Hey!

The lovely Bev bestowed the Blogger Girls who Rock award upon me (the html stuff isn't showing up for me this morning.).

Yay! Thank you, Bev.

I'm supposed to pick five other bloggers to nominate too, but that will have to wait until Monday night when we get back from our Big Canada Day Trip. We're leaving this morning and I still have to pack, so I'd better get moving.

One more thing - not pregnant. Nope. Just broody. But just in case, here are some potential name choices. Feel MORE than free to come up with some good ones for me while I'm gone.

Boys:
Yosemite Armageddon
King Doctor

Girls:
Ophelia Passionfruit
K'atherine Fayth
Trevorly
Heaven Neveah Holy Angel
Rebecca II

Another Eight Things About Me.

I was tagged by Alyssa earlier in the week:

Here are the rules:

A. Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves.

B. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed.

C. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Um, okay. Eight. Let's see.

1. I don't drink coffee, exactly - I'll drink iced coffee, but the thought of it hot makes me gag. I will and do drink nearly any kind of tea very cheerfully, though. Isn't that exciting?

2. I can't play cards, aside from Go Fish. Brave people have attempted to teach me the rules of other card games, but apparently the part of my head that might hold that sort of thing is busy holding the lyrics for EVERY SONG I HAVE EVER HEARD.

3. I just had a slice of hot gluten-free poppyseed limpa bread that I made this morning, covered in strawberry jam that I made on Monday from strawberries that I picked on Saturday.

4. I'm always pestering my husband with my theories about what happens to various children's characters as they get older: for example, Clifford The Big Red Dog gets really crabby as he ages and teenaged Emily Elizabeth brings home a boyfriend, who gets eaten by Clifford. My husband enjoys these little tales ever so much.

5. I've lost a bunch of weight lately. Deliberately. I still have a bunch more to go, but progress has been made.

6. I'm a good cook. Hey, look at me! I'm so modest! (and yes, 6 has led to the need for 5.)

7. I'm actually very modest. I don't think much about certain things I do - my writing, for example, leaves me all sorts of cold and I doubt my parenting abilities much of the time. Some things - and these are generally things that do not matter very much - I will admit to being good at: I am good at picking out books for people for presents. I am good at making supper. But as for everything else, I tend to feel rather inadequate.

8. Wouldn't a fourth baby be nice? I think it might, in a wistful not-anything-like-being-pregnant right now sort of way. (to answer all your questions_

And I have to tag EIGHT PEOPLE? EIGHT?
Hm.... I will tag:
The dolphin lovah Alpha Dogma
Her fellow dolphin collector, Jenifer
Painted Maypole
Bub and Pie
Tracy
Ann (still the only blogger I've actually talked to!)
Bonnie, when she gets back from boating around. (Okay, I've spoken to her. Lots.)
and Cinnamon Gurl.
That's the most tagging I've ever done! I AM EXHAUSTED NOW!

A book review and a pleading question.

Thanks to Metro Mama, I received a copy of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach last week. I've been a bit ambivalent about McEwan in the past - his books always left me a bit cold, which I found mysterious because I admired his writing quite a lot, but the subtle chemistry between author and reader just wasn't there.

This book, however, was brilliant. The short tale of two young people - Florence and Edward - and their disastrous wedding night in 1963 - manages to be both funny and poignant, bawdy and hauntingly reflective. McEwan deftly portrays the miseries caused by the sexual repression of the late 50s and the dehumanizing world of impersonal sexual encounters created by the sexual revolution. I really recommend it - I thought it was spiffy, and I've loaned it out TWICE since I got it last week!

Now onto my question: I live, as you likely know, in a very small town.
So the question, obviously, is what books should I suggest? I want:
- interesting recent fiction (which I think should also not be too edgy - this IS a very tiny place and people here tend to be rather conservative.)
- relevant modern non-fiction books that will be of interest to a small town readership
- some "fun" recent books, the sort of things that are fun to read in the summer
- worthwhile recent children's books - storybooks AND novels, and any non-fiction choices would be appreciated.
I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

Hence The Hysteria

I took The Girl to see the doctor on Monday and she was sitting on one of those step-stools in his office, where The Baby quite reasonably decided to join her. She over-balanced and started falling backwards in sloooow motion, which the doctor stopped by quickly blocking her fall with the side of his foot, helping her up and gently telling her that maybe she shouldn't sit there.
Which resulted in her stomping, stiff-armed and furious, into the hallway, yelling about the "mean" doctor and how she would sit where she liked, thank you (I'm summing up here). The doctor looked at me big-eyed and I had to explain that she felt thwarted, hence the dramatics.
"She is different than the other two, isn't she!" he said. "WAY more intense. A little drama queen."
Yes.
So yesterday I set out an outfit for her - that little pink top that you saw in the video yesterday, which she approved of, and a pair of pink Minnie Mouse pants, which she normally loves but yesterday she decreed were "dirty." Before I could stop her, she dashed them to the laundry room and shot them into the hamper. I retrieved them and told her that they were NOT dirty, that they were her nice pants. And back into the hamper they went. And again.
So okay, she didn't like those pants. How about some cute denim capris?
It's hamper time!
How about your beloved tough guy jeans? It was a hot day but I was desperate because in order to leave the house, my baby MUST HAVE HER DIAPER COVERED. I'm just classy like that.
Nope, tough guy jeans were apparently as filthy as the rest of her clothing. They got tossed into the hamper.So she ran around in just her cute little pink top and her diaper until after her nap and I filmed my little conversation with her because I had to capture on film quite how stubborn this child is.
I presented her with THE SAME denim capris as earlier, folded. I'd washed them, I told her.
Clean pants! she exclaimed happily and put them on and we finally got to leave the house.

