* " I hear you saying. "You're a stay-at-home-mom, Caroline. Of course you're thinking about children."
And you would be right. I do think about children a lot. (Although most of the time when I'm with my children I'm actually thinking of other deep, meaningful, important things, like 'When can I make an appointment to get my eyebrows waxed?' and 'I hope my UPS package comes today.' It seems I have to go away [and get away] from my children in order to have them return to the forefront of my thoughts. Which is what I did this past weekend - go away, that is - and as such I pined for my children as though they were gone forever.)
But I'm talking specifically about the NUMBER of children we have, which is two.
And that question that friends new and old (and well-meaning/pushy family members) ask you with increasing frequency:
"Are you done?"
Meaning, "Will you be having any more children?"
And I don't really have an answer for them.
KB has mentioned several times that he is quite happy with our quota of offspring. Two's good for him - we've got the heir and the spare, so to speak. I think this is a common position for the breadwinner in the family (if your family is so structured). They are worried about the bottom line, and three kids are more expensive than two kids.
Me? I am not so sure. Part of me wants very much to have another child. I am one of three, KB is one of three...it feels like the right number, the perfect number, the magic number. (Right about now, you should have De La Soul's "Three Is The Magic Number" stuck in your head...you're welcome.)
[Also, to be honest, I would like to have a girl. I've written about this in the past, and my want/need to have a girl has not waned. I have a good relationship with my mother, for the most part, and I'd like to have a daughter in my life. I like the idea of a built-in female friend and of having someone I can mentor. Of course, I also tell myself that maybe my very need is the reason I shouldn't have a girl child - my idea of what it's going to be like (and why I want to have one) is probably not going to line up with reality all too well. And having a child should be about wanting to bring another person into the world, whomever that person may turn out to be, not about my own personal yearnings. Right? Plus there's no guarantee a third baby would be a girl...]
I recently turned 36 years old, which, while not technically ancient, is getting up there in terms of ease of procreation. If I were to have another child now I would be dubbed a woman of Advanced Maternal Age and subjected to extra rounds of fun pre-natal testing events that weren't deemed necessary when I had Miles and was a spring chicken of 34. Amniocentesis, anyone?
So part of me feels like, if we're gonna do it, we should probably do it soon. It's not going to get any easier, both in terms of the actual conception and pregnancy, and also in terms of how tired we're going to be when the baby is a newborn. (See what I did there? I started talking as if it were already a foregone conclusion. I should have said "how tired we would be if we had another newborn.")
Another argument in favor of getting on the stick (so to speak) sooner rather than later is that I often feel now, as a Stay At Home Mom, that my life is not my own. My life is almost totally devoted to the care and feeding of two small human beings, and when that starts to change back into a more half-and-half situation (i.e., when both boys are in school part or most of the day) I'm not sure how willing I'll be to return to the land of the enslaved after having a brief taste of freedom. The real world! Adult conversation! Working on my writing more than once a week! I can...almost...touch it...
Of course, the flip side of that argument is that maybe after I've had a couple years of more regular, reliable "me time," (god how I hate that phrase) in the mornings while the boys are at school, I'll feel more relaxed and groovy and ready to handle another baby. So maybe we should wait. Who knows?
Or maybe we shouldn't have another baby at all.
My trusty brain likes to remind me of things like massive, crushing sleep deprivation, varicose veins and unwanted C-sections after 36 hours of labor. Sibling rivalry, carpooling and endless dirty diapers. Toilet training. Spit-up. Post-partum depression. Massive, crushing sleep deprivation.
Do I really want to put myself through all that again? I had Nolan a year almost to the day after KB and I got married - we didn't have a lot of together time before we had kids, and our marriage could certainly use some Us Time. Another baby will bring up all the old "Whose sleep is more important, yours or mine?" arguments that pit us against each other, instead of reminding us that we're on the same team. (Him: "I'm a doctor! People's lives depend on me! What if I'm sleep deprived and I make a mistake and someone DIES because of me?" Me: "I'm a mother! Our children's lives depend on me! What if I'm sleep deprived and crash the car and we ALL DIE?")
Essentially, I think it comes down to a war between my head and my heart (or perhaps my head and my ovaries.)
The desire for another baby is strongest when I'm doing something like putting Miles down for his nap, and Miles is doing something lovely like falling asleep on my shoulder and snoring softly. Then all the More Baby! cavewoman hormones cascade through my system and make me KNOW, for sure, that I definitely want another baby. It will happen. How can it not? Babies are lovely and I want another one.
And then, an hour later, I have to wake Miles up from that same nap even though he's not done sleeping because it's time to go pick up Nolan from school. And he's cranky. And we get in the car and drive 20 minutes and I forgot to bring milk or a toy, so he's miserable. And then we come home with Nolan and they start fighting. And I have to cook dinner while holding a 25-pound toddler in my arms who's screaming because his brother won't let him play with his Transformers car. And when KB (finally!) gets home we try to eat together and have some conversation before the boys start to fall apart and we have to split up, one parent per kid, and wrestle them into and out of the bath and into PJs so we can get them to bed before it's time for US to go to bed. There's no room for a third kid in that scenario, is there?
It's like my mom always said about having three kids versus two: You have to switch from man-to-man to zone defense.
Sigh.
No easy answers. I'm stopping there because Hey, Guess What? It's time to go wake up Miles and pick up Nolan from school!
Thanks for reading.
* Total linguistic tangent - why do the phrases "Duh," and "No duh" mean exactly the same thing? Shouldn't they be opposites? Am I exposing my grammatical ineptitude when I use "No duh," like people who say "irregardless" when they really mean "regardless?"
Monday, August 23, 2010
Sail on, silver girl
Oh lordy, how I do not want to write.
It is a lovely sunny day here in Berkeley, the first sunny day they've had in months, according to Ann. It is 80 degrees and I am sitting in Ann's backyard garden in the shade under the bougainvillea tree with my laptop. Kevin took the boys to the playground and I have just come from having a pedicure, where I had my toenails painted a lovely light sparkling teal blue. I had a coffee from the original Peet's and a cheddar roll from the Cheese Board for breakfast this morning. The coffee was strong and thick, and the scone had a nice lacy crust of cheese from where it melted onto the baking sheet and then cooled into a perfect salty, cheesy crunchiness. I have already read not one, not two, but three books ("The Innocent," by Ian McEwan, "Love Is A Mix Tape," by Rob Sheffield, and "City of Thieves," by David Benioff) from Ann's bookshelf in the last four days and have started on a fourth ("Lark and Termite" by Jayne Anne Phillips).
How little do I want to write? So, so, little.
The only thing disturbing my peace right now is an alarm clock from a neighbor's apartment that seems to have been set and forgotten - it has been peep-peep-peep-ing for the last twenty minutes and shows no sign of stopping. It is very much like the voice of my conscience in my head telling me I need to write - almost ignorable; just a little annoying noise in the background of all this loveliness. But it persists. It keeps on peep-peep-peep-ing, relentlessly. It will not stop, not ever.
So, I shut my e-mail window. I close Facebook. I open Final Draft. I open my script notes in Google Docs. Ah, yes. Page 108 - Misty frees the deer and realizes what it is she has to do (or thinks she has to) to free herself.
Back to it.
FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WILL YOU STOP WITH THAT MOTHERFUCKING PEEPING ALREADY.
It is a lovely sunny day here in Berkeley, the first sunny day they've had in months, according to Ann. It is 80 degrees and I am sitting in Ann's backyard garden in the shade under the bougainvillea tree with my laptop. Kevin took the boys to the playground and I have just come from having a pedicure, where I had my toenails painted a lovely light sparkling teal blue. I had a coffee from the original Peet's and a cheddar roll from the Cheese Board for breakfast this morning. The coffee was strong and thick, and the scone had a nice lacy crust of cheese from where it melted onto the baking sheet and then cooled into a perfect salty, cheesy crunchiness. I have already read not one, not two, but three books ("The Innocent," by Ian McEwan, "Love Is A Mix Tape," by Rob Sheffield, and "City of Thieves," by David Benioff) from Ann's bookshelf in the last four days and have started on a fourth ("Lark and Termite" by Jayne Anne Phillips).
How little do I want to write? So, so, little.
The only thing disturbing my peace right now is an alarm clock from a neighbor's apartment that seems to have been set and forgotten - it has been peep-peep-peep-ing for the last twenty minutes and shows no sign of stopping. It is very much like the voice of my conscience in my head telling me I need to write - almost ignorable; just a little annoying noise in the background of all this loveliness. But it persists. It keeps on peep-peep-peep-ing, relentlessly. It will not stop, not ever.
So, I shut my e-mail window. I close Facebook. I open Final Draft. I open my script notes in Google Docs. Ah, yes. Page 108 - Misty frees the deer and realizes what it is she has to do (or thinks she has to) to free herself.
Back to it.
FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WILL YOU STOP WITH THAT MOTHERFUCKING PEEPING ALREADY.
Friday, July 30, 2010
We can't rewind, we've gone too far
Facebook killed my blog.
I know that sounds like a cop-out, and in some ways it is, but I think it's also very true. Today is July - let's see, what day is it? - July 30th and I have not updated this blog since March. Now, I was never the most prolific or reliable blog updater to begin with, but four months is really pretty sad.
Has nothing been going on worth blogging about? Has Miles not learned to walk and has Nolan not learned to put his face in the water in the swimming pool? Why yes, they have. Have we not gone on vacation to Washington D.C. and seen the National Zoo and the Portrait Gallery? Why yes, we have. Have I written a blog post about any of these momentous events? Why no, I have not.
And I was thinking about it and rationalizing to myself and blaming my busy busy busy life, and my kids, and my kids' busy busy busy lives. But the truth is, I have always been busy (or perceived my life as being busy) and I have always had kids (since I started this blog) so there's really nothing different there.
Any my life is actually, finally, a bit more settled now that we've been in Richmond for not-quite-two years. We've met some great people and found a neighborhood we really like. I've got membership cards in my wallet for no less than seven local museums, parks and attractions. I'm volunteering for Nolan's school, I've got most of the playgrounds in town on my radar, and K and I are even having quasi-regular "date nights" and attending actual cultural events.
So what's different?
And I was, as I said, rationalizing to myself and thinking about my big writing project that I've currently got going and how maybe all my writing "urges" are being funneled into that. And my BFF 4-evah, Erica, and I are keeping a running document that, well, uh, documents our progress on our individual projects. (She's not writing, she's more of an artiste, but we're trying to hold ourselves accountable to each other and subvert our usual procrastinatory ways.) And that document has sort of morphed into a bit of an online diary where we tell each other what's going on and bitch about our husbands and also do a bit of, you know, documenting of our progress.
