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Tuesday, May 24, 2005

things about today

• T was off work yesterday because his back was (is) out. This means that I keep forgetting that it's Tuesday -- which is not only the day I pay bills, but also, in this particular instance, my mother's birthday; good thing that I remembered long enough to at least have C call her at work.
• I really feel like going for a walk, except
• it is so hot out that the cooler is barely keeping up at 9:00 in the morning. Way to go with the abrupt change of seasons, there, God. I'm sure you have a fantastic reason for it. We'll adjust. Thanks.
• My feet still hurt from wearing high heels (yes, the cute black-and-white ones) at a chorus concert last night. This is the closest I ever get to feeling the effects of hard partying in the morning. Whew, yeah, that was a wild one.
• C, who says she is "Anakin's little sister", is taking apart the works from her light-up-vibrating-head-song-playing duck. Or actually, it's my duck. She has itty bitty screws all over the couch and she is really intent on fixing the head-vibration function. I'm kind of hoping she messes the whole thing up, since I got tired of the "squeeze here for a computer-chip rendering of a familiar song" stuffed-animal gimmick about three seconds after it was invented. Chances are, however, that she'll actually fix it. Drat.
• We are thinking about renting out the apartment we use for school and guests (but not the garage underneath it). Eek! This is because we are also thinking about buying this house, and that would enable us to do it. Double Eek! No, wait, triple Eek!
• I am a bad, bad girl, because I'm on the computer without having done my Bible reading first. Someone smack me.
• OK, while you're at it, smack me for all the other days I've done that too. Which is, these days, pretty much every day. Sigh.
• I am shuddering in disgust already at the google hits I'm going to get from having "smack me" and "high-heeled" in the same paragraph. GO AWAY SCARY GOOGLERS. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

trying on a new reaction

[I started writing this on Friday afternoon and am just now finishing and posting it]

This is a pretty standard parenting day. That is to say, lots of joy, dotted with frustration. We're cleaning. You might ask, "when are you NOT cleaning, Rachel?" To which I would answer, "only when I stop to be lazy and let things pile up so as to make it take much longer the next time, which is pretty much the majority of the time." You might ask, "Why don't you try Flylady, Rachel?" To which I would answer, "I did. She never would come clean my house, no matter how much I crossed my fingers and wished." seriously, I do have a system. It works way better than Flylady's, for me -- Flylady doesn't have homeschooled kids, apparently -- when I use it, which is never. Because, well, lazy. That's what it is, I'm lazy. And if I ever close this everlasting parenthetical statement and move on, you'll find that I'm sorta working on that.)

AN-Y-WAY. We're cleaning, as I said. I set the kids working on their rooms -- if you ever want a room made messy absolutely as quickly as it is possible to be done, like say, you're making a movie and you want a scene where a hurricane has destroyed a residence, hire my daughter. But don't tell her I said that. Meanwhile I was working in the kitchen. Sort of. If "working in the kitchen" constitutes "cleaning a little, then walking by the computer to check my bloglines thing WHICH DOES NOT WORK". The kids started to snipe at each other. C hit LT (he never hits. Whereas she thinks hitting is 'the i ching...the answer to every question.'). C started to sob about the huge job of cleaning her room. LT worked well for a while, then did likewise. I was quickly approaching the point where I would begin fantasizing about a) banging my head against hard surfaces b) running for the hills or c) living alone far far away. Warning signs of my nearness to that state included daydreaming about The Parallel Rachel while I washed dishes, and thinking minor swear words.

Then I had a little breakthrough. I thought -- what if, instead of getting mad, or yelling... what if I channeled that reaction into something positive? I could take my frustrations out on my countertops and piles of clutter. Instead of fantasizing about my quiet, clean, sparse apartment with the grand piano in an upscale old neighborhood in a highly-cultured city where I "worked" as conductor or second-chair flute (even in my fantasies, I don't reach as high as principal. It just is that little bit too unrealistic) in a symphony and weighed something obscenely and fashionably small and never EVER bought bargain clothes -- um, yeah, anyway, instead of fantasizing about all that, I would do my best to incorporate the good parts of that fantasy -- namely, the quiet, the cleanliness, and the lack of clutter -- into my Real Life. I would -- here's the biggie -- get those fantasies behind me, so to speak, by pulling a Marilla.