An answer to the age old question - where are your pants?

A busy weekend over

There is The Baby - obviously, not much of a baby anymore - at her Great-Grandma's art show on the weekend. We spent Saturday morning picking strawberries (and my kids can WORK! Each of them picked an entire basket full and yes, that includes the little munchkin to the left.), drove an hour and a half to Great-Grandma's show that afternoon and came home in time for supper. Then on Sunday, we had church at the park, followed by a potluck lunch (and I will go on record as saying that church potlucks are my very favorite things to eat in the world), then home to clean the house and then out again to a good-bye party for our leaving minister. (sniff.) It was an EXHAUSTING weekend.

This particular weekend is ALWAYS an exhausting weekend. Last year's weekend ended rather dramatically for me when I got sunstroke (!) and an infected tick bite (!) and Monday came and I had to wean The Baby right away, being allowed to nurse her one last time before going on really hardcore antibiotics for a month. It was BRUTAL. We had a really hard breastfeeding relationship - constant thrush infections early on (I can still remember the shuddering pain now, as though her mouth was full of battery acid that leaked down into my spine whenever she latched on, and I would sob in agony during her entire feeding.) and we nursed through that, got through it. We nursed through poor weight gain, mysterious health problems, through my near-death hospitalization. Our breastfeeding relationship survived all those things, only to be abruptly ended and this is a photo of the last time I breastfed my baby:

We don't often get to know when we're doing something for the last time - I couldn't tell you when I stopped nursing The Boy, other than a vague knowledge that he was roughly 17 months old - but I know that on this very day last year, I nursed for the last time probably in my entire life and I am not happy with such sure knowledge. Knowing that it was the last time, when she unlatched, I did up my stupid ugly nursing bra for the last time and then put my head down on the couch and sobbed, mourned for the end of the breastfeeding relationship that I'd fought so hard to keep.


She's a big girl now, sort of - she stomped around the house this morning in what she calls her "stompy lovely sandals", demanding "Where my donkey at?", referring to her hideous McDonald's Shrek-Donkey thing that her grandma gave her. She snuck bites of marshmallows out of her older siblings Forbidden Lucky Charms, danced around the living room with her sister, ate an orange, made faces at herself in the mirror, cuddled on my knee - all the sorts of things that a happy, healthy toddler does.

At the time of her first year, I felt like I was doing the only decent things available to keep her healthy - she was such a precairous little thing, so fragile - but now I can see that I put up a valiant fight for her. Life is hard and life is busy but I can remember how sad I was this very day last year and know that I did my very best for my Baby, that I tried as hard as I possibly could. So this day might always stay a sad anniversary or someday it might just be the day that we're tired from going strawberry picking and having a picnic at the park and seeing Great-Grandma's art show, the sad anniversary being nothing more than a secret whisper, something that settles for half a second and then is gone.

The Personal Policies Meme

Susanne tagged me earlier this week and here it is!
1. After 8 p.m. is MY TIME. I will not associate with non-infant-type children after this time because I am off duty. Go to bed. I'll see you in the morning.
2. If it's Sunday and you're not actually infectiously sick, you're going to church.
3. 5 a.m. is NOT a decent time for getting up and I don't care that you're 2. Oh, I'll get up with you but do NOT expect me to sing Wheels on the Bus at that inhuman hour.
4. Is that a scary movie? Then you'll be watching it on your own, husband.
5. If one sibling is already sitting on my knee, the way to gently suggest that you also would like some attention is NOT to bodily haul off the offending sibling. This goes for all three of you little monsters.
6. Any suggestions that my hugely fat, cowardly cat is in some way less that entirely loveable will be met with a withering glare. That also goes - to a lesser extent - for the hairy, stupid cat.
That's all I can think of! Maybe I'll add more tomorrow.