So maybe all of my writing "urges" are being funneled into that.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's Facebook. What with the status updates and the long-lost friends, the cute links and the political rants, the self-censoring (my mom's on there!) and the cyber-stalking and the frequent checking, I think Facebook has sort of obviated my need to connect with the world "out there" through this blog.
And I'm not saying Facebook is a bad thing, necessarily. Do I check it too often? Yes. Do I go through days of self-imposed exile to try to combat the checking-it-too-often-ness? Yes. Do I then fall off the wagon and compulsively check it 17 times in an hour? Yes.
But it's not all bad. I get a sense of connection there. I find out how my long-lost friends are doing and feel like I'm a teeny bit more involved in their lives. I find out about things my local friends are doing and invite myself along. It serves a definite purpose in my life.
But I was thinking about it, and feeling guilty for not posting more on this blog, and then chiding myself for feeling guilty and blah blah shame spiral blah and I realized - you know what Facebook can't do?
No, not toast your cheese sandwich.
It can't provide a forum for the lengthy examination of a particular thought.
Think about it:
You're limited by the format to a certain number of characters.
You can only really post in your status update, or in comments on your friends' status updates. (Sure, there's "notes," but who the hell uses those anyway?)
People sometimes have a little back-and-forth in the comments, but then you end up using a lot of "@" symbols and scrolling up and down to see who said what and it's so fragmented that it rarely makes sense.
There's no way to really, I don't know, DIG IN to a line of inquiry. There's no room for considered thought. You post, then you forget about it. Half the time when I get comments on my status update (and I can't for the life of me figure out how to get my phone to STOP SENDING THEM TO ME ALREADY) I've already forgotten what I posted and have to check my own status to make sense of the comments.
Some of it may be just a generational inability on my part to adjust to this new format. I grew up in the age of three-hour phone calls to my best friend to re-hash the day. With a corded phone, mind you, dragged all the way around the corner from the kitchen and into the bathroom so I could shut the door and have some friggin' privacy. I wrote all of my high school papers and research reports on a typewriter. When my grandfather gave me a computer to take to college, it was the size of microwave oven, and that's without the monitor.
So maybe some of it is just that I can't quite cram my thoughts down to Facebook size (don't even get me started on Twitter) because I'm Generation X and not a Millenial, or whatever they're called. Maybe I need to stretch out a bit and meander and have some virtual Tourette's in order to get my thoughts in order. I like to spell out the whole words "you" and "are" when I'm texting, God help me.
I'm not going to go cold turkey on Facebook or shut down my account completely, because I think there's definitely a place for it. What I am going to try to do is be a better blogger.
Heck, even once a month would be an improvement, right?
Thanks for reading.
I know that sounds like a cop-out, and in some ways it is, but I think it's also very true. Today is July - let's see, what day is it? - July 30th and I have not updated this blog since March. Now, I was never the most prolific or reliable blog updater to begin with, but four months is really pretty sad.
Has nothing been going on worth blogging about? Has Miles not learned to walk and has Nolan not learned to put his face in the water in the swimming pool? Why yes, they have. Have we not gone on vacation to Washington D.C. and seen the National Zoo and the Portrait Gallery? Why yes, we have. Have I written a blog post about any of these momentous events? Why no, I have not.
And I was thinking about it and rationalizing to myself and blaming my busy busy busy life, and my kids, and my kids' busy busy busy lives. But the truth is, I have always been busy (or perceived my life as being busy) and I have always had kids (since I started this blog) so there's really nothing different there.
Any my life is actually, finally, a bit more settled now that we've been in Richmond for not-quite-two years. We've met some great people and found a neighborhood we really like. I've got membership cards in my wallet for no less than seven local museums, parks and attractions. I'm volunteering for Nolan's school, I've got most of the playgrounds in town on my radar, and K and I are even having quasi-regular "date nights" and attending actual cultural events.
So what's different?
And I was, as I said, rationalizing to myself and thinking about my big writing project that I've currently got going and how maybe all my writing "urges" are being funneled into that. And my BFF 4-evah, Erica, and I are keeping a running document that, well, uh, documents our progress on our individual projects. (She's not writing, she's more of an artiste, but we're trying to hold ourselves accountable to each other and subvert our usual procrastinatory ways.) And that document has sort of morphed into a bit of an online diary where we tell each other what's going on and bitch about our husbands and also do a bit of, you know, documenting of our progress.
So maybe all of my writing "urges" are being funneled into that.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's Facebook. What with the status updates and the long-lost friends, the cute links and the political rants, the self-censoring (my mom's on there!) and the cyber-stalking and the frequent checking, I think Facebook has sort of obviated my need to connect with the world "out there" through this blog.
And I'm not saying Facebook is a bad thing, necessarily. Do I check it too often? Yes. Do I go through days of self-imposed exile to try to combat the checking-it-too-often-ness? Yes. Do I then fall off the wagon and compulsively check it 17 times in an hour? Yes.
But it's not all bad. I get a sense of connection there. I find out how my long-lost friends are doing and feel like I'm a teeny bit more involved in their lives. I find out about things my local friends are doing and invite myself along. It serves a definite purpose in my life.
But I was thinking about it, and feeling guilty for not posting more on this blog, and then chiding myself for feeling guilty and blah blah shame spiral blah and I realized - you know what Facebook can't do?
No, not toast your cheese sandwich.
It can't provide a forum for the lengthy examination of a particular thought.
Think about it:
You're limited by the format to a certain number of characters.
You can only really post in your status update, or in comments on your friends' status updates. (Sure, there's "notes," but who the hell uses those anyway?)
People sometimes have a little back-and-forth in the comments, but then you end up using a lot of "@" symbols and scrolling up and down to see who said what and it's so fragmented that it rarely makes sense.
There's no way to really, I don't know, DIG IN to a line of inquiry. There's no room for considered thought. You post, then you forget about it. Half the time when I get comments on my status update (and I can't for the life of me figure out how to get my phone to STOP SENDING THEM TO ME ALREADY) I've already forgotten what I posted and have to check my own status to make sense of the comments.
Some of it may be just a generational inability on my part to adjust to this new format. I grew up in the age of three-hour phone calls to my best friend to re-hash the day. With a corded phone, mind you, dragged all the way around the corner from the kitchen and into the bathroom so I could shut the door and have some friggin' privacy. I wrote all of my high school papers and research reports on a typewriter. When my grandfather gave me a computer to take to college, it was the size of microwave oven, and that's without the monitor.
So maybe some of it is just that I can't quite cram my thoughts down to Facebook size (don't even get me started on Twitter) because I'm Generation X and not a Millenial, or whatever they're called. Maybe I need to stretch out a bit and meander and have some virtual Tourette's in order to get my thoughts in order. I like to spell out the whole words "you" and "are" when I'm texting, God help me.
I'm not going to go cold turkey on Facebook or shut down my account completely, because I think there's definitely a place for it. What I am going to try to do is be a better blogger.
Heck, even once a month would be an improvement, right?
Thanks for reading.
Monday, March 15, 2010
He ain't heavy
Miles turned one on the first of March.
We just had a little family party with my Mom and us. Cupcakes, balloons, presents and all that, but pretty low key overall.
While his presence in our lives has had effects, both joyful and not-so-much, on all of us, I think it's fair to say that the person most impacted by Miles's arrival has been Nolan.
Nolan loves his brother, of this I am certain, but I also know that a lot of the time, Nolan hates his brother. Or rather, he hates that all of my attention and love is not focused solely on him any longer.
I suppose this is quite natural and something that happens with all siblings, and indeed must have happened to my brothers and I growing up, but there are times when I am blown away by the sheer force of his rage. Thankfully, he mostly directs that rage at me, rather than Miles. There are occasional "Oops, I didn't realize that spinning him so hard in his jumper would cause his head to crash into the door frame" moments, of course, but they seem to be genuinely accidental for the most part.
It is only recently that it's dawned on me and KB that this is the reason for Nolan's rather precipitous slide into violent behavior in the last few months. (We're a bit slow on the uptake sometimes - this whole two kids thing is new to us.) Over just the last couple weeks I have been bitten, punched, kicked, pinched, screamed at and more, as Nolan seems to be saying, "Damn you, woman! Damn you for bringing that other baby into this house!" (The conflict at hand is never about Miles, of course - it's usually about why I won't let him watch more TV or how come I cleaned up his super-cool train track before he had a chance to take a picture of it. Perhaps that's why it took us so long to figure it out - he can't come right out and say he's pissed at us for having another baby, so he expresses it in other ways.) It wasn't so bad at the beginning, when Miles was just a little podling, but now that he's a full-fledged one-year-old (he hasn't quite qualified for official "toddler" status, yet) Nolan is having a very hard time.
I suppose we should have known the jig was up last fall, when Nolan wrote a play at his school. (His school, if I haven't mentioned it before, is a kick-ass Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool that really lets the kids expend their creative energies in a variety of ways. Check out the atelierista's blog. You'll get to see pics of Nolan in action at school.)
The play was basically just a cast of characters and some pictures illustrating the action (no dialogue or stage directions just yet), but the cast of characters was as follows:
The Only Baby.......................Nolan
The Mother............................Caroline
The Father.............................Kevin
The Dog..................................Miles
(There was also a special guest appearance by a boy from another classroom as Santa Claus.) Now, if that doesn't tell you that Nolan is having some adjustment issues, I don't know what would. But we just laughed about it and told our parents and friends in an "Isn't this cute?" kind of way, and I think we failed to really take seriously Nolan's deep ambivalence toward his brother.
So we'll be trying harder. I'm going to make a special effort to carve out some Nolan-and-Mommy time, and I won't make the mistake of sending him to (or, actually, picking him up and forcing him into) his room when he gets angry and violent. That just makes him more angry - probably because he doesn't want to be separated from me. Sigh. Poor Noney.
Thanks for reading.
We just had a little family party with my Mom and us. Cupcakes, balloons, presents and all that, but pretty low key overall.
While his presence in our lives has had effects, both joyful and not-so-much, on all of us, I think it's fair to say that the person most impacted by Miles's arrival has been Nolan.
Nolan loves his brother, of this I am certain, but I also know that a lot of the time, Nolan hates his brother. Or rather, he hates that all of my attention and love is not focused solely on him any longer.