(if you know why I would call it pulling a Marilla, note it in my comments and if you are right I will seriously get your address and send you a present.)

I also thought I'd try, when the minor swear words began to come out in my mutterings without my really even asking them to -- hang uninvited guests anyway -- I thought that I would think about something, I dunno, holy. What Would The Proverbs 31 Woman Do? That sort of thing. That didn't work quite so well, because -- here's my dirty little secret, lean in close, it's juicy -- I don't ever plan to be like the Proverbs 31 woman. She buys real estate. She has servant girls. PUH-LEEZE. That is so not my sphere, and I just cannot identify. So does that get me out of the whole "her hands are busy" kind of thing? [hopeful grin.] See, my hands -- my hands are busy! They're busy... typing. dang. oh well.

Oh, man, where was I. Oh yes, I was going to try to think about something holy instead of thinking bad words, while I turned my house into a crystal-clean palace, that's right. And it worked! it really did. By the time T got home, I was in such a state of normalcy that I did not pass him as he was on his way in, blow him a kiss, and jump in the car with my camera and tripod to go try a little -- like four hours' worth of -- Nikon therapy, as I had originally planned. No, instead I showed him around so he'd make sure to praise me for all the work I'd done, and I begged and cajoled until he got us takeout for dinner. And then I put him in charge of the kids while I went to bed early with Mansfield Park. And he was so gracious and patient. Have I not TOLD you that he is the most wonderful man in the world? I knew I had.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

the best-laid plans, part, what, five bazillion?

This is what I get for planning (and announcing my plans) to be in bed before eleven:

1. T needing me to alter a picture of a vehicle he'd found online, so that he could print it out and use it as a template for designs for the paintball tank he's been wanting to make for years
2. My decision, while I was up and at the computer anyway, to check on some journals for a few minutes.
3. You don't need to know the third thing, but it takes more than a few minutes.
4. then, juuust as I was drifting off to sleep at midnight, along comes LT, saying that he feels "funny" and "shivery" and that he thinks he needs to go outside for fresh air.
5. a cuddle with my boy in the porch swing in the moonlight, both of us tucked into one of T's flannel jackets
6. several attempts at going to sleep, only to have LT start feeling "shivery" again just as he's about to drift off
7. mounting anxiety about this whole "shivery" thing, covered by a thick veneer of nonchalance, because dang, the boy's anxious enough without Mom spazzing out
8. a journal entry and a photo posted at 2 a.m., with my nine-year-old reading his Hardy Boys book in the recliner, in the hopes that he'll get so tired he'll just fall asleep without trying

I really am unsure about what's going on with him. He has what we think is Tourette's Syndrome, coupled with more-than-normal anxiety at times, so we've seen a lot of stuff and learned to take new developments pretty much in stride, after an initial period of freaking out as quietly as possible adjusting. Part of me says this is just related to having had some sugar or some caffeine, or maybe it's just that tight-chested feeling everyone gets sometimes. Another part of me wonders how strangely the staff would look at me if we took a little drive over to the emergency room (that part is easily shut up with a reminder of the uselessness of the below-mediocre hospital in our town). And there's the whole rest of me in between, swinging from "maybe we'll go to the pediatrician tomorrow" to "let's look things up on the internet all night and see if we can scare the daylights out of ourselves" (sometimes my inner voice speaks to itself in the plural. So sue me).

In a way, this is nice. I don't get much alone time with either of the kids, so I take it when I can get it and am glad about that aspect of such situations, anyway. In another way, I'm scared senseless. Motherhood is just full of this kind of confusion; it's one of those things nobody ever tells you about when they warn you about never sleeping again and having no time to yourself for years.

Monday, May 16, 2005

what a weekend

I'm taking a break from giving the house a badly-needed very thorough cleaning to post a few notes about what my weekend was like. Because, you know, I really NEED a break, since I've been working without stopping for, what, ten minutes now. THE HARDSHIP. (really it's because words are rattling around in my brain and they won't shut up until I type them out.)

