Spring broke

Oh yes, I used to have a blog. Here it is!

I've dropped the ball on lots of things lately. Blogging. Writing that story that all both of my fan-friends are clamoring for me to finish. Cooking real meals. Working. Dressing in grown-up clothes. Those kinds of things. Lucky for the family, I haven't given up showering or brushing my teeth.

As for excuses, I've got a laundry list that I won't bore you with. Feeling run-down is among them, and that kind of encapsulates all of the NOTs I've been busying myself with nicely. I could blame Katherine, who has us staring down the barrel of Two with trepidation and sometimes outright soul-sucking panic. She's going to be a sight more difficult in this phase than her brother was, I daresay. I think it's payback for what an easy baby she was. How she slept from the minute she popped out straight through her newborn days and up to around 6 months of age, when she woke up only to grace us with smiles and sunshine until we were coddled into believing we'd never know what it's like to deal with a temperamental small person with a personality the size of Texas.

But I won't blame her, because that would be supremely unfair. She's doing what she's supposed to be doing, and is entitled to a mother who meets tantrums with calm, whining with a deaf ear, inexplicable sleep disturbances with grace and boundless energy. Oh, those mothers don't exist? Well that does make me feel better.

If I'm being honest, I haven't stopped working. On the contrary, I've been doing more than I comfortably can, and so arises the key issue of working from home, when you never leave the office and therefore forget that you should really set hours for yourself and allow for the occasional cuddle with the toddler when she's allowing people to touch her and the occasional game of Chinese checkers with the big kid when he's in the mood to refresh you on the rules without rolling his eyes too much. Or even to catch the occasional episode of The Office, The Walking Dead, or Judge Judy (don't judge me).

But not being able to do it all leads one to believe that one is not doing enough. And feeling like one is not doing enough compounds the problem by making it more and more difficult to be satisfied with what does get done, and more often than one would admit, pretty darn competently.

I'm trying to cut myself some slack. It's easier said than done.

In the meantime, Alex's spring break is almost over and I couldn't be more relieved. (Cue mommy guilt.) It's just that I feel bad when I don't keep him occupied and supply the "fun" that is supposed to be had, in theory, during spring break. I've taken them for game playing at Chuck E. Cheese and an impromptu (and ill-conceived) side-jaunt to the state park's fake beach. We walked to the park and played even though Katherine fell and scraped both knees on the way there and her diaper fell the heck off when she came down the slide. I invited their cousins over for pizza and rowdy X-Box play. We tried bowling today but were turned away because the leagues were dominating all the lanes (shame on the leagues; it's a rainy day during spring break!). So instead we ate cookies and watched a movie. All written out like that, it doesn't sound like I exactly neglected the kid, but then again I suffer from often-baseless guilt and was born with no gauge of enough.

It was a taste of the summer, and made me want to redouble my efforts to keep Alex occupied for most if not all of it. My boss insists that I stop playing and get back to the grind, and that can best be done when I'm not dreaming up ways to prevent two kids from getting (gasp!) bored. Perhaps the funniest part is that Alex is so easygoing, he wouldn't mind if his summer was a 24/7 three-ring circus or an endless loop of Nintendo DS and an occasional trip to the pool. It's all me and my misconceptions and misperceptions and mis ... givings?

I think I need to try harder to go easier.

What's on my mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brace yourself. This one's a downer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But nothing else. Ever.

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

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

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

Facebook? Yes, please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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