I suppose this is quite natural and something that happens with all siblings, and indeed must have happened to my brothers and I growing up, but there are times when I am blown away by the sheer force of his rage. Thankfully, he mostly directs that rage at me, rather than Miles. There are occasional "Oops, I didn't realize that spinning him so hard in his jumper would cause his head to crash into the door frame" moments, of course, but they seem to be genuinely accidental for the most part.
It is only recently that it's dawned on me and KB that this is the reason for Nolan's rather precipitous slide into violent behavior in the last few months. (We're a bit slow on the uptake sometimes - this whole two kids thing is new to us.) Over just the last couple weeks I have been bitten, punched, kicked, pinched, screamed at and more, as Nolan seems to be saying, "Damn you, woman! Damn you for bringing that other baby into this house!" (The conflict at hand is never about Miles, of course - it's usually about why I won't let him watch more TV or how come I cleaned up his super-cool train track before he had a chance to take a picture of it. Perhaps that's why it took us so long to figure it out - he can't come right out and say he's pissed at us for having another baby, so he expresses it in other ways.) It wasn't so bad at the beginning, when Miles was just a little podling, but now that he's a full-fledged one-year-old (he hasn't quite qualified for official "toddler" status, yet) Nolan is having a very hard time.
I suppose we should have known the jig was up last fall, when Nolan wrote a play at his school. (His school, if I haven't mentioned it before, is a kick-ass Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool that really lets the kids expend their creative energies in a variety of ways. Check out the atelierista's blog. You'll get to see pics of Nolan in action at school.)
The play was basically just a cast of characters and some pictures illustrating the action (no dialogue or stage directions just yet), but the cast of characters was as follows:
The Only Baby.......................Nolan
The Mother............................Caroline
The Father.............................Kevin
The Dog..................................Miles
(There was also a special guest appearance by a boy from another classroom as Santa Claus.) Now, if that doesn't tell you that Nolan is having some adjustment issues, I don't know what would. But we just laughed about it and told our parents and friends in an "Isn't this cute?" kind of way, and I think we failed to really take seriously Nolan's deep ambivalence toward his brother.
So we'll be trying harder. I'm going to make a special effort to carve out some Nolan-and-Mommy time, and I won't make the mistake of sending him to (or, actually, picking him up and forcing him into) his room when he gets angry and violent. That just makes him more angry - probably because he doesn't want to be separated from me. Sigh. Poor Noney.
Thanks for reading.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Domo arigato
Well, the robot costume was a hit. We finished the helmet portion today by gluing some "buttons" (actually painted bottle caps - this robot costume brought to you by Yuengling) onto it and letting them dry. Incidentally, I learned something new - perhaps if y'all are the crafty type you knew this already - rubber cement and styrofoam don't mix. The noxious chemicals in the rubber cement totally dissolve the styrofoam into a sticky puddle of goo. Lesson learned. Elmer's glue used on styrofoam helmet.
Lemme back up a minute, give you the play-by-play on the robot costume (I'm pretty proud of it, actually - I enjoyed working on it with Nolan and it was fun to see it take shape.) We started about a week ago with a trip to first Lowe's and then Ben Franklin Crafts. Nolan had some very specific things he wanted - red "fuzzballs" and two "straight wires" for the robot's antennae. We got red pom-poms and silver pipe cleaners at Ben Franklin, along with some acrylic paints and paint brushes. At Lowe's we procured silver spray paint, an eight-foot section of dryer vent, silver "metal repair" tape (I had no idea such a thing existed!) and rubber cement.
We began with the body of the robot. We had TONS of boxes of various sizes, as you might expect, but it seemed best to go with a smallish box, one just big enough to fit Nolan's body. I wanted him to still be able to see where he was going and have a relatively easy time walking, so we picked a small book box. First we taped the box shut with the metal repair tape and cut a hole for his body/legs and a hole for his head:
Then we made some armholes and attached a couple lengths of dryer vent for the arms.
(Nolan was very patient. I had to periodically call a halt to the proceedings to go find things like wire cutters for the dryer vent and a pencil to trace where the holes should go. One of the most frustrating things about moving is when you KNOW you've seen something in one of the boxes you've opened but you just can't find the frickin' thing. Nolan was very good about laying on the floor playing with Legos for 15 minutes or so while Mommy went in search of her tool bag or the contents of the junk drawer.)
Then we took the box and the styrofoam six-pack cooler we used for the helmet out into the alley and spray-painted them silver.
(Something about that picture makes me want to waggle my hands frantically by the sides of my face and shout, "It's the wrong trousers! They've gone wrong!")
They had to dry for a while, so we painted bottle caps and baby-food jar lids (saved over the past few weeks) with the acrylic paints. These were going to be our buttons and dials.
Once the buttons were dry, we rubber-cemented them onto the robot body.
Then I cut the face portion out of the helmet so Nolan could see through it.
We stuck the antennae through the top of the helmet and glued some buttons onto it, too.
You can't see it very well, but the buttons have numbers painted onto them - 11, 33, 44 and 55. Not sure why he requested those specific numbers, but that's what they say.
That was this morning. (I am a Grade A procrastinator in all things, but I think this time at least I have a semi-excuse: we just moved, dammit!)
Here's the finished costume:
We got some nice early trick-or-treating done and were home by 5:30. We started giving out candy at 5:45 and were completely cleaned out by 6:30. Oops.
Nolan got lots of compliments on his costume.
I'd write more, but I'm totally fried now. I'll leave you with Miles in his "costume."
Hope you all had a happy Halloween!
Thanks for reading.
Lemme back up a minute, give you the play-by-play on the robot costume (I'm pretty proud of it, actually - I enjoyed working on it with Nolan and it was fun to see it take shape.) We started about a week ago with a trip to first Lowe's and then Ben Franklin Crafts. Nolan had some very specific things he wanted - red "fuzzballs" and two "straight wires" for the robot's antennae. We got red pom-poms and silver pipe cleaners at Ben Franklin, along with some acrylic paints and paint brushes. At Lowe's we procured silver spray paint, an eight-foot section of dryer vent, silver "metal repair" tape (I had no idea such a thing existed!) and rubber cement.
We began with the body of the robot. We had TONS of boxes of various sizes, as you might expect, but it seemed best to go with a smallish box, one just big enough to fit Nolan's body. I wanted him to still be able to see where he was going and have a relatively easy time walking, so we picked a small book box. First we taped the box shut with the metal repair tape and cut a hole for his body/legs and a hole for his head:
Then we made some armholes and attached a couple lengths of dryer vent for the arms.
(Nolan was very patient. I had to periodically call a halt to the proceedings to go find things like wire cutters for the dryer vent and a pencil to trace where the holes should go. One of the most frustrating things about moving is when you KNOW you've seen something in one of the boxes you've opened but you just can't find the frickin' thing. Nolan was very good about laying on the floor playing with Legos for 15 minutes or so while Mommy went in search of her tool bag or the contents of the junk drawer.)
Then we took the box and the styrofoam six-pack cooler we used for the helmet out into the alley and spray-painted them silver.
(Something about that picture makes me want to waggle my hands frantically by the sides of my face and shout, "It's the wrong trousers! They've gone wrong!")They had to dry for a while, so we painted bottle caps and baby-food jar lids (saved over the past few weeks) with the acrylic paints. These were going to be our buttons and dials.
Once the buttons were dry, we rubber-cemented them onto the robot body.
Then I cut the face portion out of the helmet so Nolan could see through it.
We stuck the antennae through the top of the helmet and glued some buttons onto it, too.
You can't see it very well, but the buttons have numbers painted onto them - 11, 33, 44 and 55. Not sure why he requested those specific numbers, but that's what they say.That was this morning. (I am a Grade A procrastinator in all things, but I think this time at least I have a semi-excuse: we just moved, dammit!)
Here's the finished costume:
We got some nice early trick-or-treating done and were home by 5:30. We started giving out candy at 5:45 and were completely cleaned out by 6:30. Oops.
Nolan got lots of compliments on his costume.
I'd write more, but I'm totally fried now. I'll leave you with Miles in his "costume."
Hope you all had a happy Halloween!Thanks for reading.
Thursday, October 08, 2009
The distant future, the year 2000
Nolan wants to be a robot for Halloween. We're going to make his costume this time (contrary to every non-crafty bone in my body) instead of buying a pre-made one. I figure, how hard could it be, right? It's not like there's ONE acceptable way to make a kid look like a robot. Last year, when he wanted to be a giraffe, I was like, 'Yo, costume catalog, here I come.' Because everyone knows what a giraffe looks like, and if you fuck it up, your kid is in for a lonnnnng night of "And what are you supposed to be, sweetie?" over and over and over again. I will happily pay $39.95 so my kid can avoid that fate.
But not so with a robot. There are many acceptable forms, shapes, sizes, and finishes for robots. It's not too hard to recognize that when a child rings your bell on Halloween wearing a silver spray-painted box with some bottle caps glued to it, he is supposed to be a robot.
We have been working on the "design" of the robot, and Nolan has sketched out some ideas. His first attempt ended up with the robot looking inordinately sad, for some reason:
(The figure to the left of the sad robot is Mickey Mouse, in case you were wondering...)
I asked him why he drew the robot looking sad and he said, "I didn't TRY to draw him sad, Mommy, he just turned out that way."
We've been talking a lot about feelings recently. Nolan knows we're moving again soon, and although we've tried to emphasize to him that it's only our house that will be different, that he will have the same school and the same friends and the same playgrounds and all that, he is still pretty anxious about the whole thing. Not that I blame him. I'm pretty anxious myself.
So I totally over-analyzed the sad robot and was like, "My child is so upset that even his drawings are subconsciously coming out sad!" Never mind that Nolan has basically just started even trying to do intentional representational drawings.
So he drew another "design" for his robot costume:
(He tried to draw it in green because that's my favorite color, but then realized that since this was his robot costume, he should draw it in red because that's HIS favorite color. Note the buttons on the front of the robot's body and the very deliberate smiley face the robot has.)
So now I'm afraid because I made such a big deal about the sad robot, Nolan's going to think that it's not okay to show when you're feeling sad. Sigh. It's so easy to over-think things as a parent.
I will post pictures of the finished robot costume once it exists. We are not going to even attempt to start it until after the big move (which is next weekend) because I figure we'll have so many boxes at that point that we'll have plenty of room for error.
Thanks for reading.
