Baby Steps

What's on my mind

2012-02-12T06:49:00.005-06:00

I got up at 4 a.m. this morning, and it's now 6:08, so you'll forgive any nonsensical rambling on my part, I'm sure.

I'm always big with the disclaimers. I've been working on a story since Christmas, and every time I send a chapter out to my guinea pigs (er ... ever-so-kind friends and family who read and send me such constructive criticism as "It's good!," which is what we amateur writer-types want to hear anyway), I usually preface it with "I was up early," "I went to bed late," "I have a fever," "I got hit by a Mack truck" or the like. Just in case it really IS terrible, you see, and they're gentle enough to pretend my reason is valid.

So I woke up at 4 to whispering in my ear. I flipped over in bed and saw a shadowy figure inches from my face, and I screamed. I screamed. I'm not proud of it, nor am I not still feeling guilty about the fact that I woke my husband up so early on the morning he's running his first half-marathon in sub-freezing temperatures. The shadowy figure jumped about two feet in the air and only then did I make out the mass of bed-head and the small stature and realize it was only my firstborn ... not my worst nightmare come true. He would be thrilled for me to tell the world this, but since I daresay the world doesn't read my blog, I don't feel too bad saying that he was up (and whispering at me in the dark) because he wet his bed. "Because I was asleep," he said. Maybe that tendency to disclaim is hereditary.

And then when I probably should make excuses I can't find the right ones. Yesterday Katherine was all Linda Blair from the time she woke up at 6:30. She seemed to blame me personally for the fact that she was up too early and proceeded to whine ceaselessly for most of the morning. It finally occurred to Steven that her behavior was so unlike her that she must not feel well. So I gave her some Tylenol and bam! Happy girl. Next time I should go to the "sick" place before the "demon possession" one.

Alex ran the last mile to complete his cumulative marathon yesterday, and it was seventy-five degrees below zero. Or maybe it was in the 40s, but that WIND. He was very proud of himself, though, and has no idea that his audience of admirers (his dad, his sister, me, and his grandparents) didn't actually SEE him run. Steven took a picture over the heads of all the parental onlookers and I'm going to pretend that counts so that I'm not actually lying to him. Here, he's the one behind the kid in the lead.

I've started to think about the summer and what I'm going to do with no school and no Mother's Day Out. Short of shipping them off to the Houston family who probably isn't prepared to keep them for the FULL three months, I'm at a loss. There are church camps and VBSes galore, and I'm going to pounce on all of them that I can scrounge up even if it means Alex goes for a week or so to one of those snake-handling establishments (just kidding?), and there's the Y day camp, although I went there when I was a kid and have a distinct memory of sitting alone next to the pool and daydreaming about digging under the fence, below the highway, and halfway home, where my best friend would meet me underground for a day of 11-year-old debauchery. I also remember playing up my phobia of thunderstorms for an excuse to play damsel-in-distress to the counselor I had a ginormous crush on and feigning headaches when we played team sports, which have never been my forte. But I digress.

As long as I can keep him busy I think Alex will have a good summer. Perhaps more important is my continuing to keep up the volume of work I've been blessed enough to shoulder up till now. I'm trying to unload the guilt I have when I work all day and don't have time to take Katherine to the park or for any other age-appropriate outing. If I were at work, I rationalize, I wouldn't have that luxury. Of course, if I were at work, she would be with people who would ensure that she saw the light of day at least a few times before dark. It's something I struggle with. Not, however, enough to send me in earnest search of an office job just yet...

I was sick for three weeks recently and am now living in fear of germs. I guess that happens. Where I used to wipe Katherine's nose with my hand if there were no tissues or sleeves or shirttails or spare gum wrappers in sight (hey, you do what you gotta do), I now ... well, still wipe her nose with my hand. But I do so with trepidation that didn't used to be there. I cough and envision raw noses and Neti-Pot therapy, cough drops and chapped lips and insomnia born of breathing dusty dry air through my mouth until my throat caught on fire. It was my own fault, anyway, and accuse me of magical thinking if you will: The week before I got taken down by this plague I spoke the doomed words "I never get sick."

My quiet early-morning time is over and I have to go get ready to take the kids down to watch Steven run by. I hope he runs his heart out and that his knees don't give him any trouble and that if he runs out of steam around mile 7, he doesn't blame Alex's bladder or my overly vocal startle response.

Tiptoeing through the bad patch

2012-01-24T20:03:00.004-06:00

Things have not been going so well here at the old Bosche stead. Sickness has permeated our home. I spent one week being so inexplicably nauseated that I took four pregnancy tests just to be sure. (Granted, two would have sufficed, but I like to be thorough when it's even remotely possible there's a person growing inside me.) Thursday of that week, Katherine came down with a nasty cold, and I got knocked down by it two days later. Neither one of us have yet to shake it. Her fever is gone, but her cough still comes from the depths of hell and she's not eating, drinking, or sleeping well. The first two are new developments. Tonight she had a handful of shredded cheese, a little Gatorade, and some melted vanilla ice cream, just for its caloric purposes. Desperate times...

Last night she started screaming around 1 a.m. and wouldn't stop until we brought her in bed with us. She finally fell asleep sitting on my head.

Today there was non. stop. whining. She's clingy, and she wants me, but at the same time I can't do anything right by her so she's as frustrated with me as I am with her, minus, on her part, the guilt that comes with that frustration.

The bank messed us up, work hit one of those dry spells I've been told about but which I've been fortunate enough not to experience until recently, and things just generally and unequivocally sucked. I'm not sure, in this moment, if that should be present tense.

Bad times they do pass. I've taken on four decently sized work projects this week alone, and I have hopes that once we get Katherine's probable ear infection(s) squared away, she'll remember how to smile and return to her happy-go-lucky self. As for me, surely even the flu can't last much longer than two full weeks, and if you know different I beg of you not to douse my blue-moon burst of optimism.

Tomorrow Alex's school arbitrarily celebrates the 101st day of first grade with a hat parade through the halls that's scheduled 30 minutes before Katherine's doctor's appointment. I'm going to make it. He's proud of that pimp hat and I'm going to make it.

I find good in the fact that Steven and Alex were (knockonwood) spared this whatever-it-is, that I have work to do again, and that my in-laws are already planning our next beach vacation, which makes me think of warm sunniness, 4 o'clock happy hours, and games of '90s trivia at which no one, ever, will beat my husband.

For now, I'm just taking it minute by minute. Right now that means Caillou, Kleenex, and, as evidence suggests, an imminent diaper change.

God, grant me patience.

Laughter, the only medicine that makes a dent

2012-01-11T12:13:00.009-06:00

Sometimes life is kind. The stars align in a pleasant way, the rain is pretty but not drenching, the dogs smell good and the kids act right.

And then sometimes none of those things happen. And they all not-happen all at once.

That's all I'm going to say about that, because I like things to be neat and preferably not too woe-is-me. It's just ... I'm ready for the lined-up stars and the pretty rain. More than ready. Nails dug in, feet planted, ready.

But even when it's not running as smoothly as one might have hoped, life does its thing. Alex gets bit by a horse and loses two teeth in two days, Katherine's feet grow a full shoe size overnight and she finally has enough hair for (tiny, sticking-out, hilarious) pigtails, Steven pretends that the remote-controlled helicopter he buys is for Alex but we all know better, I take on more projects than is maybe prudent because one day the well might run dry and try to weave sanity faster than it unravels.

It's probably bad form to find humor in your children's little mishaps, but I figure humor in just about any form is to be embraced, so in light of that I have to admit that it was not-not funny when Alex got bit by the horse. Only AFTER, mind you, once I'd ascertained that he was physically okay and suffered mostly from hurt feelings. After stewing for a few minutes, he came to tell me he'd forgiven the horse ("He's just an animal; he didn't know any better," he told me), and then I was more touched than concerned and "Alex got bit by a horse" became a funny phrase.

I've never liked horses. Crazy, I know. It's akin to disliking puppies, I hear. They're big, they're beautiful, they're helpful if you find yourself without appropriate transportation in the middle of a ... well, a field. They have big brown eyes and pretty tails. I had one or two in pastel rainbow colors with glitter on their plastic flanks when I was a kid.

When I was in eighth grade, I fell off a horse. It then kicked me as it bolted toward the horizon. Embarrassing enough when you're 13. Factor in that it happened in front of my entire church's youth group, including the guy I had a massive crush on, and it made me want to die. Twice.

I hadn't thought about that in years, but the day the horse bit Alex, it renewed my intense! dislike! At any rate, you won't catch me near one of those long-nosed beasts for quite a while, and I'm going to teach my children not to pet strange horses. You never know when the temptation or the opportunity might arise here in Nothing-Ever-Happens, Suburbia, USA.

But it's not funny that my kid got bit by a horse. That would make me a bad mother, right?

Just as it's not funny that Katherine is afraid of that remote-controlled helicopter I mentioned. At least, it's not very funny. But she gets so excited, and squeals and reaches for it, and then it swoops or moves toward her and she gets spooked and you can hear her little feet slap-slap-slapping away down the hall. Or she just barrels into the nearest pair of legs and grabs on for dear life. Or she ducks and covers, usually in the safe little nook under the slide of the climber she got for Christmas.

Funny in a good way, you see. Good for the mental memory book, for the psyche, a reminder that things don't have to be so serious all the time.

Unrelatedly, I've figured out one of the keys to the mysteries of childhood and plan to become a millionaire on the book deal: Teeth.

Besides the fact that I don't imagine a liquid diet would be terribly satisfying, I have renewed appreciation for them because Alex and Katherine are both growing them, and Alex is losing them (Sidebar: The child has really lost two in two days; why didn't anyone tell the Tooth Fairy not to set the bar at a dollar per year of age? Because he's got a lot more teeth and he's not getting any younger). Teeth have more power than we give them credit for. Alex cried when his second tooth was preventing him from eating his sandwich and then informed me when I cut it up into little pieces for him that he is not Katherine; he doesn't need little pieces, this is JUST TEMPORARY. (Yes, he really said that.) Ask your parents; I bet teeth once were the center of your universe, too.

Sorry if this blog post is worse than usual. I'm distracted by Katherine's playing with her doll and doll stroller. I hope her pretend-parenting skills aren't a reflection of our real ones, because if so, we need to go to classes or something. I don't recall picking either of my babies up by their ankles to toss them into the grocery cart head-first, chewing on their hands, or sending them sailing across the room in their strollers and cackling like a crazy person when they hit the wall.

But could be I just forgot.

Christmas Wrap-Up, 2011

2011-12-31T09:02:00.004-06:00

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.

2011-12-20T23:10:00.006-06:00

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.

2011-12-18T23:06:00.005-06:00

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

2011-11-28T22:40:00.003-06:00

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

2011-10-24T22:45:00.004-05:00

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

2011-09-26T22:13:00.005-05:00

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

2011-09-14T09:59:00.002-05:00

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

2011-08-20T22:24:00.000-05:00

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

2011-08-08T22:33:00.005-05:00

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!!!

2011-07-31T22:22:00.003-05:00

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...

2011-06-25T22:28:00.003-05:00

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

2011-06-14T15:23:00.005-05:00

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.

2011-05-24T22:06:00.005-05:00

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

2011-05-09T23:17:00.002-05:00

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)

2011-05-02T08:36:00.011-05:00

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

2011-04-08T22:24:00.001-05:00

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

2011-04-03T22:30:00.003-05:00

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

2011-03-27T22:08:00.003-05:00

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.

2011-03-18T22:57:00.004-05:00

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.

2011-03-07T22:34:00.003-06:00

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.

Step Inside My Brain. It's Scary.

2011-02-05T22:53:00.002-06:00

I'm not a perfect mom. Shocking, I know. But sometimes there's a gap between not being a perfect mom and being so much less than perfect as to feel inadequate. That's where I am right now. Today I changed my baby in the back of my mother-in-law's Yukon with mostly dry wipes in dripping rain and sleet and biting wind buffeting us because I forgot my house key when we left for lunch and I thought hubby would be back before us. Today I attempted to micromanage Alex's every move because he wasn't acting the way I wanted him to act. I failed, by the way.

Katherine is just about as easy-going as they come, but lately her behavior in restaurants, such as the testing of her volume, the endlessly repeated dropping of her bottle and pacifier, and her sudden bursts of displeasure are making it hard for me to want to take her out. It's a phase, I know, I know, I've done this before. I ALSO know, because I'm much more self-aware this go-round, that my perception of her is far, far different from that of the people around me. At least nine times out of ten, and certainly when the people around me are both of her doting grandmothers and a 2-year-old little boy at the next table who coughed two inches away from her face. No, really.

I guess, as mothers, our hope is for our children to be their best with people they don't get to see very often. In this case, my husband's parents. Not that I think Katherine will be judged for her post-afternoon-nap crankiness or her tendency to fight sleep when more than one thing is happening in the living room, but I do wish they could see her at her best. And Alex, with him I feel even more at a loss and less in control. His come-and-go shyness, his unpredictable (but OH so familiar) moods, and his excellent ability to push all my buttons at once converge to make me want to scream. Preferably while running away in the general direction of a spa.

