Christmas Wrap-Up, 2011

Katherine's phrase du jour is shish kebab. Really not sure what she intends for it to be, but that's certainly what I hear.

"Katherine, do you want some milk?"
"Shish kebab."

"Katherine, where is your baby doll?"
"Shish kebab."

"Katherine, it's time to go night-night.. "
"No-wee-shish-kebab-no-weeeee!!!"

She also looks you directly in the eye, very seriously, and babbles incoherently for, oh, ten minutes at a stretch. If you smile and nod occasionally, and throw in a few "I know"s and "Really?"s, she doesn't require much from her audience in the way of feedback. When she's done talking, she nods definitively as if confirming that her point has been established, and wanders away.

I think she's practicing for her valedictorian speech at Harvard. Or Yale. One o' them kudzoo places.

Christmas was wonderful. It poured down rain all day long, making everything warm and cozy inside and inspiring me to shower and put on clean pajamas in preparation to spend the day not leaving the house. And I didn't!

I did, however, have to roast the turkey since Steven couldn't fry it in the rain. Unprepared for such a turn of events (it doesn't rain on Christmas!), I had to work with what I had on hand and a little help from Alton Brown on roasting times. Turns out that slathering anything in butter, garlic, and lemon juice, sprinkling it liberally with salt and pepper, and stuffing it with celery and onions yields good things. It's times like these that I'm glad I'm an ad libber in the kitchen.

I recommend that everyone have four Christmases each year. That's what we did: One with my sister and her three boys the day before Christmas Eve. Then Christmas Eve with my parents. Then Christmas the real thing, then a trip to Houston for Christmas with Steven's family. All were worth all of the December madness we all have to endure before the big day actually arrives. Alex enjoyed every second of his time with both sets of grandparents and both sets of cousins, and Katherine enjoyed the chaos, the wrapping paper, and the zoo. (Except for the part of the zoo where she approached a deceptively adorable little British boy who balled up a fist and socked her in the nose. She was not upset, per se, but she was baffled.)

For some reason, Christmas decorations and all things related to the holiday become hopelessly depressing as soon as it's over. That's why I was itching to get ours down. The tree was dismantled and taken to the recycle place yesterday (Alex was thrilled to learn our tree's new incarnation will be as a fish habitat in the Cahaba River), and I've pretty much found a home for all the new toys and assemblage of "stuff." My grandmother's cedar chest is now doing double duty as our coffee table and a cleverly incognito toy box. Although until I find some hinge locks it's not usable as much more than a digit guillotine.

I can't believe 2011 is over already. In fact, I'll probably have to write another blog post later if you'll pardon my spam. I need to reflect on the year past.

Brace yourself. This one's a downer.

As I sit here, choking down a sugary-plastic-coated Christmas-tree-shaped snack cake decorated with green sugar dots and red sugar lines, I feel compelled to write a post about death.

Wait. Don't call anyone. I'll explain.

Lately it's been on my mind a lot, usually there and gone like things we don't enjoy pondering too closely tend to do, but fleeting thoughts are thoughts, and I've been thinking. I have friends who have lost people recently: A mother. A grandmother. A baby. I know of people who have lost people recently. A son. A wife. I know people who probably won't be with us much longer: An uncle. Mine, in fact.

And then there are those who will step out unexpectedly, without warning or time to finish all those little things we tell ourselves we'll finish later. Because it's cliche, but there's not always a later. And one thing that's guaranteed is that we all, at some point, preferably later than sooner, will run out of later.

My husband sent me a spreadsheet of things I would need to know "in case." I hated that. As much as I know it's something we all have to entertain at some point in life, just looking at the words and numbers he'd entered into little Excel cells made me want to cry. I didn't, which is a small miracle. I'm known for my tendency to tear up at the very mention of tears.

My parents have told me where to find their important afterthings. I need to know, I suppose, but I don't want to know. Or, rather, I don't want to need to know. Ever. Ever.

I don't want to do it, I don't want anyone I know to do it. And it has nothing to do with my faith. I happen to believe in God, and heaven, and an afterlife that involves reunions with those who have gone before us ... including my childhood dog Bonnie, who will probably be too busy being snobbish to the other dogs to even notice when I step through the pearly gates.

I envision the scene that could play out if the odds were to screw us over: a bunch of people standing in a circle around our two crazy kids, eyeing them with trepidation, mentally calculating school clothes, grocery bills, and college funds, willing themselves not to be the first to say "one, two, three, NOT-IT!"

"It." Always "it." Because I don't even like to type the word. Does anyone? We euphemize the hell out of it: lost, passed, went, is gone, didn't make it ... but it all boils down to that word no one wants to say. It seems to be the most widespread and longstanding of all human superstitions. I mean, I'm not going to stand in front of the mirror with the lights off chanting Bloody Mary; I don't walk under ladders; I can't stand the numbers 3, 6, and 13 (don't ask me about the middle one; it doesn't make sense). I don't, however, throw spilled salt over my shoulder because I don't like a mess.

So I don't say that "D" word any more than I have to. Sure, the plant died. Okay, the battery died. Even, Lord help me, the car died.

But nothing else. Ever.

Sorry for the downer of a post, but it's on my mind. It. And I needed to get It out if I'm ever going to sleep tonight.

If I know you, it's pretty darn likely that I love you or at least LIKE you. (I pretty much like most people unless they are mean to my kids, rude to waiters, or carpool line cutters.) So be careful. Say your prayers. Don't break mirrors or open umbrellas inside or say things like, "What's the worst that could happen?" or, like that notorious fool on the Titanic: "God himself could not sink this ship."

Sure, it's likely nothing will happen if you do any of those things. But you won't see ME chancing it. And don't be surprised if, when I catch YOU chancing it, I body check you.

Facebook? Yes, please.

So let's talk about Facebook. Sometimes I think to myself, "Self? You post entirely too often on Facebook. It makes you look needy/overthinky/not busy enough to do other things." But for me, it's not about showcasing my kids (though I do plenty of that) or detailing my mundanity (though I do PLENTY of that) or spouting bumper sticker platitudes (I'm honestly not sure if I do that or not, but tell me if I do and I'll try to stop).

It started when I lost my job. That sounds so innocuous, "lost my job." I, along with people I cared about and people I started caring about the second we were thrown in the dinghy together, were ripped out of the fabric of an institution that has been idealized from what it was but which, for better or for worse, has become the yardstick by which I measure all other organizations. Not that I know a lot about those, really. I got a job almost immediately after being cast out of what has become Eden in my absurdly revisionist memory.

I had some great friends there. I have those great friends still. But I wonder sometimes if I would, had I not jumped on the Facebook bandwagon.

And then it became something more. A new job that didn't agree with me and at which I was slowly losing skills I'd spent almost a decade honing, coupled with my inherent ability to miss people from the tips of my toes kept me clinging, and clinging hard.

And then it became something more. I quit that job, came home to raise a baby and try my hand at trying my hand on my own. On the days I felt like a shut-in, or on the days I felt like I was doing it wrong, all of it, and had no illusions of anything but continuing to do it all wrong till the end of time, I used it like a life raft.

And now? Now it's more about keeping those ties that would've probably been severed long ago. That, and keeping myself from going stir-crazy in a house with only a busy and often-baffling one-and-a-half-year-old and two senior golden retrievers to keep me company.

It's a touchstone. And so I use it. Forgive me if I use it too often, and if you're sick of hearing about my plans for the day or the latest weird thing Katherine did or the latest unintentionally funny thing Alex did or why I love life one day and want to run away to Fiji the next ... well, feel free to defriend me, and I'll pretend I didn't notice.

A blog, on the other hand, feels like a safe place to blather on as I tend to do if given half a chance, and so here we are. I would tell you that Alex is driving me nuts with his perfectionistic tendencies which clash spectacularly with his newfound interest in origami tutorials on YouTube, or that Katherine has started speaking Swahili, best I can tell, or that the workflow is either white-water-rapids fast or stagnant like a swamp, or that my attempts to climb back on the diet-and-exercise train have all but failed because "idunwanna" has become a viable excuse ... but it's getting on up toward my bedtime and I never write more than I can conceivably complete to my satisfaction before I fall into bed.

So this is the Julie version of the short story: Tonight Katherine was the cutest thing I've ever seen, wearing nothing but tights over a diaper, belly hanging over the top of the tights, babbling incoherently at Charlie because she wasn't taking the pieces of dog food K was trying to shove between her teeth. Tonight Alex told me I'm the best mom ever and then, later, insisted (against my protests) that I'm "disappointed at" him because he's "only" on Level L books. (Which, fwiw, is equivalent to a third grade reading level.) Tonight I had soup for dinner and pizza for a pre-bedtime snack, which is probably one of the reasons I'm not exactly meeting my weight-loss goals at the rapid clip I had hoped for.

Tonight I had a fleeting idea for a story, maybe even a book, and then I lost it because the Dexter season finale broke my brain.