The Boy was recently bemoaning his friendless state: no one in his class likes him. My poor baby! Ever ready to hover helicopter-fashion over any aspect of their lives, I had a chat with his teacher this morning about my poor outcast son.
I wasn't popular in grade school. At all. I was one of those odd little friendless kids, friendless for reasons that baffled me at the time. It hurts my heart to think that my kids would ever go through years of loneliness like that, and so for this past week, I'd been walking around with this ache thinking that my poor baby, my sunshiney Boy was on the margins of his class, with my own childhood misery as the still-painful subtext for everything.
So I asked his teacher about it and she cracked up.
"Everybody loves The Boy!" she said. "He has tons of friends. The other kids think he's great."
Does loneliness pass from generation to generation like brown eyes and bendy thumbs, or is this the human state, always pining for more, this elusive intense love that will finally make us happy? Or is The Boy, perhaps, just EXTREMELY DRAMATIC? One wonders.
She also told me the following story which she thought was hilarious - and so do I:
The pre-kindergarten class was working on books about dinosaurs, so they were seated at their tables when all of a sudden this hysterical uproar started and the teacher went running back to see what was the matter. The kids were screaming, standing on their chairs and tables and she was desperately trying to calm them down.
"A SNAKE!" several kids screamed.
The teacher ran around the room trying to find it, lifting bins and moving furniture. The Boy and his female best friend helpfully pointed to where they saw the snake ("OVER THERE! ACROSS THE ROOM!") and the teacher ran frantically around trying to find this terrorizing snake. Finally, she asked the Boy and his best friend what colour the snake was.
"Silly (teacher)!" The Boy said. "The snake is invisible."
And then he and his fellow wicked prankster laughed themselves sick. The teacher told me that she loves him. He's just, she said, the BEST kid ever.
Oh, I know. And also? He is a pain in the butt.

Early summer

My yard is swoonily beautiful right now, full of peonies and lilies and mock orange blossoms and wild flowers with their sturdy prettiness and not one of these things did I plant or nurture. It's just beauty that I don't deserve, this gift to me from the women who have lived here before me.
My living room is stuffed full of flowers, heavy with scent, so that I can see them as much as I can before they fade - most of them grow in wildly overgrown corners of my garden now, places that were once nurtured and loved but have succumbed to almost-wilderness, these last flashes of beauty before they become grass and trees and rocks again.
This used to be a place where people would put roots in, would build a house and plan on staying forever but most of the things that could have supported people here are dying and there is nothing new on the horizon. We moved back here on a whim, but we're skitterish about staying - when we were renewing our mortgage recently, my husband had to be repeatedly assured that we could sell our house in the next five years with our new mortgage before he could sign. We talk about this town as though we've already moved from it, as though all the stores on the main street are closed and all the houses boarded up, as though we are already remembering this house and its wild gardens nostalgically and with some sadness.

We don't plan to stay. Once upon a time, people loved this town and the trains stopped here several times a day and now it's just a faded small place you drive through on your way to someplace else. There's still beauty here, but it's an old beauty, something that's almost decay.

Insert Ghost Noises Here

Well. We were, we thought, several weeks away from the birth of The Baby when my husband brought home our Haunted Van. He had bought it from an elderly woman and her children had cheerfully told him that their father's ghost resided in the van, but that we shouldn't have any trouble with him. He had died at 93 the year before and the van had been his baby.
Our ghost - I'll call him Sam - was friendly and obliging. The windshield wipers would start frantically moving of their own accord when we passed by places that Sam liked - the golf course, his house - or when we drove by his friends.

Two days after we bought the Haunted Van, we had the Baby. So that was handy. Our ghost has been quieter lately, so we suspect that he's moved on maybe, happy that his van is full of children and empty Tim Horton's cups and being well-used. Now, some naysayers have said that our make of van is just prone to weird electrical problems but they are Loathesome Skeptics who doubt the authenticity of our ghost, who loves our van. Rationality is the Enemy of the Good Story.

Sleepy day meme

Veronica tagged me with the one-word answer meme....
1 Where is your cell phone? non-existent
2 Relationship? Good
3 Your hair? grubby
4 Work? hands
5 Your sister? nope
6 Your favorite things? books
7 Your dream last night? censored!
8 Your favorite drink? riesling
9 Your dream car? megavan
10 The room you're in? unpainted
11 Your shoes? blister-causing
12 Your fears? death
13 What do you want to be in 10 years? renovated
14 Who did you hang out with this weekend? workmates
15 What are you not good at? stuff
16 Muffins? yes
17 Wish-list item? Wii
18 Where you grew up? farm
19 The last thing you did? awakened
20 What are you wearing? pajamas
21 What are you not wearing? chaps
22 Your pet? stupid
23 Your computer? silver
24 Your life? fine
25 Your mood? sleepy
26 Missing? chocolate
27 What are you thinking about? breakfast
28 Your car? haunted
29 Your kitchen? Clean!
30 Your summer? Chilly
31 Your favorite color? blue
32 Last time you laughed? today
33 Last time you cried? Monday
34 School? DONE
35 Love? Yes.
36 Tag? Alpha Dogma

Another rainy day

It's been a drizzly week at Casa Beck and my camera is broken. Oh, the anguish. (but as my friend Bonnie just pointed out, better rain then forest fires, which was our other option, and it makes a nice break from the 34 degree heat.) The Baby and I went for a walk yesterday in the light warm rain, to her immense, puddle-stomping delight and then upon arriving home, she promptly fell into a deep, deep sleep and napped for the rest of the day, entirely missing the sun's brief afternoon appearance.

She woke up when her siblings arrived noisily home from school, stampeding through the front door with their arms full of lunchboxes and Important Papers and drawings and notes from friends, so we went outside to play in the brand-new pool that looks like a whale who had handily been mutated to have a slide AND a sprinkler in its tale. After a while I realized that I had to start supper and then had the second realization that we had to run to the grocery store. So we did, and once there I ran into an acquaintance who had her second baby a few months ago.

