The good, the bad, and the etc.

It's been a while since I've blogged, and it's not because things aren't happening, but because it's hard to find the time.

Katherine is getting more and more active. Of course she's sleeping less during the day, which is to be expected, but for the past few weeks she has also made me regret all those times I've raved about her nighttime sleep habits without knocking on wood.

It's unpredictable; that's always been my undoing.

Predictability, as far as I'm concerned, is an asset that trumps all others. It can be something predictably awful, like burning your hand on the stove every single day at 1:29 p.m., or something predictably neutral, like dinner at 6:12 every night. As long as it can be counted upon to happen, I adapt. But little K's tendency to keep us guessing is taking some getting used to.

We took the kids to see Santa on Saturday, and Alex was shy but determined to tell him that we will be at Nana's house this year (so he won't miss us). Santa promised to be there. Alex grilled me afterward about whether or not that was the REAL Santa, and told me it's a good thing I'm not Santa, because I'd get really tired of landing on all those rooftops in one night. (My trademark laziness is lost on no one.)

I think he's already questioning the logistics.

Katherine went willingly to the old man (who looked especially old this year, bless him) and touched his beard and graced him with one of her big gummy smiles. The girl tasked with making easily distracted kids smile with her jingly reindeer puppet said, "She's, like, the best baby ever!" which, while obviously little more than teenage hyperbole, warms a mama's heart.

This was before Katherine spat up all over me and her beautiful green satin dress and the bench and the floor while we sat in the middle of the mall waiting for Alex and Steven to come out of Game Stop.

She knows how to charm a stranger, that one. She's a magnet for all those baby lovers, smiling and cooing and flirting her little heart out, so much so that I've had two creepy offers by old men to PURCHASE her and one slightly less creepy declaration by a sweet-looking elderly lady: "Just give me a chunk of her, that's all I need!"

It looks creepier in writing.

Things aren't quite all sunshine and gummy smiles and roses these days, but that's life. Which is what I told Alex tonight, when he despaired all kinds of out of proportion about the fact that Scooby-Doo Camp Scare had to go back to Red Box before he'd finished watching it. I don't know if he bought it any more than any of us do, when it comes down to those day-to-day disappointments that make up so much of life. But we learn to live with them without tears and melodrama, and he will, too. He's just (relatively) new.

Stress is, of late, like a hitchhiker I've picked up and can't shake out of my car, even after we've passed the exit he claimed he was looking for. I'm thinking of stopping at the nearest rest stop and booting him out and speeding away in a cloud of dust. I'm not the best analogy maker, but it's Sunday night and I'm tired.

Source of stress? I think it's Christmas. And not having the energy to do all the things I know I should do. It's being displeased with so many aspects of myself, and the ways in which I believe I'm falling short, and questioning even the things I think I'm doing right, like helping to raise smart, grateful, sensitive, empathetic kids who say (or will say) please and thank you without being reminded and hug me spontaneously and unselfconsciously.

It's, in a word, life. Good and bad and up and down and sometimes just there. But it's a package deal, and I do realize how blessed I am. How could I not be, with a husband who makes me giggle and snort like an intoxicated college girl, a little boy who tells me I can always call him my baby (as long as I don't tell Daddy), and a baby girl whose fast-evolving personality is in equal parts disarming, charming, and familiar? And, of course, dogs who curl up together on their new puffy bed like the remaining two puppies in an adoption-dwindling litter.

And friends who make me laugh and keep me sane. Eager and adept baby-holders, devoted Alex appreciators, bad-reality-show sharers, bravers of cold weather for the wonders of girltalk. I love them all.

A few things that have little to do with one another.

I'm a worrier, ain't no two ways about it. I come by it honestly, with two parents who are worriers each in their own distinctive ways. My father will plot out a trip to an unfamiliar destination as far in advance as possible, probably do a test-drive or two, and still leave early enough on the day he has to be there to arrive at least an hour early. (I got that from him.) My mother worries in less predictable ways and often about unlikely scenarios (i.e. If I didn't call when I was supposed to, she might jump to the conclusion that I'm dead rather sooner than most). That's a mother thing, and I'm developing my own.

But I worry (ahem) when I see the same tendency in Alex. I don't want to label him because he's FIVE and he's CHANGING and there's no way to know if what he's experiencing is natural, age-appropriate worry or if it falls somewhere a bit higher on the scale.

He had fun at his Halloween carnival but only after we convinced him that it was fun. Before that he was just jittery and reluctant and infuriatingly close-mouthed about what was wrong.

He thinks ahead about things that he will worry about in the future, i.e. "I don't want to go to college because it's too far away from you and Daddy." My response? "Well ... let's revisit this in twelve years or so."

He worried on his school's Pajama Day that he would be the only one in pajamas, and asked us each on three separate occasions to check the calendar and make really, really sure we had the right day. As if we would play some cruel, traumatizing prank on our sweet boy and send him into a den of kindergarten lions to be made fun of for wearing his Mario pj's, which are pilled and tired-looking but the only ones he owns that actually fit. (No one needs to know my son prefers to wear pajama shirts that don't cover his navel and pants that don't come near his ankle, right?)

He is at the same time brazenly confident and heart-wrenchingly uncertain, and it's all part of growing up, and whenever I stop and think about it, the hugeness of everything that lies before him, I have to catch my breath and remind myself that he's got to do these things and that he WILL find his way. Just like I did. Just like we all do. But when it's your little boy who comes home devastated because his best school friend didn't wait to walk with him, it's harder to accept that truth.

And all I can do is tell him how wonderful he his, how bright and funny and sweet and kind and beautiful, how insightful and observant and emotionally more mature than your average fully grown man. Hopefully the words don't lose any of their impact spoken, as they are, by someone who still often has trouble being assertive, taking the first step, going to the grocery store with no makeup on.

I believe in him and I know, in my heart, that he'll be fine. He'll be more than fine.

But the mother in me, the mother that IS me, now, still watches, waits, and worries.

Katherine has woken to her world completely and lights it up everywhere she goes. She has a wide-open, crooked grin and a coquettish flirty smile, eyelash batting and everything, that she saves for her daddy. Her giggles are impossibly contagious; they sound a little like hysterical coughs, and the sound always seems to surprise her. She's still bald as a cue ball, and I love her that way. She's grasping things: toys, blankets, shirts, hair. She can roll from belly to back but not the other way yet, and I wonder if that's because she simply despises being on her belly. Why would she go to such lengths to get there?

She is eating rice cereal and carrots, and by rice cereal I mean she's had several bites on several occasions that did not immediately ooze back out onto her bib, and by carrots I mean I shoved a couple of spoonfuls in her mouth tonight while we were waiting for her bath water to warm up. I figured carrots = messy. Handy bath was a good idea.

Steven's recuperating nicely and returned to work on Tuesday. Next week they take the staples out. He asked me if I thought that was going to hurt. Um. Well. They're going to PRY the STAPLES out of your WOUND. It probably won't be ice cream and puppy dogs. But I didn't tell him that.

That's all I've got for now, for this "blog" that's quickly becoming more of a "dumping ground" for "random thoughts du jour." (Though, really, that should be the official definition of blog.)

Good night.

Stick a fork in me.

I'm so tired I can't make myself even try to sleep.

Granted, sitting around a hospital waiting room doesn't sound all that exhausting, but somehow it is, especially when you've been up since 4 and are worrying about someone you love while families gather and laugh and talk and share concern and kill time all around you while sucking down Starbucks concoctions. (Genius, having a Starbucks across from the main waiting room. Even I succumbed, and I find their coffee to be only OK.)

As for me, the bag holding Steven's belongings broke and my phone died far too early in the day, my contacts got hopelessly foggy and the book I'm currently reading is too depressing to keep me terribly committed to finishing it.

Hours do have a way of passing, though.

Steven's orthopedist was four feet tall and had a Napoleon complex and talked to me like I was a six-year-old with a severe learning disability.

I was allowed to go back to recovery after he'd been there almost two hours, and he was still groggy and IN PAIN and nauseated and seemingly very surprised and kind of ticked off that he wasn't ready to hop out of bed and drive home.

The important thing is that the surgery went well, and bones and ligaments are back where they should be. Steven is worse for wear but I'm hoping the fact that he went to bed at 7 tonight and hasn't made a peep since bodes well for his feeling at least marginally better tomorrow.

My parents came over at the crack of dawn so they'd be here to get Alex off to school and to stay with Katherine until we came home, which turned out to be nine-plus hours later. Thank God for family.

My kid doesn't like me. Does that make me a good mom?