Friday: Was T's Friday off. Um, I think we spent the day at home hanging out as a family. How sad is it that I can't remember three days ago? Oh yes, in the afternoon C and I went for a walk while the boys practiced target shooting (oh goody! pacifist comments again!) in the backyard with their air rifles (read: pellet guns). Then we went to the video store, where we rented "The Phantom of the Opera", which T and I watched after the kids were in bed. I am SO MAD that I didn't go see that at the theater; I LOVED it. I was afraid to watch it in the theater because everyone said I wouldn't like it if I liked the stage musical. That just meant that the "everyone" in that sentence was taking hallucinogenic drugs, or something, because I repeat, I LOVED it. Perhaps this makes me the cinematic equivalent of a fourteen-year-old, but I don't care. (T loved it too. We watched the musical on the first New Year's Eve we were married, in San Francisco; this was one of the HUGE highlights of our pre-kids life together, for both of us.)

Saturday: T had decided that Saturday would be kind of a Mother's Day: Take Two kind of thing, since Mother's Day ended up being a quiet day at home with a (sick?) child. So we went to the zoo. We went to Storyland (basically a huge, shady playground/garden, with equipment, buildings, etc., based on kids' stories, very nice). We went to Denny's. We went to Barnes and Noble, where I spent my gift card on Middlemarch, a CD of Bach's flute sonatas, a collection of Jane Austen's unfinished works, and The Wind in the Willows.

Nothing terribly notable on Sunday: Sunday school, nap, baby shower, quick trip to my parents' so that T could get a tractor part for his cousin and the kids could go swimming in the creek. I have pictures of this but I'm too lazy to post them now.

And now today. I'm listening to Dvorak's "Symphony from the New World" at a pretty high volume level, which brings back high school years in a big way, and trying to undo the disaster that is my living room and kitchen. The kids are supposed to be cleaning their rooms. I hear playing, but I'm pretending I don't.

Speaking of people who are supposed to be cleaning but aren't. Ahem.

Monday, May 09, 2005

mother's day etc.

Well, I'm going to join the ranks of Christian women bloggers who are explaining why they're not blogging as often anymore. My reasons aren't as cool as theirs -- especially Molly; I mean, who can top having a baby as a reason to stay away from the computer? But I do have a little list of reasons. I have a crochet project I'm working on really hard; I am trying to get through Mansfield Park; we're getting to the end of the school year and I'm getting that "you slacker, your children are going to hate you when they're adults because you basically took off the entire months of March and April from any kind of regular sit-down school every year and that meant that they reached the age of 18 barely able to multiply single-digit numbers and now they live in the ghetto and scrounge in trash cans for a living THANKS A WHOLE LOT MOM" kind of panic. I KNOW it's not true, I mean, heck, if I stopped right now they could probably get jobs with, I dunno, the postal service or something. And most importantly, they're growing and blossoming and reading and writing (sometimes even legibly, but don't count on it) and being creative and they're very bright and everything. It's just this kind of opposite-of-spring-fever thing I get every year, don't mind me.

Also, it has been raining again, so I haven't been taking a whole lot of pictures to post, or going for walks. And the biggest reason is that I have a tendency to spend way too much time sitting here in front of this machine, and I need to work on curtailing that to a conscionable level. Don't expect me to disappear (especially because my resolve on this sort of thing is notoriously weak), but don't expect a post every day either, I guess. Which, hey, who's been expecting that lately anyway.

quick Mother's Day summation: I spent the day at home, except for a brief excursion to the library's used book sale, because LT woke up in the wee small hours on Sunday, throwing up. It ended up being a one-off, but we couldn't know that in time to go to church or the family gathering afterward. Plus I was up at 3 a.m., washing sheets and blankets and cuddling my nine-year-old (!!), and that is not conducive to getting up bright and early. It ended up being a pretty nice day, all things considered. We didn't play a family board game like I wanted to (the boys' round of the Star Wars trading card game thing or whatever it's called took longer than they thought it would), but I didn't have to wash dishes or cook, and I DID have ice cream and cookies. Definitely a day for the positive column. :)