"You're so brave to go out with all of them," she said to me, which caused me to stare mutely at her. Brave? It's not as though I have three toddlers, which would certainly give me pause.

Tomorrow my son "graduates" from pre-kindergarten, which I think is very, very stupid, a glaring manifestation of the current high self-esteem movement. And yet I'll attend and likely get choked up because that is my baby up there and look! He's graduating from pre-kindergarten!

I'm feeling all writers-blockery today, so maybe tomorrow I'll be back with a richer vein of stuff. Who knows?

Fortune

My first mother's day happened RIGHT after I had The Girl, while I was still in the hospital. Everyone made a big deal out of it - my middle brother brought me a card which he signed from our new baby, reducing me to a sobbing wreck. Someone also gave me one of those small, sturdy helium drugstore balloons with Happy Mother's Day written on it and eight years later I STILL HAVE IT. Still inflated. I am quite superstitious about it now, feeling that the fortunes of our family are in some stupid way tied up with the fortunes of my stupid balloon that has moved with me to three different houses now.

Yes, I am a moron. Would you like to sell me some swampland?


But I don't remember my husband's first father's day. Did anything happen then? Probably not.

I do remember looking at him a week after our daughter's birth, when I was in pain and sick with complications from the c-section and our baby was doing poorly and losing weight and jaundiced and everything was miserable and he was so gentle with our fragile new baby and so kind (as always) with me that I felt this new wave of love for him, this different thing than my previous feelings for him - not just as the man that I'd had a complicated and tumultuous romantic history with, but all at once as the father of my child, this new love that was rooted in his love for someone else, this small shared someone. And so for me, that was his first father's day, the real one. Of course, that's self-centered - marking an important date in HIS life by its revelation to me.

When we found out that I was pregnant with The Girl, he went very, very white and had to sit down alone for a while, realizing that this was Very Serious Business while I was jubilant and excited about the super-cute-and-very-fun-baby we were going to have. But my husband wisely knew right away what I didn't figure out for ages, knew that having a baby was serious business and that things would change. And those first two years of parenthood nearly killed us, nearly wrecked our fragile marriage and changed us from husband+wife+baby to two angry adults and one sad child to be shuttled between us, despite our love, despite our inability to untangle ourselves from each other.

It wasn't luck that saved us. It was his hard work, his steady kindness, and his constant patience with me as I grew into myself as a mother, his devotion to this new and exhausting role as father while never dropping any balls at work, at taking care of everyone. And two more kids later, you're still the same - self-denying, hard working, this sensible, gentle man who was born to be a father.

So Happy Father's Day to my husband, the tiredest man I know:

Now with no guest blogger!

I had big plans to let The Boy guest-narrate a blog post for me today, but he mostly just rambled on about his big computer-game-playing plans (actual quote: "Today and me and mommy are going to play a game together. A computer game it is. You might not know what that means.") and then got bored and wandered away, so too bad for my big plans. I guess I'll just have to rely upon My Own Brain for today's post. I apologize.

I've written before about how I have no eye for home decorating. My church has a chair sale every year and every year I buy an odd chair, which then goes into my orphan chair collection in my house, which is looking more and more like a bunch of chairs wandered in by accident and then just stayed. Everything else we own in thrift store stuff, aside from the occasional new thing (like our bed!) that my mother-in-law has kindly given us. SO now my house looks like an old, half-renovated place filled with thrift-store furniture and millions of books, which I think is plenty cute enough but might bother you. A friend of mine is operating under the same decorating budget and yet her house is gorgeous and mine looks like a place that's being squatted in by book-addled hobos. It's JUST NOT FAIR.

And now the Powers That Be have decided that we all have to decorate our "outdoor rooms" now. Great. We managed to mow the lawn but there are still these insanely overgrown spots, these giant plants that overnight have sprung up as tall as my head and thick as a fairytale forest. We decided that we should put more work into our "outdoor room", as scary as it is, and so we bought two rickety chairs at a yard sale. Of course.

When I first had children, I very defensively called myself a stay-at-home mom, because I was not, as I was quick to point out, here to do the cleaning (which was a bit blithely stupid, since who ELSE was going to do it?). In the past couple of years I've started calling myself a housewife, in part because it offends certain people very amusingly and also because it makes me sound like I am married to a house or perhaps AM a house myself. It's a funny word. I still feel like a pretend parent sometimes, like this is my pretend house and my husband and I are just playing at Happy Families, but the other day I had a reminder that to my children this is all very, very serious stuff - The Baby had been running around at a gathering when she hurt herself, and I could see her looking desperately around the room, unwilling to cry until she found me. I picked her up and she sobbed into my shoulder, obviously relieved that her mother, her very home, had found her. For their whole lives - and this, for me, is a sobering thought - this family will be their idea of what home is, their very idea of security, which is enough to knock the irony right out of me.