Well this seems blogworthy, if only to document the date and time of Alex's first outright tantrum. I know, I know, we got lucky when he was little. He was more of a stomper-off-to-his-room, which turned out to be a good thing since it gave him a place to vent where we didn't have to hear it. But tonight, oh. my. lord. I came into the conflict in the middle, so I'm not sure what happened except that he was playing DS and forgot to watch his wind-down show, which then became my fault even though I wasn't even in the room. Then he hit himself in the face with his DS in frustration, and if you know of DS-gate, you'll know that's a BIG NO-NO. So Steven took the DS away and told him to pick his books. The screaming, yelling, out-and-out freaking continued, even after I gave him to the count of five and then NO books. He calmed down a little but then ramped it up again, so guess what? No books.

Then he turned his unfiltered fury on me.

"MOMMY? I'M NOT GOING TO BE YOUR BEST FRIEND ANYMORE ... IF YOU DON'T GIVE ME ONE MORE CHANCE!"

"MOM? YOU'RE NOT VERY NICE."

"MAMA? I DON'T LIKE YOU RIGHT NOW."

"YOU'RE A BAD MOMMY!"

At which point Steven reached into his hidden pocket of parental tricks and basically silenced the child by, well, telling him to knock it off. Why didn't I think of that?

Beach, Bones, and Blues

A girls' trip gives the soul a chance to breathe, usually in quick gasps snatched through uncontrollable laughter.

Three days away from the three most important people in the world make them even more important than they were before; make them vital, absolute, irrevocable.

I am ridiculously blessed to have had both experiences this past weekend.

I have to admit that when I had my feet sunk deep into blinding white sand, a diabetic mimosa in my hand and newly downloaded music in my ears, surrounded by people with whom I've traveled a bumpy road that didn't manage to shake us apart even at its rockiest, all I was really focused on was relaxing. We had flawlessly blue skies, a steady breeze that took the bite out of the sun (and maybe only just enough that I didn't recognize I was getting slightly burned until it was called to my attention). Relaxing, yes, and a little soul-searching, as that's what I do at the foot of the end of the land.

My mind was everywhere and nowhere, but the little boy who kept trotting by pulled my thoughts back home to Alex, and the sound of a baby anywhere, at any time, made me yearn to sink my lips deep into rosy, smiley, squishy cheeks.

And of course I was thinking of Steven, with his broken shoulder, never letting on that he's in pain and never willing to admit that he needs help with anything. Thankfully, his mother knew better. (Thanks again, Kirk and Cindy!)

I'm lucky. Lucky to have friends like those who forgive my moody tendencies and inclination to zone out a bit during shop talk, who say HILARIOUS things and are just so irresistibly themselves that you have no choice but to love them.

I'm lucky to have my husband who claimed he would have tied me to the top of the car and driven me to the beach himself if he had to, when I protested that I shouldn't leave him there by himself with the kids and his injury.

Lucky to have a little boy who met me at the top of the driveway jumping up and down and threw half his body through my car window to give me the first of many "welcome home" hugs.

Lucky to have a baby girl whose eyes light up like a Christmas tree when she's happy and whose funny little mannerisms make her adorable even when she's not so happy.

Steven has to have surgery on his shoulder. Turns out the bone broke in pieces and severed the two ligaments that hold those bones in place. Or something like that. It's not outpatient, and it's not minimally invasive. It's going to require four to six months of recovery, and I know that hurts him because he's been training for a half marathon and really wanted to do the Vulcan Run. And his weekend bike excursions have to be put on hold indefinitely, which breaks my heart for him because I know how he loves those.

But, realizing how much worse it could have been, I feel like we're pretty blessed there, too. It wasn't his neck, after all. He came home, after all. And it's easy to say that's melodramatic in retrospect, but no one knows what could have unless it does. And then it's too late.

Despite all of the goodness, I've been a little down lately. Slightly overwhelmed and under-productive. I could work morning till night and I'm not sure I'd get everything done that I would like to. I'm running a race that has no finish line. So I settle for day to day to-do lists and hope that the rest falls into place.

I've been told I'm too hard on myself, but I feel like that's letting me off the hook for living up to the standards I've set. And so what if that proves their point?

I'm willful that way.

Just so they know...

I can't promise my kids as much as I'd like to.

I can't promise them I'll never screw up (I already have, a lot a lot). I can't promise them I'll never yell, or nag, or be unfair, or blame them for something they didn't do.

But I can promise them that I'll always love them, unconditionally, for who they are and for who they will become. I can promise them that I'll look at their faces and see the babies they were, even when they're twenty-five, and that I'll do my best to empower them even when I don't agree with their choices. Because without empowerment, without someone to tell you you're good enough and strong enough and that they believe in you, achieving a dream is that much harder. Not impossible, because the human spirit is nothing if not resilient, but harder, and less likely.

And I can think of no greater tragedy than a grown-up child who doesn't because no one said they could.

Days Like This

Today was the day that was.

Alex woke up cranky that it was only Monday and that his grandparents won't be back until Thursday, and beSIDE himself that I forced him to wear long pants because of the sudden change in morning weather. (Of course, this being Alabama, by noon it's virtually sweltering, so tomorrow we're going with shorts and a jacket and his little legs can just freeze if he wants them to.)

I was very proud of the haul of new fall clothes I bought for him today, until he tried them on after dinner and we discovered that I am abysmal at size guestimations and maybe don't really have a clear grasp of what my kid looks like. I'm pretty sure the excess length on all the pants could've been made into similar pants for at least one additional kindergartner. So tomorrow I'll drag the girlchild back to Old Navy to swap out sizes in every single item of clothing I bought today. I love doing the same job twice. It's like I never left publishing.

I will also, as it's late and this horrendous day is over and I'm dreaming big, get something done work-wise. Today that was almost literally impossible, as someone swapped Katherine out with an identical-looking but temperamentally opposite baby in the night. Nothing appeased her, nothing distracted her unless it was something that had the effect of ramping up her displeasure a few notches. She seemed to hold me personally responsible for everything that was bothering her, which seemed to be everything she was feeling, seeing, thinking, touching, and otherwise experiencing.

Everything I did today, every breath I took, every key I typed, was set to the background of "ehhhh. ehhhhhh. ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. EHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"

If that won't make a person crazy, what will, I ask you?

I had to take an important work-related phone call in my bedroom while she screamed bloody murder from her crib and I tried to pretend I couldn't hear her (and hoped that the person I was interviewing actually couldn't).

I ran back to her as soon as humanly possible and scooped her up, but she was too upset to let me comfort her right away, so there was back arching and the screaming turned to heartbreaking wails and her (still) blue marble eyes silently accused me of bad! bad! things! Like leaving her alone for five minutes when I should have been holding her, all the better to hear her ceaseless vocalizations of all-encompassing protest.

When Steven came home at lunch she managed a few smiles for him and when he made his standard joke about taking her back to work with him I agreed, but unfortunately he thought I was kidding.

There were some good things. Alex got possession of Bobby Bear for the night (though we butted heads over his "homework," which was to have an adventure with Bobby and write or draw a picture about it; Alex wanted to write a book, and aside from the fact that he's only allotted one page, I couldn't be of much help to him with his sister "ehhhhhh"ing in my ear. Right the heck in there; she does it on purpose.)

"Mommy, how do you spell 'Bobby Bear and I had a lot of fun today playing games like football and my DS and jumping on my trampoline'?" How do you SPELL that? You spell that "Ask your dad when he gets home."

Mother of the Year, right here.

I managed to make dinner but not to do the dishes. I managed to change my spit-up-soaked clothes four times and Katherine's three but not to throw them in the laundry. I managed to finish my article that's due tomorrow but not the ones I need to have written before I leave on Friday for a God-blessed girls' trip to the beach with some of my favorite people.

And that's what I'll focus on now, as I try to find the restful room in the tower of sleep. Lately I've been sleeping in the room that lets you think and think and think yourself into a nervous mess who shouldn't even BE in bed and ends up nursing fears and worries, two steps away from rocking in a corner somewhere.

Tonight I took an Ambien, so maybe the restful room will be easier to find this time.

If not, I'll just hope that Pod Katherine sleeps it off, whatever "it" is, and will be my happy angel baby again by morning.

Not really news.

I am a sucker for unshed tears.

"Do you know what Clay said to me on the day we had to say goodbye?" he asked me, apropos of nothing, on Sunday morning.

No, I had to admit that I did not. (But I would have bet that it included the word "awesome," because the two of them had adopted that word as the essence of big-kidness and used it amusingly out of context all the time.)

"He said I would be his best friend forever."