Thursday, May 05, 2005

this ought to say "Hallmark" on the back

Last night at Bible study, one of the women approached me and said that as a gift for me after The Event I Swore I Would Not Mention Again, she was going to come over and clean my house for me (she cleans houses for a living). What I wanted to say was "oh, like h*** am I ever going to let a casual friend anywhere NEAR the dirty parts of my house." However, when someone offers you a gift, you're supposed to smile politely and say 'thank you', and then only write the above sentence in your online journal (I think that's what Emily Post says about it), so that's what I did. Am doing. She's coming over at 2:30 today. And my mom is coming over from 1:00 to 2:00 to help me clean in advance of the arrival of the cleaning lady. Now there's one particular cliché I never thought I'd be living out.

Seriously, there are some household things I'm not supposed to be doing yet -- floors, and scrubbing the bathtub -- which really do need to be done pretty badly. But there is a megaton of STUFF that needs to get put away first, and that's what Mom's going to help me with. What a mom. She gives birth to me, lavishes me with love and affection and creative ideas for fun for my entire childhood, puts up with my regrettable attitude during my teenaged years, offers herself on the altar of free babysitting as soon as I provide her with a grandchild, and then, to top it off, comes over on her lunch break to help me clean my house even though I'm thirty years old and really, if I haven't got the discipline to clean my own house, that ought to be my own problem. Wow. This is the stuff of shiny embossed pastel fancy-script $4.50 Mother's Day cards if ever I saw it.

Now you'll have to excuse me; I'd love to write a nice thoughtful post about the parallels between "cleaning for the cleaning lady" and our Christian walk, but I'd better get to work; my mom will be here in three hours and this place is A MESS.

Monday, May 02, 2005

out of practice II

Well, here's how you get me to shut up, I guess. Just get me my own domain and I completely run out of things to say for days on end.

Real life started again today. No sitting in the recliner crocheting for hours. No waking up in the morning and stretching lazily and going back to sleep with my leg stretched over T's. No, T went back to work, and the kids and I had a regular day filled with school and errands and housework and all that. I even cooked dinner, which I hadn't done since April 12th, which has to be some kind of record, right? Laundry, messes, getting the soap out of C's eyes in the bath, getting down the breakfast cereal, shopping for things we're out of -- all these things are once more my responsibility. I wouldn't mind, in fact it would be nice to be getting back into our routine, if it weren't for the fact that we had become accustomed to the luxury of having T home all the time and now he's not, and we just plain MISSED him today. It was almost as bad as the day he had to go back to work after two and a half months off for a broken ankle in the winter of 2002/2003. I'm inclined to make a joke about that being pitiful, but I really don't think it's pitiful, if I didn't like having him around I wouldn't have married him, right?

Also, I have to seriously start watching what I eat again. I gained FIVE POUNDS in the past three weeks, not only because I was sitting around not getting much exercise, but also because I ate like a trencherman the whole time. I think I felt like I had to make up for the three days of either liquid diet or no food at all. And people kept bringing us these fantastic meals, and the meals were so HEARTY and the quantities were so large, and T wanted to make me happy so he would bring me heaping bowls of ice cream with brownies, and anytime I was hungry I would just snack. So if you ever should NEED to gain five pounds in three weeks, (I will try hard not to hate your skinny self and) there's the method right there for you.

Good things about today:

• School. The kids were cooperative and we all really enjoyed ourselves. LT gets to basically skip the chapters in his math book that deal with the multiplication tables, since he learned those last year, so now he's doing geometry and measurement, which C is learning along with him as well as doing two-digit addition. They both have books they're really into right now -- LT is tearing it up in his Hardy Boys series (well, tearing it up for a nine-year-old, at least), and C has one of those old-fashioned school reading textbooks, maybe from the 40's, which she borrowed from my parents yesterday, and she's halfway through it. Every time I hear her read out loud she surprises me with how FAST she's getting better and better at it.
  