But not so with a robot. There are many acceptable forms, shapes, sizes, and finishes for robots. It's not too hard to recognize that when a child rings your bell on Halloween wearing a silver spray-painted box with some bottle caps glued to it, he is supposed to be a robot.
We have been working on the "design" of the robot, and Nolan has sketched out some ideas. His first attempt ended up with the robot looking inordinately sad, for some reason:
(The figure to the left of the sad robot is Mickey Mouse, in case you were wondering...)I asked him why he drew the robot looking sad and he said, "I didn't TRY to draw him sad, Mommy, he just turned out that way."
We've been talking a lot about feelings recently. Nolan knows we're moving again soon, and although we've tried to emphasize to him that it's only our house that will be different, that he will have the same school and the same friends and the same playgrounds and all that, he is still pretty anxious about the whole thing. Not that I blame him. I'm pretty anxious myself.
So I totally over-analyzed the sad robot and was like, "My child is so upset that even his drawings are subconsciously coming out sad!" Never mind that Nolan has basically just started even trying to do intentional representational drawings.
So he drew another "design" for his robot costume:
(He tried to draw it in green because that's my favorite color, but then realized that since this was his robot costume, he should draw it in red because that's HIS favorite color. Note the buttons on the front of the robot's body and the very deliberate smiley face the robot has.)So now I'm afraid because I made such a big deal about the sad robot, Nolan's going to think that it's not okay to show when you're feeling sad. Sigh. It's so easy to over-think things as a parent.
I will post pictures of the finished robot costume once it exists. We are not going to even attempt to start it until after the big move (which is next weekend) because I figure we'll have so many boxes at that point that we'll have plenty of room for error.
Thanks for reading.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
She wears high heels when she exercises
Every now and again, while I'm tooling around at home or in the car, for no particular reason, I am struck by the fact that we live in Richmond. Virginia. We live in Richmond, Virginia. It's like when you repeat a word over and over and over again until it starts to sound like it's not really a word at all. I was driving back from my fiddle lesson tonight, and on the way back over the bridge I saw the whole city laid out next to the water, lights on in the dusk (coming earlier and earlier now, alas), and was struck, once again, by the weirdness of the fact of where we live. Not that the city of Richmond itself is weird, but that we, our family, have ended up here, of all the places in the world. I was riding along in the car with the windows down, looking at the lights, wind blowing through my hair, saying over and over again, "We live in Richmond, Virginia. We live in Richmond, Virginia."
We are getting more and more settled in as time goes by, of course, but I am struck by the differences between here and many other places we have lived.
In Princeton, the streets are all named after trees - Walnut Lane, Maple Street. They cut down the trees and then name the streets after them. In Boston, the streets are all named after either presidents - Adams, Washington - or again, some landscape feature that was despoiled when the street was created - Granite, Quarry, etc. Here in Richmond, although you also get the trees and the presidents, they also name the streets after the Native American tribes they stole the land from - Matoaca, Kanawha, Seneca.
We have a highway called the Powhite Parkway, for which our running joke is that that's where the po' white folks live. What also screws me up is when there's a street name that is exactly the same as one from a place we've lived previously - there's a Commonwealth Avenue right near our house, and every time I drive by I think of Boston.
(Fun fact from the Useless Trivia Girl: I have now lived in three of the four states in the Union that are actually Commonwealths, not states - Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Can anyone name the fourth? No fair Googling...)
We are also lacking in good radio stations here in Richmond. There is one independent station and one college station from the University of Richmond...and that's about it. The rest are either generic classic rock (I can only listen to Free's "All Right Now" so many times, thank you), aggro "nu-rock" alternative stations that play crap like Staind and Adema, or those robot stations that advertise themselves as playing anything, but which are really a pre-programmed list of stuff, some good and some very, very bad. We end up streaming a lot of KCRW and WXPN on our internet radio at home, but in the car you're basically screwed. Thank you, 6-CD changer.
Here, a "VT" sticker on someone's car doesn't mean Vermont, it means Virginia Tech. "LAX" doesn't mean Los Angeles International Airport, it means lacrosse. "OBX" is outer banks. I thought a lot of people here were New Orleans Saints fans until I realized that that sticker on their cars is also representative of two of the local private schools' mascots, also called the Saints.
Nothing opens before 10 am on Sundays. Except the churches, of course. We tried to go out for brunch one Sunday, showed up at the restaurant at 9:25, saw the sign on the door and turned around and went home for cold cereal. Nolan will not wait 35 minutes at a restaurant, no way, no how.
So we're adjusting. Some times I feel that we are definitely finding our way and becoming part of the community, and then sometimes...not so much.
Thanks for reading.
We are getting more and more settled in as time goes by, of course, but I am struck by the differences between here and many other places we have lived.
In Princeton, the streets are all named after trees - Walnut Lane, Maple Street. They cut down the trees and then name the streets after them. In Boston, the streets are all named after either presidents - Adams, Washington - or again, some landscape feature that was despoiled when the street was created - Granite, Quarry, etc. Here in Richmond, although you also get the trees and the presidents, they also name the streets after the Native American tribes they stole the land from - Matoaca, Kanawha, Seneca.
We have a highway called the Powhite Parkway, for which our running joke is that that's where the po' white folks live. What also screws me up is when there's a street name that is exactly the same as one from a place we've lived previously - there's a Commonwealth Avenue right near our house, and every time I drive by I think of Boston.
(Fun fact from the Useless Trivia Girl: I have now lived in three of the four states in the Union that are actually Commonwealths, not states - Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Can anyone name the fourth? No fair Googling...)
We are also lacking in good radio stations here in Richmond. There is one independent station and one college station from the University of Richmond...and that's about it. The rest are either generic classic rock (I can only listen to Free's "All Right Now" so many times, thank you), aggro "nu-rock" alternative stations that play crap like Staind and Adema, or those robot stations that advertise themselves as playing anything, but which are really a pre-programmed list of stuff, some good and some very, very bad. We end up streaming a lot of KCRW and WXPN on our internet radio at home, but in the car you're basically screwed. Thank you, 6-CD changer.
Here, a "VT" sticker on someone's car doesn't mean Vermont, it means Virginia Tech. "LAX" doesn't mean Los Angeles International Airport, it means lacrosse. "OBX" is outer banks. I thought a lot of people here were New Orleans Saints fans until I realized that that sticker on their cars is also representative of two of the local private schools' mascots, also called the Saints.
Nothing opens before 10 am on Sundays. Except the churches, of course. We tried to go out for brunch one Sunday, showed up at the restaurant at 9:25, saw the sign on the door and turned around and went home for cold cereal. Nolan will not wait 35 minutes at a restaurant, no way, no how.
So we're adjusting. Some times I feel that we are definitely finding our way and becoming part of the community, and then sometimes...not so much.
Thanks for reading.
Monday, July 20, 2009
I got damaged, I lost myself in you
Some Thoughts On Breaking My Ankle:
-I really need to come up with a better story as to how it happened. I mean, how many times in my life have I wiped out snowboarding? At least it could have been something semi-righteous like that. "I was walking" is just so...lame.*
-I guess I will have to revise my "25 Things" list on Facebook, because one of the things was "I've never had a cavity or a broken bone." So much for that.
-Have you ever wondered if my hair would do dreadlocks? I can answer that for you, and the answer is...Yes. Quite easily, in fact. All I have to do is not wash it for a little over a week (I was taking spongebaths instead of showers), and it starts to spontaneously dreadlock.
-Apparently, if you're going to break your ankle, this is the way to do it. A Weber Type A transverse fracture of the distal fibula/lateral malleolus, a typical avulsion fracture, nondisplaced (no surgery or screws necessary, thank goodness).
This is much better than tearing a ligament, because bones, once healed, are basically as good as new, while ligaments can get scarred and much less flexible after they heal. You learn something new every day! (Insert your own "lucky break" pun here.)
-I am not a good invalid. Terrible, in fact. We have home health care aides coming in to help us during the day while Kevin goes to work, and while they are generally very helpful and nice, I hate hate HATE having to ask for help. So I try to do things myself and stupidly risk falling and injuring myself again, or I just sit here on the computer, morose and cranky. (And sad that I can't pick up my boys!)
-Crutches suck. Particularly when you are breastfeeding. That whole armpit/upper breast area is quite sensitive, and stumping around on crutches can be excruciating. Thankfully, there are medical supply rental places in Richmond, and I rented one of these babies. It makes getting around a wee bit more tolerable. (The only drawback is our long narrow kitchen makes turning around practically impossible. I feel like I'm doing this.)
-I am married to the greatest guy in the world. Kevin has been Busting. His. Ass. for the last two weeks. Even the health care aides helping during the day does not really cover all the stuff I usually do, so when he comes home at night from nine hours at his regular job, he's finishing the dinner prep and cooking, cleaning up after dinner, giving the boys their baths, getting them in PJs, et cetera. Every night. He's also been getting up at night with Miles, who is only intermittently sleeping through the night. So I expect him to be nominated for sainthood any day now.
But other than that, we are all doing well. (Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?) Nolan is "reading" street signs like crazy and will shout them out to you as you drive along. "No U-Turn!" "Right lane must turn right!" "No Parking!" Miles is cooing and rolling over and eating rice cereal. Kevin is loving his job and looking for a way to start playing tennis again. And I am counting the days...
Thanks for reading.
*So yeah, I was walking on a bike path with Nolan on his bike and Miles in the Baby Bjorn. Thankfully, Kevin and another friend (her son was riding his bike with Nolan) were with us at the time. If I had been alone with the boys it would have been a much bigger problem. So we're all walking on this asphalt path that's built up about 3 inches above the ground, and I couldn't see my feet because of the Bjorn, and I stepped right on the edge of the path with my right foot. My ankle rolled down and outwards, I felt a "pop!" and I went down. I tried to roll to my left side so I wouldn't fall face down on top of Miles, and I ended up taking the brunt of the fall on my left knee. Miles unfortunately still bumped his head, but at least I didn't squash him completely. So I'm laying there screaming, "Take the baby! Take the baby!" and Kevin got him out of the Bjorn. He was crying, but then he smiled at Kevin right away, so we knew he was going to be okay. Our friend helped me up and I hobbled to a picnic table to sit down. She got me some ice from some nearby picnic-ers, and we got my shoe and sock off to look at the damage. I knew it was bad when it happened, since I couldn't put any weight on it at all without shrieking pain from my ankle. When we got to the ER (and the doctor confirmed that Miles was okay) and found out it was broken, I wasn't surprised at all. Bummed, yes, but not surprised.