And that's where I died a little, because he got choked up like an adult who's trying not to cry, and Those Eyes got all glisteny and wet and he turned his face away so I wouldn't see the tears in case his ducts couldn't reabsorb them before they fell.

Not to mention the fact that it reminded me of Tod and Copper from The Fox and the Hound, which was a movie that utterly destroyed me when I was little and I still can't think about without feeling achy in the heart.

Tod - er, I mean Clay - is coming over Saturday.

Good idea or opening an old wound? I really don't know, but for at least two hours they can be "awesomest buddies" again and do all those 5-year-old boy things that they've been doing with new friends instead of each other ever since school sent them down separate paths. I would accuse myself of attaching a sentimentality to it that's beyond their years, but then again ... teary eyes.

Miss Katherine is a chubby angel, still scheming every day to derail my efforts to get anything at all done but doing so in such a charming way that I have to succumb.

Plus she just won't abide all eyes not being on her at all times, a little conceit born of having the two men in her life fawning all over her every second, and who could blame her?

She's growing so fast, all I can think is how I should be memorizing all of it: The deer-in-headlights stare, the unruly hands that occasionally act of their own accord and smack her in her own face, the wispy trying-to-be-hair coming in on top of the soft, mostly bare scalp. Squishable thighs, kissable cheeks, bobbly head when she's tired.

There. I think I got it.

And if memory fails me, there's always the 1,027 pictures on my iPhone.

Cheese!

I love Tired Alex.

OK, so I love all facets of Alex, even Grumpy Alex who pouts and Early-Onset-Teenage Alex who stomps and slams doors. Chatty Alex, who won't stop talking for a single minute for all the world. Delirious Alex, who spouts incoherencies and flings his body around the living room until he inevitably smacks head-first into a wall and instantly becomes Grumpy Alex.

But Tired Alex has a special place in my heart because he's the one who's not too big to cuddle with his mama. He says sweet things like "I'll put you in my dream and the whole world will be made out of cheese and we can eat however much we want." He melts into my arms while I sing the alphabet song, which is the only song he's requested at bedtime for going on a million years. He's soft and warm and unconcerned with that recently born goal of being "just like Daddy."

Wait, he's "Dad" now. Much to his displeasure. ("I'm too young to be "Dad," he insists.)

I'm still "Mommy" most of the time, except when "Dad" is around. Then it's much more crucial to play the Big Kid role, and I become "Mom," and that's fine with me because it's just part of the growing up he's so busy doing most of the time.

Except, that is, when he's tired.

Katherine will be three months old next week, can you believe it? I can't. The birth is still so clear in my mind I can almost FEEL it if I try ... which I don't, very often, because wow. That was some serious pain.



They say (I listen to They more often that perhaps I should) that three months marks the peak of crying. If that's true, then we were truly blessed. She has days where she's a little more, shall we say, vocal? than others, and they seem to have been occurring one on top of the other for the past week or so. And yet she still sleeps like a rock through the night and is usually quickly consoled by a bottle or a pacifier or a well-timed shift in position.

Some days I'm frustrated. Some days, like today, I'm just exhausted. But it never seems to be too much, and I've yet to regret a single moment spent with her. This weekend is going to be chock-full of work I didn't do today because today she was fussy and today I was utterly wiped out. But even that's OK with me, because working from home was a decision I made, and stand by, and am determined to see through even when it's not as easy as one might imagine. Is anything, ever?

My sleep habits are still fraught. I have the best almost-three-month-old sleeper in the world and yet since her birth I've lost my own formerly unparalleled ability to zone out at any time and under any circumstance. Now, for instance, my body says "sleep," but my brain says, "do."

I guess that's better than last night, when I got home from a wonderful girls' night and my brain said "sleep" but my body said "eat." Thank God Steven had ordered pizza for dinner.

On that note, I'm going to bed. To sleep, or to think, or to overthink, or to worry, or to brood, I never know. No matter what, though, somewhere in the space that separates the waking world from the sleeping one, I'm hanging out with Alex, eating stuff made out of cheese.

It's never too late to nest.

My bedside fan is making a death rattle. This is not good.

Bad enough that the man I married is cold-natured and ill-equipped to handle my preference of keeping the thermostat at a comfortable 68 degrees. After eight-plus years of marriage he's gotten used to it, or maybe he just doesn't fight it anymore because he has witnessed my heat-induced wrath on many an occasion.

Lucky for me, Alex tended toward my constitution as a baby and is still much more likely to complain of being hot than cold.

But alas, Katherine. Her little hands and feet (arguably little, and comparatively little, though people keep exclaiming over them like she's a puppy and they're trying to estimate what her full-grown stature will be) can turn icy a second after being brought in from the 5,002-degree temperatures of our Alabama summer. And because I birthed her and she's incapable (as yet) of engaging in the hot/cold war that has been ongoing since Steven first came to realize that I wasn't going to budge on the comfort factor, I've surrendered to it.

Rather than, say, dressing her in fleece-lined diapers, mittens, hats, and socks.

Still, this fan needs to reconsider committing suicide at this point in time, or I will be breaking out the infant-size long johns, throwing Steven a Snuggie, and having my way with the thermostat.

I hesitate to make the mistake I made a few posts ago and blather on about these smooth waters we're currently drifting. And maybe I will just leave it there, or risk the karmic counterbalance.

Alex is loving school, and Katherine is sitting in a Bumbo, cheekily pleased with herself.



The work is holding steady, and it's been a while since I felt like setting the dogs loose and reporting them to animal control or shipping Alex off to boot camp or donating Katherine to my BFF to raise in a fleeting moment of perceived incompetence.

In short, I'm happy. Let it slide this time, karma.

Happy notwithstanding, I'm also as neurotic as ever.

Now that I'm home a lot I have started to notice everything about my house. Everything. Everything. And there are a trillion little annoyances (and a few big ones) to distract me from work, feeding the baby, or putting deodorant on both sides (heh).

The guest bathroom has become the bane of my mornings because every single time I open the door it looks for all the world like the Colgate factory exploded in there. How does he get toothpaste on the ceiling, I beg of you? He's like three feet tall!

So today, in an effort to keep crazy at bay, I cleaned the house and rearranged the living room and dining area, and it felt amazing. Tomorrow we are going to look at a cheap-but-not-cheap-looking couch that I think I can squeeze in enough extra work to afford. (My hatred for the couch we have now, which has been boiling in my blood for at least four years, is now a constant seething itch and if we don't get rid of it soon I'm just going to set fire the hell to it.)

This is Labor Day weekend and I am going to spend it laboring. I have big plans to buy a good mop and new dusting cloths and clean every surface of this house that sits still long enough, which means Katherine better not be sleeping when I get to the top of my game. Steven gets the outside, because, as noted above, I don't do heat.

I'll try to find some room for the mainstream brand of fun when I finish the kind that's its own reward.

Maybe I'll treat myself to a new fan.

Happy long weekend!

Don't type THAT.

He's only five, but today I realized it was time to put a parental control block on the computer. Because when you have a child who is so excited about learning to sound out words that he's doing random Google searches of his favorite ones, bad things can happen.

I know, because one of them happened today. I woke up from my brief but restless nap with Katherine to the sound of him cackling breathlessly, as only five-year-old boys seem able to do. I only caught a glimpse before he closed the window (we have rules about not doing anything on the computer outside of Playhouse Disney games, the occasional rousing round of Road Rash circa-1989 Atari, and a charming but annoying site called Learn to Read!) But what I saw just didn't look right, y'all. It didn't look like anything that somebody who was a baby just the other day should be looking at.

I mean, sounding out words is far from foolproof. In a world where he might type in words he knows and get results that are far from child- or even regular-people-friendly, you have to be careful. Alex might someday type in "race" looking for some cool cars and end up on a cyber-gathering place for skinheads. And then there are the words he almost knows. He recently sounded out the word "cake" in a book and ... well, I'm not even going there. ("Hm, Alex ... what other sound can "a" make?)

It's a dangerous place, this pass-through ramshackle town called Almost Literate. And of course I say this with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek (though it occurs to me that THAT phrase could bring up some Google ghastliness), but I did have Steven set a parental control on Google searches.

He decided it was working when he typed in "boob" and got no results. Oy.

And another weekend has come and gone. I spent it enjoying my family: watching bad movies with Steven, painting pictures with Alex and watching him engage in all his weird little-kid doings, like putting all his stuffed animals in a plastic bag and arranging them in the middle of the trampoline. Putting his pants on backward and then telling me, when I pointed it out, that he likes them that way. Insisting on wearing his fleece-lined waterproof jacket to the grocery store because "it might rain, you never know."