Tonight Katherine decorated our Christmas tree with tampons and I found my new lipstick floating in the glass of water I keep by my bed.

Tonight Alex slipped and called Steven "Daddy" instead of "Dad," and my heart broke just a little.

And who knows what tomorrow will bring? I'll likely put the highlights (or the lowlights) on Facebook, for my own reasons and against my better judgment. I might tell the world how much it sucks that you miss someone the most when you know you won't be seeing them for a while. Or how hard it is to not tell your kid to hang on for another week, he'll have real origami paper come Christmas and not have to make his origami ninja stars out of random pieces of looseleaf. Or how my heart leaks out of my body when Katherine appears out of nowhere, wraps her arms around my leg, and says, "Mwah!" Or how Alex and I are reading books by the same author. Or how much I love my friends and their ability to say the rightest possible thing at the rightest possible time. Or how weird I think it is that spell-check didn't put a squiggly red line under "rightest" just then.

For now, I'm going to read a chapter of my terrible teen horror novel, wish that I had the patience and the time to write one of my own, and then hope I can sleep and that Katherine's snot doesn't wake her up so that we're both equally cranky in the morning.

Because I have work to do. And she has messes to make.

Life is sweet, messy, maddening, and worth it.

TV and other mommy crimes

I ran out of cheesy secondhand teen horror novels, was just slightly underwhelmed by tonight's installment of my current television obsession, and am nowhere near tired enough to turn in, so here I am, scrounging out a long overdue (but pretty fluffy) blog post.

In Alex news, he's becoming a chess champion but still ends up guessing the wrong person when you play Guess Who? with him, which leads me to believe someone, somehow, is doing something wrong. We've made sure he knows the difference between a beard and a mustache, and where a goatee falls in the mix, and whether or not someone with just a ring of hair around the sides counts as bald and that "orange" hair is actually called red hair, and still, you'll be down to the wire and he'll be all, "Is your person George?" And you feel a twinge of pity when you have to say, "No. My person is Nancy."

But ask him which ways pawns move or what's the best strategy to protect your king or bishop or whatnot, and he's all over it.

He is now Alexander at school, in part I think because the other Alex in his class is an Alejandro, and the teacher wanted to differentiate but was iffy on how to pronounce the latter (or maybe just hasn't heard the Gaga song). And Alex is fine with being Alexander, and I am fine with him being Alexander because that's what I wanted him to be in the first place but everyone takes liberties and it's easier to just let them.

He moved up another reading level, he's into origami, and I'm easing him into becoming a horror-genre fanatic like his mama. We started small, with Goosebumps and R.L. Stine's Haunting Hour, but I have big future dreams of his accompanying me to the theater to see Blair Witch XII or Texas Chainsaw Massacre Returns years down the line. We were both a little freaked out by the Scary Mary episode of Haunting Hour, but in my defense I was subjected to a disturbing (if giggly) Bloody Mary experiment with my sister and her friend at the tender age of 5 and will never quite live down the trauma. But since then, and once you get past the extreme 1990s, extreme Canadianness (no offense intended), and extreme bad child acting of Goosebumps, it's not so horrible. And it's a sight better than Caillou.

Yes, Katherine has fallen under the spell of that infamous bald 4-year-old boil on the butt of cartoon-kind. If I were a better mother, perhaps I would stimulate her brain by reading to her all day, having her put together 100-piece puzzles singlehandedly, or taking her on a new, stimulating cultural adventure every day. Unfortunately (and not), I have to work. So she watches some TV. Her preferences are Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (tolerable, now that we're far enough out from Alex's Mouse-ka-days that the hot-dog song doesn't make me want to drive rusty nails into my eardrums), Fresh Beat Band (even WITH the new Marina and her giant mouth and never-gonna-measure-up-to-her-predecessor desperation), and yes, leading the pack, Caillou. She likes Elmo but has no patience for the other residents, whether human or monster or unidentifiable muppet creature, of Sesame Street.

Most of the time, though, she has no patience for sitting and watching TV, which is great except when she brings me a toy, book, or random object and slaps it right smack down into the middle of my keyboard, either coincidentally or not (as I'm beginning to believe) shutting down the program I was working in or inserting a whole bunch of errors that my clients would likely frown upon.

When she's doing something wrong and I catch her at it, she immediately stands up, smiles so sweetly you'd swear she's the female Damien, waves, and says, "Hiiii!" And you're wrong if you think that's not persuasive. Sometimes I manage to hide my laughter in the couch cushion, but my girl she is no dummy. But I tell her every day, cute will only get you so far. We still don't rip pages out of books, lick the dogs, or poke our fingers into the Blu-Ray player slot. And now that Christmas stuff is up, we don't take the crudely constructed wooden baby Jesus out of his makeshift cardboard manger and try to eat him. Call me strict.

Christmas shopping is all but done, and every day that goes by that I trip over Katherine's play vacuum or slip on an errant marble or jump when T.J. Bearytales lets out a bone-chilling blat of discordant music as his batteries slowly die makes me more set on the idea that my kids just don't NEED a whole lot. Give Katherine an empty box and a Happy Meal race car. Give Alex a piece of paper and find him a YouTube video of the lady who does step-by-step origami. They're all set.

That's it for now. I'm skipping over the ugly details of our recently ousted stomach virus because I'm still two brain-bleachings away from completely forgetting the ordeal. In fact, I'm skipping over a lot of things. But here is my nod to what we're up to in this almost-December of 2011 world. I take some solace in the fact that there's no more significant news to report.

Wherein I blog badly

Forgive me if this post is only semi-literate. I'm tired. Katherine was up all night for the first time in ... well, ever ... and that's including those newborn days when she would wake up, suck down a midnight snack, and go straight back to sleep. Yes, I know how lucky we were.

Last night was a different story. She was very obviously having trouble getting comfortable. It started with moaning, tossing and turning. At one point I went in and her head was pressed up against the foot of the bed, one arm flung over the back of her head and one leg sticking through the bars of her crib (and here I thought one of the bazillion crib recalls had addressed that particular hazard).

She was fine as long as I was holding her, but when this became clear it was 3:30 in the morning and I didn't fancy standing next to her crib holding her for the next three hours. So I thought to myself, Self, no one is getting any sleep this way. Let's just put her in our bed. Myself and I did so. And we discovered, quickly, that our girl is a burrower. She would wiggle around until her face was smushed right up against my own, which was fine and dandy except that my nose and mouth were buried in her chubby cheeks and I couldn't breathe. So I moved, and she went over to her daddy, who was still out cold, and burrowed into his side until he woke up and made the grave mistake of rubbing her head, which she took as a sign that it was time to play. Cue flopping and rolling and general delirium culminating in her patting (slapping) me on the face a few times, until I opened my eyes and looked at her ... and she waved "hi" at me.

Suffice it to say, bringing her in bed with us is not an option.

Today, after a trip to the doctor, we know it's a virus and an ear infection and she's started antibiotics and is Motrined up. My plan is to attempt to sleep on the couch with her if it proves to be a night like last night. I figure one of us should get some peaceful sleep, and why not let it be Steven, since I can ostensibly neglect to shower and/or dress and still get some work done tomorrow.

Which brings me to the all-around ick that was this day.

Sometimes I think on-the-job training is insufficient when it comes to parenthood. There should be a boot camp of sorts, an immersion crash course covering every scenario you might possibly encounter over the next eighteen years and then some.

I mean, parenthood. It's arguably the most important job there is, right, and there's nothing that can prepare you for all it entails. It's the great equalizer, isn't it? We grow these creatures in our bodies, we plan and prepare and stockpile gear and necessities and read All Those Books like our lives depend on it and formulate opinions on things we never before considered (cloth or disposable? breast or bottle? co-sleeping or crib? paci or not?). We decorate nurseries as though matching a bed skirt to a window treatment or finding the perfect shade of paint for those wooden wall-hanging monograms of the future occupant's future name is going to make one bit of difference.

The rules change when it becomes reality, and that happens at different times for different people. Women, more often than not, have their epiphany earlier than men, who don't suffer the back pain or the massive body changes, the blood pressure ups and downs and the sleep deprivation from fifteen nightly trips to the bathroom, who don't feel the squirms and bumps of an ACTUAL BABY growing and subsisting in their ACTUAL BODY.

Fast-forward six years, to the child who someone less sensitive than I might call our guinea pig. When we had him, my husband and I barely knew anything about being grownups, much less parents. We got dogs and thought they were a good-enough trial run. Essentially, we were stupid. Or at least its kinder equivalent, naive. Ever since, there has been something new around every corner. First diaper change, first trip to Children's Hospital ER, first public tantrum, first day of kindergarten, first day he didn't want me to sing him a song before bed ... firsts every day, every single day.