-I really need to come up with a better story as to how it happened. I mean, how many times in my life have I wiped out snowboarding? At least it could have been something semi-righteous like that. "I was walking" is just so...lame.*
-I guess I will have to revise my "25 Things" list on Facebook, because one of the things was "I've never had a cavity or a broken bone." So much for that.
-Have you ever wondered if my hair would do dreadlocks? I can answer that for you, and the answer is...Yes. Quite easily, in fact. All I have to do is not wash it for a little over a week (I was taking spongebaths instead of showers), and it starts to spontaneously dreadlock.
-Apparently, if you're going to break your ankle, this is the way to do it. A Weber Type A transverse fracture of the distal fibula/lateral malleolus, a typical avulsion fracture, nondisplaced (no surgery or screws necessary, thank goodness).
This is much better than tearing a ligament, because bones, once healed, are basically as good as new, while ligaments can get scarred and much less flexible after they heal. You learn something new every day! (Insert your own "lucky break" pun here.)
-I am not a good invalid. Terrible, in fact. We have home health care aides coming in to help us during the day while Kevin goes to work, and while they are generally very helpful and nice, I hate hate HATE having to ask for help. So I try to do things myself and stupidly risk falling and injuring myself again, or I just sit here on the computer, morose and cranky. (And sad that I can't pick up my boys!)
-Crutches suck. Particularly when you are breastfeeding. That whole armpit/upper breast area is quite sensitive, and stumping around on crutches can be excruciating. Thankfully, there are medical supply rental places in Richmond, and I rented one of these babies. It makes getting around a wee bit more tolerable. (The only drawback is our long narrow kitchen makes turning around practically impossible. I feel like I'm doing this.)
-I am married to the greatest guy in the world. Kevin has been Busting. His. Ass. for the last two weeks. Even the health care aides helping during the day does not really cover all the stuff I usually do, so when he comes home at night from nine hours at his regular job, he's finishing the dinner prep and cooking, cleaning up after dinner, giving the boys their baths, getting them in PJs, et cetera. Every night. He's also been getting up at night with Miles, who is only intermittently sleeping through the night. So I expect him to be nominated for sainthood any day now.
But other than that, we are all doing well. (Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?) Nolan is "reading" street signs like crazy and will shout them out to you as you drive along. "No U-Turn!" "Right lane must turn right!" "No Parking!" Miles is cooing and rolling over and eating rice cereal. Kevin is loving his job and looking for a way to start playing tennis again. And I am counting the days...
Thanks for reading.
*So yeah, I was walking on a bike path with Nolan on his bike and Miles in the Baby Bjorn. Thankfully, Kevin and another friend (her son was riding his bike with Nolan) were with us at the time. If I had been alone with the boys it would have been a much bigger problem. So we're all walking on this asphalt path that's built up about 3 inches above the ground, and I couldn't see my feet because of the Bjorn, and I stepped right on the edge of the path with my right foot. My ankle rolled down and outwards, I felt a "pop!" and I went down. I tried to roll to my left side so I wouldn't fall face down on top of Miles, and I ended up taking the brunt of the fall on my left knee. Miles unfortunately still bumped his head, but at least I didn't squash him completely. So I'm laying there screaming, "Take the baby! Take the baby!" and Kevin got him out of the Bjorn. He was crying, but then he smiled at Kevin right away, so we knew he was going to be okay. Our friend helped me up and I hobbled to a picnic table to sit down. She got me some ice from some nearby picnic-ers, and we got my shoe and sock off to look at the damage. I knew it was bad when it happened, since I couldn't put any weight on it at all without shrieking pain from my ankle. When we got to the ER (and the doctor confirmed that Miles was okay) and found out it was broken, I wasn't surprised at all. Bummed, yes, but not surprised.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
[Insert theme from "The Odd Couple" here]
Nolan and his baby brother.
Miles and his big brother.
Yes, we have no jealousy issues!
Nolan came downstairs on this particular day dressed in plaid shorts and dark socks. All he needs now is to move to Florida for a canasta game and the early bird special at Denny's.
Jen, that's the "Terra Cotta Warriors" shirt you sent him...And here's baby Miles at two months:
He's still not sleeping very well, but we think we'll keep him...Thanks for "reading."
Friday, April 17, 2009
And the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all
Happy Easter! Only five days late. Hey, you gotta take what you can get from a mom of a preschooler and a six-week old, am I right? Of course I'm right. Don't talk back to me, you!
Here's more pics (aka the lazy blogger's way of filling up a post):
Nolan's Easter Egg hunt. The Bunny was good to him this year, and wouldn't you know, that thoughtful bunny bought candy that Mommy can't stand, Spree and Smarties, so there is no risk of her eating all of the candy out of Nolan's basket. Thank you, Easter Bunny!
Nolan and his little brother. He's getting better about holding Miles - at first he wanted nothing to do with having the baby in his lap. He would give him kisses while someone else was holding him, and "hug" him while he was in his car seat or bouncer, but if you suggested he sit down and hold Miles on his lap he was like, "I don't think so." Now he'll do it, but not for very long. Which is fine, since we're still a little unclear on the concept of "gentle."
Miles' first Easter. The Bunny didn't bring him anything except for a hat, hastily shoved into big brother Nolan's basket, because the Bunny realized at 10pm the night before that Miles not only didn't have any presents, he didn't even have his own basket. So the Bunny quickly grabbed a hat purchased at Target earlier in the week and smushed it in there with Nolan's kite and wiffle bat and balls. Ta da!
We are slowly, slowly achieving a new version of normal for us. KB returned to work this week after a week off (huzzah!) and Nolan started a new preschool this week since the other one wasn't working out so well. (More on that whole drama later.) Miles is growing, eating, pooping, sleeping and doing all the things a six-week old should be doing. At his one month check-up he was 11 pounds, 6 ounces and 23 inches long. (At birth he was 8 lbs 11 oz and 21.5 inches long.) So he's gained almost three pounds and grown an inch and a half in a month. No wonder he's nursing every hour and a half!
We are all well, just a wee bit sleep-deprived and scruffy.
How are you?
Thanks for reading.
Here's more pics (aka the lazy blogger's way of filling up a post):
Nolan's Easter Egg hunt. The Bunny was good to him this year, and wouldn't you know, that thoughtful bunny bought candy that Mommy can't stand, Spree and Smarties, so there is no risk of her eating all of the candy out of Nolan's basket. Thank you, Easter Bunny!
Nolan and his little brother. He's getting better about holding Miles - at first he wanted nothing to do with having the baby in his lap. He would give him kisses while someone else was holding him, and "hug" him while he was in his car seat or bouncer, but if you suggested he sit down and hold Miles on his lap he was like, "I don't think so." Now he'll do it, but not for very long. Which is fine, since we're still a little unclear on the concept of "gentle."
Miles' first Easter. The Bunny didn't bring him anything except for a hat, hastily shoved into big brother Nolan's basket, because the Bunny realized at 10pm the night before that Miles not only didn't have any presents, he didn't even have his own basket. So the Bunny quickly grabbed a hat purchased at Target earlier in the week and smushed it in there with Nolan's kite and wiffle bat and balls. Ta da!We are slowly, slowly achieving a new version of normal for us. KB returned to work this week after a week off (huzzah!) and Nolan started a new preschool this week since the other one wasn't working out so well. (More on that whole drama later.) Miles is growing, eating, pooping, sleeping and doing all the things a six-week old should be doing. At his one month check-up he was 11 pounds, 6 ounces and 23 inches long. (At birth he was 8 lbs 11 oz and 21.5 inches long.) So he's gained almost three pounds and grown an inch and a half in a month. No wonder he's nursing every hour and a half!
We are all well, just a wee bit sleep-deprived and scruffy.
How are you?
Thanks for reading.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
A tummy without you just wouldn't be right
Miles' umbilical stump fell off this morning. He officially has a belly button!
That was the happy surprise this morning when I came down from the bedroom. The not-so happy surprise was that the refrigerator isn't working. I swear, we must have some kind of bad kitchen appliance ju-ju surrounding us in a cloud that follows us around the country. So now we have lots of quickly-growing-warm foodstuffs sitting out on the kitchen counter, along with the cooler and the insulated shopping bag out on the porch packed full of all the meat and dairy. Thank god the freezer is still working, what with my hard-earned four bags of pumped breastmilk in there, not to mention the freezer meals I cooked so we'd have some quick things to eat after KB's mom leaves next week.
*sigh*
But anyway. The good things, must focus on the good things.
"I Lost 30 Pounds in Two Weeks! Ask Me How!"
Yes, I've lost a good share of the pregnancy weight, thankfully. The swelling from all the IV fluids they pumped into me during the delivery is finally going down and my feet and hands have returned to a normal size. (My feet totally looked like this up until a few days ago.) Yesterday I peeled off the Steri-Strips that were holding my incision closed, and it looks pretty...okay. I guess. All the nurses who checked the incision in the hospital were like, "Oh, that's a great-looking incision! You'll be back in your bikini in no time!" and I was like, "Back?" It's itchy as all hell, but it's not swollen or infected or anything, so that's good.
Miles is still eating like a champ - we haven't had any of the latching-on problems like we did when Nolan was a newborn. He's been sleeping okay at night - not great, but not horrible, either. I'm typically getting one longer stretch of about 3 hours each night, and then the rest of the night is the same every hour and a half of feeding as it is during the day. So far KB is off the hook for feeding since we haven't introduced the bottle yet, but one day soon...
We go back to the pediatrician tomorrow to confirm that he's gaining weight and thriving, but I'm not too worried. I think I'm-
Argh. I think I'm going to cut this post short, seeing as how I started it two weeks ago and haven't worked on it since then. I can't even remember how I was going to finish that sentence.
Here, I know what you want:
There. That should hold you for awhile...
Thanks for reading.
That was the happy surprise this morning when I came down from the bedroom. The not-so happy surprise was that the refrigerator isn't working. I swear, we must have some kind of bad kitchen appliance ju-ju surrounding us in a cloud that follows us around the country. So now we have lots of quickly-growing-warm foodstuffs sitting out on the kitchen counter, along with the cooler and the insulated shopping bag out on the porch packed full of all the meat and dairy. Thank god the freezer is still working, what with my hard-earned four bags of pumped breastmilk in there, not to mention the freezer meals I cooked so we'd have some quick things to eat after KB's mom leaves next week.