But instead I'll bite my tongue and give him the speech for the ten thousandth time about how if you focus on the bad things (his grandparents leaving on Monday) you'll miss all the good things that happen in the meantime (tomorrow's fun and festivities, for example). He doesn't buy it, and I'm not sure I would either. His negative outlook he gets from yours truly.

I'm just feeling like I came in a little bit under the Bell Curve O' Motherhood the past couple of days, I guess. And I feel like making it publicly known (again?) that my sun rises and sets on those two small people. Even when he flips about losing a DS game, forgets what he's supposed to be doing in the middle of doing it, or is already acting like an emo-teenager at the age of 5. And her, even when she is inconsolable from exhaustion but won't go to sleep or seems to time her bowel movements to the worst. possible. moment.

They're mine, and I love them. Who wants perfect kids? Does the same go for mothers?

Milestones.

2011-01-27T22:53:00.002-06:00

Instead of milestones, I used to dwell too much on "lasts." One night will be the last night he wants me to sing him the ABC song and tuck him in. One day she will not be so eager to do ... well, everything. One day, one day.

I'm kind of a Debbie Downer. Or, I can be. I fight the tendency with a little help from my friends, who see things so much clearer than I do on a pretty standard basis. They are master redirectors, pep talkers, empathizers. How I fell in with them in the first place I'll never know. For a long time I suspected them of some hidden agenda, but I've pretty much let my guard down and no one has yet poisoned my drink. (Unless they're doing it slowly, the better to watch me suffer.) Ha! I kid!

Milestones abound in these parts of late. Alexander the Kirk is reading, really reading, books at a steady clip. That happened overnight and it still takes my breath away.

Princess Katherine is trying to crawl but has so far only succeeded in finding reverse gear. Tonight we found her head sticking out from under the couch. She had backed the rest of her trying-to-be-reasonably-mobile body under the couch. Oh YES I got pictures! And because she's one of the happiest babies in the world, she wasn't a bit concerned about her predicament but found it hilarious.

Other milestones: Alex bikes without training wheels. We finally realized we just had to let go and he'd get it, and he did! There were a few "I'm never going to be able to do it" meltdowns, a few threats to skip the infamously bratty birthday child's party completely, one or two discussions about how training wheels are not the mark of failure and will not doom him to the entire school's contempt, but in the end it didn't matter, because he got it. Debbie Downer SMILED.

Katherine eats peas. Regular ones, like what we're having, as long as I mush them up and look away so I don't have to witness the messy struggle that ensues as she tries to command her motor skills to not only grasp a squished pea in her tight little fist, but bring it to her mouth and then -- this is the tricky part -- OPEN, so that she can use her tongue to maneuver it inside. And then we all hope it stays there instead of falling out when she realizes she's succeeded and opens her mouth wide to grin at us (See what I did? See? See what I-- oh.) PLUNK. It's almost painful to watch. Minus the almost.

I'm staying busy and fighting the procrastination bug, which has been scarce since I had a real job (oops, an office job) ... because what was I going to procrastinate? But now there's daily work and longer-term deadlines, and I'm learning to juggle them all. A roll of duct tape is at the ready for that nagging voice that tells me none of this is a promise, none of it is forever.

Because nothing is. But I'm practicing living in the day, in the hour, in the moment. When you don't do that things happen too fast. Like your babies start riding bikes and crawling under couches, and you missed it because you were lost in the what-ifs of the future. I can't do that right now. I won't.

To borrow and paraphrase a phrase from the late, great Lost, what happens, happens.

All we have to do is be here when it does.

Little Hurts

2011-01-12T23:05:00.004-06:00

I'm sitting here on my bed, pondering the two spots of blood that Alex dripped there today when he came in from outside, sobbing hysterically that he'd fallen on the ice and it hurt everywhere EVERYWHERE! And to be honest, it looked pretty bad. Not like one of those barely there scrapes he likes to flaunt and crow about and use up too many Band-Aids for (so that when you ACTUALLY have a bleeding wound from slicing your finger damn near off while chopping potatoes that no one wanted to eat afterward, you have to bind it with Scotch tape). His poor little thumb took the brunt of the accident, skin pushed up and aside to reveal a smoother layer of wannabe skin beneath. And lots of blood. Enough to where, when he started to panic, I lied unabashedly and without a second thought about how when the blood soaks through the Band-Aid, it's just proof that it's doing its job and healing the injury.

He lay next to me in bed (where I'd been napping lightly when he woke me up with that cry that every mother knows, the cry of her child in pain, so different in timbre, texture, and effect than any of those other cries we know so well) until he got himself under control. I think it was the idea of showing it off to Steven that finally won him over. "He'll be really impressed," I told him. "Daddy is easily grossed out."

A smile. That's what I was going for, and I got it. Plus a "Thanks, Mom" for fixing the hurt finger and kissing it even though he's probably too wise-beyond-his-years to think that my kisses have healing powers anymore (if he ever believed that).

It was nice, after our altercation yesterday, when I cut him off mid Mario Kart and told him he was done for the night because I'm not going to have that "Don't freak out when you lose" talk with him again and I have to stick to what I'm calling my Zero Tolerance policy for video-game-related outbursts. At this point I pretty much hate Mario, which is sad, since he was my friend growing up, too. And there are toothmarks in my old NES controllers to prove that I was every bit as irrational as Alex can be when I lost. (But we want better for our own children, don't we?) His "I'm not liking you ever again, and I don't love you anymore, either!" was vitriolic, uncertain at its core, and absurdly short-lived. If I thought it was a useful skill I'd show him how to REALLY hold a grudge. (I don't think it is.)

Today I fixed his finger, and he let me kiss the wound and hug him and treat him almost like a baby, although I was sworn to secrecy about how much he actually cried. So, for the record, he was an almost-silent trouper.

Our princess is growing so fast it's mind-boggling. Someone asked me today, while I was lugging the poor baby through the third store of the morning on a desperate search for biscuit cutters and a rolling pin for a photo shoot I have tomorrow, how old she was. My immediate response, shy by just a few days, of "Seven months," shocked me even as I said it. How can my little girl be over halfway to a year old? How can she be the age Alex was five hundred years ago? They JUST put her on my chest and covered us both with that hot blanket and marveled over the way she just went right to sleep there, two minutes after birth. Not just. Seven months ago. Yikes.

Steven wants her to crawl. I think he is mistaken about the importance of crawling to motor development. It's not necessary, and it's certainly not convenient on the range of handy skills they learn like sitting up, holding their own bottles, putting pacis back into their mouths without assistance ... I think she will be a roller. It seems to require less effort on her part, and my Kat she is lazy. But she has figured out that three rolls off her play pallet on the floor will get her over to the dogs' bed, where she can poke and prod Jack and try to suck on Charlie's tail while they give me silent looks that say, respectively, "Seriously?" and "Is this OK?"

I have work coming in from several corners and am endlessly grateful for all of them. I'm also grateful for a long weekend, Steven's clean bill of health from the orthopedist, and the fact that the biscuits I made for tomorrow's shoot didn't turn out terribly ugly. And that I have a girls' night on Friday, and a husband who is all for it.

The good, the bad, and the etc.

2010-12-05T21:58:00.004-06:00

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.

2010-10-29T22:21:00.004-05:00

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.

2010-10-22T21:28:00.001-05:00

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?

2010-10-14T21:38:00.003-05:00

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

2010-10-13T22:57:00.002-05:00

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...

2010-10-07T22:38:00.001-05:00

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

2010-10-04T22:12:00.003-05:00

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.

2010-09-21T22:00:00.004-05:00

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!

2010-09-10T23:01:00.004-05:00

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.

2010-09-03T22:33:00.002-05:00

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.

2010-08-29T21:55:00.004-05:00

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.

2010-08-26T22:44:00.002-05:00

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.

2010-08-25T22:32:00.000-05:00

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.

2010-08-24T21:57:00.004-05:00

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!

2010-08-22T22:04:00.003-05:00

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.

2010-08-20T14:01:00.003-05:00

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.

2010-08-15T17:57:00.006-05:00

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.

2010-08-07T22:52:00.005-05:00

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

2010-08-03T23:09:00.002-05:00

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!

2010-07-26T22:23:00.003-05:00

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.

2010-07-02T11:12:00.002-05:00

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!

2010-06-27T08:57:00.007-05:00

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

2010-06-15T20:10:00.003-05:00

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

2010-06-10T07:20:00.001-05:00

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...

2010-06-07T15:10:00.005-05:00

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.

2010-06-03T15:14:00.006-05:00

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.

2010-06-01T07:46:00.002-05:00

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

2010-05-24T07:48:00.008-05:00

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.

Little Things

2010-05-21T08:03:00.009-05:00

Most important news first: My sister, Kelly, had her baby via C-section on Wednesday. He was born a very-healthy-considering 6 pounds, 1 ounce at just 36 weeks gestation. All accounts have him doing well, although he is in the NICU for breathing troubles—tiny lungs aren’t quite sure what they’re supposed to do just yet. I’ve only seen one picture of him, but from what I can tell it seems we’ve got another Kelly clone. (Her firstborn, Jack, was an absolute carbon copy of her, a startling sight to behold as he peered with her eyes from her arms in his bundle of blankets.)

Kelly’s Boy #3’s name is Andrew Paul (Andrew because they liked it; Paul as a compromise from what Kelly wanted but also my maternal grandfather’s name), and I hope to meet him soon.

In other news, my boy is a preschool graduate. I’m such a sap. I knew I would cry, and I fought it from the moment the director made her speech about how our children had touched their lives but now it’s time for them to give them back to us and blah blah blah other pretty clichés. I’ve known some of these kids since they were babies, and I do have a tendency to get attached, so seeing them walking down the church aisle (the same one I walked down to marry Steven, by the way, which added its own element of sap/sweetness depending on your POV) in their little blue caps and gowns was pretty hard-core.

Here, mine's third from the left:

...second from the top left:

...and second row from the top, second kid from the left:

They sang their little hearts out—choreography included, and even some sign language!—on three songs, two of which made me misty, one that just made me laugh.

But it was really the photo montage that got to me. Set to music about how great kids are, there was a baby photo of each child followed by his/her cap and gown picture.

This one was met with laughter and “awws” from the audience and a fresh wave of nostalgia for me.

In other other news, I’m finished, for all intents and purposes, buying things for baby girl’s room. Now it’s a matter of taking care of a few details like covering my responsibilities while I’m temporarily incapacitated (either by labor and delivery or by that peculiar brand of post-baby shock and awe that can masquerade as catatonia) and finding a way to deep-clean the house without kicking off contractions. I’m seriously considering a one-time maid service. Is that too indulgent?

Everything in her room smells like Dreft, and I think I’ve become a junkie. I’ve been going in there before bed and sitting in the glider to soak in the what’s-to-come and ... sniff things.

A few more weeks. Wow.

No one's gonna read this...

2010-05-11T14:46:00.002-05:00

(so I slipshodded it).

Once upon a time my car kept making this weirdly mesmerizing noise that sounded like a bird chirping under the hood. It went on for months, because whenever I tried to demonstrate for someone who might be able to diagnose the sound or at least reassure me that I wasn’t having auditory hallucinations, the bird fell silent. So I finally started turning the radio up loud enough to drown out the bird, and eventually, it stopped. (And people tell me my “ignore it and it’ll go away” philosophy is ill-conceived.)

So yesterday when I went to the doctor after having a two-day-long Braxton-Hicks-contraction party, I was pretty sure I would leave with a big HYPOCHONDRIAC stamp on my forehead and that people would point and laugh me all my red-faced way to the parking lot. Even though Dr. Pretty Cool (yes, he used to be Dr. Awesome; long story) told me specifically that he wanted to know if I ever had six in one hour, I felt silly when I handed him my crumpled-up piece of paper with a list of times jotted down, front and back, detailing what my uterus had been up to all day.

Forget six in one hour; I’m an overachiever. I had eight, then five, then seven. One of them hit when I was waddling down the crosswalk toward my doctor’s office and took my breath away. Some of them were even kind of painful, although when asked that very question I brave-little-soldiered it and labeled them “a little uncomfortable.”

Also, perhaps because Nurse Always-Has-To-Comment-On-My-Weight-Gain said as she was slapping the blood pressure cuff on me, “Oh yeah, he’s gonna want to do a cervix check for sure; that doesn’t look good,” my first BP reading was high. Not as high as it was when I had pregnancy-induced hypertension with Alex, but high enough to earn a neon-green sticky note at the top of my chart.

So Dr. Pretty Cool came in and said, “Why are you trying to get your blood pressure all riled up?” and I wasn’t in the mood to get that he was joking so I said “I’m not!” so defensively that he chuckled and patted my arm reassuringly (but not patronizingly, which earned him at least one Awesome point back).

And then he informed me that these contractions were in fact “doing something”—I was 1.5 centimeters dilated (hey, less work to do later!). He sent me down for a non-stress test to monitor the contractions and my blood pressure. I was probably lying in the very bed my sister had just vacated, as she had the time slot right before me even though our paths didn’t cross this time.