It hasn't been easy lately. In some ways my boy is old beyond his years. The child has been speaking coherently since the ripe old age of nine months, and while he has retained certain little Alexisms from yesteryear (i.e. he still says "I had bleed," instead of "I bled," for instance, and his prepositions and verb tenses aren't so polished, and some of his mispronunciations I will never correct because they are just damn cute and I'll probably continue to think so when he's sixteen and other people deem it a bit odd). But he's six. He's six and growing up too fast because that's what kids do these days. I don't think we did. But maybe members of every generation believe that they were kids longer than they were, because childhood, when you're in it, seems eternal, vast and all-encompassing with no boundaries or time constraints.

So, as a mother, I struggle to merge the duality of my son's six-year-oldness and his desire and sporadic successes at being, or at least seeming, much older than that.

"You have recess after lunch?" my mother asked him one day.

"Yes, that's correct," he replied seriously.

Who talks like that? My sometimes-pretentious first-grade man-in-the-making.

Now, and by now I mean this week, he's obsessed with sportsmanship. He is a bad sport, he says, and having seen some of his disproportionate outbursts when he loses, I can't honestly disagree with him. But we've discussed how it's a choice, not how he feels when he loses, but what he does with how he feels. (Sometimes therapy starts at home.)

But he stubbornly refuses to admit that he knows that's the case. "I made the choice to be a good sport," he told me tonight through gritted teeth, from behind the pantry door where he'd chosen to hide so as to avoid looking me in the eye. "It didn't work."

Just now I went into his room for our reading time, and I found a note on his floor.


"That's for you," he said.

"Oh really, what's it for?"

"You told me how to be a good sport, and now the good sport is just popping right out of me."

I hope, hope, hope, that we're doing right by him. But again, without the handbook, who ever knows? I wish there were report cards for parenthood. Something to let you know if your kid is on the path to greatness, or to simple happiness, or to self-fulfillment ... or to prison. Not that those are the only options, mind, but I'd take any of the first three.

And I know it's not all nurture because nature plays a role. From that I take solace and find new worries, because I am me and it's my nature.

No one instilled it in me. It's just me.

Just like Alex is Alex, sweet and stubborn and earnest, goofy and serious and fiercely loyal, tenderhearted, maddening, and temperamental.

Just like Katherine is Katherine, affectionate and obstinate, funny and exasperating, a hyperactive, intoxicated monkey as a bunkmate and a squishy piece of heaven after bathtime.

All I can say is that we're doing it, day by day, helping these little people grow and trying our blind best to facilitate that growth, to guide without pushing, and to instill in them the simplest and the most important fact that anyone can hope to possess: that they are loved without question and beyond reason.

Home Work

I work from home.

We know this.

I hear comments all the time about how lucky I am to be able to do that, and I agree, and I'm endlessly grateful that it has (as of this blog post) worked out well for me. God, I hope I'm not tempting fate by saying that!

When I worked in an office, especially in my most recent one, I spent five days a week longing wistfully for the weekend, spinning fantasies of working from home in pajamas and fuzzy socks, editing at my leisure without interruption and maybe even starting on that book I've been wanting to write since I set forth that goal at the age of 7, the comforts of home with (bonus!) enough work to keep my brain from atrophying, which it was doing at a rapid clip in my last incarnation as a not-so-glorified proofreader. (Side note: Never make the mistake of calling a copy editor a proofreader.)

The reality is that some of it is actually like that. I am partial to my fuzzy socks. I have, generally, a steady flow of work. Home is comfortable when the dogs aren't obsessively licking their paws and after I get in my daily dose of vacuuming. I cannot focus on anything if there is a strand of dog hair or a speck of dust on the floor, and I realize that doesn't make me sound precisely stable and I don't particularly care. Some people have their morning coffee. I have my morning Dyson.

Recently, though, I lost one of my main (minus the "one of") gigs and I feel obligated to say it was through no fault of my own but due to company cutbacks. (Aah, those. I'm familiar. Once upon a time a bunch of amazingly talented people worked together ... and then New York took over.)

Recently also, my baby became a toddler, which means that the days of two, two-hour-long naps are over and the days of abandoning the laptop to extract the child when she has managed to wedge herself between the coffee table and the couch with an oversized book, or of running to see what just fell in the kitchen, or of saying, "Don't touch" more times than is prudent before I actually get up and move her bodily. Or of cuddling the tears away when she leans over too far in the act of examining her belly button and tips over on the hardwood floor on her head.



Some days more time is spent comforting, cajoling, and containing the stress of knowing, at the back of my mind, that I'm going to be working into the wee hours to meet a deadline because my children come first. Unfailingly, unchangeably, unapologetically.

Not that they haven't always. Alex was in child care from the time he was 3 months old, and the time I got a call from the daycare to say he couldn't turn his head I fled my cubicle like my desk chair had spontaneously combusted and I was next. Meningitis, was my fear. A crick in the neck, it turned out to be.

But wiping snot with one hand and noting structural errors in prose with the other has become a regular day at the office, which happens to contain my couch, my fuzzy socks, my vacuum cleaner, and my beloved family.

Those recent developments (or, rather, setbacks) I mentioned before weighed on me for a while, but not a long while. Like, ten minutes, the time it took for me to hang up the phone and process the information before realizing that Katherine was being too quiet and finding her in the kitchen, happily patting an impressively tall pile of spilled kosher salt into the linoleum. And I knew I had no choice but to roll with it.

"We'll work it out," Steven tells me when I step over the line from stressed to anxious. And I believe him, even if he's just saying it because he needs to believe it, too. We do what we have to do, and we make things work. Sometimes they don't work quite the way we want them to, but then we just head down that path and see what's there. It can't hurt to look, and it may hurt more than you'll ever get the chance to know, not to.

It's a lesson I learned not so long ago, and one I'll keep learning every time something unpredictable happens and I'm forced to reevaluate. I'm tougher than I give myself credit for, more often than not. Or so I've been told by those who know me best.

But yeah, it's nice to work in fuzzy socks, and the spontaneous hugs and kisses from that walking maker of messes when I'm in the middle of a project that's due in ten minutes? That's priceless.

Dead fish and toddler frustration

Since I posted last, Alex's fish died. Again. Only this time there was no smooth cover-up operation, partly because I felt guilty for lying to him the first time and partly because, well, how many times can you replace a pet with such a naturally high mortality rate before (a) the kid notices or (b) you start to feel like you're taking the easy way out because you can't stand to see the kid sad.

And really, seeing the kid sad is pretty awful. I'm sure all parents feel that way about their kids, and I'm sure Alex's tears are not unique in their ability to make anyone who sees them feel like they did when the hunter shot Bambi's mother.

I debated ways to phrase the bad news, ranging from "Finny is no longer with us" to "Have you ever heard of fish heaven?" to "So, about that fish of yours..."

But "Finny's dead" popped out, Band-Aid ripped off, and it was like that time that I actually DID rip Alex's Band-Aid off and realized that that bit of advice is not to be universally employed. Like, for example, when the Band-Aid-covered wound is on the child's FACE and you have ten minutes before you have to take him to meet his kindergarten teacher with an angry red splotch on his cheek that looks suspiciously like a slap mark. Nice.

His grief over Finny was brief but intense, both of which seem to be defining characteristics of childhood emotions both good and bad.

Luckily for all concerned, we left for a long weekend with the Texas family the next day, leaving behind an empty aquarium filled with weeks' worth of fond memories of Finny the Fish (the Second, but you didn't hear that from me). For a while there was a shrine in the spot where the tank used to be, a water glass filled with water and a seashell, a note that was heartbreaking in its earnestness, and a spotlight fashioned from the aquarium lid.


Now that Alex's heart seems to have healed (a couple of weeks seems sufficient mourning time for a pet you've only had for a minute), he's on to bigger and better things. New DS games, for instance, and counting backwards by tens from 200, and jumping up three reading levels since the beginning of first grade. Life is in constant flux when you're six.

Katherine has suddenly grown dimples because, apparently, her face didn't think it was irresistible enough without them. Were I one to be swayed by cuteness, we might have a problem in the coming years. Steven is one to be swayed by cuteness, so we'll see how that shakes out.

We're fully ensnared in Mother's Day Out two days a week now, and the drop-offs are as not-fun as I remember them from Alex's child-care days, and the pick-ups are generally filled with trepidation; the main teacher makes vague accusations like "She had her moments" and "When the mood of the room changes, she gets upset." And I try not to take it personally because these are not judgments on Katherine's 15-month-old character nor mine as her mother. I ask, after all, invariably, "How did she do today?" I guess I should inform her that the only answer I'm really interested in, whether true or false, is "Great!"

I've always been a proponent of the ignorance-is-bliss approach to life. I guess I could just quit asking.

I'm ready for her to start talking more now, and not because I'm paranoid. I know that she will start talking and that one day, if she's anything like her brother, we'll wonder that we ever wanted to rush it. But I do think it would cut back on some of her frustration. She knows what she wants unfailingly, at all times. And she wants you to know that she knows what she wants. And she wants you to give it to her. Yesterday. "More, more, more," she signs incessantly, increasingly frustrated as you play the destined-for-failure guessing game. "More what? More milk? More goldfish? More Fresh Beat Band? More ... patience?"

