Meandering...

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

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

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

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

So different.

She. I finally got used to saying it.

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

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

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

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

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

That's perspective.

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

Surely, surely, that's a gift.

Six

I had a baby six years ago today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blink and you miss it.

This kid is about to finish kindergarten.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Boring Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Name the night.

Perspective (the Night the Tree Fell)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coupla things

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

JUST A LITTLE.

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

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

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

Sweetness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I'm getting there. Slowly.

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

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