Blink and you miss it.

This kid is about to finish kindergarten.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Boring Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Name the night.

Perspective (the Night the Tree Fell)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coupla things

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

JUST A LITTLE.

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

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

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

Sweetness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I'm getting there. Slowly.

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

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

Pan Out, Julie

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

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

You're welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Details, though. Details.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm spring-broken.

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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



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



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

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



No? Well then. Never mind.