And of course I spent plenty of time holding Katherine (a lot; she didn't want to be put down much this weekend), kissing rolls of baby fat and acting like an utter fool to make her laugh.

Tomorrow it's back to the new normal. I'm good with that.

I lost my kid today.

This walking thing.

Alex went to the park with his "new best friend in the world," Riggs (I don't know) today. Instead of meeting me where I was waiting for him at the top of the track.

I was busily engaged in an adorable conversation with a gaggle of little girls who were magnetically drawn to Katherine in her stroller and wanted to touch her toes, point out to me that her pacifier had fallen out, ask me if Katherine was with a "K" or a "C" (this one was from a Catherine with a "C" who had a Cindy Brady lisp that made the braggy spelling of her own name extra adorable), and otherwise act like tiny women.

Suddenly I realized that all the walkers had passed while I chatted up Kat's admirers, and nary a scruffy-haired, yellow-polo-clad, oversize-backpack-toting kindergartner among them.

My irrational heart jumped into my irrational throat. You remember that Movie of the Week called I Know My First Name is Steven? It's been a running joke between my husband Steven and me for some years now. Anyway, that movie came to mind. Irrationally.

I got up and started back down the track toward the playground, scanning the area and continuing not to see him. The girls drifted away to their waiting moms like obedient children, except for one, the daughter of a former classmate of mine, who is much chattier and precocious than I remember her mother being. Then again, I wasn't exactly friends with her mother. No, VHHS alum, I ain't telling.

And this story has a rather anticlimactic conclusion, but thank God for that. Alex and Riggs were there, at the playground, playing with a dog, looking for caterpillars (Shelby's sad little corpse has been deposited in our front flower bed because Steven told Alex the thing had to be outside to build his cocoon, oy), and just generally being 5-year-old boys.

Which means that when I called Alex's name, he glanced up briefly from where he was kneeling to pet the dog, looked vaguely surprised to see me there, and said, "Oh yeah, I got something for you." Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out one of those burr thingies that fall off trees, only this one was green instead of brown like they usually are, after they die, I guess. I took it from his grubby little hand and thought about how hard it is, this business of letting the rope out. Bit by bit, I'm giving him more slack when sometimes all I want to do is reel it back in. I look down and he's not there and I panic. Sometimes even when he's safe at school I have that moment, that zingy !!!where'smykid!!! moment that sends irrational hearts into irrational throats.

But of course we had the inevitable talk about how I have to know where he is at all times, even if he was "just about to leave but [he] had to see the dog and then there was a caterpillar but [he] lost it. And can Riggs come over??"

I'm so glad he's making new friends.

A post about nothing.

I haven't been sleeping right lately. By "right," I mean not like me. I used to be able to go to bed at 9, wake up at 10, and take a two-hour afternoon nap without missing a beat. Now I'm lucky if I'm asleep before midnight and I hate it when the husband comes to bed before I've even worked out the antsiness of the day by reading a chapter or two of whatever (usually) Stephen King book is on my nightstand or writing ... something like this.

Getting up is no problem, and I'm glad for that. I wake up naturally between 5 and 6 unless Katherine has other ideas, though thankfully she rarely does. She's been very reserved with her free thinking thus far, and yes, I realize I've just condemned myself to a night of ups and downs for feedings and Miracle Blanket jailbreaks.

There's just so much to do at night. Things I didn't do during the day that I kept meaning to do. Dishes to put in the dishwasher, for instance, or spit-up-stained clothes to wash. Apropos of nothing I just brushed my dog. It's 10:20 p.m. I have too much energy and too little time. AND too much to do. It's quite the conundrum.

I no longer have to pick out clothes for the next day because I just grab something pseudo-presentable that is not likely to get points and stares when I walk Alex to school. I've realized it's pointless to shower until I come back from doing that, at least until blessed fall graces us here in the far reaches of Hell. (Though that's not altogether fair; we had quite a lovely day today, and no, I am not going to blog about the weather.)

Katherine slept pretty much all day today, with the dual exceptions of when I took her by my (now-former) office and she demanded to be let out of her stroller (she was hijacked by the president of the company for a least an hour while I sat there afraid to tell her I had to go even though she no longer holds my livelihood in her hands) and then decided to turn on her fuss the second a friend came over to visit. Lessons learned: When you bring a baby into an office populated primarily by women, block off a chunk of the day and bring a bottle. And keep friends like mine, who understand that babies cry sometimes and it's neither a reflection of your failure as a mother or the baby's bad attitude.

I'm tired now, but not sleepy. Tomorrow I have nothing to do all day so I plan to get lots of work done. I realized I've also just condemned myself to a day of writer's block and lethargy, if not a cranky baby to boot.

Tonight I'm looking forward to the weekend, and beyond that to a girls' beach trip in the offing. If any one of you backs out, I'm going to personally beat you up.

For mothers.

Mothers, as a whole, are a resilient bunch.

They kind of have to be. Their hearts are beating not for one, but for two, three, four ... twenty if you're Michelle Duggar. (But let's not get into that maybe-pathology.)

Mothers are healers, short-order cooks, personal assistants, dictionaries, maids, and drill sergeants.

They are appreciators of confounding art and boosters of confidence.

They keep secrets and they share them.

They bury dead caterpillars and mourn lost toys and crashed rockets.

They bandage skinned knees and soothe hurt feelings.

They sing the same bedtime song every night for four years straight.

They mold and they shape and they hope that what comes out in the end is something as beautiful as what they started with, that gift they were given the day those heart-thieves took over their lives.

It's the most wonderful kind of robbery.

Jinx!

It was a rough weekend here at the ol' Bosche stead.

I earned every bit of it, every whine, every tear, every fit whether mine or that of one or the other of my offspring. Because my last post was just too life-is-grand to sustain itself.

It was brutally hot, both inside and out, and we never did get the rain I'd been counting on. I worked too much and drank too little. Alex regressed to the age of three, crying over everything that went even microscopically askew for no explicable reason.

Katherine, dear, sweet baby Katherine ... well, she just about did me in with her refusal to sleep and the resulting caustic crankiness. She wouldn't eat and five minutes later would scream for food like she was being torn limb from limb by a hungry mountain lion. She spat up so much we ran through most of the clean clothes in her drawer. And that's a LOT of clothes (thanks be to LJ!). No matter how we held her, swaddled, unswaddled, tummy to tummy, back to tummy, up high, down low, at an angle ... she squirmed and "ernnnngh"ed until you put her down. Whereupon she would scream.

White noise, fail.

Car rides, fail.

Alex making funny faces, double fail, as the failure hurt HIS suddenly extraordinarily delicate feelings and sent him into a funk from which he didn't emerge for hours.

Gas drops, Zantac, burping, bouncing, swinging, swaying, rocking, being still.

NOTHING WOULD WORK.

Thank GOD she slept through the night last night or I think I might have gone off the deep end. Which isn't saying much, as I usually tread water in that space in the pool that's right next to the rope line with the little buoys.

I got out of the house all of three times, and one was to get the mail and find no lottery checks awaiting me. Just a birthday invitation for some kid who called Alex a loser. (It was in the frame of preferred football teams, which really means this kid's DAD is to blame, so I won't hold it against him too hard. Though we are going to the state fair next weekend instead of to his party.)

One of my on-the-side articles got flagged for plagiarism, which set off every single defense mechanism I own all at once, at full blast. I would NEVER. It was cleared quickly, and it helped some that it was flagged by a computerized plagiarism checker, not a person, and only because I used a tiny phrase from a governmental document because I was scared to change the wording too much for fear of making it wrong and getting carted off to jail.

I don't know, I'm tired!

My birthday present to myself didn't work so we had to take it back.

My throat was and is on fire, and I'm hoping it's ragweed because if I'm getting sick I'll take a cue from Katherine and scream my displeasure to the stars.

...Otherwise, life is grand!

Small potatoes, I realize, and a minute price to pay for all that I do have and all that goes right more often than I have any right to expect.

But still. Next time I go off on a Pollyanna tangent, muzzle me.

***

Upon re-reading, I realize I used "defense mechanism" wrong. But it's really less of an error on my part than a compliment to anyone who's reading. My friends and family are smart. Y'all know what I meant.

Well, THIS is new.

I’m new to this work-at-home thing.

Eyes on my computer monitor, I reach over for my coffee and my hand comes back holding a bottle, a pacifier, a bottle of Mylicon.

That almost never happened at the office.