When you stumble upon the correct more, she rewards you with one of the newly dimpled grins, and you've earned a gold star for cracking the code.

The whole tiring scene, replayed fifty-some-odd times a day, makes me think fondly and perhaps a little revisionistically on Alex's baby days, when he said things like "Mother, a cookie would really hit the spot" and "I would like for you to pick me up now." OK, no, but certainly "Cookie, peez!" and "Up, peez, Mama!"

Katherine just likes to make us work for it a little harder. She is honing her feminine powers.

In the meantime, I just need to improve my guessing skills.

Not so deep thoughts

Tonight I am extra thankful for my husband.

I guess it's easy to take the really good ones for granted. The ones who bathe the baby without being asked, who know when you're upset and need to be left alone versus when you're upset and need someone to be just as righteously angry as you are versus when you just need a good hug and an assurance that it's going to be okay.

I try not to do that, take it for granted, because I know how lucky I am. I know that Steven is One of the Good Guys, and I'm pretty sure they're few and far between. At least from what I've seen. He makes me laugh, he keeps me sane. He loves me when I'm finding it hard to love myself. He is my balance, my anchor, my home. And, thank God, he's the father of my children.

My baby is now walking, and I think the crippled-crab crawl is gone forever. Bittersweet. She still walks sort of like Frankenstein, and the least distraction has her freezing and holding her arms out for balance, and she has the first little scrapes on her perfect baby skin, knees and elbows, from taking tumbles that she gets right back up from and keeps going on her merry way. She occasionally holds on to my finger but more often than not pushes my proffered hand away in a grand gesture of independence. Last week at a bookstore she insisted on doing it herself, and it took us a good 20 minutes to make it from the back of the store to the checkout counter, but she was proud as could be.

My other baby (who says I can still call him that, but only in private) is a big first grader, who likes to sit on the first grade bench and who has decided he's in love with our former neighbor girl. One day when his class was on the way to recess, Liddy was en route to the bathroom when she saw Alex, ran over, and hugged him. When she left, he says, a little girl from his class asked, "Who WAS that?" which led Alex to believe that she is in love with HIM, and has determined that he shouldn't tell her he's in love with Liddy because it might hurt her feelings.

Who knew the soap operatic antics begin in first grade?

Katherine will be starting Mother's Day Out two days a week in a few weeks. I know the first day is going to be hard for both of us. After all, we have not been separated, essentially, since conception, my girls' beach weekend notwithstanding. MDO will give me eight hours a week of uninterrupted work time, and the idea of THAT is so tempting that maybe I will be able to let go of her tiny hand and walk out without crying. You'd think it would be easier with the second one, but since Alex was in care from the time he was 3 months old, it was different with him, somehow. But I honestly think his experiences have led to his (to me and his father) incredible ability to roll with the punches, to make friends in any environment, to be the strong, confident, easygoing kid he has grown to be.

I've been very content lately. Life is good. And when it's not, it's at least funny, interesting, or enlightening.

Katherine, who has taken to raiding our pots-and-pans cabinet, came out one night with a clear-Plexiglas pot lid, put it on her head like a hat, and laughed like it was the best joke ever. But the funniest thing to US was when Alex, cracking up himself, said, "Katherine's a pot head!"

Oh, kids.

I've managed to scare up some extra work and have yet to be let go from my primary source of income even though their recent "restructuring" scared the daylights out of me. I originally said I'd give this work-at-home deal a try for a year and if it didn't work out, I'd go back to an office job. But the time I get with the kids that I wouldn't have any other way is precious, and I wouldn't trade it even on the days when I have a triple deadline and Katherine isn't in the mood to let go of a big handful of my hair.

It's stuff you don't get back. Like the crab crawl. Like fluffy-haired Alex. Like watching them grow up, little by little, and still being startled when the older one comes into the room with pajamas that fit him a second ago suddenly stopping well above his ankles. Like going from Mommy to Mom without realizing it's happening.

It's no different for moms who work outside the home; I've been one of those, too.

If I learned anything from my first go-round with parenting, it's that nothing is insignificant and that it's important to take mental snapshots along the way.

Life is funny, even when it's boring

I have this fantasy of life running like a well-oiled machine. Laundry doesn't pile up. Dishes are promptly loaded into the dishwasher, washed, and put away. Dinner disasters don't happen. The children are sweet and happy and entertain themselves quietly while I get my work done. The floors don't keep needing to be mopped because of muddy pawprints, and the culprits of those pawprints don't keep making their beds in the mud under the deck. There is no dust. There are no stray goldfish crackers in the crevices of the couch, or greasy little handprints on the TV screen. I don't lose my cool, ever, and my hair is always presentable. And I don't wear clothes with dried arrowroot cookie smudges on them.

It doesn't last too long, the fantasy, because usually by the time I get to the laundry part I'm too busy running the vacuum cleaner (or lately, my Godsent little handheld Dirt Devil) to suck up breakfast crumbs under the table or scrubbing sticky finger leavings from the chairs.

And then I sit down to do my work, be it editing or writing or occasionally self-promoting so that I can do more editing and writing. Katherine plays happily for a good 15 minutes while her breakfast digests and The Fresh Beat Band is on, Alex takes about twice that long to get dressed (factoring in the inevitable re-do that comes when he dresses in clothes he got out of the dirty-clothes hamper, puts on a shirt that fit him two years ago but that now shows his belly button, or just forgets what he was doing altogether, on which occasions I find him sitting on his floor in his underwear, making signs for the aquarium he's going to open in his bedroom, admission required and a Betta fish the main and only attraction).

I realize that, if you'll excuse the analogy, the road of life has potholes. Big ones. The kind you can lose a tire in, if you're not extra-careful, or at least jostle something loose from the undercarriage and spend a few weeks worrying about the rattling sound until it goes away on its own.

But some weeks it's harder to remember that the road always smooths out. Some weeks you're just plain spent. Or just plain anxious. Or just plain overwhelmed. And I've come to understand that those kinds of weeks are okay too, as long as you don't get stuck there and let the mind-set best you.

So now I'm always looking toward the next thing that's going to push me out of the pothole. Alex starting back to school is one. Katherine starting to walk is another, and my back is thanking me for it.

Much less is it thanking me for my recent decision to undertake Jillian Michaels' 30-Day Shred, which got rave reviews all over the place and which, from my first session, I've decided is a form of preparation for an afterlife spent in Hell. (I need to go to church.)

Alex has a new backpack (it bothers him that it's flat, but I told him it will get less flat when there's stuff IN it) and a new lunchbox even though he usually buys his lunch because I am A Lazy Mother. He has tie shoes and he calls them that, "tieshoes," like it's just the one word, and they come untied about 75 times a day, so apologies in advance to his first-grade teacher.

I know he's ready to go back to school because he's complaining about being bored, which he knows means I'll put him to work, and he's doing weird things like tying his tieshoes together and trying to walk across the backyard, peeing into an empty water bottle and hiding it behind the toilet (???), and playing hide-and-seek with Katherine, who forgets she's playing after 60 seconds and leaves him crouched under my bed for half an hour before he realizes she's not looking for him.

Katherine, while we were waiting for her incisors to pop in so we could have our sweet girl back, cut two surprise teeth at the same time, further back and seemingly VERY painful. So now I understand her weeklong upset. She's back to laughing, walking like a very short, very drunk person, falling on her well-padded behind, and giving everything in sight big open-mouthed kisses. I was flattered until I saw her kissing Steven's shoelaces the other night.

So, all in all, right now things are. We're in a holding pattern while Big Things await. I'm doing some editing for a former co-worker who left the pack, moved to Orlando, and created a wonderful publication called Edible Orlando (edibleorlando.com). I'm doing some editing for Oxmoor House, the book division of Southern Progress ificanstillcallitthat. I'm writing daily health and wellness posts for a corporate wellness company and can maybe feel a bit less hypocritical about those if I manage to survive the next 29 days, JILLIAN. I'm writing for Alabama magazine, and have written for Birmingham Home & Garden. I'm working on a little project of my own, too, and am determined to stick with it this time and not let my muse die as it has so many times before.

I'm busy and I'm stumbling along and I'm no longer feeling guilty for being SO INCREDIBLY READY for my boy to go back to school. I think of Katherine's morning naps and of all the work I can get done in blessed silence.

Sometimes I miss an office, even if it was just two flimsy walls with a big beach umbrella overhead (what WERE those anyway?). I miss people who don't drool on me or try to steal my F2 key. (I'm not sure what it does, honestly, but thanks to Katherine now I'll never know.)

But mostly I feel lucky to be doing what I'm doing and that I still enjoy it and that people still seem to think I'm good enough to give me more and more work.

And aside from the work part, I've recently re-realized the fact that God knew exactly what He was doing when He put Steven and me together and gave us these amazing, frustrating, temperamental, earnest, confounding, fascinating, hilarious, heartrending kids. Thanks for that.

Back to school ... YES!!!