Some Names That www.Nymbler.com Has Assigned To Me

.... based on the actual names of my kids and my opinions of said names:

Malvina - "Similar in style", Nymbler chirpily informed me, "to Mertie." It certainly is.
Walker - "and my other son, Texas Ranger!"
Archibald - Seeing that someday the poor lad WILL be bald (given his father's genetics), it seems somewhat cruel to remind him of that every day of his life.
Peerless - He certainly would be peerless with a name like that, in that all of his peers would avoid him.
Medea - Oh, THERE'S a good idea. There may be some merit in the idea that studying classical mythology has little relevance in today's gormless world, but there's always going to be someone in the room who knows why Medea is a bad idea. And that person will laugh and laugh at poor little Medea.
King - Actually, King sounds sort of fabulous, like someone in one of Damon Runyon's stories. But then I always must return to not actually wanting to raise a professional gambler.
Alys - That name is stoopid.
Darnell - Not having to wear shirts under our overalls now will save me so much on the laundry!
Hermione - At last! An actually attractive name from Greek mythology (or is it Roman?) with no current references in popular culture! We have a winner!

"I need a nickle," The Girl told me last night.
"Okey dokey," I said, without putting down my book. "What for?"
"To buy mercury. At the drugstore."
This made me put down my book and look disbelievingly at her guileless, hopeful face. It turns out that her father loaned her a turn-of-the-last century book of magic tricks and one of the tricks started out cheerfully with "Buy five cents worth of mercury from your local drugstore." I had some sadly disappointing news for her about the increase in mercury prices and the decrease in mercury availability. Oh, and the general inadvisability of playing with mercury in general. And thus is thwarted another great career in magic.

Here's a graceful segue: hat-makers, back in the hat-making day, did not go crazy from handling mercury. That's an urban legend. The Mad Hatter? VILE ANTI-HATMAKING PROPAGANDA! Not vile at all was today's post by the blogging Mad Hatter ("Not vile" - I said from the outset that this was going to be gracefully done.) writing, in part, about the way our culture admires risk-taking and scorns cautious, careful people and what it is like to be the parents of a cautious child.

My older two kids are both quite cautious - The Boy has no use for physical peril, although he clamours up and down the monkey bars cheerfully enough and is not in the least morbid about things. He is brave enough to be quite manly without being brave enough to be brainless - a cheerful combination, I think. The Girl, however, is very careful - she has never climbed to the top of the monkey bars, rides her bicycle at a careful, wobbling pace and is very, very physically fearful. Of other types of dangers she is quite cheerfully oblivious, though - I've caught her more than once cheerfully making her way down the hallway with her arms loaded up with a number of dubious items and big plans to blow them up in the bathtub. She is just like her father who at five sat down with a screwdriver and very carefully took apart the family television. So I'm not afraid that she'll break her leg on the climbers but I do worry that she'll accidentally set the house on fire or get some anti-terrorism unit after us.

The Baby, of course, is a maniac.

"I WALK A-LOOOOONE!" she wailed this morning as we walked to the store, throwing herself limply down in protest of my cruel insistence that we hold hands, so that every other step I'd have to stop, place her on her feet again and then half-drag her another step when she went all boneless again. Given the chance, she will scale any climbing gym to the very top and scamper to the very tallest slide, zipping down unbalanced before any adult has a chance to catch her. She has walked up to much, much bigger toddlers (so pretty much any toddler, really) and smacked them in the face and then, when the child wailed in protest, snatched away the desired plaything with a satisfied "MY toy." I spend much of my time with her screaming out a horrified "NO!" and desperately chasing after her as she takes off. Oh, and apologizing to other parents.

I like her like this. I don't know if that comes through in my description - and she certainly is exhausting - but I LIKE her, this grumpy, fearless, wily, rather bad little girl. I don't think she'll stay like this, you see - my other two were certain ways when they were toddlers, fond of people they're now shy with, scared of things they now don't even think about, braver in other ways - and those toddler selves are gone, irretrievably. Some things stay - The Boy has always been sweet, The Girl has always been clever - but I doubt that The Baby will stay this naughty, fearless, teeny storybook girl (like Pippi, like Madeline) forever. The world gets bigger and scarier and some kids realize this right away and sensibly stay close to mom, but I want her to feel this brave for as long as possible, standing up at the very top of the climbing gym like the Queen of the Playground, time running as fast as quicksilver.

As a palate-cleaner from yesterday's apparently-terrifying moth and brief childcare post, let me post this picture of one of the kittens that live on my grandma's steps:

Meow.

Everyone here is sick. The Boy is sitting - sniffling - at the dining room table, carefully doing a sticker book about fish and The Baby is standing on a chair beside him, querulously demanding to put on stickers too ("I DO THAT NOW!"), and coughing. Yesterday afternoon, The Baby and I walked to the school to pick up the older kids and The Girl came walking down the hall towards us, white-face and her voice reduced to this miniature whispering rasp. She'd been sick, she told me, all day. One of the things that people never told me was how often kids are sick in the early grades of school and how often everyone ELSE will be sick, too.

The Baby had her first cold when she was eight days old, horribly enough, which I remembered yesterday while uploading photos to an online photodeveloping site. I haven't had pictures developed since we bought the digital camera three and a half years ago, so I picked the day of The Baby's birth as my starting point for my elaborate making-a-photo album plans. So I spent yesterday with these ghosts of my children's smaller selves, these vanished babies. I think being a parent was less poignant in the pre-photography era, when their growth was a slow progress from here to there, with no backwards stops, no souvenirs from some soft-faced baby time.

