Stuff Not To Do

1) Do NOT write several posts in which you refer mysteriously to your youngest child's upcoming heart tests and then NOT POST FOR A WEEK. That's really jerky AND gets you lot of "IS EVERYTHING OKAY?!!!" emails from UNDERSTANDABLY WORRIED PEOPLE.

EVERYTHING IS FINE!

She hasn't gone for her tests yet. They're coming up. We went away for the weekend - reason 1# for the blog silence - and then I've spent the past couple of days riding the migraine bus, which is a fairly solid reason 2#. That's all.

Hey look! I wrote a post today. It is not terribly great, but it's about me trying to find ways to deal with my emotions appropriately around my kids. Go say hi and stuff, puh-leez.

Happy birthday, beautiful girl.

The face pictures of The Baby yesterday? Baby pictures.

This is what she looks like right now:



That face!


I have seen better-looking faces lots of times. I think she looks - if I am being totally honest - a bit like a pasty monkey (a cute one, but still a monkey.). She's short and skinny and sickly and mouthy. But like Shakespeare's mistress,

... by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

In my earlier days, I was not a sappy person. I never cried during romantic movies, love songs made me roll my eyes and I generally presumed that L-U-V was actually spelled S-E-X.

And then I (not too surprisingly) had kids. And every saccharine love song in the world became suddenly, piercingly, about the love that had overwhelmed me, that had shuddered away my cynicism and my defences and turned my heart into a black velvet painting of a Precious Moments figurine holding a big-eyed puppy. And so:

She Looks So Beautiful (To Me)

She's The First, The Last, The Everything

She Lights Up My Life

Nothing Compares 2 Her

.... and so on. (and do not even think of playing the song "Little Green" by Joni Mitchell around me unless you want to see me Ugly Cry.) Songs that would have made me gag slightly, pre-kid, now make me go misty-eyed as I imagine it being the soundtrack for a slow-motion photo montage of baby pictures. Maybe I hit my head really hard when I had my first kid. Maybe something broken within me was fixed forever.

"You're so little for five!" an old lady said to her this morning.

"Little and PERFECT," The Baby said, calmly.


I don't think - really, I don't - that there is anything terribly wrong with her. I'm not looking forward to the testing (understatement), but if they find what they're looking for, it's most likely one of those outgrowable/easily fixable deals. And while it's frightening - and it IS frightening, because this is my fragile little child they are talking about and not some stranger - it is not what is dwelling in my mind all the time. Next week, when the testing starts? I will deal with it then. But for today, I woke up to her leaping into bed with me, nestling close and whispering "Happy birthday to me, Mama! The living room is a beautiful jungle!".

Five does not last forever. Five melts away quickly, turns into the rambunctiousness of six, this sudden turning into a Big Kid. I trust that anything broken can be fixed, that bad things will become nothing but funny stories, that she can grow up and still be my beautiful little child, my enchanted, enchanting girl.

this morning, getting her nails done

A Hard Post And Five Years

When I started this blog - nearly four years ago, impossibly enough - it was because I had no way of saying in my real life how I felt about my own MUCH TOO CLOSE brush with death that March and your then-undiagnosed and harrowing health problems.

I had been certain, going into my third pregnancy, that my third child would be a total cakewalk. I knew what I was doing, I had successfully breastfed my second child for nearly two years, I had made it through post-partum depression with my first child and I couldn't think of many things that would slow me down with you.

Oh, HA! I think, somewhat bitterly. I am such a dope.

My heart was broken by this, by my sweet, grumpy baby having such a hard time.

My heart was broken when you had to go for extensive testing when you were only 14 months old.

My heart was broken when you had to go on a restrictive diet for the rest of your life.

My heart was broken - again - when you collapsed in front of me this fall.

My metaphorical heart, of course, by which I mean that I was distressed and terrified and worried and sorry.

It turns out that your own heart might have quietly been broken all this time, too. Your actual, literal heart.

I don't want to write about all of the testing you have coming up yet again. I am nearly wordless with dread.

Instead: you will be, impossibly enough, five years old in two days. Five years old! And I want only sweet things for you, my baby, my little girl, my joy.