*sigh*
But anyway. The good things, must focus on the good things.
"I Lost 30 Pounds in Two Weeks! Ask Me How!"
Yes, I've lost a good share of the pregnancy weight, thankfully. The swelling from all the IV fluids they pumped into me during the delivery is finally going down and my feet and hands have returned to a normal size. (My feet totally looked like this up until a few days ago.) Yesterday I peeled off the Steri-Strips that were holding my incision closed, and it looks pretty...okay. I guess. All the nurses who checked the incision in the hospital were like, "Oh, that's a great-looking incision! You'll be back in your bikini in no time!" and I was like, "Back?" It's itchy as all hell, but it's not swollen or infected or anything, so that's good.
Miles is still eating like a champ - we haven't had any of the latching-on problems like we did when Nolan was a newborn. He's been sleeping okay at night - not great, but not horrible, either. I'm typically getting one longer stretch of about 3 hours each night, and then the rest of the night is the same every hour and a half of feeding as it is during the day. So far KB is off the hook for feeding since we haven't introduced the bottle yet, but one day soon...
We go back to the pediatrician tomorrow to confirm that he's gaining weight and thriving, but I'm not too worried. I think I'm-
Argh. I think I'm going to cut this post short, seeing as how I started it two weeks ago and haven't worked on it since then. I can't even remember how I was going to finish that sentence.
Here, I know what you want:
There. That should hold you for awhile...
Thanks for reading.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Just as long as I'm in this world, I'll be, I'll be a light of this world
Well, here he is at last:
Mr. Miles Bradford Hoover, born at 10:57 pm on March 1st, 2009. He weighed 8 pounds, 11 ounces, and was 21.5 inches long. Big boy! Mommy had a C-section after 35 hours of labor, which was a major bummer, but I am choosing instead to focus on how lucky we are to have such a beautiful, healthy baby boy in our family. You will get a full gory play-by-play one of these days, I'm sure, but for now, let's just think positively, shall we?
He is a fairly relaxed and groovy little dude - he usually only cries when he's hungry, which is about every hour and a half at the moment. He took to breastfeeding like a champ and hasn't really given us any major problems so far. Maybe he's trying to make up for the harrowing delivery.
Nolan seems to be doing fine with his baby brother so far. He got to take pictures of Miles in to school for show and tell, and he likes to kiss and pat him on the head. (He also likes to "help" me nurse Miles by patting my boob to make the milk go down into Miles' mouth faster. Yeah.)
We can't get over how much Miles looks like Nolan when he was a newborn. (I guess most newborns look alike, don't they? - like angry, befuddled old men.) He is slowly starting to differentiate, but at first he was totally Nolan 2: Electric Boogaloo. With the exception of his fingers and toes, that is. He's got some craaaaazy long skinny fingers and enormous monkey toes. Check it out:
When he was first born his big toe was even farther away from the other toes. He looked like he had baboon feet, like he could use that big toe as an opposable thumb, almost. So I've been calling him Miles Monkeytoes.
Sweet baby.
More baby pix soon!
Thanks for reading.
Mr. Miles Bradford Hoover, born at 10:57 pm on March 1st, 2009. He weighed 8 pounds, 11 ounces, and was 21.5 inches long. Big boy! Mommy had a C-section after 35 hours of labor, which was a major bummer, but I am choosing instead to focus on how lucky we are to have such a beautiful, healthy baby boy in our family. You will get a full gory play-by-play one of these days, I'm sure, but for now, let's just think positively, shall we?
He is a fairly relaxed and groovy little dude - he usually only cries when he's hungry, which is about every hour and a half at the moment. He took to breastfeeding like a champ and hasn't really given us any major problems so far. Maybe he's trying to make up for the harrowing delivery.
Nolan seems to be doing fine with his baby brother so far. He got to take pictures of Miles in to school for show and tell, and he likes to kiss and pat him on the head. (He also likes to "help" me nurse Miles by patting my boob to make the milk go down into Miles' mouth faster. Yeah.)We can't get over how much Miles looks like Nolan when he was a newborn. (I guess most newborns look alike, don't they? - like angry, befuddled old men.) He is slowly starting to differentiate, but at first he was totally Nolan 2: Electric Boogaloo. With the exception of his fingers and toes, that is. He's got some craaaaazy long skinny fingers and enormous monkey toes. Check it out:
When he was first born his big toe was even farther away from the other toes. He looked like he had baboon feet, like he could use that big toe as an opposable thumb, almost. So I've been calling him Miles Monkeytoes.
Sweet baby.
More baby pix soon!Thanks for reading.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Let's get this party started
Hi! Let me introduce myself. I'm Sadly. Sadly Mistaken? Remember me? From my last post? The one where I said the baby was most likely coming soon? Yeah. He's not here yet.
I guess I'm already making the classic parental mistake of comparing the first kid to the second kid (or in this case, the first pregnancy/labor to the second one) in assuming that just because I've had some spotting and some contractions like I did with Nolan, the baby is imminent. Just because his due date has come and gone, just because my mom has already been here for four days, just because I am desperately, desperately ready to be done with this pregnancy, I shouldn't assume. You know what happens when you assume, right? You end up awake at 4:30 a.m. four days past your due date watching Beyonce's Single Ladies on YouTube because you can't go back to sleep and your befuddled mind can't think of anything else to do.
I know what it is. I'm supposed to be getting my new MacBook soon. Like, maybe tomorrow (according to FedEx tracking, that is). Doodle's just waiting for it to arrive and for me to get all excited about playing with it and being able to stop using KB's computer, and THEN he's gonna show up.
Sigh.
We'll keep you posted.
Thanks for reading.
I guess I'm already making the classic parental mistake of comparing the first kid to the second kid (or in this case, the first pregnancy/labor to the second one) in assuming that just because I've had some spotting and some contractions like I did with Nolan, the baby is imminent. Just because his due date has come and gone, just because my mom has already been here for four days, just because I am desperately, desperately ready to be done with this pregnancy, I shouldn't assume. You know what happens when you assume, right? You end up awake at 4:30 a.m. four days past your due date watching Beyonce's Single Ladies on YouTube because you can't go back to sleep and your befuddled mind can't think of anything else to do.
I know what it is. I'm supposed to be getting my new MacBook soon. Like, maybe tomorrow (according to FedEx tracking, that is). Doodle's just waiting for it to arrive and for me to get all excited about playing with it and being able to stop using KB's computer, and THEN he's gonna show up.
Sigh.
We'll keep you posted.
Thanks for reading.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Something's happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear
I think Doodle's arrival is imminent.
I was reading back through my post about Nolan's birth and some things that happened that time around about two days before he was born happened yesterday. (Bodily function type things - if you really want to know exactly what, please feel free to re-read that post.) So unless I am sadly mistaken, I think there will be a baby soon. Like, in the next forty-eight hours.
Watch this space.
Thanks for reading.
I was reading back through my post about Nolan's birth and some things that happened that time around about two days before he was born happened yesterday. (Bodily function type things - if you really want to know exactly what, please feel free to re-read that post.) So unless I am sadly mistaken, I think there will be a baby soon. Like, in the next forty-eight hours.
Watch this space.
Thanks for reading.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
People, people, we got to get over before we go under
First things first: Nolan is fine. The surgery went off without a hitch yesterday, he is back at school today and all is well. I continue to be amazed at what a sanguine kid we are raising. I don't know how my hypochondriacal-ass self ended up with such an incredibly unflappable boy.
We kept him up late (for him) Monday night, he slept in (a bit) Tuesday morning, played with KB for a couple hours, and generally wasn't too bitchy about not being able to eat or drink anything. (We had previously prepped him with the explanation that the dentist would be giving him some medicine so he could fix his tooth, and if there was any food in his stomach it could make him very sick. He seemed okay with that.)
We went to the dentist's office at 10:30 and they gave him a little cup of medicine with Demerol and other good stuff (chloral hydrate maybe? I kind of blanked there for a bit, because while he was taking the medicine I was signing a form that said I understood that there was a [very small but definitely still there] risk of SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH with the anesthesia. That'll give you pause.) in it to make him drowsy. Then we got to hang out in the waiting room for about 45 minutes while the drugs took effect. Sorry I have no video goodness for you, Broc - we have no camera at the moment, so YouTube fame shall have to wait. But he was generally very floppy and cute and drowsy and kept saying, "Mommy, my head is too heavy for me to hold up."
Then the doctor's assistant came out to get him, and when she took him out of KB's lap and carried him back through the waiting room door it was all I could do not to tackle her and run away with him. Thankfully, I restrained myself. The actual surgery only took about half an hour, and then they were calling us back to get him. He was sitting in the assistant's lap looking very flushed and tired, but he seemed in good spirits. We got to quiz the doctor on all our post-op concerns, and he was very reassuring, almost blase about it all. The newly stabilized tooth should hopefully last Pickle another year or two, and the adult tooth behind it looks pretty healthy, just a little crooked from the injury. We got a souveneir x-ray to take home with us, and Nolan got a bunch of stickers and a balloon.
We went home and made him a strawberry milkshake, and then he slept for five hours straight. We woke him up for dinner, he ate heartily including ice cream for dessert and then didn't want to go back to bed. So he was up late again, but he still woke up at 6:30 this morning. Perhaps he shall take another nap today...
So he's good. I am immensely relieved, and I feel like now Doodle can come whenever he wants and I won't care because this giant nerve-wracking experience is behind us.
In other news, we decided to do our part to support the crumbling US economy and buy a second car. I was kind of bummed out about it, because we'd done so well for so long with one car, but the public transportation options here in Richmond are sadly pretty limited. KB rides his bike to work as often as he can (which is usually when he works downtown, about 2-3 days a week) but there's no safe way for him to get to his other worksite on the bike. The second car will eliminate a lot of the stress and hassles caused by us having to drop KB off and pick him up on those days - we were eating dinner late because I'd have to stop whatever cooking I was doing to go get KB, and then Nolan was getting to bed late. Or we'd be out at the playground and I'd decide to just drop by to see if KB was ready since we were already out with the car, and then KB would feel all stressed if he wasn't done with work since we were sitting there waiting for him. You know, that kind of crap.
So we are now the proud owners of a used 2007 Honda Accord, a nice, safe, reliable family sedan. We've moved Nolan's car seat over to the right hand side and put Doodle's new car seat on the left side. We have yet to transfer the James Brown and Jazz for Kids cds to the Honda - we'll see how long we can hold him off.