Where does this stab of pain come from? I don't wish my children any age other than the one they are, but the past has this hold on our hearts, the urge backwards to when their whole worlds could be held in our arms, backwards to this vulnerable, hard time.

I forgot to ask:

What is this thing?
It looks like a hummingbird - it has wings that move just like one and a long pointed "beak" - but it's some sort of moth.
It likes my lilacs.
We found this one sitting still-but-not-dead on the tree and Brave Husband lured it over for the picture. We're not sure if they all have see-through wings like this or if something has happened to this one.



I have never seen this bug before in my life - they were here Friday and now they're gone again. Can anyone identify Mystery Bug?

My house is quiet. This weekend felt long, these big expanses of summery space in each day. We went to a 40th anniversary party on Saturday night and came out of the hall several hours later, prepared to walk to the car through the darkness of the parking lot - and instead found ourselves squinting in the bright still-sunlight. And then we went to a church potluck yesterday, because we our Social Butterflies and flit from one dazzling event to the next. We also bought an enormous metal bread box at a yard sale, this shiny relic from the 1930s and it is now sitting on our counter, somewhat surprised (I'm guessing here) to be out of whatever attic it was sitting dustily in for so long.

The Baby is napping - she's been sleeping poorly for the past couple of nights, which is unlike her. She migrated to our bed last night and thrashed around complaining, screaming at her dad whenever he brushed her feet off his face. For some reason, he ended up sleeping downstairs on the couch, while the Baby did her impression of a bed bolster at the top of our bed and I only half-slept for the rest of the night, worried that she would scoot off the bed, head-first. She woke up crabby, clingy, snotty-nosed. I can't imagine taking her out of bed this morning and dropping her off at this daycare.

I have a post that I would dearly love to write about daycare, but I can't make it all come together - it would talk about how I know that most parents dearly love their children and make the best choices that they can with the resources that they have, how I know that most daycare workers are pretty great with kids, and how I know that to finanically survive these days most families NEED two incomes. It would talk about the things I worry about regarding daycare and why we've made the childcare choices that we've made - but I can't. It is a subject that hurts people, and that makes me feel unable to write honestly about it.

So now I'm just frustrated, full of words that I think should not be written.

More Phun With Pharming

Yet another agricultural outing - today, we (that would be my dad, The Baby and me) went to visit a variety of farms, some of which were DIRE and the rest of which belonged to Mennonites. I was barked at by a number of sturdy farm dogs, dutifully, and then the dogs would come up to be petted. I did not get out of the truck at a few non-Mennonite places, some of which were so completely covered in garbage that it looked like you would instantly get tetanus if you weren't wearing a pair of SERIOUS leather work boots, which I of course was not. I was wearing a past-knee dowdy navy skirt, though, which made me feel like a TEMPTING JEZEBEL at the Mennonite farm. "Doth thou see, Brother Albert? Yonder scarlet woman doth expose her imperfectly shaved stocky calves!" Hot stuff, that's me.


We were buying horse stuff - halters, looking for saddles. My dad has bought a horse, much to The Girl's extreme delight, and the horse apparently needs accessories, just like My Little Pony - although not FUN accessories. I have been forbidden from buying the horse a frilly tutu, for example. (Oh, like I'm going to go anywhere near the horse. I am scared of horses. Add that to the list.)

Speaking of lists: I've been rather obsessed with Nymbler recently, which is a name generator - you enter your favorites and it suggests names based on those - and quite fun. (I found it at No Mother Earth's site earlier this week.) I've found myself quite delighted with some of it's suggestions: Archibald! Fritz! BERTRAM! My children have certain kinds of names (obviously) - names that, while simple and old-fashioned, also suggest that we expect them to be Special. So my children's names suggest that they are going to lead soulful, artistic lives, writing novels, perhaps, about spending their formative years riding in the backseat of their grandfather's truck and watching their mother carefully pet a hillbilly farm dog while avoiding any contact with its red infected weeping eyes. It will serve me completely right, of course, if all three of them become accountants or insurance adjusters or bankers, come to visit me and click open their briefcases while saying, calmly, that they want to talk about my RRSPs and there'll be that buzzing sound in my head that I get when I'm bored and this mammoth gap between me and them, that they've ridden too far away for me to ever, ever catch up with them.

My husband and I have agreed that should we ever get pregnant again - unlikely - and should said unlikely child be a girl, we will name her Betsy.

Mother, May I Blog With Danger?

So the thunderstorm is over now. It was briefly quite intense - my kids gleefully were waiting for the power to go off and school to be cancelled - but then the storm went away and so did the rain and now it's pretending to be a reasonably nice spring day outside. My grass apparently hasn't noticed the unusually cold temperatures and is now at hayfield heights. And there is your agricultural report for today.

While I am typing this, The Boy is happily playing with The Girl's Littlest Pet Shop Virtual Pet, which is making a series of satisfied electronic noices and The Baby is screaming "MINEMINEMINEMINE!" and wailing and climbing all over him, hitting him frantically. Every couple of seconds, I reach behind me and remove The Baby from The Boy's back and place her on my lap, where she sobs stormily and then clambers back down and onto The Boy again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Although in the time it took me to write this, she wept herself to sleep and is now snoring on my lap, sharp little chin pressed into my chest. Thunder and lightening, all the time.