Ghosts and Flowers

This is today's post, which is about the title of THIS post.

On the poverty project: It is TOTALLY still a go. There are tons of behind the scenes things going on right now.

I'm going to have a bunch of reviews up at my review site tomorrow AND I'm hoping to get a TON posted on my recipe site this weekend, so stay tuned! And in the meantime, my husband's art blog is a busy, busy place. His coworker asked him yesterday if the two of us are having a blog competition, which made me feel - BRIEFLY - very very competitive. But it faded, as these things do.

Let's Craft With The 1970's!

There have been good eras in which to be a child, eras of freckle-faced innocence and bikes and lemonade stands and polio (a not-so-good part) and then there was the 1970's, which was a time of polyester hitchhiker-murdering fleshy nastiness. I was 7 when the 1970s ended, so most of my memories of it involve the smell of marijuana smoke, dolls with genitals and itchy bellbottom pantsuits, but my husband was 11 and he remembers hard-core pornographic magazines and coke lines left out in the open at friends' houses, of TEACHERS AT SCHOOL casually talking in the hallway to each other about "swinging".

Lovely!

And as a charming souvenir, we have his gianormous set of 1970s Kids' Activity Books. The recommended "activities" are somewhat dubious. Observe:

Tigertooth Necklace

1) Save the bones from
a cooked turkey neck. Clean as much meat off the bones as you can.

2) Boil the bones until there is no meat left on them at all. Then
soak them overnight in some water and bleach.

AND BLEACH! No safety warnings, no measurements: JUST SOAK SOME BONES IN BLEACH.
But the finished product is exquisite:
That would look PERFECT with a tube top, polyester shorts and a faux-leather fringed purse, all being worn by some 8 year old. PERFECT.

There are, of course, a lot of macrame projects.

There was nothing SPECIFICALLY wrong with macrame - yes, it's ugly, but so are most crafts, really.

But do you remember macrame? DO you remember seeing macrame on the wall at your friend's houses - made by their mother, generally, in between going to primal screen classes and having affairs - and it would always be coated in STRINGS of dust because you CANNOT CLEAN MACRAME?

Gross.

I was just told that macrame is coming BACK INTO FASHION. This is a BAD IDEA.

This fish doesn't know what it did to deserve the fate of being cooked by paraffin on top of a piece of hacked-up garbage by an unsupervised child.


It just does not know.

But it certainly doesn't look happy about it.

That's from the volume entitled "Foraging." Because when I think of what I want my children to do for fun, "rifling through garbage" is RIGHT at the top of the list.

Of course, not everything is vile and loathsome, but a LOT of it is. Ever wanted your child to make a candle by pouring (unsupervised, of course!) boiling hot wax into a bucket of sand? OF COURSE YOU HAVE!


I remember those squatty little sand candles from the 70s. People actually BOUGHT THEM.

This salute to the Native People of North America was made from a meat tray. A meat tray on which the turkey that you used to make the neckbone necklace possibly came from. THE CIRCLE OF LIFE!

My kids, I should add, just LOVE these books.And my husband - the original owner of these breathtaking volumes - actually DID grow up to be an artist. (here's his blog - see?)

And the 1970s, with their casual Keep-On-Truckin' laid back grossness DID encourage creativity. Creativity and herpes and dudes with nose reconstructions thanks to snorting just MASSIVE amounts of coke. But mostly now? They just encourage me to feel kind of queasy. Art!

The Baby's Latest Art Exhibition

The Baby has had a previous art exhibit and I thought it was high time that I scanned in some of her more recent work that is EVERYWHERE IN MY HOUSE.

First up, we have a religious piece that was drawn in Sunday School. This piece came to the curator's attention when the Sunday School teacher called her downstairs to admire the artist's work while laughing hysterically.

An unconventional approach to the story of Mary washing Jesus' feet makes this piece raise many theological questions: Why is Jesus laying on the ground? Why are His hands so big? Is He supposed to look like Kermit?

"This is Mary washing Jesus' feet. I drew it with pencils." said The Artist. "I drew it because I had to."