I have to admit feeling slightly vindicated every time I had a contraction that showed up on the little scroll of paper coming out of the machine. It wasn't in my head! Nurse Carol even praised me for being in tune with my body. (Yeah, well, I’ve known that since I shoved a very-obviously-negative pregnancy test under Steven’s nose and said, “IT’S LYING. Trust me.”)

Nurse Carol, by the way, sat by my bed the whole time, and God bless her I wanted her to go away and leave me to watch Holmes on Homes and the fetal/contraction monitor in peace. But no, she wanted to talk about blood bank errors, incompetent fellow nurses, her two children (both born in March and both fans of Thai food!!!), and winning a third-karat diamond ring in a Cracker Jack box in some McRae’s find-the-diamond promotion years ago.

When she got onto how she’d canceled her subscription to Coastal Living three years ago because there wasn’t enough Gulf Coast coverage, I stopped listening so I wouldn’t snap at her.

After half an hour I’d had five good contractions, baby’s heart rate looked good, and my blood pressure had settled down. Nurse Carol called my doctor and he ordered terbutaline to make my uterus stoppit. That stuff burns like a _____ going in and then makes you jittery and shaky as your pulse rate shoots through the roof. Fun stuff.

But it worked. I had to lie there for another half hour or so with Nurse Carol chattering away as we waited for Dr. Pretty Cool to come down and look at my scroll, write a prescription for the pill form of the magic medicine, and pronounce me “good to go.” He said Nurse Carol had saved me a trip to L&D for IV fluids, so I guess I should cut her some slack for talking my ear off.

I hope my next appointment (scheduled for next week, quite possibly at the same time my sister is having her C-section) is a little bit smoother.

Now I'm under orders to rest as much as possible and drink lots of water. There's water in Diet Dr Pepper, right?

Stubborn independence

2010-05-07T07:47:00.003-05:00

Milestone of the millennium: The child who once upon a time screamed bloody murder if you got within ten feet of him holding a bottle of shampoo has started washing his own hair. It’s a miraculous thing, really; up until very recently I had disturbing visions of following him to college in the capacity of official hair washer. (Creepy inDEED.)

He couldn’t have picked a better time to reach this goal, as my bulging belly makes it painful for me to lean over to hold a washcloth over his eyes with one hand and lather with the other and then help him tilt his head back to rinse while he makes pitiful little panicky noises. A couple of nights ago I was doing laundry when I heard something that I can only imagine is what a drowning kitten would sound like.

Before you call CPS on me, let me clarify that he takes showers, not baths, so the danger was more that he’d snorted some suds up his nose than anything more dire.

“Alex?! Are you ok?” I called, starting for the open bathroom door.

“Yes!” [Gulp, sputter, cough, snort, gasp.] “Yes! I’m DOING it! Don’t come help me!” [Gulp, sputter, snort.]

The finesse will come in time, I’m sure.

That independent streak of his springs, I think, from his desire to be like his daddy. Unfortunately for him, he has an attitudinal streak that is just like mine. (Steven points it out frequently. “You can’t get mad at him for that,” he says when Alex stomps away in a huff because I’ve said no to some outrageous request. “That’s all you.”)

This morning I asked him to hand me the milk. He got distracted by string cheese, so I got the milk myself, used it for his cereal, and put it back.

“I wanted to hand you the milk,” he complained when the string cheese lost its hold on him.

“Well, I’m sorry, I’m in a hurry and you weren’t paying attention,” I said.

He thought about it for a second. Then he walked back to the refrigerator, opened it, took out the milk carton, plunked it down on the counter next to me, waited two seconds, and put it back in the refrigerator. Wow. (And yeah, I’d’a done the same thing, maybe.)

Baby girl is running out of room. I get fewer kicks and more shoves, which are decidedly less enjoyable. I mean, I love the kid, but my spleen was there first.

I’ve officially lost my office key card, which means I have no at-will access to the bathroom. This could be interesting. And by interesting I mean utterly disastrous.

Happy Friday, all!

Dress rehearsal

2010-04-30T08:01:00.004-05:00

Last night was chock-full of nightmares, and ones so vivid and plausible that they weren’t even fun. Getting yelled at by two different editors at work because everyone believes their copy is the most important and time-sensitive copy that ever copied. My water breaking while standing in line at Chik-fil-A (to be honest, the scariest part of this one was the alarming realization Oh no, I didn’t get my waffle fries!). Walking through the empty halls of Former Place of Work and finding bodies piled in every corner—ok, perhaps not so plausible from a literal standpoint, but boy do I get what my subconscious meant.

Between dreams, I got up to go to the bathroom four times, tripped on a dog three out of the four times, chugged a half-gallon of water around 2 a.m., rearranged Alex in bed (he’s taken to sleeping sideways across the bed with his head and legs hanging off opposite ends), popped some Tylenol for my back, and pondered the mysteries of the universe. All in all, a night of productivity. Does that mean I can sit and stare catatonically at the wall today? That’s the plan.

Kindergarten orientation went off without a hitch. I fully expected hitches. Especially when they ushered us inside the school and without warning funneled parents down one hallway, kids down another (“Let them go, Mamas; you’ll have to do it soon enough,” announced the principal—encouragingly??) and Alex turned around and fixed me with Those Eyes and gave me a trembly smile that was so utterly and obviously aiming for brave that a little piece of my heart broke off and shattered right there on the floor outside the cafeteria. Dramatic? Yes. True? Trust me.

It struck me during the parents’ portion of the meeting how very fish-out-of-water I feel in this little microcosm of society, and that’s a little bit surprising considering I’ve lived in it for the better part of my life. The other parents are very nice, and I chatted with a few of them and even saw a few familiar faces, but wow—I’d say there’s a mere three degrees of separation working in this community.

Oh, and my what-the-hell moment came when one of the cheerleaders from my own middle- and high-school days came out to ... do a cheer. For a second I could not have told you what year it was.

The kids who were herded into the lunchroom by the kindergarten teachers to reunite with us did not look older and wiser than the ones we’d watched wander confusedly down the hall an hour before. Their little faces registered some relief, some bewilderment, some pride ... but most notably they just looked very, very small.

Mine could not wait to tell me how he’d shared the crayons with a boy without even being asked and that he’d been a little bit scared at first but that he didn’t cry and then he’d made a friend and he’d talked to a grownup and used his manners and made a monkey and danced to a funny song that he didn’t remember and and and ... !!!

An almost-5-year-old’s excitement is infectious, I tell you.

I took him to Publix and told him he could pick out whatever he wanted as a treat for doing so great. He picked orange-flavored Tic-Tacs.

Moving Along

2010-04-28T08:19:00.005-05:00

Baby girl is, as I type, jabbing me with a little—elbow?—and making my stomach lopsided and lumpy. It’s fascinating. I’ll miss this part of being pregnant. (Not that I’m doing the almost-end-of-game wrap-up, OH no, not yet.) I’m 32 weeks along now, and she is measuring right on target. If I can keep my blood pressure in the normal range for the next few weeks, I will hopefully avoid induction or C-section.

Walking down the hall just now, I was greeted by the office receptionist with an unmistakable “Oh my God you look huge” gesture involving arms held way out in front of an imaginary giant belly. This same person once insisted—to the point of arguing with me about it—that I was pregnant before I was pregnant, so, okay.

We did the 4D ultrasound even though I’d said I was going to skip it this time. It’s expensive (not covered by insurance), and there are no guarantees that you’ll get a good look at the baby’s face if she decides, for example, to hide securely behind one arm and one leg. Ours did that, and I was duly impressed by her flexibility—knee to nose, no kidding—but we got some good shots, too. Enough to tell that she has chubby cheeks, a full, pouty little mouth, and (!) quite probably not a single strand of hair. (I am a sucker for the baldies.)

In other news, this:

is about to start down the path of Formal Education. I enrolled him in kindergarten yesterday. People keep telling me how emotional the process of sending your first off to kindergarten is, and I am a pretty sentimental sap. Mostly my twinges are of the “Will he miss Clay J.?” (I will!) and “Will he be upset when I leave him that first day?” (I will!) variety. Maybe because he’s been in full-time care since he was 3 months old, some of this is old hat to us. Routine, following directions, working with other kids, listening to teachers, all that stuff is (should be) in the bag.

But be gentle with me on August 13. (And August 14 for that matter; that’s my birthday.)

My fourth nephew (my sister’s third child) will most likely be joining us much earlier than his due date of June 17. She’s on bedrest now for pregnancy-induced hypertension and they’re talking about scheduling her C-section for mid- to late next month. Please spare a good thought or two for her, imagining how impossible it must be to rest and keep calm with a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old running around the house.

Anteshocks

2010-04-07T10:52:00.004-05:00

A wonderful and staggeringly talented friend of my mother-in-law’s who has made the crib bedding for all the babies in the family has finished our girl’s. I got pictures yesterday. Wanna peek?

Oh, wait. You can't. Because I'm not ready to tell you her name yet. =)

Baby Jane Doe gave me my first real scare yesterday, or maybe it could be more accurately classified as a prolonged period of paranoia and baseless, free-floating anxiety. Decreased fetal movement after 29 weeks. If you ever get a hankering to do a Google search on the topic, think twice—there are terrifying stories to be found and very few that will make you feel an iota better.

So yesterday I was a nervous wreck. I tied knots in all knottable objects within reach, I called the OB nurse in the hopes that she would tell me I was being ridiculous, I called one of my best childhood friends, a very GOOD nurse who delivered Alex (and who said to calm down, drink a Coke, and that if the OB nurse told me I was being ridiculous she was just a straight-up bad nurse and I should tell her so). I poked and prodded my belly relentlessly until I elicited a faint, sluggish bump, breathed a sigh of relief, and then faced a wave of fresh worry because sluggish is a terrible adjective!

Finally, gradually, in the midst of all this inner turmoil, baby girl decided to stop tormenting me mentally and return to the good old physical kind. Bouncing on my bladder, testing the elasticity of my ribs, doing that squirmy thing that induces nausea. She’s at it as I type. And I am intensely grateful.

Last night we went on a tour of the hospital where that whole birthing deal is going to happen. It made me excited, and nervous, and speaking of nausea, the C-section prep room smells like surgery and if I have to go there they won’t even have to give me a spinal because I’ll just pass out and save the anesthesiologist a trip. The tour was a barrage of words and images and memories of fear and giddiness. After-hours maternity drop-off, L&D rooms, stirrups, epidurals, skin-to-skin, rooming-in, visitors, nursing, BABY ... oh my.

Yes, indeed. It is perfectly excitifying.

Easterrific

2010-04-05T07:56:00.005-05:00

Long weekends. The idea of them always sounds heavenly, exotic somehow, laced with promise and possibility and adventure. In reality, more often than not (in my world, at least), there are long periods filled with indecision and motivation-gathering and pro-and-con weighing, resulting in more time spent trying to figure out what to do than doing it, and then needing a nap. Flightiness is hard work.

This weekend started on Thursday. There was an Easter party/egg hunt at which I was made a fool of by thirteen 4-year-olds who have no business being so good at Pin the Egg on the Bunny. (I overcompensated for the fact that every single one of them nailed that game by making the next one—Toss the Egg in the Bucket—excessively hard. I never claimed to be merciful.)

Then there was a trip to the mall with my son, mother, sister, nephews, and visiting aunt and cousin that resulted in a waking nightmare that only just turned out OK, and from which I am still reeling, four days later. Suffice it to say that my almost-2-year-old nephew might have a future as an Olympic sprinter. Or a kamikaze pilot. And that even in my third trimester of gestation I am capable of running and screaming in public when the stakes are high enough. (Such as preventing a baby’s suicide-run at the escalator, hypothetically.)

Then there was Easter itself, including a church service so packed out that we couldn’t even get in and had to watch it on a big screen in the small chapel next door. There was too much candy and not enough self-restraint. There was ham and casseroles and a coconut cake that never did finish cooking in the very middle. There was a little work, squished in between overeating and overnapping, while the hubby showed everyone up by taking little girl golden on a 10-mile hike.

All of it wrapped up with a sugar-induced meltdown over just one bedtime story, oh the humanity and a much-needed marathon of The Office with one of my favorite people.

This morning Alex was not at all thrilled at the prospect of returning to school. He asked me to do my best to pick him up before naptime, please, and then wanted to know if he could have a couple of Peeps for breakfast. (I said no to both requests because I am MEAN, MEAN, MEANNESS PERSONIFIED.)

But here we are, at the head of another week, well rested if unprepared to buckle down and get stuff done quite yet, craving raw vegetables and mineral water to counteract the nutritional damage we’ve done the past few days.

Baby girl is 29 weeks today, giving me heartburn at every turn and making me work for the oxygen (they tell me she’s the size of a butternut squash now). Tomorrow we tour the hospital so I can start having flashbacks to Labor & Delivery 2005, and find new and time-consuming things to obsess over.