I am drawing a blank today

.... and I am also eating some applesauce, The Official Food Of My Family. That and cottage cheese, which my children are just wild about - they've been known to spy it in the grocery bag and before it could be put away, it's been stripped bare by my little dairy-loving piranhas. My husband has never, ever eaten cottage cheese and looks sick at the very mention of it, which means that my primary goal in life now is to make him eat cottage cheese and also to admit that it rocks.

My Sears order came in today, which is how you can tell that I live in a remote rural area: Sears orders! I have four nice new summer skirts now, which is my concession that the weather is warmer since I refuse to wear shorts. I don't think they're flattering to anyone who isn't a 17 year old runner, you see. I'm particularily partial to the long denim skirt, but a recent photograph of my denim-skirt clad backside suggests that they might not be as partial to me, tragically.

I was at the library the other night and I ran into a friend who I haven't seen since Christmas and her Baby-aged daughter. I asked her daughter what she was doing and she said "I'm looking for books with my mommy." which nearly made me fall over, since she - like The Baby - is 25 months old and The Baby still talks like Tarzan. "READ ME BOOK NOW!" she demanded this morning, for example, before cracking me in the head with the book, just to show me that she meant business. The Boy was an early and articulate talker and by the time he'd go to bed I'd have this throbbing ear-based headache because HOW COULD ONE PERSON TALK THAT MUCH? Did you see how I wrote that to subtly imply that he's somehow become less verbose? No. He's home today and it's like I have my own constant narrator - at one point this afternoon, he yelled through the bathroom door at me "AND NOW YOU ARE WASHING YOUR HANDS!".

Hey look! It's tomorrow already!

So two weeks ago I announced, brazenly, that I had made BIG PLANS for a solo trip to Toronto and even went so far as to make other BIG PLANS to meet up with some Torontoites, but then my plan fell right through almost immediately. My mom has other plans for that weekend, which would mean that my incredibly exhausted husband would be on solo parent duty with the incredibly active and incredibly separation-averse baby and that makes me nervous, even though my husband is by far the better of the two parents in this household. He is an incredibly supportive man and really encouraged me to go but he has this bad habit these days of instantly falling asleep as soon as he sits down or if he stands in one place for too long, and this worries me.

So there goes my plans. I also don't feel like - and I'm going to say this very, very quietly - that I'm ready to be that far away from The Baby yet. She's so little, you see. She NEEDS me. I'll be up with the whole crew in August for a family wedding, and I'll be around for a week, so that will be a much more leisurely amount of time, and I'm going to pretend that I'm completely happy with the way things have worked out.

Crabby

Why was the poor maligned crab picked to represent people in a vile, snappy mood? Why don't we feel lobstery? Alligatory? Turtley? My dad used to rescue snapping turtles that had made it to the middle of the road and were in danger of getting run over by FREAKING JERKS, tossing the hissing, freaked-out turtle onto the floor of the backseat with a casual warning that my brother and I might want to keep our feet up, because a snapping turtle can bite your toe off. Strangely, I still feel fond of turtles. And my father.

I'm not crabby today, though. I'm just not feeling very good. A combination of yesterday's adventures and The Joys Of Womanhood have knocked me off of my pins, and so I'm going to spend today lounging about and feeling very, very sorry for myself. So take care, see you later and I'll probably post more tomorrow.

And what did I do this morning?

Why, I went shopping for cattle hoof antibiotics with my father, of course. He phoned me first thing this morning and asked if I would like to go for a drive to various farm stores, so I packed The Baby and her five thousands pounds of apparently essential stuff up and as soon as The Boy and The Girl were off to school off we went on a whirlwind, agricultural-product-buying adventure. I also gave my dad lots of handy driving advice like "I think you may be tailgating this guy" and the always popular "Speed: Let's Not Be Too Hasty Now" speech, as well as "Look out! That car several miles ahead appears to be turning!", and other variations on the tailgating theme. I am the best passenger ever.

Our first farm store destination wasn't there anymore - not even a sign up, just vanished, replaced by a store selling skate boards. So we pressed on for another half hour and got to the NEXT farm store which was still there and very well stocked in everything you could ever possibly need, especially if you REALLY needed black rubber boots, but it didn't have any medicine for a poor miserable bull with a rotten foot so we ended up driving for another hour until we got to a farm vet and bought the stuff right from him. The Baby had been keeping up a solo speech in the backseat the whole time about how she hated the car seat, hated us, hated the toys and books that had been packed for her, hated her snacks and drinks and how she really, really yearned for her father's company RIGHT NOW, and she very obligingly kept it up the whole way home, right until the effort was just too much for the poor mite and she fell complainingly to sleep. Good thing I was there to help my dad drive safely.

On the way home I pointed out many farms of pleasing aspect, green fields and rolling hills and red-roofed barns and hundred year old houses, all crying out for me to live there with my many, many children and wearing some devastatingly gorgeous yet simple white cotton dress, a clothes basket balanced on my hip and apple trees growing everywhere. Of course, my serious work aversion and need for constant amusement makes that perhaps not the best plan I've ever had, but it sounds pretty.