Also-
I keep meaning to mention how, when we were watching Obama's inauguration on TV, Nolan asked me if they were going to play "Funky President." This is hilarious, I think, but not so unlikely when you consider that that is the only song he knows with the word "president" in the lyrics, so all the talk of our new president this and our new president that surely brought the association to mind for him. I responded that I thought that would be cool, but that they probably wouldn't. And, sadly, they didn't. But it would have been cool.
(I also thought, during Obama's speech when he was talking about soldiers who had given their lives for our country and he listed various places and then mentioned Khe San, somewhere out there Walter Sobchak was going, 'Right on!')
So, yeah. No baby yet. We'll keep you posted.
Thanks for reading.
We kept him up late (for him) Monday night, he slept in (a bit) Tuesday morning, played with KB for a couple hours, and generally wasn't too bitchy about not being able to eat or drink anything. (We had previously prepped him with the explanation that the dentist would be giving him some medicine so he could fix his tooth, and if there was any food in his stomach it could make him very sick. He seemed okay with that.)
We went to the dentist's office at 10:30 and they gave him a little cup of medicine with Demerol and other good stuff (chloral hydrate maybe? I kind of blanked there for a bit, because while he was taking the medicine I was signing a form that said I understood that there was a [very small but definitely still there] risk of SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH with the anesthesia. That'll give you pause.) in it to make him drowsy. Then we got to hang out in the waiting room for about 45 minutes while the drugs took effect. Sorry I have no video goodness for you, Broc - we have no camera at the moment, so YouTube fame shall have to wait. But he was generally very floppy and cute and drowsy and kept saying, "Mommy, my head is too heavy for me to hold up."
Then the doctor's assistant came out to get him, and when she took him out of KB's lap and carried him back through the waiting room door it was all I could do not to tackle her and run away with him. Thankfully, I restrained myself. The actual surgery only took about half an hour, and then they were calling us back to get him. He was sitting in the assistant's lap looking very flushed and tired, but he seemed in good spirits. We got to quiz the doctor on all our post-op concerns, and he was very reassuring, almost blase about it all. The newly stabilized tooth should hopefully last Pickle another year or two, and the adult tooth behind it looks pretty healthy, just a little crooked from the injury. We got a souveneir x-ray to take home with us, and Nolan got a bunch of stickers and a balloon.
We went home and made him a strawberry milkshake, and then he slept for five hours straight. We woke him up for dinner, he ate heartily including ice cream for dessert and then didn't want to go back to bed. So he was up late again, but he still woke up at 6:30 this morning. Perhaps he shall take another nap today...
So he's good. I am immensely relieved, and I feel like now Doodle can come whenever he wants and I won't care because this giant nerve-wracking experience is behind us.
In other news, we decided to do our part to support the crumbling US economy and buy a second car. I was kind of bummed out about it, because we'd done so well for so long with one car, but the public transportation options here in Richmond are sadly pretty limited. KB rides his bike to work as often as he can (which is usually when he works downtown, about 2-3 days a week) but there's no safe way for him to get to his other worksite on the bike. The second car will eliminate a lot of the stress and hassles caused by us having to drop KB off and pick him up on those days - we were eating dinner late because I'd have to stop whatever cooking I was doing to go get KB, and then Nolan was getting to bed late. Or we'd be out at the playground and I'd decide to just drop by to see if KB was ready since we were already out with the car, and then KB would feel all stressed if he wasn't done with work since we were sitting there waiting for him. You know, that kind of crap.
So we are now the proud owners of a used 2007 Honda Accord, a nice, safe, reliable family sedan. We've moved Nolan's car seat over to the right hand side and put Doodle's new car seat on the left side. We have yet to transfer the James Brown and Jazz for Kids cds to the Honda - we'll see how long we can hold him off.
Also-
I keep meaning to mention how, when we were watching Obama's inauguration on TV, Nolan asked me if they were going to play "Funky President." This is hilarious, I think, but not so unlikely when you consider that that is the only song he knows with the word "president" in the lyrics, so all the talk of our new president this and our new president that surely brought the association to mind for him. I responded that I thought that would be cool, but that they probably wouldn't. And, sadly, they didn't. But it would have been cool.
(I also thought, during Obama's speech when he was talking about soldiers who had given their lives for our country and he listed various places and then mentioned Khe San, somewhere out there Walter Sobchak was going, 'Right on!')
So, yeah. No baby yet. We'll keep you posted.
Thanks for reading.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Look at my circumstance (and the bulge in my big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big)
Whoooo nelly. I am tired of being pregnant. I am the largest, most ungainly, bloated, swollen giantess in the world. Pretty soon I will be affecting the earth's rotation with my own gravitational pull. My knees hurt, my feet hurt, my hands are puffy (they look like the "man hands" from that Seinfeld episode.) I have outgrown all but my most gigantic maternity pants, so I am wearing the same five pairs over and over and over again. And doing frequent laundry. I haven't shaved my legs in months. Once I put my shoes on in the morning, I don't take them off again until that night, because I'm afraid I won't be able to get them on again if I do.
Yeah, I'm ready to be done with this. Not that I'm necessarily ready to have a newborn yet, you understand. I just want to be over the pregnant part.
We took a tour of the maternity ward at the hospital where I will be delivering last week, so I've at least scoped out the territory. My mom is coming down on the 21st to stay for two weeks, and then KB's mom comes on March 8th to stay for two weeks as well, so I will thankfully have some help on hand for that first few weeks. I am frantically cooking and freezing food (let the nesting begin!) to be reheated later on. I have washed all the infant clothes in the infant laundry detergent, set up the cradle/mattress/bumper sleep center, and washed and sterilized all the bottles and breast pump accessories (oh, joy) and pacifiers. I have packed my suitcase for the hospital, laid in a supply of size one diapers (they are so tiny!) and arranged for a cleaning person to come once a week (yay!) for a while.
AND YET. There is more to do. I forgot to buy wipes. Our friggin' car needs a new catalytic converter, so we have to go in sometime next week (when the part comes in) to have that replaced.
Worst of all, Nolan has to have dental surgery next Tuesday. Remember last summer? Our vacation in Canada? Nolan fell on a rock and hurt his tooth? The blood and the screaming and the maternal guilt and the cheap Canadian emergency dental care? Yes. That tooth that we thought wouldn't die? It's dying. He went to the dentist last week, they took x-rays, it's not good. They're going to "clean out" the dead root tissue and try to stabilize what's left of the tooth so he can keep it another year or two. He basically is going to have a pediatric root canal. So he has to be sedated, which means no food or drink for twelve hours before the surgery, scheduled for 11 am. That's going to be a fun morning. "No honey, you can't have any juice. Mommy and Daddy can have cereal, but you are not allowed. Trust me, it's for your own health and safety. Really." Plus I'm probably going to need to be sedated in order to let him go INTO SURGERY. My three year old son, having a root canal. Give me a call and let me know where and when I can pick up my Mother of the Year award, I'll be there.
And, as you already know if you are my Facebook friend, my poor laptop was killed in a tragic accident earlier this week. KB, for reasons known only to himself, left a glass of water on top of a teetering pile of Montessori-related paperwork directly next to my TiBook while he looked in the closet for a towel. The water glass fell over. Onto my computer. Which proceeded to pop and sizzle and generally make noises like the short-order cook's griddle in a diner. We mopped it up as best we could, I gave it a few days to dry out and tried to boot it up, but it will only give me The Grey Screen of Death. Of course, I had not backed it up onto my external hard drive since, oh, October or thereabouts, so I don't know exactly how much writing and how many photos I lost. Sad, really. I got that computer in 2001, and have only replaced the DVD drive once and the battery once. Otherwise, it was the same piece of equipment. You gotta love Macs. And, on the plus side, I get to pick out a new one in the next couple weeks.
You know, in my spare time.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. Good thoughts going out to Lucy, who was scheduled to have her little girl via c-section on Tuesday the 10th. Hope it all went well! Send pictures!
Yeah, I'm ready to be done with this. Not that I'm necessarily ready to have a newborn yet, you understand. I just want to be over the pregnant part.
We took a tour of the maternity ward at the hospital where I will be delivering last week, so I've at least scoped out the territory. My mom is coming down on the 21st to stay for two weeks, and then KB's mom comes on March 8th to stay for two weeks as well, so I will thankfully have some help on hand for that first few weeks. I am frantically cooking and freezing food (let the nesting begin!) to be reheated later on. I have washed all the infant clothes in the infant laundry detergent, set up the cradle/mattress/bumper sleep center, and washed and sterilized all the bottles and breast pump accessories (oh, joy) and pacifiers. I have packed my suitcase for the hospital, laid in a supply of size one diapers (they are so tiny!) and arranged for a cleaning person to come once a week (yay!) for a while.
AND YET. There is more to do. I forgot to buy wipes. Our friggin' car needs a new catalytic converter, so we have to go in sometime next week (when the part comes in) to have that replaced.
Worst of all, Nolan has to have dental surgery next Tuesday. Remember last summer? Our vacation in Canada? Nolan fell on a rock and hurt his tooth? The blood and the screaming and the maternal guilt and the cheap Canadian emergency dental care? Yes. That tooth that we thought wouldn't die? It's dying. He went to the dentist last week, they took x-rays, it's not good. They're going to "clean out" the dead root tissue and try to stabilize what's left of the tooth so he can keep it another year or two. He basically is going to have a pediatric root canal. So he has to be sedated, which means no food or drink for twelve hours before the surgery, scheduled for 11 am. That's going to be a fun morning. "No honey, you can't have any juice. Mommy and Daddy can have cereal, but you are not allowed. Trust me, it's for your own health and safety. Really." Plus I'm probably going to need to be sedated in order to let him go INTO SURGERY. My three year old son, having a root canal. Give me a call and let me know where and when I can pick up my Mother of the Year award, I'll be there.
And, as you already know if you are my Facebook friend, my poor laptop was killed in a tragic accident earlier this week. KB, for reasons known only to himself, left a glass of water on top of a teetering pile of Montessori-related paperwork directly next to my TiBook while he looked in the closet for a towel. The water glass fell over. Onto my computer. Which proceeded to pop and sizzle and generally make noises like the short-order cook's griddle in a diner. We mopped it up as best we could, I gave it a few days to dry out and tried to boot it up, but it will only give me The Grey Screen of Death. Of course, I had not backed it up onto my external hard drive since, oh, October or thereabouts, so I don't know exactly how much writing and how many photos I lost. Sad, really. I got that computer in 2001, and have only replaced the DVD drive once and the battery once. Otherwise, it was the same piece of equipment. You gotta love Macs. And, on the plus side, I get to pick out a new one in the next couple weeks.