Ladies' Man

2010-03-24T11:07:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I watched Alex make a new friend. The little girl next door had been watching him surreptitiously from her own yard for a good half an hour when I pointed out to my oblivious boy that it looked like she wanted to say hi. So he went out onto our front patio, waved at her, and immediately turned away to see to the very pressing task of picking up gumballs and sticks and throwing them into the front yard.

And so it went—the little girl swinging her pink vinyl purse and watching Alex do his unique brand of gardening, me wondering if I should help somehow or just let them do their kid thing—until the child’s mother walked over. We chatted our way through a decidedly different social dance than our little people were doing, and Alex and the little girl, whose name is either Olivia or Lydia, with the corresponding nickname of either Livvy or Liddy (in some incarnation) eventually drifted over to her yard to play. “Play,” from my vantage point (which was peering through the open door and spying like a freak to make sure he wasn’t bothering the nice people) seemed to consist of a silent hunt for four-leaf clovers in the weeds with an occasional burst of hysterical (and seemingly random) laughter.

It was, I say without a trace of sarcasm, fascinating.

When I finally called Alex back inside for dinner and exchanged the “Let’s get them together” conversational wrap-up with Livvy/Liddy’s mother, she made my day by telling me that he was the sweetest and most polite little boy she’s ever met. (She glossed over a story about a former neighbor child who liked to throw rocks at Livvy/Liddy, so I’m not entirely sure what kind of measuring stick she was using. Still! Proud mama here.)

Alex was thrilled with himself. He did not, however, catch her name, so she shall remain “That Girl” until and if he remembers to ask her. He wants to put a note in her mailbox today, and I’m trying to figure out how to urge him in a different direction, because he dictated his note to me:

I had fun playing with you today. Next time I see you, come to my house and we can have a sleepover.

And so he grows.

Party of One

2010-03-23T02:55:00.003-05:00

It's 2:43 a.m. Do you know where your preggo is? Well this one is sitting on her couch, wearing lopsided glasses, nursing a mild headache and a mild craving for something that she can't pinpoint, and writing to tell you about it. Oh, also, there seems to be a rave going on in my uterus, thumping baseline and strobe lights and all. Can one sing a fetus to sleep? Should I go collapse in the glider and rock myself? Allow me to whine: Insomnia suuuuuuuuucks!

Jack seemed to take it as a personal affront when I came out of the bedroom and flopped down next to what has become his sleeping chair. He raised his big dopey head, gave me a withering look, and heaved a big sigh before hopping down and sauntering off to points unknown. Well he's in for a treat when baby comes and makes this a nightly, and much louder, event! Unsympathetic beast.

OK, as spelling is proving much harder than it ought to be for a professional speller, and I've finally figured out what that mild craving is (chocolate milk), I'll be on my way. If I go to sleep in the next five minutes I'll have two good hours before it's time to get up. Whee!

P.S. Look at my pregnancy ticker. Baby moved up a square! She's now in that creepy bent-up position I've been waiting for. Two more squares till go time.

Pulling the plug.

2010-03-16T07:50:00.003-05:00

I have to confess: Somehow TV and computer have taken over our household. It was fine when Alex was playing the occasional Playhouse Disney game online; they’re educational, I rationalized, and they keep him occupied for extended periods while I cook or clean or catch up with my backlogged DVR. And when he discovered SpongeBob I was just glad that we were moving out of the realm of The Wonder Pets and branching off from superheroes, whose prolific appeal, frankly, baffles me. But now technological entertainment is king. Last night he requested a rain check on playing Chutes and Ladders with his oh-so-fun mommy in favor of trying to beat the “hammer brothers” on one of the countless old-school Nintendo games Steven has downloaded to our desktop (thank God for the laptop). In the mornings I’m lucky if he tears his eyes away from Bob’s adventures in Bikini Bottom long enough to make eye contact when he mumbles a perfunctory goodbye. (I used to get a big hug and a kiss to keep in my heart so that I would have it all day long in case I missed him. By used to, I mean a couple of weeks ago, before SpongeBob in conjunction with Mario and Megaman stole my baby.)

This morning I got tired of reminding him to eat his breakfast as he sat with his tray in front of him, staring slack-jawed at the TV. Five or six times I told him. “Eat, Alex. Don’t just watch.” He would pick up the spoon, put it in the bowl, scoop up some cereal, and freeze there like he’d forgotten how to complete the maneuver. Now, I’m proof positive that it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to shovel food into one’s mouth while watching TV. Unless you happen to be watching Lost, which requires every single functioning brain cell you’ve got, plus a few borrowed ones from your viewing partner.

So, this morning, I threw down the breakfast-time gauntlet. I turned off the television. I know! It resulted in a display of horror and disbelief that in turn resulted in an overturned juice box and the need for a change of pants. But he finished his breakfast at the table, which is probably where I went wrong in the first place, letting the occasional meal drift away from there for the sake of convenience and/or bouts of lazy parenting. But we had an actual conversation—him between bites of Cheerios—about our plans for the day. And when I left he gave me one of those keepsake kisses.

When we get home today I plan to thwart the relentless pull of Road Rash and Donkey Kong (yes, Steven’s all about the classics) by whisking Alex off to the library. There’s a Franklin book about the dangers of playing too many computer games that is calling our name.

A dream is a dream...

2010-03-02T10:59:00.004-06:00

Things move faster after the 20-week mark. Here I am at 24, the long-awaited glucose test in the offing at my next regular appointment and six whole weeks since we found out we’re growing us a she-baby. Re: that glucose test ... I’ve been told there are now flavor options. I’m going to choose based on which one might be the least offensive on its way back up. Lemon-lime, I’m told. And, by a nurse with wide-eyed earnestness: Stay away from the cola-flavored one. You don’t have to tell me twice.

The weird pregnancy dreams have hit hard lately. I was waiting—I remembered them, vivid and startling and technicolored, from my first pregnancy and have actually been looking forward to the nightly entertainment. (Broken only by the bladder-determined intermissions; there are now always at least three trips to the bathroom between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.) Last night I dreamed that we lost the chainsaw we’d planned on using for our home Cesarean section. We were really very upset by the missing chainsaw/surgical implement. And so we ended up at the hospital against our collective will, and suddenly I was stuck in an elevator with a former boss of mine and SHE was going to deliver the baby. I kicked her in the nose. On purpose. And God help me, it felt good. (If you’re reading this and are a former boss of mine, it’s not you, I almost promise.)

I’ve also had several dreams in which I am wandering half-clothed or inappropriately so (i.e. wearing the threadbare, too-short, polka-dotted nightshirt Steven "lovingly" refers to as my hospital gown) in public places: my old office building, a ritzy hotel, some sort of museum. I’m lost, more often than not, or at least confused about why I’m heading wherever I’m heading. Sometimes there is a baby to find. Once, I acknowledged to a passerby who asked the whereabouts of my baby that she was at home being looked after by her 5-year-old brother. Yikes!

Steven and I did once leave Alex in the car, but only for a few steps before we caught ourselves, mind you, and he was such a new development—surely other people occasionally forget they suddenly have babies. I don’t worry about that so much, this time. And whether or not the dreams mean anything, they are fun. I’m a fan of a good nightmare. I blame early exposure (and instant attachment) to Stephen King. So I’ll enjoy them, until and if I have that one where my teeth fall out of my mouth. That one creeps me out but good.

Boys vs. girls

2010-02-22T08:14:00.002-06:00

It’s happening already, that inevitable boy/girl division that I’d somehow thought the enlightened 2005 birth set would rise above. I saw it in action at a bowling birthday party this weekend. Five girls bowled in one lane, five boys in the other. All five girls lost interest in the game at some point and defected, choosing instead to hold hands in a giggling chain and weave haphazardly among tables and people and other obstacles. The same one stepped on my foot four times. I overlooked it because she’s been one of my favorites since Alex’s crew was in the baby room (a chubby girl with rosy, freckled cheeks and curly red hair—and her name is Sunny, come ON, how cute is that?). Seemingly ignorant of the girls’ apathy about the competition, the boys continued to work together to beat them. It was a valiant effort, I’ll have to say, and admirable that they really didn’t care, after a while, about whose turn it was or whether or not their meandering communal 7-pounder managed to find its target (thank God for bumpers).

They’re not so far gone that they’re not still friends, thank goodness. That would break my heart. I watched Alex try to encourage sweet shy Anna to bowl even though her big teary terrified eyes and her death grip on her mother said that she had no intention of being convinced. I watched the five girls form a circle around the birthday boy and take turns hugging him. (I’m pretty sure he only pretended to be put out.) And on the way out with little Ruby and her mom, Alex said, “Great job bowling, Ruby!” and she giggled and if I didn’t know better I’d say she actually blushed. (This is the one whose mother told me that she recently said, “That boy Alex in my class, sometimes he looks at me. And I like it!” and then ran away in embarrassment.)

Yikes, they’re growing up fast. There’s some bitter in the sweet, but it makes me proud to see my boy’s good-hearted nature in action. I love that he thanked the birthday boy’s mother for inviting him without my reminding him, and that he told his friends “Good job” after every turn, even if he kept returning to me and telling me how harrrrrrrrd it was to wait for his own. I love that when we were leaving and he said, “Boys are tougher than girls” and I explained to him exactly why that is fallacious logic, he relented and told me that people are “the same tough. Even though sometimes boys are ... taller.”

Lastly and randomly, I love this snippet from Ms. Donna’s 4K last Friday, just because it makes me snort:

Alex: “Lucy spent a long time making her picture beautiful, and then Patton came over and told her it looked damn.”
Me: “He said what?”
Alex: “He said ... He said it didn’t look beautiful.”
Me: “No, it’s ok, what did you say he said?”
Alex: “He used a grown-up word.”
Me: “He said it looked...”
Alex, solemnly: “He said it looked damn.”

My kid, the cutter

2010-02-19T08:18:00.003-06:00

Alex is on his way to becoming that kid who, in elementary school, cut off the tip of his nose with scissors and damned generations to follow in the VH school system to using nothing but the blunt-nosed kind forevermore. It sounds like an urban legend, but I swear, it happened! Right? The part about the nose tip falling into a pile of dried beans the class was using for math purposes is still up for debate.

Alex’s nose is intact, thank God, and he didn’t do any real damage, but yesterday he came home flaunting an accident report pinned to his school bag and a Band-Aid on his thumb. “We were using plastic knives to spread marshmallow cream onto apple slices” the note read (and here I’ll add an editorial ‘ew’). “Alex cut his finger while ‘sawing’ on his apple with the plastic knife.” Translation from the soft-centered language spoken by sweet 4K teachers the world over: “Your kid was using his plastic knife for unsanctioned purposes. Don’t blame us.” I asked him why he was sawing on the apple instead of spreading (ew) marshmallow cream. He looked at me like I’m quite dense. “There was peel on the apple. I couldn’t eat that!”

It wasn’t long after when I noticed a perfectly straight-edged hole in one of the knees of his jeans. The third time I said “Alex, did you cut that with scissors?” I got a reluctant but earnest “Well yes I did, but I don’t know why I would've done something like that!” This makes me wonder about the brand new pair of khakis that came home recently with a gaping hole in BOTH knees, and while he insists (vehemently) that he most certainly did not take scissors to those pants, and in fact finds the very idea quite offensive—I have to wonder.

If he doesn’t start making better choices when it comes to common utility tools, he’ll eventually be the 40-year-old man who cuts his steak with a rubber-coated spoon and clips coupons with his teeth.

Baby Girl is doing great. Strong and loud heartbeat of 157 bpm, measuring right on track, not yet forcing my blood pressure into the danger zone the way Fetal Alex did. I’ve gained quite a bit less weight than I'd imagined, considering my newfound appreciation for Snickers ice cream bars and Limited Edition Publix Premium Strawberry Shortcake ice cream. And hot biscuits with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and strawberry jam. Mmm...

Food for Thought

2010-02-09T09:53:00.001-06:00

How the Octopus Got Eight Hands
by Alexander Kirk Bosche

This is how the octopus got eight hands. It wished in the magic sea for eight hands because it found a lot of beautiful things. Then it picked up all the beautiful stuff and then they carried them to build their house, and the star was to poke the hole.

The End.

Passing the time

2010-02-08T08:02:00.001-06:00

Girlchild is moving around a lot these days, but the bumps still aren't strong enough to feel from the outside. Plus, she seems to stop whenever a hand is put over the source of her poking. Stubborn like her brother? And maybe her mama—I hear nasty rumors sometimes that I'm pig-headed. I hope Alex gets to feel her soon; he's been claiming since she was about the size of a peanut that he can feel her head when he touches my tummy. I never had the heart to tell him no, my dear, that's just Mommy's gut. The movements are so reassuring, though, and that's what I remember from before. Having that frequent, multiple-times-daily physical reassurance that she's OK in there helps me in my efforts to make my old frenemy Anxiety shut it, already.

Steven put up the crib this weekend, of his own accord and without my having to lift a finger. And he kept the cursing to a bare minimum, even though there was an impromptu trip to Lowe's in the middle of the project and the drawer that's supposed to slide into the bottom of the frame flat refuses to be slid. If baby came home tomorrow we'd be 74% ready for her, at least physically. Which means that, roughly twenty-seven years from now, when I finally give birth, we should be all set.