Katherine is walking. Ish. She took her first few steps when we went to the beach with the Bosches and the Jacobses (Steven's parents, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and their three adorable children), and since then has been getting more confident little by little. She still prefers her crippled-crab crawl, but that's OK with me because I'm going to miss it when it's gone. I've never seen a baby move as fast as she does by propelling herself with one leg stuck out in front of her. Steven says she reminds him of that weird spider-doll thing in the Toy Story movies. I think that's creepy.

I'm so ready for school to start. I love Alex ... ADORE him, in fact ... as anyone who knows me can attest. But having the two of them home since May has been a challenge, and that's putting it mildly. A home-based job simply does not lend itself to entertaining an energetic 6-year-old at the same time as meeting the diametrically opposed needs of a 1-year-old and getting the amount of work done that I should and want to. I'm not complaining about the work; this is my dream scenario, and I'll do whatever it takes to ensure that it stays this way for the foreseeable future. But I never really considered the logistics, back in the days when Katherine slept 22 out of 24 hours and was content to lie next to me on the couch in her Boppy while I fed her with one hand and typed with the other.

I miss those days a little bit. Seems like I was extraordinarily productive. But if I'm honest with myself, I'm pretty darn productive these days, especially under the circumstances. I've taken on more projects and am not feeling bogged down at all. In fact, it gives me quite a charge to multitask, something I never really felt when I had an office job. I can throw in a load of laundry and give the kids lunch (thank God Katherine is now self-feeding) and get back to my laptop in a matter of minutes, and every now and then I can have an awesomely terrible movie like Paranormal Entity on in the background while I do some of the less-cerebral work (i.e. formatting, which consists largely of cut and paste). Not that I watched Paranormal Entity last week. Not that if I had, I would have really, really enjoyed it. Nope.

But it's been mostly a challenge to see to it that Alex didn't get cabin fever all summer. Don't get me wrong; he is excellent at entertaining himself. He plays spy games outside, he tries to train two senior-and-set-in-their-ways golden retrievers, he watches Scooby Doo and plays with his sister and finds new and weird crafts to make. Just last week I was presented with a bracelet made out of yarn, Scotch tape, and a quarter, and today he used his new skill, which is blowing up balloons and tying them, to make a whole family of balloon people.

He got a new fish. It's a beta that he named Finny. It lives in a small tank with a barely working filter and a gigantic alien skull that is really not at all attractive. Steven is responsible for both the fish and the skull. I told him he's also responsible for picking up the pieces of Alex when that fish inevitably dies, which, from my experience with fish, I know could be at any second, for any reason. I have a really poor track record with fish, going back to Frank, my first one, when I was about 9. I'm sorry, Frank.

Fridays have been our "fun" days, and the "fun" is in quotation marks for me, not for Alex, who loved every minute. We've done Chuck E. Cheese, bowling, swimming pool, and Pump It Up, the inflatable wonderland where I spend most of my time chasing after Katherine, who does not understand why she can't participate in the bouncy fun. I told her last time that she would get squished. She didn't care, and expressed that sentiment to me at the top of her lungs.

So yeah. One more week. And this week Alex is going to a fine arts camp at a local church from 9 to 12:30 every day, so I'm guiltily glad for that, too. Surely it'll be more fun than making balloon people and coming up with new and innovative ways to scam money out of his parents. (He opened a "LIBRARIE" in his room the other day and charged me 25 cents to check out a Clifford book and an Encyclopedia Brown that we got out of the free bin at 2nd & Charles.)

I'm grateful for every new project I get, for every day that I have the steady work that keeps Katherine in diapers and me as busy as I want to be without making me so overwhelmed I want to tear my hair out. I am grateful that I have healthy, happy children who do their damnedest on a daily basis to circumvent me from DOING that work, and for a husband who takes over when he gets home so I can make up for the time I spent being Julie the Mommy instead of Julie the Freelancer.

I'm grateful for a wonderful beach vacation where I got to see my boy trample his fear of water like it had never been, and ride gentle waves with my girl on a float while she pointed excitedly to every boat, parasailer, person, and seagull and asked, "DAT??" And for the people with whom we shared the experience.

And today, especially, I'm grateful for people out there, two in particular who are on my mind and heart, who are willing to turn their lives upside down for the good of others. Ian and Laura, I don't know if either of you will see this, but God bless you both, and all three of those little ones.

Meandering...

So Katherine turned 1 and I didn't even blog about it. Strike 1. She sort of shared Alex's birthday party, which was three days before his real birthday, five days before hers. Strike 2. I read all these things about people who do the whole shebang: themes and matching floral arrangements, little duckie centerpieces and alphabet-block ice sculptures and whatnot ... and I wish I could say I had the time or energy to do those things, but I don't.

I will remember how I scooted her chair up to the table and she leaned forward at the same time and her forehead went right into the pretty pink cake. And how dainty she was, plucking little gobs of icing off the top and sucking on her fingers with her eyes full of pleased confusion. I will remember that she was little, and sweet, and extremely tired because she'd missed her morning nap. I will remember how much fun she had splashing in the baby pool by herself because her cousin Andrew wanted nothing to do with it, and how she kept taking her sunhat off every time I wasn't looking. I will remember that my friends and my sister-in-law and my husband did most of the party cleanup before I even realized it was happening.

As far as the actual day, she was out-of-sorts, and it turned out she had an ear infection, which we didn't know until her 1-year checkup last week. We blamed it on teething, which has been our go-to excuse for Kranky Katherine since she was about 5 months old, even though she still has only two and a half teeth.

It's been a year, and it slipped by so fast it's scary. It could have been last week that I woke up in the hospital with this surprisingly powerful need to get my baby back from the nursery.

So different.

She. I finally got used to saying it.

As far as life in general goes, I've had better times, but I've also had far, far worse ones. I'm stressed, spread very thin and stretched like a rubber band some days. I wonder how I'm going to get it all done. I berate myself for things that I wouldn't blink an eye about if anyone else did them.

I've been told that distance between people is relative and variable, and I try to believe it. Because sometimes it feels like it's all passing me by, this thing called life that other people are engaged in while I scratch at the walls and over-update my status on Facebook and try to be better, better, always better.

Sometimes good enough is good enough. And sometimes it takes someone else to point that out to you.

So maybe I'm too close for perspective. Maybe I have to step back to see that I'm doing the best I can, which is, as I always say to Alex, what matters. But when you stop trying to do more, to be better, to eradicate mistakes and achieve perfection, do you stop progressing? And progressing toward what? Some arbitrary fantastical pinnacle of perfection where everything is excruciatingly boring in its perfectness?

A good friend of mine from childhood lost her mother this week. I miss her, my friend, and hurt for her hurt, and wish I hadn't lost touch with her. Her mother once took us to five different stores on a misguided search for hazelnuts so we could bake a cake for a French class project. She was funny, sweet, and real.

That's perspective.

Next week I hope I can do more, be better, but most of all, be more okay with the ways in which I fall far short of perfect. I love my kids, I love my husband, I love my damn dogs. Our life is good. We are happy more than we are not.

Surely, surely, that's a gift.

Six

I had a baby six years ago today.

He was born at 3:59 p.m., weighing in at 7 pounds, 9 ounces, 19 inches long. He had some wispy newborn hair which he subsequently lost, plus a bruise in the shape of the doctor's thumb on his forehead. Not to mention what we thought up until a year ago was a broken collarbone. (Now we know his clavicle just didn't form quite right inside me. Sorry, buddy.)

When he came out, Steven lapsed into slack-jawed silence. I shed a couple of tears as I got just the briefest glimpse of him before they whisked him off to clean him up and make sure he was breathing all right (meconium aspiration).

And then they brought him back to me, swaddled and wearing the ubiquitous newborn cap to cover his little conehead, and he opened his eyes and I saw that they were the size of dinner plates, even then, five minutes after birth. And I wanted to protect him forever.

These days I'm still his fiercest protector, his biggest fan, his strongest advocate ... even on the days when it feels like all I say is "shhh," and "no, you can't," and "go play outside for a while."

I love his mop of blond hair (and no, I don't know how Steven and I keep creating these towheaded children), his willful determination, his perpetual use of the word "actually." I love his boundless loyalty, his kind heart, his empathy for people, animals, bugs, and inanimate objects alike. I love that the first time we went to Pump It Up he sat at the top of the big slide for 20 minutes because he abjectly refused to let anyone force him to do something he wasn't ready to do. I love how he loves his baby sister, whose reciprocated adoration is magnified and amplified into something like hero worship. I love how he wants to be just like his dad and his assertion that he'll always be my baby (though I'm not supposed to tell anyone that).

He's already had his birthday party, complete with six cousins, four friends, four grandparents, two aunts, and lots of backyard splashing, plus pizza, an exceptionally tough pinata, and a baseball diamond birthday cake.

To mark the "real" occasion, we're going easy. He got cake for breakfast (you're only 6 once!), a replacement balloon for the one that met with tragedy when a sweet little cousin accidentally let go of the string, and a bonus gift from his grandparents. Tonight he has requested a trip to the pool and a Happy Meal for dinner.