• The library. I hadn't been there in weeks. I didn't find any books I wanted (when I'm reading Austen, nothing else has any appeal) but I found a few movies. And it was good to just BE there.
  
• LT discussing Austen adaptations with the librarian.
  
• The rebate from the purchase of The Nikon finally arrived, just in time to pay (pause to push down the wave of white-hot self-loathing trying to overtake me) the fine from my traffic ticket.
  
• I went back to the community chorus and I really enjoyed myself.

Oh, man, I am just SO un-funny tonight. You know the scene in The Phantom Tollbooth when Milo winds up in the Doldrums? And the doldrums kind of slink around and talk slower and slower until Milo is lulled into a state of exhausted apathy? I am that tired.

Saturday, April 23, 2005

my husband. And his friends' baby.

Here, just from yesterday, is a brief partial list of reasons I'd be totally jealous if anyone else was married to my husband:

• He willingly went and bought me, um, girlie stuff at the drugstore.
  
• He made breakfast and lunch, and dished up the food that people brought for dinner, and he did the dishes, as he has every day since I had surgery last week.
  
• HE MADE ME SIT DOWN AND READ JANE AUSTEN. Do I even have to continue?
  
• He was outside at twilight having a strategy-and-sneaking sort of war with the kids and LT's friend, who was over to spend the night for LT's birthday. He was on C's team.
  
• He spent the morning fixing his grandmother's brakes (for free, of course) and just smiled when she was impatient with him about it.
  
• He has extremely sexy arms.
  
• He cleaned the guest apartment because his friends were coming to visit today.
  
• When I went to bed, he stripped the blankets off and then made the bed while I lay in it, which -- especially the cool sheet floating down -- is just the most comfortable thing ever. In a comfort-food sort of way.
  

Speaking of T's friends -- they are the ones with the miracle baby about whom I wrote in my old journal. And here's Little Miss Miracle herself, in all her little babyish glory:

This is the first time The Nikon has been set loose on a baby. It is having a hard time controlling itself, let me just put it that way.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

the best-laid plans...

Well, here's a list of things I meant to do before I went into the hospital:

1. Get fully caught up on laundry.
   
2. Make the house spotless.
   
3. Find a picture of the kids together to take with me. (one of the few evils of digital photos is that they're seriously less portable, unless you print them, which we can't since our printer hates us.)
   
4. Make a new journal template.

5. Write at least one journal post that wasn't full of whining, so that newcomers to my blog wouldn't run screaming the other way at the first sentence written by a person who gives Cousin Gladys in The Blue Castle a run for her money in the whining department. (Read This Now. This Means You.)
   
6. Go to the library and get some light-but-not-hilarious (because I know from experience that laughing after abdominal surgery is a huge no-no) books to take with me in addition to the stack I've already got going.
   
7. Wash my bathrobe. (this takes a load almost by itself. It's huge and blue and terrycloth.)
   

Now ask me how many of these things I got done. Go ahead, ask.

Maybe the BIG FAT ZERO you just heard has to do with the fact that I spent Monday in Yosemite, Tuesday in the valley doing pre-op stuff, and today working my hiney off (ha! I wish) helping to fell about 20 trees, and pulling brush, and stacking logs. T's dad (the realtor) had a client who wanted some property brushed and cleared a bit before he would agree to buy it, so T's dad hired us to do it. Today was the only day that my dad, T, and I could all work on it. LT and C helped also. I AM SO SORE OH MY GOSH SO SORE AND I CAN'T TAKE ADVIL. At least I'll have morphine tomorrow. That should knock out some muscle soreness pretty effectively, wouldn't you think?

Anyway. Ahem. This was supposed to be a NON-whiny post, wasn't it. Whoops.

Sunday, April 03, 2005

you know you wish he was YOUR dad

Here's what the kids (the 35-year-old, the 8-year-old, and the 5-year-old) spent Saturday afternoon building:

that old dryer just keeps on giving

LT as gunner and C as driver (I think those are the correct technical terms)

inside view. I told them to "look angry." Remind me not to tick LT off, will you?

It was his idea. That should not be surprising to you. :)

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