So now begins the interminable wait. The long stretch of no concrete milestones, with the finish line still too far distant to make out without binoculars. We are over the hump though, more than halfway there, and I still get to sleep a lot. A lot a lot. I guess now there's nothing to do but enjoy my sleep and my Only and my spit-up-free existence, to occasionally panic when all's too still for too long in my belly, to play the eating-for-two card, to bask in the rosy, rewritten memories of what having a newborn is really like. And occasionally to get all mushy when I encounter a rack of tiny, flowered sundresses, knowing full well that anything but sleepers and onesies is impractical in the beginning but not caring one iota. This is fantasy time. Gimme it.

I adore my husband, but I do hope he'll refrain from making this creepy face this time. Note the frozen semblance of what might be a smile in some improbable parallel universe, with the underlying visible effort to avoid puking on my head. (It's shocking, when there's suddenly a baby in the room.)

Motherhood should grade on a curve.

2010-02-04T08:17:00.000-06:00

I suppose it’s natural, if neurotic, as a mother, to watch other mothers and do a quick mental assessment of how you hold up. It’s born of insecurity, that tendency, and at least for me was a way to make sure that, while I wasn’t doing everything perfectly, at least I wasn’t the mom who forgot her kid’s coat in sub-60 temps. Ok, fine, I was her once, but in my defense, it was way colder at the pumpkin patch than it was when we left the house and if you stayed in direct sunlight it was almost possible not to shiver. And, if I'm going to be confessional: I’m the one who forgot to replace his summer backup clothes at daycare with winter ones, who perpetually neglected to bring snacks along on day trips to the zoo, who quite frequently imposed the five-second rule of food on the floor. Sometimes I forgot to replenish his daytime diaper stash, and he’d come home in a borrowed Disney Princess Huggie. Once, when he was just sitting up, he toppled off my bed because I was too busy making a video of him sitting up on my bed to catch him. I know I’ve mentioned on here the baby powder incident. A friend of mine recently told me about her daughter’s similar adventures with an economy-size tub of Vaseline that she got her hands on after climbing out of her crib at a shockingly early age. Once out and thoroughly greased up, baby decided to try getting back into the crib, which proved impossible because she was too slippery. My friend felt guilty for not knowing her kid was capable of such mayhem; I felt stupid for not closing the baby powder. It’s a comedy of errors, this parenthood thing, and I finally understand that even the ones who make it look effortless (I’m lookin’ at YOU, Cathy) struggle sometimes. Cuz ain’t none of us perfect.

Hopefully the second time around I’ll get less caught up in those involuntary comparisons. I will try, as they used to remind us during tests in school, to keep my eyes on my own work. Maybe this time I’ll be the mom with one of those magically bottomless diaper bags that can produce a wet wipe in five seconds flat, or crayons and coloring pages for restaurant entertainment, or a spillproof cup of Goldfish or Cheerios at just the right moment during a long errand run. I’ll have Band-Aids and hand sanitizer on my person at all times, several changes of season-appropriate clothes, and spare pacifiers in every corner because I swear to God those things have legs.

More likely I’ll forget a lot of stuff, a lot of the time. I’ll leave the baby powder container open because of sleep deprivation or laziness. At least once during her life I’m bound to dress her in direct opposition to the weather. I will—because sometimes it’s just funny—at some point laugh when she trips over air and slides down the hall on her knees, or walks into a wall because she's in that bizarre toddler fog and they're straight-up blind in those moments. And she’ll be ok. Just like Alex has always been ok, just like we are all ok, more or less, despite (or because of) parents who are human and as such make all kinds of mistakes along the way. Kids really are elastic, in mind, body, and spirit.

I also realize, sort of against my will, that these are the easy mistakes. For Alex, tweenhood, teen years, and beyond are right around the corner, harboring all kinds of as-yet-untold horrors. I'm bound to long for the days when my biggest missteps were forgetting to pack a snack or to remind him to brush his teeth. Golden simplicity. These are the days that one day will be the good old days.

Alex, you are my heart. I apologize in advance for all the screwing up I’ve yet to do.

Short and Neurotic

2010-01-26T08:05:00.000-06:00

Ever since I told Alex that the baby can hear him now, he's been talking to my stomach. "Baby [Girl's Name]," he said yesterday, "I tripped over a rock getting Neemama's mail and I scraped my knee, but don't worry. I'm going to be ok." And "Mommy likes it when you kick her; you should do more of that."

It's sweet, and bizarre.

This morning I woke up feeling like I'd doubled in size overnight. I said as much to Steven, who glanced, did a double-take, and said, "Wow. Yeah, um, I guess she moved or something. Like, a lot."

The gender-specific pronoun still fills me with giddy disbelief. And it's occurred to me that maybe the tech was wrong; that maybe I will be in for the shock of my life when they hand me a bouncing baby boy on D-Day. Whether that's paranoia or not remains to be seen. I've read the stories, mostly on the iVillage expecting club message boards. Posts with titles like "My girl has a penis!" and "Switching teams" and "He's a she." Mostly they're just interesting to read, but if this kid comes out a boy, he's darn well going to sleep in his rose-studded nursery and quite possibly wear a few pink onesies (yes, I've done a little shopping) and he won't know the difference. I will, however, dust off the boy name we were going to use because I really do love it and was slightly bummed about not getting to use it. Maybe our next dog can be Owen Thomas. There. Happy now? That was our boy name that we won't be needing unless it turns out that our ultrasound tech lied to us.

Dazzled

2010-01-20T17:06:00.000-06:00

That, friends, is my baby girl.

I KNOW, I can't believe it either! I didn't realize how much I was expecting to hear "It's a boy" until I heard, well, not exactly "It's a girl" because when the tech said "See those three white lines?" I gasped and burst into tears. Well, maybe that's overstated. There was definitely a gasp, and there was some mistiness that took me by surprise because, while I'm known to be an easy crier, it's rare for me to produce those elusive and helpless happy tears.

I'm going to have a daughter. Steven's going to have a little princess (and he might need a few pointers from men who were terrified of baby girls until they had one of their own, so if you know anyone...). Alex is going to have a baby sister. He was excited when I told him. He jumped up and down and reiterated his desire to teach her how to walk and run, "but only inside, at least until we get her some clothes to play outside in." And while I'm still in a state of semi-shock and pseudo-disbelief and breath-holding awe, Alex has moved on to more pressing matters. Right now he's drawing pictures of robots and taping them around the house as decorations for some convoluted surprise party for Steven. When we dropped by my parents' house to show them the DVD of the ultrasound, I told Alex to share the big news. Wide-eyed and earnest, he told them: "We got a new TV!"

Life is amazing.

Cuteness Overload

2010-01-18T10:52:00.000-06:00

Wow. I've got to stop these nostalgic journeys. Thing is, we rearranged Alex's room yesterday and removed the last vestiges of nursery from it; it's now officially a BIG BOY room. And I'm OK with that, of course, because he just gets better as he gets older, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a little twinge when I stumble blindly upon (or go to great lengths to dig up) one of these reminders of my funny baby boy.

Poor Charlie has only recently stopped fleeing anytime Alex gets within a 50-yard radius of her. I wonder how she'll react when we bring home another human puppy. My guess is that she'll keep a safe distance but (again) be a devoted if rather hands-off surrogate mama dog. She'll plant herself in front of me and bat mercilessly at my legs if I don't answer baby's cries as promptly as she thinks I should. She'll lick tiny feet with a kind of reverence (but only when the owner of the tiny feet is sound asleep). Jack ... well, Jack is Jack. He will passively tolerate being spat up on, pushed and pulled, and having his lips flapped around by chubby baby hands. He will serve as a furry step stool and a reliable source of infant amusement. All he'll ask in return is to be allowed to lick all traces of food, milk, juice, and unidentifiable stickiness off the child as he sees fit.

Day after tomorrow, we'll have a better picture of what our future holds.

Tripping down Memory Lane

2010-01-15T08:16:00.000-06:00

I’ve been indulging in a little pictorial nostalgia recently. Several things have become clear.

1. My baby was very, very bald and had very, very big eyes. Like a Glo Worm.

2. I was very, very unprepared for motherhood.

3. Our old house was quite probably situated over a Hellmouth. (Maybe I should’ve warned the nice man who bought it from us after approximately seventy-five years on the market.)

We moved when I was 37 weeks pregnant. I picked up one end of a couch and my share of fairly heavy boxes in the process. We agreed not to tell our mothers that. The dogs settled in quickly, and Steven acclimated ... I never did. Before I could come to know the Stonehaven house as home, I had a baby, and my world turned inside out. We called him Alexander the Demander. I don’t think he was as fussy as we’ve come to remember. I think we were scared new (young) parents and everything was amplified and magnified until we found ourselves hopelessly confused about where we belonged on the spectrum of This Is Normal.

And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if he cried incessantly or a perfectly normal amount. We figured out that a few seconds outside would snap him out of those cries that didn’t seem tied to anything we could fix. We figured out that rocking him in the glider in his room with the lights off was akin to magic, and that he liked Bette Midler’s “The Rose,” a song to which I inexplicably know all the words. I learned to relinquish some measure of control because God knows you don’t have much when it comes to babies. Eventually, eventually, I didn’t overdo when he whimpered and I learned that getting a grip on ME was a prerequisite to soothing him.

Easily frustrated is my sweet boychild. Type A, like his grandfather and his mommy. Baby steps were never enough to satisfy him. Tummy time made him want to crawl, crawling made him want to walk, walking made him want to run. He’s doing 100-piece jigsaw puzzles on the computer now and grouching that it takes him too long. I wish he knew there’s time to reach all these goals. That one day he’ll be 31, expecting his second child, realizing that kids he used to babysit are graduating from college and entering the real world, and all the milestones will come in their own time. I hope he can come to see and appreciate himself for what he is and what he can do—both of which blow my mind on a daily basis.

“I hope we get an easy one this time,” said Steven, making me envision a warehouse of babies, row after row of bassinets, each tagged with a temperament and a number denoting level of difficulty. I agreed with him, remembering the infinite afternoons spent coddling and swaying, singing and patting and rocking and shushing. But then Alex ran into the room to give me a “golden ticket,” which, he explained, I could use to purchase prizes from his room, anything I wanted except for his cars because those are special and cost three golden tickets, and I changed my mind: I want our baby. I want Alex’s brother or sister, Steven’s son or daughter, my little bug. I want another big-eyed bald Glo Worm with Kermit the Frog legs, or a chunky teddy bear with untamable locks. Whoever we get will be just right for us.

Five days and counting till the Big Ultrasound!

Look out, literary world!

2010-01-12T08:51:00.001-06:00

Alex wrote a book. It’s called Speeding Turtles. It’s adorable and I’m very proud. Why? Because I used to fancy myself a writer? Maybe. But maybe more because he is so proud of it. He had me read it to him as one of his bedtime stories the other night. He credits Steven with helping a little bit, meaning Steven was the ghostspeller. And that would explain the choppiness of these sentences from a child who hasn’t stopped talking since birth. Without a doubt, it went like this:

“Daddy, how do you spell ‘This turtle runs faster than any other turtle in the world, and nobody can catch him, even other animals that are actually supposed to be fast’?”

“R-U-N-S F-A-S-T.”

Close enough.

Of Christmas and Cult Leaders

2010-01-05T08:55:00.000-06:00

Today I caved and broke out the maternity pants. Ample breathing room cannot be overestimated. Week 16 has brought nothing new or exciting except for this rapidly expanding midsection of mine, and I can’t quite stop trying to suck it in. It’s true what they say, though, that you show earlier with subsequent babies than with your first, and if it’s not true in your experience, I beseech you not to correct me. I’ve felt a few maybe-baby flutters within the past week and am eagerly awaiting the days when I’ll be shoving the kid’s feet out of my ribcage.

Christmas came and went with the customary blend of chaos and calm, impatience and panic and joy and melancholy, family and friends and too many awkward-shaped boxes to wrap, food prep and overindulgence and crankiness born of exhaustion. Alex was wildly disproportionate in his glee on Christmas morning, exclaiming stridently over a 20-cent Spider-Man Frisbee and a hollow plastic candy cane filled with Hershey Kisses, and dismissing the FRIGGIN TRAMPOLINE with a polite but disingenuous “Oh, wow, I like that too!” (In his defense, the unmarked box full of poles and netting didn’t look quite so impressive as one might have hoped and I’m not sure he understood exactly what it was.) He got lots of games with little pieces, and to my dismay I keep finding tiny bones from the Operation man lying around the house, and blocks of ice (from Don’t Break The) keep appearing in random places. Chutes and Ladders is a new favorite, although when he loses (and hard as I try sometimes when I’m not in the mood for the fallout, I can’t seem to throw a game of chance) he is not what one would call a good sport about it. “Oh NO!” he melodramas. “I’m not any good at it! I’ll NEVER WIN!” We’re workin’ on it.