One of the most alienating things that I ever heard, a thing that made me instantly feel almost sick was revulsion, was on an Oprah special, which I watched because I have very, very bad taste. Oprah had returned home to some rural place where she had grown up and was telling about how when she was a little girl, her grandmother took her outside with her while she hung up some laundry and said to her that someday Oprah too would be hanging up her laundry outside and little child Oprah, said Oprah with deep self-satisfaction in her voice, instantly thought "I will never do that." REALLY, I thought. Huh. There are many, many hard, demeaning things in this world, things that I am glad that I have been spared, but hanging up laundry? Really? (although if she was, as Painted Maypole mentioned, talking about Oprah going into domestic service, than that is an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THING ALTOGETHER. But I think it was just her own regular laundry.) There is some satisfaction in taking dry sheets off the line, sun-bleached and smelling of grass and lilacs, the same quiet deep joy I felt in nursing, in this feeling of This Has Been Done Forever, and yes, many people are so busy that it becomes a necessity for other people to take on the domestic side of their life for them, but still - standing outside on a warm spring day, hanging up clothes while some pretty grandchild ducks playfully under the wet sheets laughing sounds like a happy ending to me, sounds rooted and gentle like an apple tree, its roots deep in the field.

Oh Dear.

This meme has been making the rounds of the clever-blogging-mothers community, an examination of the process of blogging itself, and now Her Bad Mother has tagged me. So, I shall try me best and here we go:

1. Go back to first or early post. How would you describe your voice back in those early days?Who were you writing to? What was your sense of audience (if any) back then?
Hm. I had to go back and look at my earlier posts and you know, they're a bit awkward, but I still sound like myself. I've always written quite a bit, so I think that I just went right ahead and wrote to this unknown audience as though I were writing an email to a friend.
I was SO nervous about it, largely because I thought that the whole blogosphere was filled with eager trolls who would mock my every post, super-critical people who would tear apart my early posts on upholstery and chocolate fondue. I've only ever had a very few negative comments and those have been largely hilarious and not the soul-searing critiques that I'd worried about at first.

2. Do you remember when you received your first comment?
I DO remember - I had very shyly linked to a Works-For-Me Wednesday with a hesitant little tip, which struck even me as silly because I am NOT exactly the person one should come to for helpful household advice. My very first commenter was very kind and gentle and I don't think that she reads my page anymore, but I still remember her fondly. That was my first week of blogging and it was very, very pleasing.

3. Can you point to a stage where you began to feel that your blog might be part of a conversation? Where you might be part of a larger community of interacting writers?
Um, no? This has probably happened and all but I'm pretty unconscious of having any big "EUREKA!" moment, and even more mercifully unaware of said event happening while I was in the tub and running delightedly from the house in my bare and enlightened state.
I'm not GOOD at emotional revelations, because I normally realize things at a glacial pace.

4. Do you think that this sense of audience or community might have affected the way you began to write?
I avoid some topics - sex, for example - although I had never intended at any time to write anything raunchy, being possessed of a previously undiscovered puritanical streak. I don't avoid discussing my faith entirely, but I dislike the sounds of crickets chirping in my largely empty comments when I do, which makes me feel sort of bad, honestly. I don't think I write WELL on matters of faith, and it's more my own feelings of clumsiness about something precious to me that makes me avoid the topic.
I avoid writing at all about political matters and this IS because of my sense of an audience.
I do LIKE getting lots of comments on posts - it makes me feel like I've received an A+ AND a shiny gold star. My less popular, runty posts bother me, of course but generally I like my own voice - I sound like myself, which is nice.

Getting taggity

Bren J. tagged me with the Eight Random Things About Me Meme, which is handy since I'm rather creatively bankrupt today.
1. I don't wear jewelry. None. I'm totally married but I don't like jewelry, okay? Especially rings. My husband wears one, so at least one of us looks married.
2. I used to think that there wasn't a character in literature that I could identify with more than Anne Shirley. Talkative? Check. Overly romantic? Check. Prone to DIRE KITCHEN EMERGENCIES? Check checkity check. The only difference, of course, is that I am dark and not red-haired at all. That and I HATED school. But then Mad mentioned Mary Musgrove and there went that. Mary Musgrove, c'est moi.
3. I'm rather agoraphobic. It's one of the main reasons that we live in Little Town - not just because it's small but because it's totally known to me, which makes it possible for me to live an active, fairly normal life. I fantasize about living someplace more interesting but the very things that I yearn for would cause me to emotionally capsize eventually. I read things about Paula Deen with a wistful hope, because she was much the same at one point.
4. Is there a better song in the world than "China Girl" by David Bowie? No, there is not.
5. I would totally join the Amish if it wasn't for that hard work + no computers thing.
6. I have dozens of cookbooks, which is probably not that surprising but it IS random.
7. The Baby is this insane combination of fearless and really stubborn and by the time she goes to bed I am just exhausted and spent. She fell off the top step on the porch tonight and her dad caught her right before she landed face-first on the bottom step and I feel utterly emotionally drained right now because of the little maniac.
8. I love cardigans. Random!