You know, in my spare time.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. Good thoughts going out to Lucy, who was scheduled to have her little girl via c-section on Tuesday the 10th. Hope it all went well! Send pictures!
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there
Hey y'all.
(Let me just interrupt myself [only two words in! a new record!] with the first of what is sure to be many parentheticals to say this: I was saying "y'all" waaaay before we moved to Virginia. So don't let me hear any crap from youse guys hassling me about my usage thereof and its significance of my being somehow corrupted, language-wise, by The South. But I did learn something new: Apparently, "y'all" is the singular, while "all y'all" is the plural.)
We are doing fine. Sorry if we've worried anyone with my lack of posting. Things are getting down to the wire with the pregnancy (less than three weeks to go!) and KB and I are working like crazy to have as much settled as we possibly can in our lives so things can come to a screeching halt (as they will, whether we're ready or not) once Doodle makes his grand debut.
What kind of things, you say? Nothing very interesting, unfortunately. A lot of bureaucratic crapola, really. Things where you look at your to-do list and go, "Is this why I got up this morning? Really? To inform our auto insurance company of our new license plate number? To make a dentist appointment for Nolan? This is my grand mission in the world today? 'Take car for oil change?'"
We got a renter for the house in Princeton, which is a good thing, income-wise, but a pain in the ass otherwise. I'm hoping things will smooth out once we get over the "getting started" phase and having a tenant becomes more of a routine thing. I swear, we talk to our property manager/real estate agent up there more than we talk to our friends and family. Not that she's not a lovely person, but it's getting kind of old. The refrigerator up there broke (for those of you who are keeping track, that's four major appliances to go kerflooey in that fabulous space-age kitchen in less than a year) and we've been going back and forth with our agent, the repair place, and the tenant, trying to get things fixed. It's a part-time job, really.
Down here in Virginnie we are slowly assimilating into the local culture. We decided to join the Unitarian Universalist church (a.k.a. the Unie-Toonies) and went to our first service this past Sunday. It was pretty awesome. The sermon, delivered by a lesbian minister, was on Charles Darwin and his contribution to society. That's my kind of religion! They have lots of local service/charity work that they're involved in, and they give classes in Bhuddism, yoga and Wicca. I'm looking forward to having a connection to an open-minded spiritual community without all the Jesus and the Guilt and the look-upon-his-bloody-visage-he-died-a-horrible-painful-death-for-your-sins and the glaven. (Can you tell I was raised Roman Catholic? Is it that obvious?) So the Unie-Toonies are pretty much the maximum amount of religion I can handle without having an allergic reaction.
That being said, I have also joined a support group run through a nearby Presbyterian church that is for women who have recently moved and need...well, support. It is a little more Jaheezeus Christ than I would ordinarily have in my life (which is, you know, none) but I find that the group leader does an excellent job of keeping things very open and neutral and not proselytizing or trying to convert people. It is mostly just a varied group of women eating snacks and talking about how hard the transition period is and helping each other find ways to make the best of it. I figure beggars can't be chosers. I do occasionally have to restrain many of my natural impulses toward eye-rolling and snorting (and quoting Chris Rock), but there are definite pay-offs, in the form of recommendations on where to find the best New York-style pizza, or how to get a discount at the drug store. Is that cynical of me? Well, so be it. I am also trying to "pay it forward," as they say, put some good karma out there, by helping bring dinners to another woman in the group who recently moved and also just had a baby.
Nolan seems to be settling in fairly well. We have met a couple of other mommies with boys around his age and had a few playdates, and he's enjoyed himself immensely. Things are smoothing out at his school, too, although I find I'm having a harder time getting used to it than he is. It's a fairly parentally hands-off school philosophy, Montessori is, and I guess it's tough for me to give up that much control. I drive him up to the school in the morning and a volunteer helps him get out of the car, and then I drive up at noon and a teacher helps buckle him into his seat. I never even get out of the car. I don't see or speak to his teacher at all unless I call her at home, which I have a hard time doing. Nolan is not the most forthcoming about his days (what three-year-old is, really?) and so I find myself obsessing over the littlest utterance from him. But they (Montessori) are all about building self-reliance and independence and such, so I guess that's good. We're still investigating other pre-school options for the fall, and we have a classroom visit tomorrow, so we'll see. The jury's still out, in my mind.
KB is enjoying his job, which is nice for me to hear. He comes home every day talking about how much he's learning, how much he's enjoying himself, how many interesting cases he saw that day. It's a definite relief. He's working long hours right now, mostly because he's just getting started and the other doc in the MSK service finally got to take a vacation (he'd been the solo attending since the person KB replaced left six months ago), but things should hopefully settle down a bit soon.
We are toying with the idea of buying a second car, because right now he is only biking/riding the bus to one of his work sites - the other one Nolan and I have to drop him off and pick him up, which isn't such a pain right now, but when Doodle arrives it's going to get more difficult. We just fought for so long not to buy a second car (and having one car is enough of a pain in the ass) that it's hard to admit we need another one. Not to mention expensive. And polluting. Sigh.
So I guess that's all I got, for now. I promise to keep you posted on Doodle's progress. Please let me know how y'all are doing. I know I'm not the best at keeping in touch, but I always love to hear from you.
Thanks for reading.
(Let me just interrupt myself [only two words in! a new record!] with the first of what is sure to be many parentheticals to say this: I was saying "y'all" waaaay before we moved to Virginia. So don't let me hear any crap from youse guys hassling me about my usage thereof and its significance of my being somehow corrupted, language-wise, by The South. But I did learn something new: Apparently, "y'all" is the singular, while "all y'all" is the plural.)
We are doing fine. Sorry if we've worried anyone with my lack of posting. Things are getting down to the wire with the pregnancy (less than three weeks to go!) and KB and I are working like crazy to have as much settled as we possibly can in our lives so things can come to a screeching halt (as they will, whether we're ready or not) once Doodle makes his grand debut.
What kind of things, you say? Nothing very interesting, unfortunately. A lot of bureaucratic crapola, really. Things where you look at your to-do list and go, "Is this why I got up this morning? Really? To inform our auto insurance company of our new license plate number? To make a dentist appointment for Nolan? This is my grand mission in the world today? 'Take car for oil change?'"
We got a renter for the house in Princeton, which is a good thing, income-wise, but a pain in the ass otherwise. I'm hoping things will smooth out once we get over the "getting started" phase and having a tenant becomes more of a routine thing. I swear, we talk to our property manager/real estate agent up there more than we talk to our friends and family. Not that she's not a lovely person, but it's getting kind of old. The refrigerator up there broke (for those of you who are keeping track, that's four major appliances to go kerflooey in that fabulous space-age kitchen in less than a year) and we've been going back and forth with our agent, the repair place, and the tenant, trying to get things fixed. It's a part-time job, really.
Down here in Virginnie we are slowly assimilating into the local culture. We decided to join the Unitarian Universalist church (a.k.a. the Unie-Toonies) and went to our first service this past Sunday. It was pretty awesome. The sermon, delivered by a lesbian minister, was on Charles Darwin and his contribution to society. That's my kind of religion! They have lots of local service/charity work that they're involved in, and they give classes in Bhuddism, yoga and Wicca. I'm looking forward to having a connection to an open-minded spiritual community without all the Jesus and the Guilt and the look-upon-his-bloody-visage-he-died-a-horrible-painful-death-for-your-sins and the glaven. (Can you tell I was raised Roman Catholic? Is it that obvious?) So the Unie-Toonies are pretty much the maximum amount of religion I can handle without having an allergic reaction.
That being said, I have also joined a support group run through a nearby Presbyterian church that is for women who have recently moved and need...well, support. It is a little more Jaheezeus Christ than I would ordinarily have in my life (which is, you know, none) but I find that the group leader does an excellent job of keeping things very open and neutral and not proselytizing or trying to convert people. It is mostly just a varied group of women eating snacks and talking about how hard the transition period is and helping each other find ways to make the best of it. I figure beggars can't be chosers. I do occasionally have to restrain many of my natural impulses toward eye-rolling and snorting (and quoting Chris Rock), but there are definite pay-offs, in the form of recommendations on where to find the best New York-style pizza, or how to get a discount at the drug store. Is that cynical of me? Well, so be it. I am also trying to "pay it forward," as they say, put some good karma out there, by helping bring dinners to another woman in the group who recently moved and also just had a baby.
Nolan seems to be settling in fairly well. We have met a couple of other mommies with boys around his age and had a few playdates, and he's enjoyed himself immensely. Things are smoothing out at his school, too, although I find I'm having a harder time getting used to it than he is. It's a fairly parentally hands-off school philosophy, Montessori is, and I guess it's tough for me to give up that much control. I drive him up to the school in the morning and a volunteer helps him get out of the car, and then I drive up at noon and a teacher helps buckle him into his seat. I never even get out of the car. I don't see or speak to his teacher at all unless I call her at home, which I have a hard time doing. Nolan is not the most forthcoming about his days (what three-year-old is, really?) and so I find myself obsessing over the littlest utterance from him. But they (Montessori) are all about building self-reliance and independence and such, so I guess that's good. We're still investigating other pre-school options for the fall, and we have a classroom visit tomorrow, so we'll see. The jury's still out, in my mind.
KB is enjoying his job, which is nice for me to hear. He comes home every day talking about how much he's learning, how much he's enjoying himself, how many interesting cases he saw that day. It's a definite relief. He's working long hours right now, mostly because he's just getting started and the other doc in the MSK service finally got to take a vacation (he'd been the solo attending since the person KB replaced left six months ago), but things should hopefully settle down a bit soon.
We are toying with the idea of buying a second car, because right now he is only biking/riding the bus to one of his work sites - the other one Nolan and I have to drop him off and pick him up, which isn't such a pain right now, but when Doodle arrives it's going to get more difficult. We just fought for so long not to buy a second car (and having one car is enough of a pain in the ass) that it's hard to admit we need another one. Not to mention expensive. And polluting. Sigh.
So I guess that's all I got, for now. I promise to keep you posted on Doodle's progress. Please let me know how y'all are doing. I know I'm not the best at keeping in touch, but I always love to hear from you.
Thanks for reading.
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