Before:
After:

Our annual post-Christmas trip to Houston to see our Texas family was nice. My baby boy insisted on sitting in a seat on the airplane by himself, with the aisle separating him from us. He was content to “read” his books and look out the window and drink his Sprite and eat his little pretzels. I remember the panicky flights of yore, my carry-on filled with a solution to every conceivable problem: Boredom? Toys, books, movies, games. Sleepiness: Blanket, stuffed animals, pacifier. Meltdown? Emergency chocolate stash! Once, when he was about two and a half, he realized he had the upper hand (when we’re not surrounded by innocent captive passengers we never lose the upper hand, mind you) and began demanding a steady stream of Dum-Dums until we were safely on the ground and able to balance the power scale. I guess we have these things to look forward to from BB at some point, while Alex will no doubt opt to sit farther and farther away from us with each successive year.

He had a blast with his cousins, Elizabeth and Emily, and Steven’s friend Jeremy’s kids, Hunter and Tyler. Five munchkins between the ages of 3 and 5, running wild in the upstairs play room on the hunt for Alex’s “Mystery Maker” and their ever-missing light sticks. (We later realized why the light sticks kept disappearing when I overheard Alex say, “Let’s play Hide the Light Stick again!”) Whether a natural leader or a Jim Jones in the making, Alex gave me cause for concern with his bossy tendencies, which I’ve never had occasion to see on display quite so vividly. At one point he organized a cleanup of the playroom and I heard him announce, “I keep telling you! This is not play time, this is cleanup time.” (I had a talk with him that night about bossiness, and how to suggest things to friends instead of giving orders, and he did put the strategies into action the next day, thank God. Or maybe he was just lulling me into a false sense of security so that I’ll drink the Kool-Aid too!)

I enjoyed every second I got to hold my sweet 2-month-old nephew Charlie. I thought about asking to borrow him to tide me over until June, but, nice as my sister- and brother-in-law are, they might balk at fostering out their third-born. I did, however, do enough cuddling, smelling, kissing of peach-fuzzy head, and patting of puffy diaper-clad rear end to scratch my baby itch for a while.

And shhh, don’t tell him I told you this, but Steven admitted, of his own accord, that seeing Charlie got him really excited about ours. He can join the club.

My Son, the Philosopher

2009-12-15T07:16:00.000-06:00

I had my second OB appointment yesterday, and Dr. Awesome perused my file and proclaimed, "You're perfect." Aw, you flatter me, Dr. Awesome. Good bloodwork, good blood pressure (whew), good baby heartbeat, good weight gain (if there is such a thing) at one pound after the nice nurse subtracted one because I was wearing boots. And! He told me that if I come back in five weeks instead of four, we can do my "big ultrasound." So on January 20 at around 10 a.m., barring baby stubbornness or unforeseen events, we will find out if we're having a John or a Jane. And no, those are not the names. It's hard to believe that my next appointment will mark the almost-halfway point of this pregnancy. Makes me feel, comparatively and in retrospect, like I gestated Alex for about two and a half years. This is flying by!

Speaking of the funny 4-year-old, he told us last night that, while he realizes that God gets to choose whether the baby is a boy or a girl, he certainly hopes God was listening when he put in his request for a baby sister. Why a sister? I asked out of curiosity. "Because," he told me matter-of-factly, "Girls are cute."

Less cute, more heart-wrenching was the conversation we had a week or so ago when I was putting him to bed. He went through his whole how-much-I-love-you routine, starting with "I love you ten million" (we never know what units he's using) and going all the way to "I love you up to the sky and around the world and past Heaven." Then, unexpectedly, he said, "I'll even love you when you die." He thought about it for a minute and added, "But that's going to be a looooooong long long time away, right?" After reassuring as best I could on such a landmine-dotted topic, he seemed not a bit soothed. "Why does life have to be like that?" he asked, frustrated.

I think he used to ask easier questions.

He has come up with his own surprisingly accurate theory on the logistics of childbirth. When the baby runs out of room in my tummy, he said, it will start looking around for the door. The doctor at the hospital helps the baby open the door, because, duh, babies don't know how to turn knobs.

The Joys of Being Neurotic

2009-12-01T09:42:00.000-06:00

I’m brainstorming. It’s a sight to behold, let me tell you. Notes are scattered in front of me, scribbled on Post-Its of varying sizes, looking important and schizophrenic. Monday 10:45, says one ... I didn’t do anything yesterday at 10:45, so I’m hoping it’s old. I doodle my name a lot, it seems, in all its incarnations. I doodle the baby’s potential names, especially ones I know I’ll never have the guts to saddle the kid with for real. Christmas shopping. One of these Post-Its has names and abbreviations of what I can only imagine were intended to be gift ideas, but I can’t imagine why I would be buying my 4-year-old nephew a Psk CXp bd. I need to get better with my shorthand. Mostly there are random numbers with dollar signs that make me the appropriate degree of nervous: 895 minus 654 equals 241 and even though I don’t know what that 241 is, it seems ominous, right? S: 866.25 with an exclamation point next to it! VBC 715 with a question mark? Baby care, afterschool care, yack! It’s important, too, not something you can just close your eyes and point to and hope for the best ...

I’m a planner. Not because I’m so all-fired organized (Post-Its everywhere attest) but because I worry if I don’t have a plan in place. I worry if I do have a plan in place, but less, and for different reasons. The having of the plan is A-Number-One-Important; the plan can be tweaked and adjusted, reframed and repositioned, but its bones don’t change and that brings me some measure of comfort. Right now there is no plan. Or actually there are several completely separate potential plans, with corollaries, and I’m stuck at the crux of where all the paths branch off, staring down one after the other with panicked indecision. Wishing someone would push me down one, any one, so I can claim PLAN IN PLACE, NO TAKE-BACKS and go on about my business.

So while I wait for something to click, for a decision to make itself (hasn’t happened in my 31 years of life but that’s not going to stop me from waiting), I’m going to throw myself into the things that are fairly controllable and don’t require much in the way of choice. Beginning the slow process of clearing out the office in preparation to transform it into the nursery. Reading about what’s happening inside my body from week to week. Boosting Alex’s burgeoning big brother ego. Working. Freelancing to fill in the holes because my goodness formula has gotten more expensive in the past four years! Hanging with people who make me laugh. Reading mindless fiction (confession: I’m halfway through my second reading of New Moon, yes I am, don't judge me). Writing mindless nonfiction, so that I’ll remember this time in my life, years down the line, when the decisions have all been made and paid and become woven into the fabric of How It Is.

Stop taunting me with your secrets, future.

Help, I'm Addicted to Sleep!

2009-11-30T07:54:00.000-06:00

FATIGUE. It’s starting to give me a bad rap. OK, so I’m sort of notorious for my tendency to take long naps whenever possible, but four hours at a stretch midafternoon after a night of twelve? Kind of absurd, even for me. Yesterday I turned over birthday party detail to Steven because I simply could not face two hours at McWane Center. There’s like seventy-five floors of hands-on activity! It would have KILLED ME DEAD. I was supposed to be catching up on freelance work while they were gone. I napped. Don’t tell Steven. This morning I woke up to pouring rain and the prospect of Monday after a five-day break. Didn’t help that when I went to wake Alex up he asked if it was Friday. I summoned all the faux chipper I could muster and said no, honey, it’s Monday, and you get to tell your friends all about your Thanksgiving, won’t that be FUN? (To which he huffed with bitterness far beyond his years, “No it won’t be FUN. I hate Mondays.”)

Of course, when you’re 4 you’re generally easily distracted by shiny things. He was surprised into grudging delight by the sight of our lit-up Christmas tree (“I forgot our tree was decorated!” he bubbled), and was nudged the rest of the way into a good mood by getting to pour the syrup on his waffle allllll by himself. (I need to scrub the counter when I get home.)

Little one is 11 weeks in utero today, showing no signs of laying off the nausea-making or the exhaustion-mongering even though THAT’S THE RULE, KID, 12 WEEKS AND MOMMY GETS TO FEEL GOOD AGAIN, READ THE HANDBOOK. I look forward to having more energy, to not feeling like a trip to the Dollar Store to buy wrapping paper for the birthday child’s present is going to do me right the hell in. I’ll still probably take two-hour naps when I can because, hey, once this baby shows up I won’t get to do that nearly as much as I’d like to. I’m banking sleep, it’s logical! But hopefully I will soon, again, be able to manage my time like a normal person and not make up an errand for the exclusive purpose of justifying re-pajama’ing and returning to blissful unconsciousness the second I get home.

Maybe we should’ve kept the Mattress O’ Torture.

Is the world ready for Alex the Big Brother?

2009-11-23T08:30:00.000-06:00

This week BB graduates from embryo to fetus. I know, how exciting! I finally was able to find the heartbeat with the home Doppler I’ve been ordered to send back for the sake of my sanity and that of those bound to listen to my fretting, and I heard that sound with mine own ears. It’s incredible.

Steven and I had occasion to see a 3-week-old Saturday night. He stared at the sleeping baby for all of five seconds and then said, “OK, now I’m scared. I forgot how little they are.” And I kind of did too. My “baby” has been too big to comfortably pick up for two years now (not that that stops him from diving into my arms occasionally, heedless of my protesting back), and long gone are the days when I had to hold my breath while trimming impossibly tiny fingernails. I’d even forgotten the way they grip your finger with a whole, minuscule and perfect hand, and how their skin is so soft and new it’s almost translucent. (Unless you’re Alex, who had cradle cap on his head and eczema on his legs, but a damn soft belly to make up for it.) I’m sure there’s a host of baby goodness I’m going to rediscover come June.

Alex wants to teach the baby how to walk, and how to hop on one leg. Right away, I believe he plans to do this. I don’t want to poke a hole in his enthusiasm, so we’ll just let things play out as they will. I just learned that my 3-year-old niece Emily is asking how long her new baby brother will be staying with them, and I find that adorably pitiful. My nephew Jack, to my knowledge, still hasn’t stopped asking when baby Nicholas is going back to the hospital, and baby Nicholas is 18 months old now. It’s got to be disheartening, to be so little and to helplessly ride out the cosmic shift of your family as you’ve known it. I think, considering my intense aversion to change, it’s a good thing I was the youngest.

Alex has started declining to hold my hand in parking lots, citing the argument “I’m almost a big brother.” He will hold my hand if I tell him that he needs to keep me safe, as he seems to believe I’m sort of a bumbling idiot who relies on his constant guidance and protection for my very survival, and he says that he will always hold his baby sister’s hand or “actually, I’ll carry her” while crossing streets. (He, like his dad and more than half the general population that has some stake in it, is convinced we’re having a girl.) But I like that he’s practicing his new role. It’s never too early to prepare for a major life change. I don’t know that from experience, as I tend to watch the change coming with a mixture of dumb awe and passive denial, but that’s rarely worked in my favor so I gotta assume Alex’s way is more effective. He even has a plan for the birth. “While you’re in the hospital getting the baby out of your tummy, Daddy and I will stay here and wrap presents.” So far he’s set aside several toys he deems “baby toys,” two chewed-up pacifiers, and three sets of too-small pajamas to bestow on his sibling.

I hope the spirit of generosity holds.

This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with this post, but it makes me laugh.

My Baby Looks Like a Gummy Bear

2009-11-17T08:37:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I went to Dollar General and bought a stuffed horse head on a stick, heavy-duty aluminum foil, and a pregnancy test. I do wonder if I’m the only one ever to have done so.

Pregnancy test, you ask? YES, I say. I realize that I’ve taken sixteen, give or take, since early September, that they’ve all been varying shades of positive, and that all the logic and reason I’m able to muster these days (not to mention friends and spouse and People Who Make Sense) tell me “You’re pregnant, weirdo. Stop testing.” But yesterday was my first appointment, and the morning hours found me utterly at loose ends, and it was just a dollar anyway for a little piece of peace of mind. It was blazingly positive, if you’re wondering. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that stick was taunting me. Jerk.

Part of my anxiety was rooted in the fact that I did something ill-advised for those of us who are generally sweepingly anxious as a rule. I rented a home fetal doppler and tried (in vain) to find Baby’s heartbeat myself. I found mine about five thousand times over until I began cursing its reliability, which is pretty self-defeatist, in retrospect. But I didn’t find BB’s, and that scared me but good. Because, you see, it is VERY difficult to find the heartbeat before 10 weeks anyway, and I started trying at 8 weeks. Why? Just to freak myself out, maybe. Maybe life had been altogether too free of gut-wrenching worry for my taste. Who knows what motivates an incurable neurotic?

So thus was my state of mind going into the doctor’s appointment yesterday. I didn’t know what to expect. I have a new OB since Alex, and a new practice and a new hospital. My old doctor was stingy with ultrasounds. I only got one, and it was at 20 weeks. I did have a nurse friend who snuck me in for a quick peek at 10 weeks, so I knew Alex was IN there at least. With BB, yesterday, all I knew was that all pregnancy tests the world over insist the same thing, but that I was not going to be satisfied until I saw or heard for myself that there was a beating heart or three. So when they called me back and took me and Steven into an ultrasound room, I had to stop myself from throwing my arms around the nurse. No need to scare anyone. And it happened fast, the transition from dark uncertainty to crushing relief. It happened the second the nurse turned the monitor in our direction and I sat up on my elbows and saw our baby. Moving, no less, and looking much like a little gummy bear with stubby arms and legs. Blurry here, but you get the idea. But the best part? The crazy-fast flutter in the middle, the heartbeat, strong and vital, 180 beats per minute.