This next piece was the subject of some controversy in The Artist's home, when it was mistaken for both a goat and a unicorn and also some sort of unicorn-goat hybrid.

"I drawed this one with a pen," said The Artist. "It is a dog and not any of those other stupid things. It has a little tiny pointy tail and it has a fuzzy chin."

We will let The Artist speak for herself with the next piece:

"This is a cat in pajamas and it hates the music. This is marker on purple construction paper. I picked purple construction paper because I couldn't find white paper, of course."

"I think," she added, "That the cat is listening to music that Papa picked out."

The final piece is haunting in both its execution and its subject matter. The Curator thinks that it represents The Artist's fears over the destruction of the environment and its resulting impact on animal life.

"This is a red robin," said The Artist. "It has a sad look on its face. That is because it is sad."

Stay tuned for such future exhibits as Spontaneous Interpretive Dance In Hardware Store and A Bunch Of Cut-Up Paper Is ART, Mom.

Sally, Edna

My mother-in-law gave each of the kids a giant gift bag for Easter yesterday.

When I was first a mother, this bothered me - I don't come from a Big Gifts At Easter family, and I felt like Easter was going to become nothing but a second-rate Christmas if I went along.

"Making your mother-in-law cry at Easter proves you're an awesome Christian, all right," said a good friend. And I realized ALL AT ONCE that I was being a jerk and so now my kids get giant gift bags from my in-laws and not from their parents and they are, strangely enough, cool about it. And one of the many, many treats in The Baby's gift bag was a cunning miniature wire rabbit hutch, with two perfect chocolate rabbits inside.

It is obvious if you read my posts from this time last year that something had gone terribly wrong in my life. And here is what it is.

Here is the list of people I love in this world, in numerical order:
1. My children, en masse.
2. My husband, but this is a close second.
3. This next person.
4. Everyone else.

And it is the person in my third-place spot, this person who is neither husband nor child but who is well-loved by me, who is irreplaceable in my life, who all at once had a terrible psychotic break and we could not get this person help - it seemed that everything was conspiring against this person's well-being, and this person was in dreadful, unreachable danger for months and months. It was - and I do not use this word lightly - agonizing. I would cry myself to sleep and finally, finally, fall into restless, nightmare-plagued sleep only to wake up to the crushing knowledge of what was happening. Over and over and over and over again, month after month after month, with no hope, just things getting worse day after day.

The phone would ring and I would stand frozen with terror - had they wandered off and could not be found? Had they collapsed and died (like many mentally ill people, my person was horrifyingly unwell physically)? And I remember Good Friday coming last year and that feeling as the final candle was blown out, that feeling that candles were going out one after another everywhere and soon everything would be dark forever. I remember sitting by myself in the darkness of my office late on Good Friday and listening to Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here and sobbing wretchedly, hopeless. What had I done, what had they done, to deserve this blight?

The Boy came with me to Good Friday service this weekend, blinking in the sudden brightness of the still-light evening as we left the darkened church. And I laughed and rubbed off the tears that I had cried during service and returning home feeling gloomy but with the consoling knowledge that Easter was just ahead. And The Baby was given a miniature wire hutch with two chocolate rabbits inside, who she promptly named Sally (of course) and Edna. Edna!

My person is better now. Not all the way better, nor is this likely to even happen, but better, a million times better. The grieving dread has passed away and now there is my life back, returned to me almost intact.

Today is Easter. The minister spoke of the women coming to the cave to prepare Jesus' body for burial and the rock in the door had been moved aside and I cried, again. Life is not perfect and life is full of just awful things and there are terrible things coming up, but that rock gets moved again and again and I find myself over and over again blinking and suddenly blinded by the brightness of the sunlight around me, startled over and over again by the way happiness returns after pain. What have I done to deserve this joy?

"Oh Sally! Oh Edna!" The Baby said to the chocolate rabbits, tenderly petting each of them. "I am going to eat your ears!" And then she did.

I have a new post up!

It's about how yesterday was April Fool's Day.
I might get a Good Friday post up today - depends on how my day goes.
xo