And at 3:59, I'm going to give him a big hug and spend a minute remembering the day we met.

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Blink and you miss it.

This kid is about to finish kindergarten.



OK, so he doesn't look quite like that anymore, but this picture makes me smile.

How is it that this school year is all but over? Two more days, and Alex will officially be a going-into-first-grade-r. A few weeks beyond that, and he'll be turning 6. And a couple of days beyond THAT, and the Tiny One will be 1.

How do these things happen so fast? People tell you that they do, and you nod and try not to roll your eyes because it's just one of those things everybody says, but really at the back of your mind you're thinking your kid will be in kindergarten forever, that your baby will always have just the two teeth and a few wisps of hair. That you're in some pocket of frozen time where the weekend is always in the future, usually too far for your liking, and there's all this stuff that hasn't happened yet.

Then it does, and you're surprised by it.

Or maybe I shouldn't generalize that way. Maybe it's just me.

So the summer is stretching out before me, and I'm at a loss as to what one does when one has a home-based job, an intense aversion to sweltering temperatures, and two kids with vastly differing daily needs. I think it's going to require quite a bit more after-hours work on my part and some extra energy and fortitude. Maybe a stockpile of patience, too, as I seem to be running low.

Today I took them to the park because Katherine was annoyed with me (she napped only one hour all day long, and seemed to think I was solely to blame) and Alex was overly exuberant. Ten minutes flat, and I was buckling the baby back in her carseat, promising Alex we'd find a fun alternative that wouldn't give Mom heatstroke, and wishing I'd put on extra deodorant. Alabama summers have never been my friend.

So we ended up at the mall for a carousel ride (Katherine's first, and a big hit) and ice cream for Alex, plus a good walk for me. Should I be ashamed to admit that I'm seriously considering becoming a mall walker? People are weird, which provides ample entertainment, and it's air-conditioned. Plus if I have a change of heart and just decide to hell with my weight loss goals, there's a very convenient Chik-fil-A in the food court, spittin' distance from the Godiva shop. It's food for thought. Ba-dum-bum.

In light of my recent light-bulb moment about time and its tendency to slip away right under our noses, I'm going to do my best not to wish the summer away, even if it means playing kiddie cruise director and making enough money to offset the expenses of any fun I decide to let Alex have during his break.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to borrow my children from time to time, I wouldn't turn down some kind of barter arrangement.

A Boring Post

Let me apologize in advance to my two fans -- those being my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law -- for the fact that this entry is likely to be pretty boring. I just felt like writing, so here I am.

Being back in the house is everything I expected it to be, all those days I was scrunched over on my side of the bumpy, pokey love seat at the hotel and trying to get comfortable (at one point I told Steven it reminded me of the constant and vain attempts to get comfortable during the last month of pregnancy).

There's a big empty space where the table should be, but the dogs have claimed it as their lounge-about room, as if they needed one more place to display their lazy. The artwork hasn't been rehung yet, partly because I want a change, but I'm not sure what kind or to what extent, and we don't know if we're salvaging our current table or getting a new one. So we do what we do best: procrastinate. (A mirror almost fell on Katherine tonight, though, so we should probably do something about it sooner than later.)

I kind of like not having a table. It's comfortable to eat on the couch, except that Katherine is worse about begging for food than any dog I've ever met. She'll pop her head up next to you, almost upsetting your plate if you weren't paying attention, mouth open wide for a bite of whatever you're eating. Whatever. She doesn't care, and she's not hungry. Half the time she spits it out to examine it in her little palm before putting it back in her mouth or, if rejected, on your plate.

She simply gets a kick out of communicating to us what she wants and our complying. Tonight, I was all proud because I thought she was going to town on butter beans, but then when I stood up to take my plate to the kitchen I stepped in a small squishy nest of the things that she had rejected and neatly set aside, right next to my bare foot.

Poor Alex has been relegated to the computer table in the corner in a porch chair that's losing pieces of its plastic wicker-type weave all over the floor. (He's not as good at guarding his plate against the human scavenger.)

He's sick, as everyone and their brother knows by now, and if you know me at all, you know I'm worried beyond all reason. I don't like fevers. I've always run low, Alex has always run low, so when there's a real fever involved, I get nervous. His has been in the upper 102s for two days now. We dragged him to a Mazer tent sale yesterday and had to keep turning back to get him, as he was sitting or lying down on all the couches we passed. That's how tired. On a positive note, if you give him Tylenol he's bouncing off the walls and challenging you to bike races and the dark circles under his eyes go away. He wears sick like no one I've ever seen. His face is a mood ring gauging how he feels at any given moment.

Steven and Alex both tried to make my Mother's Day wonderful, and they did a great job. Steven took the cranky baby and Alex to Railroad Park while I went on a random mission to find couch throw pillows in Pelham. We met back up and I tried to nap when Katherine did but then realized that I don't remember how to nap anymore, so I got up and got some work done. Steven had already cleaned the house while I was at the grocery store, so that was a good thing. Then after our unsuccessful search for a dining room set, he mowed both the lawns and bathed the dogs. Clean dogs!!! There is no better gift. Plus I got socks with no holes and an IOU to go to Flip Burger if anyone wants to sit on our babies so we can have a cocktail or two. =) Anyone? Anyone?

I did all the laundry on Saturday so I wouldn't have to do it yesterday. It was an effective strategy that I thought would mesh well with my intention to do nothing all day long. Unfortunately, Katherine had other ideas.

She has decided that I am the Complaint Department of our household organization. She files complaints day and night, left and right, with and without reason, and I don't even speak her language! Is the "Du Du Duuuuuh!" she's so desperately trying to convey meant to express that she's hungry? That she wants her duck? That she wants her Dada? That she wants her other Dada (Alex)? Is "A ba ba ba. A bababa! BA!!!" meant to tell me that there's something she wants I'm not providing? Or that I'm too slow? Or that I'm hopelessly dumb, she wants the SMALL lamb, not the BIG one, oh my poor tired brain.

I look forward to the days when I can say "Use your words, Katherine" and she does.

In the meantime, I've told her that when Daddy comes home the Complaint Department is closed for business, and any messages she would like to relay to her father will find their way to me in the morning.

Work is happening. I like that. I like it more when I have time to do it, when there's no crisis that sends me to live in a hotel with spotty Internet access for two weeks, and when I don't feel like I'm being incredibly unprofessional by straightening things out so I CAN get to the work that needs to be done.

I need to write, which means I need to do some phone interviews. Those have to be scheduled during Katherine's naptimes, and lately those are unpredictable. I'll find a way, even if it's sticking her in her crib and taking my phone and laptop out onto the back deck. I've been known to do that. And bonus, by the time I came back in, she was asleep!

I'm really looking forward to a summer beach vacation with the Texas family. The cousins always have a blast together! And now we have two newbies who are bound to forge some kind of bond that will flip the balance of power. Watch out for those two, everybody. Charlie is smart and Katherine is in awe of little boys. A coup is not out of the realm of possibility. She'll be walking by then ... wow!

I need girl time. I'm putting that out there for any particular combination of the initials K, K, J, S or L and L who might be reading. I've been stuck in my head too long, and I need a field trip out.

Name the night.

Perspective (the Night the Tree Fell)

I had a blog post half written about our experiences with the tree through our dining room. And then Wednesday happened, and people lost everything, including their loved ones, and any damage we sustained seemed suddenly so ridiculously insignificant by comparison. A rug? A table? A couple of weeks in a hotel?

Not much, when you've seen the footage of that breathtaking hammer of destruction making its deliberate way through a city you love and friends' hometowns, picking away lives, homes, neighborhoods, the very fiber of the places, and leaving rubble in its wake.

So after all, I have little to report. My husband, my children, my dogs, and I are all present and accounted for, no worse for the wear unless you count a fading circle of rug burn in the very center of Katherine's forehead from when she tried to fly off the bed. Unless you count Alex's newfound anxiety about bad weather, which remains thus far in the realm of healthy respect and not the haunting paranoia that I grew up with and which would require more than calm amateur weather lessons and hugs and assurances.

Assurances, which, it turns out, are generally pretty empty. Some things are just too big, too powerful, to protect each other from.I guess that's my own scar. That, and my recent tendency to eye the general tree population with suspicion and distaste. (For the record, I was nowhere near Toomer's Corner.)

Two weeks in the Residence Inn taught us how to live on top of one another without resorting to violence, and two weeks living in my parents' basement left the dogs fat and happy. There was cabin fever, mainly for the almost-6-year-old who is used to being able to run in and out at will. There was crankiness from all corners but mainly from Katherine and me, who both have a hard time adapting ... a trait slightly more appropriate for the 10-month-old than the almost-33-year-old. The good old RI saw us through Steven's modest birthday party, Easter and illness.