Alex started kindergarten last week, and now it’s just me and my little turkey, 9-week-old Katherine. She’s still sleeping a lot, as newborns are wont to do, and I usually set her up to nap next to me on the couch while I tap away at my laptop and listen to her gentle coos and rhythmic sucking sleep sounds.

One thing hasn’t changed from the days when she was in me instead of beside me: She still kicks me while I’m working.

I expected to feel a little shaken up at first, a little chicken-with-its-head-cut-off, and I do. I’ve never had a job under the same roof as my bed, my refrigerator … my underwear drawer. At first I worked feverishly to make up for the feeling that I was doing something wrong.

I felt, quite sincerely, like I was playing hooky. I was in pajamas and sock feet in the middle of the day; how could I not feel that way?!

To outrun the guilt I threw myself into work. I wrote, I edited, I revised, I read, I repeated. I cleaned the house. I did the laundry. One day, I kid you not, I scrubbed the baseboards. I came back to write some more. Oh yes, and there was a tiny baby and a bored 5-year-old who both needed attention in diametrically opposed ways. People, I did it all.

But my work suffered; I noticed the quality slipping, and even though I’m one of my toughest critics, I maintain that when I’m mixing up “there,” “their,” and “they’re” and failing to make even a hint of a point in 500 words, there’s a problem.

And my mothering suffered, too. “Go outside and play,” I said to Alex one day when he was pestering me with his ballooning and absolutely valid boredom. “Mommy’s working.”

“It’s too hot,” he argued.

“Go get a snack, then,” I said, irritably. And as he ran off to the kitchen to get a brownie (I hadn’t specified, in my horrific display of lazy parenting, what kind of snack he should choose to relieve his boredom) I realized what I’d just said.

“Wait a minute, we don’t eat just because we’re bored!” I called after him. That child looked me straight in the eye and then, pointedly, at the open bag of potato chips on the table next to me.

Katherine woke to eat every three hours like a hungry little clock with a bloodcurdling wail to chime the hour, and I found myself rushing impatiently through whatever I was doing before tending to her.

I would type with one hand and feed with the other.

Even my dogs were being neglected. One of them adopted a stuffed animal "baby" of her own and the other developed an Eeyore complex and moped around the house sighing … wait, he’s always done that.



Slowing down wasn’t an option; I had to prove to the world that I wasn’t sitting on my couch eating potato chips and watching Oprah.

Or, because I was sitting on my couch eating potato chips and watching Oprah, I had to prove that wasn’t all I was doing.

I’d just taken on twenty times more work than I ever tackled at the office and I wanted everyone to know it.

“How was your day?” from my husband translated to, “Did you manage to drag yourself out of bed today while I was out in the real world breaking my back to keep our kids from starving?”

No, he doesn’t talk like that.

But because it’s what I feared, it’s what I heard, and my answer, a rattled-off list of every single solitary thing I had done since opening my eyes (very, very early) that morning, reflected that fear.

I’m getting over that fear slowly, coming to realize that working from home can truly be the best of both worlds. I can wipe noses and elicit toothless grins and not miss a beat writing daily posts for Corporate Wellness Advisor (shameless plug) or one of my other regular clients.

I’m learning that it’s all about time management and priorities. When the baby is spitting up and gargling on it, I am going to suction her out before I finish the sentence I was writing. Even if I’d had the perfect conclusion in mind and those few moments of oh-my-God-she’s-drowning panic blew it right out of my head.

If I don’t get enough done during the day because she won’t abide not being held (with both arms, the demanding little thing), I toss dinner duty my husband’s way and stomp on the little voice that tries to tell me he’s been working all day because so have I.

I can work while he does the parenting sometimes, and when that doesn’t cut it, well, that’s what wee hours and weekends are for.

I’ve realized it helps to get dressed … besides making me feel like less of a slob, I can’t very well walk Alex to and from school in my torn 15-year-old Victoria’s Secret nightgown. Even though it is the softest thing I've ever known.

Which reminds me that it’s almost time to get Katherine fed and Zantac’ed up (moms are all nurses, too; add that to the list) so we can walk down the street to meet him without her doing her “errngh, errrngh, errrrngh” thing the whole way. (It’s a sound of distress or annoyance, sometimes both, and I blame many a typo on it because it gets right down in the middle of your middle ear and vibrates your whole head until you want to jam a pencil into your eardrum.)

So here we go.

Keep the work coming, I say. I got the balancing act down.

All That and More.

Katherine hates Publix with a passion.



This is the fifth time she's been there, and the fifth time she has (loudly) expressed her displeasure about it.

Halfway down the bread aisle, I pulled over to try the pacifier rotation. This includes the Comfort Paci, the Frustration Paci (which Alex calls the Mad Paci), and the Hunger Paci, the latter to be used only temporarily while somebody gets a bottle ready, or to test the "she's hungry" theory when, according to the clock and all those books that don't know what they're talking about, she shouldn't be, yet.

When she spat all of them out with a look of contempt and opened that adorable little Cupid's bow mouth to yell at me, I stuck the emergency bottle into it. She shook her head at me. Yes, she did.

So then my little helper jumped in, as he does whenever he thinks he knows better how to handle any given situation than I do, which is pretty much all the time.

"Why don't you just pick her up?"

Fine.

So I got her out of the car seat, which was hooked onto the front of the almost-full shopping cart, and she instantly passed out on my shoulder just like she did after the birth experience, as if we had both not just been through something pretty noteworthy.

Pushing the cart, which OF COURSE had a bum wheel and wanted to pull stubbornly to the left, proved more difficult than my adviser or I had anticipated. We ended up walking in front of it, each on one side so that we took up the whole breadth of the aisle (the breadth of the bread aisle, heh), me barking navigational orders. "Turn right. No, your other right. Watch out, we're about to hit that guy!"

And I did almost take out an elderly lady who responded to my harassed-sounding, "I am so sorry," with "Oh no, baby, you've got your hands full, bless your heart!" Which made me extra glad I hadn't run over her because I'm a sucker for well-intended terms of endearment. Go on, call me sweetheart or honey, make me believe it, and see if I don't agree to lend you a hundred bucks.

But I got my grocery shopping done, and Katherine's mini-meltdown didn't faze me much. Alex and I even laughed about it as I was unloading our stuff onto the check-out belt one-handed and trying to get Alex to conform to my unloading method: frozen with frozen, cold with cold, boxes with boxes, cans with cans, etc. NO, I AM NOT ANAL RETENTIVE.

And I just realized I've written all of this about a fairly run-of-the-mill grocery store experience, so no wonder my uber-nice sister-in-law is usually my only commenter! I'm sure you've lived through a bazillion of these scenarios, C.

Bigger and better: Alexander started kindergarten.



He likes his teacher (whew, because she seemed a little less kid-gloved than I would have liked) and made three friends ("at the same time!!") because they all sit at his table. He doesn't remember their names but promises to tell us when he learns them. They're very tight.

Liddy, the girl next door who is very much in love with him, is not in his class but they did meet up at recess. I guarantee there was hugging. This girl hugged him so hard his feet left the floor (and she is a little girl) when we ran into them on Meet the Teacher day. Ever since he gave her a hydrangea blossom she's been his biggest fan. I figure if he's going to be a ladies' man, one day he can help us protect Katherine from the jerks Steven seems bitterly certain she's going to want to go out with.

I had a good birthday, spent Friday sitting around a metal table in a thunderstorm talking and laughing with awesome friends who sang Happy Birthday to me at midnight; enjoyed the gift of an extra two hours of sleep when Katherine went back down after her first bottle of the morning; went clothes shopping for comfortable things to wear in my "home office" that aren't pajamas but which I can wear out of the house and not be mortified when Liddy's mom drops by unexpectedly in the middle of an unsuspecting Tuesday morning. (When we ran into them at the school, she hugged me like we're BFFs and said she will be coming by to meet the baby soon. Scary, as sometimes I don't wear the requisite undergarments while I'm working on my couch, or I have on a threadbare T-shirt with chicken wing and wine stains on it. Classy.)

I wish there weren't windows in our front door.

My parents graciously offered to come over and watch the kiddos while Steven and I went out to dinner last night. I felt prettyish for the first time since this second birthin', and granted it took some WORK, but I think it was my new wine-colored lip gloss. I'm a fan of colorful lips. I ate chicken and lobster and drank Chardonnay and met someone with four kids and a passion for her church and a burning desire to share that passion with any and everyone. She happened to have graduated with my sister and was nice as nice could be and had lovely, well-behaved children but wouldn't stop talking to us. (Ironically, when we got there she said to her kids, "Leave these people alone; they're on a date night!")