“Wow,” said Steven, my man of few words, and that just about summed it up for me, too.

Last night, after Alex was in bed and we were sitting on the couch trying to find something watchable on TV, Steven took another look at the sonogram pictures. “It’s weird to know what this is going to grow into,” he said. “That it’ll be funny and crazy and we’ll laugh at it and yell at it...”

“And love it,” I thought but didn’t say because it would’ve sounded cheesy. Then again, future tense doesn't apply here; the love switch has already been flipped. I sensed it before I saw that flutter on the screen; I knew it after.

Gender Bender

2009-11-12T09:22:00.000-06:00

Alex had a dream that the baby is a boy and a girl. Honestly, I’m not sure if he meant twins or a hermaphrodite. Either way I’m kind of hoping he doesn’t have the gift of precognition. No twins in any direction in either of our families, so we’re probably safe there...

Oh, gender. That’s The question of the second pregnancy, it seems. I’m sure I got it a few times with Alex, but not nearly so much. Now people just assume that I’m jonesing for a girl. And yes, having a girl would be nice, assuming I could figure out how to change Girl Diapers, and what to do with hair, once she grew some. (Alex was cue-ball bald until he was 2, and I’m pretty sure Girl Bosche would be too. I was, and my mother used to tease the few strands she could gather up into an Alfalfa ‘do and stick a barrette on it.) I’m not good with hair. My own, and presumably anyone else’s. I mean, look at my poor son’s hair and tell me I’m wrong.

Hair aside, I will also fall just as hopelessly in love with a boy, if that's what God sees fit to give me. If having Alex has taught me anything besides NEVER BE SURPRISED, it's taught me that kids are not their gender. I had it all wrong the first time, knowing nothing of boys and expecting the stereotypical factory standard. Alex is anything BUT the factory standard. And I’d be willing to bet girls don’t fit into their societal gender roles so neatly either. My nieces certainly represent two opposite ends of the spectrum. Anyway, I have a name in mind for either case, and don’t even ask me to tell you because I won’t. It’s hard enough to settle on a name between two people, without factoring in others’ bad connotations. If I’m dead-set on naming my next son Rufus, I don’t need to know that the bully in someone’s kindergarten class was named Rufus. (It’s not Rufus.)

When you think about all that could go wrong, all that went right to set this little life in motion, whether it’s a he baby or a she baby becomes utterly irrelevant. Right now I just want to hear that little whoosh-whoosh heartbeat and know that HE or SHE, or he and she, or he/she, if Alex’s dream comes to pass, is healthy in there, swimming around and growing all the right things and thoroughly enjoying wearing me down this first trimester.

Monday (first doctor’s appointment) can’t come soon enough.

Call me Mommie Dearest.

2009-11-09T07:51:00.000-06:00

Nothing like a good dose of guilt to kick off a Monday morning! Now, granted, one might’ve expected me, as the adult in the equation, to exhibit a little bit more grace in this scenario. I blame a restless night, and the shameless pilfering of my last ten minutes of snoozing. My last ten minutes of snoozing are sacrosanct, even if you’re 4 and rumple-headed and sort of cute when you’re cranky.

But seriously? When one requests a smiley face on one’s Pop-Tart “Not because I want it to be special but because I want it to be happy,” mind you, and one’s mom dutifully places raisin eyes and a raisin nose and a raisin mouth onto one's toaster pastry, one should just suck it up when the raisins fall off. It’s not a national disaster, it’s not cause for sniveling and seething anger and waterworks, and how the hell did one plan to eat the Pop-Tart anyway without disrupting the raisin art at some point during the process?!

I let him have his little snit-fit while I finished putting on my makeup and drying my hair, and then I kissed him goodbye, told him to have a good day, and walked out the door. I was about to pull out of the carport when he yanked the door open and yelled after me, weeping freely, “I don’t want you to goooooooo!” So I stopped, opened the car door and held my arms out so he could nestle his snotty, tear-streaked face into my shirt, and asked him what, exactly, the problem was. “We didn’t apologize!” he said, and he wasn’t wrong, although technically I didn’t really see what I’d done to apologize for ... faulty raisin-face engineering? So I said “I’m sorry we didn’t have a very good morning,” which should pass muster unless you’re very picky, and he said, “I’m sorry I been sick,” which was sooooo not the point, and I took him back inside, blew his nose, and bade Steven good luck.

Alex watched me back out of the driveway, waving mournfully as if I were off to the battlefields instead of off to a day of correcting spelling and grammar. “Have a good day; I love you,” I called to him as I put the car into Drive. He was bawling afresh as he yelled back, “I [sob] love [sob] you [sob] toooooooo!!!!” The heartbroken wail followed me down the street.

So, Monday: 1, Julie: 0. The day can only get better.

Where Babies Come From

2009-11-05T12:32:00.000-06:00

Nothing will get a bunch of veteran moms talking like a spirited discussion of labor and childbirth. These conversations are best when they happen in the presence of a scared first-timer who’s mere days away from having her own story to tell. The veterans seldom notice when the mother-to-be in their midst begins to shift uncomfortably, breaks out into a cold sweat, or turns slightly green. It’s not that no one wants to hear about your epidural-gone-wrong, or your emergency C-section, or your God-help-me tearing. It’s just that when a woman with a belly the size of a bowling ball is present, and maybe just coming to terms with the fact that this child she’s been so proudly growing all these months is going to have to come out somehow, it might be prudent to stick to the good stuff. The epidural that worked backward and succeeded only in numbing you from the midsection UP paled next to the inexpressible joy you felt when you (got the feeling back in your arms and) held your little one for the first time. That recovering from your C was easier than one might imagine, and for many women quite preferable to the alternative. That the God-help-me tear ... healed.

So I won’t tell any newbies about throwing up in a Best Buy bag because the pre-epidural drugs didn’t agree with me and Steven is resourceful. Or about passing out AS they were putting a needle into my spine. Or about pushing for two and a half hours before finally having Alex pried from me with oversize salad tongs. I won’t tell them about the fact that those tongs broke his tiny little newborn clavicle, and that the break was supposed to heal cleanly and instead left a huge calcium deposit BUMP on his collarbone that seems to be growing as he does. That on the second day in the hospital I collapsed into sobs because he wouldn’t eat and I was so sure they weren’t going to let me take him home because of what an unfit mother I was that I begged the nurse to bring me some formula and show me how to bottle feed. That I felt like a big jerk because of that.

Nah, nobody needs to hear the horror stories. Least of all me. Because, while I’ve done it once before, I’m no expert and I am a worrier. So as far as I’m concerned, this one is going to show up on my doorstep, all snuggled in a blanket in a basket with a refresher list of instructions attached. I’m not too old to believe in the stork.

I'll always call Skittles Nickels.

2009-11-02T10:32:00.000-06:00

Say what you will, it’s darn funny when a little kid mispronounces something or mangles grammar. When it’s your own kid, it’s darn funny and darn cute. And I don’t say this lightly, as I’m not permitted to because I am a Pseudo-Professional and Occasionally Proud Grammarian and a decent pronunciator (Hush, peanut gallery). Who is prone to sentence fragments. For effect. And sometimes laziness.

That dog on the Peanuts cartoons? Snoofy.

The stuff a bee gets from a flower? Connectar.

The place you stay when you’re on vacation? Hootel.

There is a state, in Alex World, called Ohidaho.

Many Alexisms have, sadly, self-corrected. Wha’ happeen (what happened?). Issat NEWiss (what’s that noise?). Nersh (nose). I have bleed. The endlessly entertaining phase when the consonant cluster “CR” came out “CL” (therefore cricket=clicket, Christmas=Clistmas, and crack=clack. Steven was meaner than I, and often asked the poor kid to say “Chris Kringle crossed the creek.”).

Still, we have “I sleeped good,” “Are you so proud at me?” and “It happened for a long time ago,” among many other gems. I don’t correct him, because I know soon enough he’ll correct himself and it’ll make me sad.

Until then, whenever I need a pick-me-up, I watch the infamous Issat NEWiss video. If you know me (or even select friends of mine) you’ve probably seen it a few dozen times. I’m a little biased, but it’s good for a smile and a maternal pang. What I wouldn’t give to kiss that baldish head again. Click me.

Hanging up Halloween

2009-11-01T08:26:00.000-06:00

Halloween is over, and what do we have to show for it? Two fast-rotting Jack-o'-lanterns, a bucket full of pregnant-lady's kryptonite, and a child who I swear against all scientific probability is still on last night's sugar rush. There was more buildup this year, which may be a sign of the times, in a world where Christmas decorations start sneaking into the periphery before the heat of summer has fully faded, and because of the buildup, the overness of Halloween has that weird hollow feel. It's like the day after your birthday when you're little. So now I guess we focus on Thanksgiving? Not me. I'm going day by day. Tomorrow Baby Bosche will be 7 weeks solid, working each day toward looking less like a tiny reptile (Why does he have a TAIL??? Alex demanded, wide-eyed, when I showed him a picture of what BB looks like right now). Day by day.

So Halloween started with visits to every single proprietor of costumes in the metro area in search of a Batman costume in Small. It would seem that only Small-size people are interested in Batman costumes, which is why every size but was available everywhere we went. (I ended up ordering his online.) Then we did Boo at the Zoo, where thousands of pint-size creatures packed in for games with penny prizes, trick-or-treating, a standard carousel ride (they used to run it backward for Boo, but we overheard the operator guy telling someone that it was malfunctioning that way), and a "haunted" train ride. Alex reassured himself by repeating "It's not real, Mommy," every time we saw a creepy thing in the woods, until a little girl behind us, improbably named Betsy, informed him haughtily that "Even if it's not real, it's still cool!"

Then, my mother decided to spend her birthday night in Hell, so we took Alex and his cousin Jack to the carnival at my old elementary school.

OK, so it used to be a Halloween carnival, now it's just a carnival. I don't know what that was about. The school (smaller than I remember, of course, but it smelled the same!) was packed out. I'm not prone to claustrophobia, but after a fifteen-minute wait in line for the haunted house, I was gearing up to fight my way through a group of giggly braces-clad Pizitz dance teamers and claw through solid cinderblock in a desperate search for fresh air and open space.

Then there was Alex's school parade and party. The parade was cute as always (and a little bittersweet, as it was our last, at least with this kid), and a little cruel. It's impossible not to laugh at the sight of a chubby little cowboy who dissolves into heartbroken wails when he glimpses his mommy on the bleachers, and that sounds horrible but it's CUTE. Don't judge me.

And finally, FINALLY, Halloween night. After an exceptionally rough day, Alex and I both sick to varying degrees and tired in equal measure, I wasn't at all sure it was going to be a successful trick-or-treat outing. But we packed him into layers under his Batman duds and set off into the streets, where we quickly discovered an interesting fact about our new neighborhood. Evidently Halloween night here is a sort of block party with no open-container restrictions. Parents and grandparents holding glasses of wine and cups of spirited homemade concoctions and beers in coozies tailed hyper costumed kids from door to door in a scene that was oddly all-American, fantastically fall, and straight-up fun. Alex made friends with a tiny decked-out Bama player, whose helmet came in handy when he took a header off someone's brick porch steps. Alex wound down about the same time my new lack of stamina began demanding a break, so we packed it in until next year.

Oh yeah, Steven did a great job on our Batman Jack-o'-lantern this year, and valiantly tried to salvage Scooby Doo. In the end the mangled Scooby face was covered by a place mat and a standard-issue Jack-o'-lantern face carved on the opposite side of the pumpkin. They're awesome, and they're making me sick. (BB doesn't seem to appreciate the scent of slightly charred pumpkin.)

The Baby Torch

2009-10-28T08:50:00.000-05:00

We keep passing it back and forth, me, my sister, and my sister-in-law. Cathy (SIL) went first, bringing us my beautiful niece, Elizabeth Grace. It took maybe a week from the time we saw the first pictures of her for me to decide that if they could do it, we could (or something a little more seasoned-sounding) and voila, Alex was conceived. I was already pregnant here, and I knew it but hadn’t told anyone. Note the dazed expression. The smile says “Pretty babyyyyyyy,” the eyes say, “Holy *$!#% I’m growing one of these?!”

But wait. Before Alex was, Jack was. My sister, Kelly, was pregnant with my nephew John Vincent almost exactly one month before Alex came to be dividing cells. So I got a sneak peek at What Life Would Be Like With a Newborn. (Disregard my tired eyes and puffy face in this pic; motherhood was a month in the offing and I was holding a living, snuffling dose of reality.)

THEN we got Alexander Kirk, courtesy me.

THEN we got Emily Marie, courtesy Cathy (round two).

THEN we got Nicholas Matthew, courtesy Kelly (round two).