When the latest and most severe round of storms crashed into the state and pieces of other cities started raining down outside our hotel windows, I took the kids and hid out in the bathroom. Alex was all eyes and questions ("Why isn't Dad in here with us?"), Katherine thought it was great fun. She found a plastic Easter egg and threw it repeatedly, endlessly, into the bathtub just to watch us retrieve it for her. Babies train their people very well.

I guess all of us (save Kat, who only seems concerned with her general physical comfort at any given moment, as it should be) were thinking back to that night, that comparatively insignificant storm, the suddenness with which hell, when it breaks loose, breaks loose.

There was little warning if you don't count the sirens, which we should have but didn't (we're those desensitized people they keep admonishing on the news, or at least we were. Now we'll pay more attention). There were some weird noises in the distance, coming closer, that we heard/felt, and I remember looking at Steven and both of us pausing to be puzzled by it, but just for a second. Because then the lights went out and our dining room exploded, and it started pouring rain on us. I don't remember running but I'm sure I was headed for Alex's room. Alex met me in the hall, trembling head to toe, straight from the shower, in his too-small, mismatched pajamas with his freshly washed hair plastered to his forehead and his hands grasping, squeezing, clawing at me, screaming, "What happened? What happened? What happened?"

And me, with my refrain of "It's OK, it's OK, it's OK," which was both a lie (I really didn't think it was) and not an answer to his question.

"Where's Katherine?!" Steven yelled from twenty miles away in the living room, and my heart stopped because for a split second my fear-distorted brain couldn't retrieve the information.

When it did, I ran in and grabbed her up from her crib, poor little oblivious thing, and she grumped at me for the rude awakening, and I squeezed her tight in one arm, with the other arm around Alex's thin, trembling shoulders in a death grip. I stood there in the hall surrounded by scared creatures (the dogs had apparently determined that I was somehow going to put things to rights) and feeling utterly vulnerable.

With the lights out, the house was pitch-black except for flashes of lightning that showed us just enough to know that it had been a near miss. Steven had been sitting at that computer desk, now covered in hunks of ceiling, support beams, and pink fluffs of insulation like the disemboweled remains of a cotton candy machine, a minute before if not less, cursing the bad luck that the power flashes had disrupted his progress on our tax filing program. I had been sitting at the dining room table scarcely five minutes before, going through a stack of junk mail mixed with important documents (no lectures, please, I KNOW birth certificates and such don't belong with long-expired coupon leaflets), looking for Katherine's social security card.

We had no working flashlight (note to self), and Steven was persistently searching through the rubble on the computer desk for his cell phone. It didn't even occur to me to ask why. (Turns out it was the only place he had our homeowner's contact information.)

And I think we could've been all right then if the burglar alarm hadn't gone off. There's no adequate way to describe the piercing wail that started out of nowhere and refueled our panic, but we ran outside onto the front patio without even thinking because that sound ... it's just not humanly withstandable. Bad for our situation, good for a burglary.

The storm had reached its peak by then and lightning was all around us, making the night bright as day and really simplifying our options into: get struck or go deaf. Getting into the car proved harder than it might've. Alex was terrified and refused to walk, and I don't blame him because I was tempted to ask Steven to carry ME. I ran through the rain in my socks and nightgown with Katherine in my arms and huddled in the back of the Trooper with her. Poor Steven was tasked with rounding up the panicked, confused dogs. Charlie jumped right in but Jack, always the holdout, required some coaxing. And it's not easy, coaxing a terrified golden retriever into the back of a truck in the middle of a tornado. Hats off to Steven for making it happen without knocking him out and throwing him in like a giant sack of potatoes.

We sought refuge at my parents' house, in the basement where I think Alex wanted to stay until he felt completely safe, maybe forever.

Looking back, I realize how lucky we were and also how lucky others weren't. The ones whose trees didn't stop at the dining room, or the ones who were in the wrong place at the wrong time like any one of us could have been. It's a retrospective nightmare, and I pray for healing for everyone whose towns, homes, lives were irreparably altered.

We're back home now, safe and relatively sound in our much emptier great room with its new scuffs on the wood floors, unhung artwork, and odd, unlived-in smell.

It's home, and I've never been more thankful for it.

Coupla things

It's hard to believe I started this blog so long ago. I was just going back through old entries and only made it back to last Easter before calling it quits. I mean, reliving one's second child's birth is kind of heavy, and I hate to say that the early, early posts make me miss being pregnant, but ...

JUST A LITTLE.

Today Alex and I took a bike ride and went to swing at the park before coming home. He spotted his student teacher, a PYT from Samford who is acting as his classroom's primary teacher this month and on whom Alex seems to have a massive crush. She hugged him and he turned three shades of red. It was kind of adorable.

Katherine managed two restaurant lunches and a trip to the library this week without getting us kicked out of anywhere. That's my girl! She has also developed a weird/hilarious fake laugh: "Ha! Ha! Ha!" that makes me think she's going to be a funny one like her big brother, who started TRYING to make us laugh at about 7 months of age.

Also in the name of nostalgia, OH SWEET LORD, CLICK HERE FOR BABY ALEX.

Sweetness

My father won't call Alex sweet, but he will say that he's a good boy, which means the same in Southern-man-speak. Steven uses the word sweet more now that he has a daughter, but either way, we agree that our firstborn child is goodhearted, thoughtful, considerate, empathetic. It all seems to add up to sweet.

He told me last night that he thinks when he has trouble falling asleep it's because God wants him to keep Him company. I think that's an extremely interesting and rather self-important way to look at insomnia.

Also last night he brought us his DS (do we all remember DS-gate of pre-Katherine?) and said, "The good thing is it still works!" And then he showed us that it's hanging by one hinge, and since it is still operational, I'm not too concerned. It was kind of pitiful though, how obviously he expected us both to be horrified, angry, vengeful (and seriously? We're kind of too lazy for vengeful). It's all good now; he fixed it by wrapping half a roll of Scotch tape around it. Now it won't open, but somewhere inside that closed box, rest assured that games can be played.

Today he clogged up the toilet, broke a shelf off the entertainment center in his room, spilled a half-full bowl of cereal all over the kitchen floor and tried to clean it up with toilet paper before anyone noticed.

He also sustained a pretty ugly elbow abrasion from a fall off neighbor-girl's scooter, but was so proud that he didn't cry and has refused Band-Aids so that he can show it off at school tomorrow.

He kisses his sister and has a made-up song called "Little Pinky Toes" that he sings while he grabs said toes to make her giggle. (Well, if Katherine were capable of giggling; she has developed a laugh that one could accurately describe as part shriek, part maniacal cackle, part Revenge of the Nerds.)

People keep telling me to treasure these times with these little boys who are trying so hard to be big boys, and I do. Some days it's easier than others. Some days he seems to have warped right over to the teen years, sulky and brooding and, yes, jaded.

Then other days he clips a plastic sheriff's badge to a rubber Iron Man wrist band, colors little hearts around the band, and presents me with a special bracelet for being the best mom in the world.

It's things like that that make me bite my tongue when, um, shall we say dirty water starts overflowing the toilet and flowing across the bathroom floor.

Today we went to a birthday party at Pump It Up for a boy I will always remember as the sweet, chubby redhead in Alex's Toddler I class who always wanted me to pick him up if I arrived to a function before his own parents got there. He turned 6. Amazing. He and Alex fell back in step together like they haven't been at separate schools since August, and it was a lovely thing to see. Maybe boy friendships ARE less complicated, as my husband insists.

Miss Katherine is doing great now that she's over the cold that took both of us down. Her hair is coming in like gangbusters, light light brown unless you're in direct sunlight, when it's blonde (and Steven says I'm crazy, it's blonde and I just WANT it to be brown).

She charms the pants off people everywhere we go with that crooked smile that lights up her whole little body. Not that Steven and I are antisocial (hey, I just like the people I like), but where she got this innate desire to bestow upon everyone we walk past that dazzling grin, I do not know. Alex was the one who would stare at his shuffling feet until you nudged him to respond to a question with something other than a monosyllabic mutter. He outgrew that shyness, I think, or at least most of it. Yesterday he told every single person we met that he had a real game that day.

We don't know if they won. No one keeps score. But I'm going to say that they did. Go Durham Bulls!

Yesterday and today we hit the Lakeshore track by bike; yesterday it was Alex, Steven, and me, and today just me. It's easier with company. Even if your company keeps wanting to stop for a sip of Gatorade and the 5.2 miles down and back takes about twice as long as it should otherwise. I'm never going to develop Steven's enthusiasm for biking, but it's certainly fun enough to add to my shortlist of potential ways to get my @$$ back in shape.

And I'm getting there. Slowly.

Katherine's latest gift is those open-mouthed kisses that make up for in heartstring-pulling what they lack in not being sloppy. And I hate to wipe her kisses off, but sometimes there's little pieces of food stuck on my cheek after she gets affectionate...

Feeling good this week, feeling good about this weekend. God grant it sustenance.

Pan Out, Julie

The devil's in the details, isn't that what they say?