I got awesome new knives (and boy does it take a brave man to buy his often-moody wife knives) and a lopsided chocolate cake with bumpy icing that was delicious and as cute as a baked good can be.



I also scored the infamous green mop that Alex saw on a commercial months ago and has been telling me he wants to get for me ever since ("It even has a powerful vacuum!" ... which it doesn't, but that's because I told Steven to find a cheap green mop that would satisfy Alex without costing too much), gift cards for !!!CLOTHES!!!, a salad spinner, and a necklace that lets me wear my kids where they belong ... no, not around my neck (though on a bad day it often feels like they're hanging there). Near my heart.

I also got lots of much-appreciated birthday wishes on Facebook and that special birthday feeling that lasted all day long.

I love my peeps.

Changes ... (y)uck.

Go download the song "Everywhere I Go," by Lissie. It's beautiful. I love it. I'm listening to it now.

I would also recommend anything at all by Matthew Ryan, but as I went back to insert this sentence his lovely "Some Streets Lead Nowhere" came on my playlist, so that's a good one to start with. It takes about 20 minutes to really get going, but it features pretty and evocative lines like "What I'm trying to say is I was afraid that you'd leave, so I slept with my failures and I started to grieve" ... so I'll forgive it.

Which is maybe why I find myself in this nostalgic place that usually leads nowhere but to a restless night's sleep and/or morning-after regret and toe-scuffing apologies.

Or it could be that Steven and I were watching the movie The Road, which, if you haven't seen it, don't. (Wow, this is a bossy post.)

We're only halfway through and I'm abjectly terrified that the kid's going to die. Even though the post-Apocalyptic world he and his dad are traveling is hardly a place I'd want to live. Bottom line, there's a little boy in the movie, and Steven made the comment that after you have kids it's harder to stomach movies in which kids are sick or hurting or in danger and whatnot.

It led to a conversation about our awesome Alexander Kirk, and how sweet he is, and how proud we are, and how he's starting freaking school next week. He's going to be fine, I know he is, but ... he's my baby. And it's a scary thing, this place in time when they have to let go of our hands and go it alone.

We all did it, though, right? And we're fine, most of us. And if anyone can do it, Alex can. That boy's got it all, and I have no idea where he got it, no offense to my wonderful husband or myself, but I thank God every day for blessing him so completely.

I guess I'll just miss that hand in mine.

Other reasons I'm indulging in my Playlist o' Melodrama?

Well, I quit my job on Friday. It's been something we've talked about and talked about until I almost broke my own staggering record for indecisiveness, but in the end it just made the most sense. Financially, logistically ... child-o-centrically.

I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing, essentially, which has been anything but sitting on my you-know-what in my pajamas all day long enjoying my UNPAID maternity leave. (Well, pajamas, so what?) I've been freelancing, and God willing the well won't run dry but if it does, I am secure in the knowledge that we will work it out.

The day I lost my job with perhaps the best group of people who've ever been thrown together to produce a magazine, I thought my heart would break and be swiftly followed by our bank account. Didn't happen that way. I dealt with it. I worked, I networked, I found work. And that taught me something about myself: that I can do it if I have to.

For this.



And for this.



And, at the end of the day, for me, too.

Now I'm closing out iTunes and going to bed. Night, all.

Keepin' On

I’ve devoted much of my last few posts to Katherine.

She’s new, she’s mysterious, she’s … loud. Quite, quite loud. And I’m not just saying she cries a lot (which she does) but the child, to be so tiny, makes A LOT of noise. All the time. She grunts, pretty much constantly, and the grunts have different meanings. There’s the “I’m hungry” grunt, which quickly turns to the “Feed me now or I’m going to shatter glass” screech.

There’s the “I’m kind of interested in what you’re doing” grunt, which makes you keep doing what you’re doing until she tires of it and her grunt changes to the “Stop it now or I’ll make you wish you had never started” one.

She grunts when she eats, she grunts when she sleeps, she grunts when she’s in any one of those states of being the book tells me small infants have: quiet alert, active alert, asleep, and the ones I don’t remember because Katherine only does those three.

Plus the crying. Did I mention the crying? She had her first public meltdown today in the (oh-so-quiet and oh-so-crowded, of course) waiting room of my doctor’s office. I, being someone who is not particularly keen on attracting undue attention, could quite literally have melted into the carpet in a puddle of blush-red goo.

And have you ever tried to change a seriously dirty diaper in a bathroom without a changing table? So that you’re doing all the maneuvering with the baby inside her car seat inside her stroller? It’s not fun, I tell you. Thank God for Alex, who stood nearby with helpful bits of insight like, “Maybe we can wait and change her when we get home,” and “Shouldn't you have brought more wipes?”

And he’s the one I wanted to talk about in this post. My baby boy, whose hands are now shockingly huge, and I have no idea if he’s recently had a growth spurt or if I’m just used to the comparatively itsy-bitsy baby ones. Either way, those biggish hands make me sad sometimes. He’s growing up so fast. Starts kindergarten in mere days.

We had a heart-to-heart on the swings at the park yesterday. He told me that the boy he met at orientation, the one whose name he didn’t know and who, according to the original version of the story, didn’t talk to him much if at all, is sure to be in his class. Furthermore, the boy’s name has since become Andrew, as in, “I hope my best bud Andrew is in my class, too.”

On my way down the hall toward bed tonight, I stepped over two paper airplanes (but don’t let him hear you call them that; they’re JETS) and a plastic Nintendo DS game case filled with pennies and a slip of paper on which is printed ALEX. It’s his wallet, and the paper is, of course, his ID. He’s been taping it to his shirt with masking tape every day, and offering to pay for groceries or whatever I happen to be purchasing at the time.

He wants a beagle. Apropos of nothing he decided this. Just got on the computer, did a Google search for “dog,” and found and fell in love with the picture that popped up first: a beagle puppy that’s up for adoption at a rescue organization in Harlem. “What button do I push to order him?” he wanted to know.

Tonight I got two good-night hugs (“You forgot something,” he told me the second time) and a promise that he will have a really cool dream so he can tell me about it in the morning.

Some days are hard. Some days Alex doesn’t stop talking and Katherine refuses to be appeased by any any anything. Some days I miss grown-up people and feeling like part of the world. Some days I get damn tired of my couch and my never-ending freelance work and my house that’s never quite clean enough for my liking.

But then.

Then I get a good night’s sleep. And then, in the light of day, I look at him with his untamable hair and his unfathomably huge eyes that seem able to read souls, and I look at her with her mouth wide open and her face beet red, ready to unleash howls from the bowels of hell (but also with her unimaginably soft hands that grip my fingers and the glimpses of that dimple that likes to hide beneath the pudge of her cheeks), and I wonder how I got so lucky.

She's Portable!

The first time we took Alex on a plane, he was three months old. I brought along the Boppy and a bag full of things fit to entertain a three-month-old to the extent they're capable of being entertained. At this point someone told me about the sugar-on-the-paci trick that was to be used ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, and while we didn't need to resort to it on that trip, I shamefully admit that there were others, down the line.

Now Alex is five, and self-reliant, and not quite but almost to that point where he wants nothing to do with us (mainly me) in public. I'm mostly okay with that; an independent streak and a healthy dose of confidence in his own capabilities must mean we've done something right ... and/or, and probably or, he's just an awesomely mature kid in his own right.

So he sat in the one-seat aisle across from us, and we crammed into our two-seater with Katherine and I spent the whole flight shoving Steven's arm off the communal armrest because I am prone to heat and was cradling a little ball of fire. PLUS a blanket, because even when it's 101 in the shade, she won't abide not being wrapped in something. I don't know if she's modest or ashamed of her scrawny little legs and disproportionately gigantic feet or what. (And I can say that without being labeled cruel because I wouldn't trade either of those traits for all the world.)

The trip there (there being Houston, to introduce baby K to the paternal side of her family) went off without a hitch. We heard not a peep from her except when I leaned over to get a snack for Alex out of the diaper bag under the seat in front of me and squished her just a lil' bit. Then she gave off a little "gunnnh" and went right back to sleep over my profuse apologies.

It ain't so easy, though, once the plane lands and you get to where you're going and your angel-baby decides to prove you a big fat liar by crying and fussing and refusing to be held by anyone INCLUDING we who conceived her. She slept a lot, thank God, but was otherwise just about as cranky as cranky can be. (I might have had her beat, a little.)

And it makes you feel, even when people say shut up, that's stupid, that you're standing in a spotlight with one of those trick floors like they have in fake game shows, and if you can't soothe the baby within a given amount of time (say, ten seconds), the false floor will give out beneath you and you'll be funneled down into wherever it is they send mothers who can't calm their babies fast enough.