THEN Cathy went all kinds of out of order and got pregnant with Charles William, whose birth we’re all eagerly anticipating as I type.

THEN Kelly again, trying to boot me out of the lineup altogether, announced HER round three contribution, who is due four days (count ‘em, FOUR DAYS) before my round two offering to The Family Pot of Babies.

Add it up and you’ve got lots of Christmas and birthday presents to buy. But you’ve also got funny cousins,

sweet hugs,

and sisters with whom to share the moments when you want to put them all up for adoption.

Cathy, can’t wait to add Charlie to the mix.

My Little Superhero (and Inexplicable Bob)

2009-10-26T08:09:00.000-05:00

In four years of life, we’ve come full circle in the Halloween costume department. When Alex was 1, he was Batman. He was a bald, big-eyed, banana-eating Batman with super-pinchable cheeks. No, really.

When he was 2, he wanted to be a big bear. I remember his assertion that he would be a big bear, and my gentle nudges in another (any other) direction. I couldn’t conceive of the logistics, you see. Big bear would require heavy, furry costume, far from ideal in Alabama, where October 31 temperatures can remain mulishly in the mid-70s. Besides, big bear costumes I found online were both expensive and impractical—be a big bear after you’re securely potty trained, I told him. Those suits don’t have emergency zippers.

So he was Bob the Builder. How we came up with that I really have no idea. Alex has never watched Bob the Builder, and has always seemed bored by the premise. I can’t really blame him; whose idea of entertainment is watching others engage in manual labor? He was a cute Bob, though. He got to wear the “Toddler Two” sign in his school parade, and was just bursting with pride.

On the second lap around the gym Steven was beckoned by Ms. Margaret to come and rescue our hysterical Bob.

When he was 3, he was Superman. Ideal because Superman doesn’t wear a mask, and neither did Alex. “It hurts my nooooooooose!” he complained about all masks no matter how innocuous-looking. He was a proud, face-baring Superman in a sea of Batmans. (Batmen?)

This year, in a retro fashion nod to Halloweens 2006 and 2008, he is Batman, once again. But not just any Batman. He is The Dark Knight. Plastic mask and long cape and body suit and all. Crazy blond curls have replaced the bald head and the mask hides the big eyes, but he still won't turn down a banana.

He's still my baby.

Is it bad form to call your kid a smart@$$?

2009-10-24T22:51:00.006-05:00

Alex is very into opposites lately. He's mastered a long list that he repeats with teeth-grinding frequency. Yesterday, just to see what he'd say (because seriously, half the fun of having these little people is poking around in their minds and being entertained by what you find in there ... unless that's somehow developmentally questionable, in which case, just kidding)...just to see what he'd say, I said, "What's the opposite of Alex?" He didn't miss a beat. "Mommy." I don't know if that's true, but I found it really funny. Then again, I'm easily amused. Ask Steven, who often looks surprised when a halfhearted one-liner gets a dose of uproarious laughter. (He thinks I married him because he's funny. I think he married me because I think he's funny.)

I actually think Alex and I are more alike than we are different. Take that, kiddo. But oil and water or oil and oil, something is keeping us from mixing harmoniously of late. I'm pregnant. Did I mention? And pregnant people reserve the God-given right to be unpleasant, cranky, easily antagonized. Zaxby's forgot to put my lite vinaigrette in the bag with my Zalad tonight and I thought briefly about several different, equally disproportionate plans of revenge. In the end, I ate my Zalad with Wish-Bone balsamic vinaigrette from our fridge and obstinately did not enjoy one single bite. Take that, Zaxby's.

"Let's push our reset buttons," I suggested to Alex after an unsuccessful shoe-shopping endeavor this morning left us both crabby and annoyed with each other.

"Well Mommy," he said sanctimoniously (before having a child of my own I would've said a 4-year-old is not capable of sanctimony, but boy, would I have been wrong). "I think you need to push your reset button. You're the one who's mad."

Sometimes pointing out to an admittedly temporarily irrational person that she's mad is exactly the wrong thing to do. "I'm not mad," I told him.

"Yes you are."

"No, I'm not."

"Yes you are."

"NO I'M NOT. I think I would know!"

When it hit me that I'd fallen into this trap and that not only had he baited me but that he was winning, I quickly pointed the car toward the nearest McDonald's, where I sought French-fried solace and he hit his reset button, took off his shoes, and disappeared into the germ-infested reaches of the indoor Play Place.

Tonight during his prayer he asked God to help me be more patient tomorrow. Amen.

The Best Part of Being a Kid or a Dog

2009-10-22T08:20:00.007-05:00

My first baby was a five-pound ball of reddish-gold fur and tough-as-nails attitude. He liked to chew on his teddy bear (and occasionally do other things to it, but we don’t need to go there) and attack bare feet with sharp little teeth. I distinctly remember bursting into tears one day upon having the epiphany that my dog Jack was a lemon. He was aggressive, stubborn, uncontrollable, and just plain mean. I think Steven laughed at me. “Have you ever met a vicious golden retriever?” he asked. “He’ll outgrow it.”

And, well, he did. He’s now a buck six, give or take, still stubborn as all get-out, prone to seizures and skin inflammation, terrified of the vacuum cleaner, and pretty much the most harmlessly endearing beast this side of Eeyore. So he’s still kind of a lemon, but we love him.

Then we added his sister to our family. Charlotte, her name was going to be (but it quickly proved too dainty for her, with her odd mix of rough-and-tumble playfulness and tail-thumping joy). Charlie she became. Chuck, more often than not. She’s a pleaser, a sweet and loving and submissive little thing with a penchant for unattended socks and ... Steven. (He hung the moon and maybe set the Earth turning, her worshipful brown eyes say whenever they land on him.)

And then one day we brought Alex home.

I set the carrier on the floor and let Jack and Charlie examine our new addition. There was prolonged sniffing and tentative toe-tasting, there was a moment of utter confusion when the new human made a noise, and then? Then they were over it. Jack turned to me for a treat, Charlie retreated to the corner with the best vantage point from which to gaze longingly at Steven, and they had accepted their new reality.

Kids do it too. Alex was sad for all of a day when we moved from the only house he’d ever known. There were a few requests to go and visit the old house, there was one bed-wetting incident that I’m pretty sure was related to the change, and then ... He was over it. New reality, accepted.

Wouldn’t it be nice if major life changes were as easy to swallow when you’re both a grown-up and a human? Kids and dogs have the secret, I think. They take stock of the important things, and, once they’ve ascertained that those are in order, the rest falls into place. Jack: New baby, smells good, where’s my treat? Charlie: New baby, tasty toes, where’s my man? Alex: New house, Mommy and Daddy and Jack and Charlie are here, Spider-Man sheets are on the bed, I’m going to play in my new backyard.

Love. Once it's inventoried, all is right with the world.

When we bring the next baby home, I plan to put him down on the floor in his carrier, let Jack and Charlie sniff and tentatively taste to their hearts’ content, and then give them treats. I plan to pull Alex into my lap, cover him with kisses and attention, and hope that he’s still young enough to get the message.

Grains of Salt

2009-10-21T09:59:00.000-05:00

The best pre-baby-having advice I ever got was Do What Works. For us, that meant that Alex slept in his carrier on the floor of the bathroom with the fan on for the first two months of life. How we stumbled upon this magical formula for FIVE CONSECUTIVE HOURS OF SLEEP I don’t know (it resulted from a desperate act of sleep deprivation, no doubt, i.e. “I dunno what to do anymore, just put him in the bathroom!”) but try telling new parents that it’s wrong to put the baby on the bathroom floor in his car seat despite the priceless benefits ... You won’t get far. We encountered a problem in Week 3 when we went to the beach with our Texas family and the otherwise magnificent house we were renting had an ant problem. Even a sleep-starved half-crazy-with-anxiety first-time mom can’t abide the thought of ants crawling on her newborn (regardless of whether or not he would’ve slept through it, and I have a sneaking suspicion he would have).

The rules of having a newborn are pretty basic. Keep it safe, keep it fed, keep it clean. That doesn’t factor in the arbitrary MUSTs you’ll get from every direction, from (usually) well-meaning been-there-done-that moms: Pacifiers are a necessity. (Or, conversely, pacifiers are E-VILLE.) Breastfeed or risk raising a halfwit. Swaddle, for God’s sake, SWADDLE! And my personal fave: Sleep when the baby sleeps. (If you’ve ever had raging anxiety-induced insomnia and a newborn who is a noisy sleeper, you’ll know that’s simply not an option.)

But it’s all moot, because at the end of the day you’ll Do What Works. Some babies need that paci (and if yours does you might regret it until that glorious day when he can actually keep the damn thing in his mouth!) Some moms try to nurse but switch to formula when nursing begins to trigger uncontrollable weepy emotional upheavals. (Um, so I HEAR.) Some parents never get the hang of swaddling, or can’t get comfortable with turning their baby into a burrito. Some babies sleep only under a painfully specific set of circumstances, and woe be to anyone who deviates from the system even a millimeter. Those kids turn out fine, too. Those kids turn out ... Alex.

Good Night(mare)s

2009-10-21T07:28:00.000-05:00

I never thought I’d be a chart maker. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with charts, I’m just not a charty kind of person. But Alex’s bedtime routine of late has been wearing a hole in my already-thin-because-I’m-pregnant-oh-yeah-that’s-it patience. It goes something like this.

7 p.m.: Shower (He’s a showerer now, can you believe it?? Well I can’t. This is the child who thinks water in the eyes is akin to battery acid in an open wound.)

7:30 p.m.: Wind-down show. Have you ever seen Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Friends? Kristin Davis (Charlotte!) is the voice of Miss Spider, who is the adoptive mother of lots of “lil bugs” and says things like “everybuggy” and “spideriffic.” It’s awful, but it beats Caillou, the Whiny 4-Year-Old Canadian.

8 p.m.: Teeth brushing, book reading, song singing, tucking in. That’s when the fun begins.

8:20 p.m.: Alex gets up to turn on the hall light.

8:22 p.m.: Alex gets up to go potty.

8:26 p.m.: Alex gets up to ask for water.

8:33 p.m.: Alex gets up because he spilled that water but just a little bit and it was an accident!

8:37 p.m.: Alex gets up because “I forgot to tell you a question! Who made God?” (variations include “Why do dogs [sic] slaver?” and “When is it gonna be Friday?”)

8:40–9:32 p.m.: Alex gets up for a hug, to tell us about a broken toy, to beg for help finding his green blanky, to report that his radio has informed him that he has a new 106.9 The Evil. (It’s actually The Eagle.) Sometimes he gets up to ask me if he’s doing a good job going to bed.

9:45 p.m.: Mommy has HAD IT OH MY GOD CHILD JUST STAY IN BED AND GO TO SLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

9:50 p.m.: I feel bad. I go in to kiss him and tuck him in one. more. time.

See, it’s just out of control, and it leads to bad mornings because he’s cranky and I’m not a morning person and Steven is pressed for time and impatient and it’s just a bad scene, people.

So last night I made a chart. It’s called “Good Nights,” and do you see what I did there? I love a play on words! There are star stickers and days of the week and some nebulous reward at the end of a five-sticker stretch. Lord knows we may never get there. But, I’ve become a chart maker.

I blame Jo Frost.

Hey, I know this!

2009-10-20T14:24:00.000-05:00

The big fear with the first one is that you’ll fail. Fail at all of it: diaper changing, feeding, holding, consoling, being a mother. And you do, in a way. Diapers don’t stay clean. There is spit-up and there are days when the baby wants to eat more than the books say he should. Your muscles ache from stiff posture and frozen arms because if you move he’ll wake up. Sometimes you just can’t make him stop crying. And you can always name five or six women who seem to have it all together while you come apart.

It’s not failure but it’s not perfection and you think anything less is unacceptable. That’s how it is the first time.

By the second, and this is my sincerest hope because, well? By the second, you’ve unburdened yourself of a lot of that bull[stuff] (censored for delicate constitutions). Perfection is a myth you gave up that time you found your one-year-old toddling around the kitchen in the middle of the night sucking on a stick of butter after having broken the third refrigerator lock in a row. Or when he fell off the shopping cart you shouldn’t have let him hitch a ride on and you ran over him with it. Or when he repeated a word you didn’t know he heard you say. The myth of perfection goes the way of snuggly baby fantasies and memories of childbirth. By the second, you have reality firmly in hand.

I’m looking forward to growing this baby. I’m looking forward to feeling him/her move, to watching my belly swell, to the times when people rush to give up a seat or hold a door, and when old ladies in the grocery store stop me to offer unsolicited advice.

I’m also looking forward to holding him (stiff posture and frozen arms). To watching my big boy's face when he meets his sibling for the first time. To realizing for a second time—and much sooner than I realized it the first—that perfection is unattainable, nonexistent, and, frankly, kind of boring. That the good stuff is in the missteps. That when he shakes an entire container of baby powder all over his room and his person because I forgot to close it after the last diaper change, all I need is a vacuum and a camera.

I’ve been Mommy for a while now, and I’ve screwed up a lot. Still, I have a pretty fantastic kid despite (or because of?) those mistakes.