I just came up with a whole long explanation of potential origin for that saying that involved crops and livestock and sulfuric retribution, and then I reread it and realized it made me sound like a crazy person, and since I don't need any help doing THAT ... it's gone.

You're welcome.

What I will say is that I'm all about the details. That's probably why I was drawn to copy editing (Lord knows it wasn't the money, yuk yuk yuk), and why I tend to get so sidelined by what some might call insignificant that I miss the hugely obvious. I'd be the one in the plane struggling to bring my seat to the full upright and locked position while we were nosediving toward the Atlantic Ocean.

I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed at the little paint splotch on the knee of Alex's jeans earlier today (and don't even get me started on why an art set marketed as a CHILD'S TOY comes with paint that could conceivably be used to coat your house) and was elated when it finally faded to the point that the pants were at least wearable again ... and then when I was tossing them into the washer for the fifth time, I saw an Alex-sized green handprint right on the seat of those pants. I gave up.

Today was the kind of day that spawned surrender from all corners.

Katherine refuses mixed veggies for lunch? Meh, give her a cookie.

The dogs want to stay in all day and be maddeningly underfoot and frightened of the vacuum cleaner and the baby, respectively? OK, but don't blame me if I suck up a tail in the vacuum or send Katherine to play her favorite new game, Squeal at the Skittish Dog.

Alex wants to skip his shower because "I didn't sweat that much today"? Well, I tell him, "At least run a washcloth over your feet."

It's not so much that I was lazy today, though I was, or that I had relaxed my let's-face-it-never-pristine standards of child-rearing for some noble purpose or strange experiment. It's just that, and bow out here if you can't stand to see a grown woman whine, I DON'T FEEL WELL.

I'm not good at being sick. All those jokes about "man cold"s and such apply to me. When I'm sick, nothing is fair, nothing is easy, and mostly, nothing is not irritating on a grand scale. My mother always took good care of me when I was sick. She gave me ginger ale and brought me sympathy and Saltines, a "food" whose sole purpose in existing is to sit on a sick person's bedside tray and silently taunt her with their almost-goodness.

Now that I'm a grown-up, now that I live with people who depend on me to be an actual functioning human being when my body is spontaneously deteriorating? Now I get "what's for dinner, Mom?" and the incessant leg tugging that is the universal baby sign for "Pick me up, pick me up, pick me up or I'm gonna screeeeeeeeeam!"

Details, though. Details.

Big picture tells me that this is a little sinus infection, that I'm going to get over it, that soon the sight of my children will not send me spiraling into NAGdom and my son will stop whispering to his dad when he thinks I can't hear, "I think Mom's gonna explode!"

Big picture also tells me that this is a decent place to vent, wail and gnash teeth and that the one or two people who read my blog and actually know me more than to wave at on the streets won't judge me for having a bad day. Cathy? Katie? (G or F, I love you both!)

So while the details insist that it's just about 5 degrees too hot in this house, that Jack has positioned himself right in front of the air vent so that not only are we not getting any air, but the whole bedroom smells like dog, that I forgot to get Alex's snack, water, and school bag ready to go for tomorrow, and that I'm about three days past the point where I need a girls' night (aHERM), the big picture is far less bleak.

It shows my kids warm (5 degrees too warm, perhaps) and safe in their beds, my sweet, helpful husband laughing at something on TV that probably only he would find amusing, two freelance projects in the works that I thank GOD for, friends, family, and goodness in the offing. And it's nice to remember those big-picture things when the details of the day involve lots and lots of snot, a hacking cough, an aching head and face and ... hair follicles. And what may very well be oil-based house paint that came disguised as a toy.

Oh, and there's at least one good detail: Clean sheets on the bed and new-to-us pillows. Thanks, Mother!

I'm going to make use of those riiiiiiight ... NOW.

I'm spring-broken.

I don't remember spring break when I was a kid. I remember AEA week, which had something to do with continuing education for Alabama educators, but I didn't call it spring break, and neither did anyone else.

But this was Alex's spring break, and I was determined to give him a good one. Sometimes beyond all reason, both physical and intellectual.

We went to the park a lot. I don't think that actually counts because the park is almost literally in our backyard. It takes five minutes to get there, walking slowly, and I know this because I've set the timer on my iPhone every day in the hopes that I would rack up some notable burned calories to add to my daily tally. Nah. Five minutes of "walking, pushing a stroller," according to My Plate, only counts for 33 calories.

Every day, when Steven got home from work, Alex and I went for a bike ride. The track behind his school is flat enough that I don't feel like I'm going to die, and the painted-on lanes inspire in him a limitless array of pretend race configurations. We've raced (and beaten, of course) Auburn, Tennessee, and "The Navericks," just this week. And that's not to mention the excitement of near-misses with two kids on scooters, an unleashed cocker spaniel, and a toddler named Brooke someone left to her own questionable devices.

We hit the petting barn at the state park, where we arrived early and were the only ones brave and stupid enough (on my part) to spend a good half-hour before the day warmed to comfortable. Alex brought a notebook and crayon and ran around heedless of the horrifying volume of farm animal excrement to take a survey of each animal he saw.



A goat tried to eat Katherine's stroller and pacifier clip, and she lost both socks before we decided to call it done.



A failed attempt at going to Chuck E. Cheese for lunch one day (thanks to a very well-intended grandmother) led us to the bowling alley, where Alex played one of the few operational arcade games a million times in a row and earned a whopping 59 tickets, to which I had to add $5.50 so that he could "win" the most expensive deck of cards ever purchased out of a mostly empty prize vending machine.

Pump It Up's pop-in playtime was our best choice of the lot. Alex jumped to his heart's content while Katherine crawled to the five-foot distance I allotted her before dragging her back to start over. She drew a crowd of preteen fawners, and Alex joined forces with a day-camp group while I sat on a bench and pondered all the germs they each were coming in contact with.



Afterward, we ate Chik-fil-A and I took them to Yogurt Lab, where Alex got an atrocity of Dulce de Leche with toppings of nonpareils and sour gummy worms.



All in all, it was a great week, and I'm glad we had it if not altogether sorry to see it end.

Have I mentioned that separation anxiety has suddenly kicked in with a vengeance? That Katherine doesn't want me out of arm's reach, much less sight? That she tries to climb up my legs, or, failing that, to fling herself backward so that I'll have no choice but to drop everything and catch her? That I've lost feeling in my left arm from holding her and have seriously considered cobbling together some sort of papoose-like contraption? That it's intensely more frustrating than one might have hoped?



No? Well then. Never mind.

There's something to be said.

After a weekend like this past one, when a particularly nasty stomach virus took down two of our troops (the boy had his bout a week ago, and I have THUS FAR, PLEASE KNOCK ON WOOD been spared), it's good to let oneself bask in the good things.

So I won't tell you about Katherine's new skill, wherein she lets out a bone-chilling scream when she doesn't get what she wants right away. Or about how today she tried to and for all I know succeeded in shattering all the glass in Publix by testing that skill when she caught sight of the Gerber Graduates puffs container that I put in the cart (GASP!) without giving her any.

I won't tell you that Alex's first teeball game got canceled because of the rain and that he cried his poor little heart out even though his parents were secretly rejoicing because (a) his dad was just mastering being in an upright position without a violent vomiting episode and (b) his mom hadn't had time or inclination to procure all elements of his ridiculously specific uniform. And (c) his grandparents were also ill, making it a double blessing in disguise that the teeball field was a mudpit, because sick baby sister in attendance would've brought down the SKY.

I will skip over the place where my diet just stopped even pretending to work, and the one where I felt really, really isolated and starved for the kind of grown-up water-cooler conversation (and hell, Idol gossip) I used to take for granted.

And I'll tell you, instead, that things are better. Baby K hasn't forgotten how to scream your eardrums loose. Alex still thinks that running more than one base at a time is cheating. I still haven't finished buying all the parts of his teeball uniform.

BUT.

I've already achieved most of the things I wanted out of life, and I experience all of them on a daily basis. I'm a wife. I'm a mommy. I'm a WRITER.

I have fantastic friends, people who would answer the phone if I called in the middle of the night to say "Bail me out of jail, " or, far more likely, "I need to talk."

I know more than anyone ever wanted know about unpredictable (and thus un-divulgeable) topics, I watch Judge Judy religiously, and I'm currently, shamelessly, reading Books I and II of R.L. Stine's The Baby-Sitter.

As of Wednesday, I will have been married for nine years to the only man in the world capable of not just putting up with, but somehow actually loving me along with my unshakable jumble of unclaimed baggage.

My kids, they are wonderfully weird, incurably awesome, and heart-piercingly sweet. And they remind me that, even when I manage to explode the tempered glass oven door facing and reduce Kraft mac and cheese to unrecognizable mush because I got sidetracked by some court show or other, I am loved and I've been given the rarer-than-you-might-think gift of loving unabashedly, brazenly, and without a filter.

It's the best I could've hoped for, and more than I ever expected.