I realize that sounds ridiculous. I realize that IS ridiculous. NOW I do.

But now I'm home, and now baby K is asleep (cried all the heck out, she is) and my not-a-baby-anymore Xandermander is asleep and I've had my post-travel shower and am splayed out on clean sheets typing away about all this, and I KNOW no one thought I was a screw-up or that I failed some nonexistent test of motherhood. I know that Katherine was fussier than usual because she's been around for less than six weeks and for the first five nothing changed except for her formula a couple of times when I thought I could fix her reflux without a pediatrician's assistance.

And now we can look forward to December, when we'll be traveling with a much more active baby, one who might not be appeased by the five "S"s (and yes, we did 'em all) and who might be going through a clingy phase that will inevitably bother me if she won't show off her bound-to-be-goofy grin and sweet open-mouthed kisses like her brother used to give.

Bottom line: Julie is neurotic no matter what the circumstance.

Other bottom line: My kids (and I still love that plural) are, to borrow from Carrie and from Katie, my insides.

We had a great trip, Texas family! See you soon.

Week 2 A.K.

The helium "It's a Girl!" balloon that came with a friend's Edible Arrangement gift when I was in the hospital is still afloat. That's how new Katherine is.

It's kind of mind-boggling, that she's only been touchably, smellably, kissably here with us for two weeks and two days now. Or at least it was mind-boggling when I was struck by the improbability of that still-floating balloon while trying to rock her back to sleep at 2:30 this morning.

(In my defense, lots of things boggle my mind at that hour.)

The shake-up we experienced when Alex was born, the one I was fully expecting this time around, just never happened. It was like the buildup to Y2K ... and then when the nothing hit, you either felt silly for expecting something to happen or embarrassed for the world full of people who did. Of course, that was a nonevent, whereas this was not, by any means. It's just eventful in a wonderful way that I never expected, and that's hard for a pragmatist to admit.

She clicked right into place, like we'd had this little Katherine-shaped cutout in the middle of our family all this time and just didn't know it until she took her rightful spot there.

We've fallen into a comfortable daytime pattern wherein I freelance while she sleeps next to me, wrapped in a blanket, nestled in a Boppy, smiling and whimpering and startling the heck out of herself every now and then. She's distracting in the most awesome ways.

I don't turn the TV on until I've done my writing for the day, and I always shower and get dressed in real clothes so I don't feel like I'm a box of bon-bons and an episode of Days of Our Lives away from becoming an outdated and wildly off-base stereotype. For what it's worth, Days of Our Lives is way better now than it was when I was on leave five years ago, even if that's not saying much.

After lunch we'll lie down in my bed and she'll continue her several-hours-long nap and I'll take one that's much shorter and more refreshing than the dead-asleep kind I got into the habit of when I was pregnant with her. Then we'll get up and go pick up Alex at his school's summer camp program.

I don't miss adult conversation like I once did because there's always Facebook, text, and, when I'm breaking my own rules, DVR-ed gems like Toddlers and Tiaras and People's Court to catch up on (yes, I do). Plus, Steven usually comes home at lunch, gazes adoringly at Katherine for a few minutes, and makes a sandwich before heading back to work.

It's not a bad setup, all things considered.

Right now Katherine is telling me she's about to wake up and demand to eat, so that's it for now. Happy Friday Before a Long Weekend!

It's a Girl!

It's taken me a while to post this, but most anyone who is reading already knows ... I had a baby! Shocking, isn't it? Well it was for me! I mean, as much time and energy and money and emotional whatever-itude you put into planning for a new addition for ten whole months (more if you were scheming for it even before), when that new addition actually gets deposited on your chest covered in a warm blanket (and goo you'd cross the street to avoid under normal circumstances), it's shocking.

Anyway, I'll go backward since you already know the punchline, as it were.

This is Katherine Hall Bosche.

She was born June 16, 2010, at 11:39 a.m. via scheduled induction ... and epidural ... and an epidural booster ... and forceps. The use of forceps was minimal this time, I'm told, and only because my pelvis is weirdly shaped and not conducive to birthin' babies. So I guess I did the best I could do. Steven was impressed, which was satisfying in some vaguely validating way that probably says bad things about my need for approval.

Arriving at the hospital at 6 a.m. for induction was a muffled sort of terrifying. Muffled because who can muster real terror that early? I do know that I spent the three-minute drive to the hospital in a state of silent panic.

Steven was wonderful and the nurses were young and sweet and nonthreatening and my doctor was calm and capable (if a very big fan of himself). The pain was worse than I remembered, but I did manage to labor to 8 centimeters before requesting the blessed needle in the back. In the meantime, having Alex and his grandmothers in the room was enough to keep me from making too big a deal about the pain (I didn't want to traumatize the boy).



Katherine was "tricky," they kept telling me. Her heart tones were perfect when nothing was happening, but when I pushed they'd go way down. Enough to worry my doctor and have them weighing the choice between forceps and a C-section. In the end they let me "labor down" for an hour to see if her head would come down to within forceps-grasping range. And I don't remember much about that hour except that it hurt and I worried. And when my doctor came back and the grandmothers left with Alex and pushing resumed, there followed the most intense experience of my life. Here I'll spare the details.

When she was out they immediately placed her on me, and on top of us both an almost-hot blanket, and I held her, chest to chest, and I couldn't see her face but Steven said she looked like me. And with the room still buzzing from the whirlwind of labor and delivery and me still trying to catch my breath and Steven still texting the moms to update them, the child at the center of all this activity and excitement fell asleep. It was all pretty incredible.



She is for all intents and purposes a dream baby, and we're still waiting for her to prove she's just been lulling us into a state of complacency so she can stage her coup, overthrow us, and rule the household with piercing wails and chronic dissatisfaction. (Oh, newborn Alex...)

But really. She amazes us.

She sleeps. Like, a lot. During the day we look forward to her two or three periods of alertness, when the three of us cluster around and admire her rarely glimpsed newborn-blue eyes as she blinks up at us in alien-esque slow motion.



She stretches. She scrunches her little body up, rear end stuck out and tiny feet crossed to mold herself into a little ball of irresistibility.

She makes funny faces. She has an entire repertoire of expressions already, most of which flutter over her features repeatedly while she sleeps, reminding us in rapid succession of Alex, of Steven, of me ... occasionally of someone we're not even knowingly related to.

She loves her big brother. His voice can stop her (granted, infrequent) bouts of crying in their tracks. She turns her head toward the sound of his voice and, when we let him hold her, she's happy as a clam and he is proud and adorable. I think her first two days home I did nothing but take pictures of the two of them together. He calls her "My best Katherine" and thanks me for having the best baby ever.



OK, so it's not all roses. Alex is adjusting in his own way, which entails little overreactions and uncharacteristic responses to things. Like when the turkey and cheese fell out of his sandwich and he exclaimed heartbrokenly, "Oh no, now it's just bread!!!" He's suffering more than his fair share of minor injuries, most of which are suspect, and he's not sleeping well. Worst for me is that he seems excessively eager to please, as if he's trying to ensure his good standing.

And he broke his damn Nintendo DS, a birthday gift that was doing double-duty as a you're-a-big-kid-now special rite-of-passage reward.

We're doing well. Settling into the new routine that won't really be a routine for another couple of years because with a baby predictability is hard to come by and with a toddler it's impossible. I'm trying to get out more than I did when Alex was tiny because I think we both suffered for my not doing so and I don't want to make that mistake again. Yesterday I braved Babies R Us and Old Navy, plus took her to a friend's house, and all were successful ventures that did not leave me in tears.

Her umbilical stump came off last night. She's growing up already.

My Only

Tomorrow at 6 a.m. I go in for induction (if that ends up being necessary). My body seemed pretty sure it wanted to do something today but then I took a nap and the contractions fizzled out and now I'm just feeling ... yeah, I have no idea. Whoever said words are my thing?

I just put my baby to bed on the air mattress in his room (his Nana is camping out with him tonight) and got an excellent reminder of the rewards of parenthood. "Here's your hospital hug," he said, squeezing the life out of me, "and I'll give you some energy for tomorrow." Bzzzzhhhhhp. Bzzzzzhhhhhhp. He gave me a double dose.

He's hanging on to a picture of me and gave me one of him to take to the hospital, and this show of age-appropriate self-soothing, this healthy manner of coping with temporary separation and the not-so-distant rush of monumental life change is a lesson I hope to hold on to forever.

"Oh yeah," he added before I shut the door. "Tell the doctor to get the baby out the easy way."

Building blocks

I sense it coming now, a feeling reminiscent of getting close to the last page of the last chapter in a book that's carved a piece out of you. I've always been one to mark these events, these "lasts," either consciously or not and without even a sense of why I find it so important to keep track.

There will be, and it's measurable in hours and days now instead of weeks and months, a last time I put my only child to bed. A last time we eat dinner as a family of three. A last time I wake up in the morning and don't have a daughter.

A last time I go through my day without carrying a picture of her face in my mind and my heart.

And who knows what today has in store? I could have already had those lasts and not even know it.

But that's ok. I know it's not really necessary, or even very advisable, to put more emotional stock in "endings" than they merit. To focus on what's not, anymore, is to undermine what's going to be.

Those books that stay with you, they built their foundation while you were staying up too late for comfort because you couldn't put them down.

And the little family of three that started with two almost-kids thrust into the roles of Mama and Daddy, plus a handful of baby who turned their world upside down, that little family doesn't cease to exist just because there's about to be a number four.

It's our foundation. It's who we were upon which we built who we are. And soon enough and without even knowing it's happening, the four of us will start the quiet construction of who we will be.

I think it's going to be pretty amazing.

58 months down, 14 days to go...

Far be it from me to complain ... but I can whine with the best of 'em.

I'm not saying I want her out right this second; I'm far from sucking down castor oil or seeking out bumpy back roads in the hopes of jostling her loose. What I am saying is that if I make it to Friday without an utter come-apart it will be a miracle.

When you're not sleeping (and can anyone aside from my husband attest to my unparalleled talent for sleeping?)

AND you're stretching out even the maternity clothes you once set aside with a snicker and a "maybe at the VERY end"

AND you're still having trouble breathing because the child won't get in the GO position already

AND the 107-year-old check-out lady at Publix tells you not to hurt yourself and puts your gallon of milk in the cart herself

AND your belly feels like what you imagine a boulder would feel if it were animate enough to feel pain and were badly, badly bruised

AND it's five thousand seventy-two degrees outside and your husband insists on setting the thermostat at an astounding 74 degrees during the day

AND it hurts to sit, stand, walk, recline, hover, lie, and lean...

When those things all hit at the same time and make your excitement a little bit sharper even as they dull your will to open your eyes in the morning, well that means it's almost time to be a mama again.

Four more days of work and then I can park it on the couch with a Diet Dr Pepper in my hand and the fan at point-blank range and not budge until either my water breaks or she crawls out of me a full-grown toddler.

Sap, unabashed.

In cleaning out old files I came across something I wrote a little over a year ago. I miss my little-bit-younger Alex.

***

Today we were astronauts. You were the spaceship driver, and even when you crashed five or six times you wouldn’t let me take over. My job was to cook the astronaut food.

Today I showed you a picture of my childhood dog, Bonnie, and told you she was in heaven. You cried like your heart was broken, then ran to your room and wouldn’t let me come in. Makes me want to put Jack and Charlie in plastic bubbles to make sure nothing ever happens to them. Let alone how I wish I could preserve your heart from those other inevitable fractures.

Today you told me you loved me repeatedly, unabashedly, apropos of nothing except that, well, you love me. Today you played hard and got sweaty and dirty and sticky. Today you played silly little-boy games and said words you think are bad and drove me crazy while we were eating dinner. Today you went grocery shopping with me and held my hand in the parking lot and rode in a race car cart and said hi to people at the store because you wanted me to tell you how nice you are.

Tonight you brushed your teeth with your new Spider-Man toothpaste and we read “Grow, Flower, Grow” and sang “Twinkle, Twinkle” instead of the ABC song (in keeping with the astronaut theme, I think). I kissed you goodnight and you were tired but determined not to be. I thought you were asleep but then you started laughing when I yelled at Jack for drinking out of the toilet. You put five thousand stuffed animals in bed with you and kept making the barking dogs bark until I threatened to take them away if you kept it up.

How long before this isn’t an ordinary day? Not long enough, I’m afraid.

Ready and Not.

Baby girl is officially full term plus one day now, which means that prescription I never got filled for stopping contractions can be tossed. Bring on the pain! I have a feeling she’s going to be stubborn and unpredictable, though, and what’s more that she’s going to make me work up until the very last minute because I can’t conceive of much less appealing—and I’m an expect-the-worster from way back.

The long weekend taught me that “cankles” are actually made worse by too much sitting; I had almost no swelling whatsoever the entire weekend, which I spent cleaning and walking and otherwise doing. Which means, by loose association, that being at work is hazardous to my health. I knew it.

Alex has decided that my going to the hospital to have the baby is simply out of the question. He’ll miss me too much, and that’s that. He wanted me to promise that I wouldn’t go, and because I was not emotionally prepared at the moment for a tearful scene but I also have an aversion to outright lying to appease the kid, I mumbled some cop-out like “We’ll see,” and distracted him with tooth-brushing and bedtime-story-reading. Could be he’ll be fine when the time comes; could trigger trauma that will have him in therapy for the next twenty years.

We’ll see, indeed.

And it could be he was just worn the heck out from a day of playing hard and launching rockets and baking brownies and making a conscious effort to do everything his dad was doing at any given moment. Plus, at one point while he was grilling the ribs, Steven had him running laps around the backyard to burn off some of the energy that was coming off him in waves of pure mania.

And then there was the hair-washing incident from hell, complete with a near-slip, which resulted in his choking on a mouthful of still-being-chewed pork rib, which I’m sure set him back both in the hair-washing phobia and in the misplaced belief that Mommy reacts appropriately to things sometimes.

I'm hoping for a speedy week and some progress toward D-Day and a better attitude and less back pain and relief from this internal bruised feeling. Also for an immediate and generous infusion of patience, as Alex stabbed me in my guilt zone by saying, “Maybe when your tummy goes back to normal you’ll feel better and be in a better mood.”

From the mouths of babes come things that make you want to relinquish your mama badge, crawl under the covers, and sleep till their predictions come true.

Pity Party

Two birthday parties in one weekend just about did me in. The first was for nephew #2, turning 2, whose mama was still in the hospital and thus unable to dote. Nicholas did his level best to keep up with the big boys as they ran around outside. There were Happy Meals and cake and almost-exclusive Lightning McQueen presents. (Big brother Jack has finally retired Thomas the Tank Engine in favor of the Cars star, so Nicholas is now a fan by default.)

I swear they had more fun than this.


And the birthday boy even found his smile when the cake showed up.


Then we were impromptuly (I know it’s not) invited to girl-next-door’s party on Sunday at 2. Smack dab in the middle of my naptime, but what are ya gonna do? I had fleeting hopes of sending Alex over solo; after all, the party was in the backyard so I could keep an ear on him if nothing else, but at the last minute he decided it would be best if I were there to sweat and swelter and watch him interact with his strange species.

It was an art party; evidently Liddy and family are very artsy. (I was relieved to see from the Happy Birthday banner that I’d made the right choice in deciding her name was Liddy-short-for-Lydia instead of Livvy-short-for-Olivia.)

I parked myself in a pseudo-shaded lawn chair and made decent small talk before the sweat started pouring off me in rivers and I gave up all attempts at pretending to be good company until at least early July, when I’m not carrying around what’s feeling more and more like a small-statured water buffalo.

The kids painted tiles that were all pushed together into one big canvas, and it was a group effort but try explaining that to a sweaty 5-year-old who has just watched some other kid squirt brown paint all over the square he had painstakingly decorated with red dots and glitter. And at some point most of them drifted away but Alex stuck to it like he aimed to salvage the whole drippy, gaudy, blobby, sad-looking piece. He failed, my child, but I give him points for effort.


There was almost a brawl between two little girls, and I was debating whether to mediate or place bets on the angrier of the two when we were saved by the cake.

The cake was artsy, too, and a little bit shocking. I think Liddy made it herself.

We escaped when it became clear to me that my choices were to succumb to heatstroke or go home and try to cool off. Alex, because tolerance for heat and noise and overstimulation is proportionate to youth and not-being-pregnant, went directly out to the backyard to rejoin the party from our side of the fence.

I took a freezing-cold shower and put my puffy feet up and waited for the Lost series finale to punch me in the heart.

Baby Andrew is still in the NICU; jaundice and a less-than-hearty appetite both standing in his way of coming home quite yet. I watched her feed him when I went to visit on Saturday. He’s tiny, his little head the size of a softball, and he looks, in true newborn fashion, like an angry little old man. Absolutely precious. Here’s hoping she can take him home soon.