The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

Breaking the blog again. I finally udated to WordPress 2.7 last night, and thought “Oh hey, since I am already changing things, I should change my theme and start customizing it, yay!” Because at 2am, I am an idiot. The girls are finally back to their giggly, jumpy, running selves, so finishing this theme work may not happen today, but I am 100% okay with that.

I didn’t forget about your questions from way back in November, but with the last minute trip to Montana, and then NaNoBloMo ending, I never had a chance to finish them. And since I’m tired of the whining post being on the top of my blog, and am not motivated to come up with my own subject matter, questions ahoy!

From Sara: (who, you may remember, made my year by sending me a box of Cadbury eggs just because)

Favorite memory of your mom?

I was 16, getting the hell out of Louisiana, and was able to spend a week with her in Tulsa before I caught a flight back to the NW. We were sitting in her tiny trailer, in our PJ’s, laughing so hard that the next day our abs hurt and we could barely pull ourselves out of bed. I can’t remember what we were laughing about, but I remember realizing that nothing in the world could break that bond between us.

I haven’t intentionally painted my mom as a saint here, but I know I haven’t been completely open about her faults, and to understand why that realization was so powerful you have to know that my mom made a lot of mistakes. And as a kid, it’s hard to see the line between your parents lives, and your own. I spent a good portion on my childhood feeling guilty for things I had no control over, but sitting there, laughing until I felt dizzy, I knew that none of it mattered. She did not leave because we were ‘bad’, she did not choose to be away from us, and when she said she loved us, she meant it. And she would always be my mom, flawed or not. I’m glad I had that chance to forgive her, because it changed how we talked in those last few years of her life.

Best thing about being married to Tom?

The fact that he compliments my neurosis so well. He sees the world in very simple terms, where as I see 29762306 shades of gray, all of which make me want to cower in the corner. This “Baby or no-baby” question for example: We talked about it more tonight, and by ‘talked’ I mean that I went on and on and on (and on) about the pros and cons of having another baby, and when I finally shut up, he said “Aww come on, we make really cute kids. If we don’t do it now, we’ll just get pregnant in March and have a baby on December 7th. Stop over thinking it. So, Thomas for a boy, and what do you think of Isabelle for a girl?”

It sounds dismissive, but really, if he indulged all of my anxieties, I would just find more to stack on top of them. The baby question is still very much in the air, but the thing about Tom is that when he says “It’s up to you, you know I will be happy either way”, I know he means it. And how could I not want to have 7 babies with that man?

What is Ella doing these days as far as milestones (I hate that term and I realize it’s loosely interpreted, so take it as you will!) and activities to keep her busy?

Oh man, I love to talk about what my kids are doing now-a-days, but I know it gets old to read about how ammmmazing someone else’s kids are, so I try to keep it to a minimum. But since you asked… Ella is awesome. Even when she is sick and bratty, she stuns me every day with what she is learning. Today she told me a story about an astronaut who traveled to Pluto and was disappointed when he realized it was just ice, and not a planet at all. To which I said “…..” so she went on about how Astronaut starts with an A, and then went around the room, looking for other things that start with an A. And she got a lot of things wrong, and a few right,  but really just the fact that she is learning all of this without my pushing her at all is just crazy to me. She knows the sound of every letter in the alphabet, is starting to grasp vowel sounds, and wants to know how everything is spelled. Other cool things: She also just started playing with playdoh in a meaningful way, and is making recognizable animals, and a whole series of faces with different emotions. She draws for hours every day, and while a lot of pictures end up as scribble tornadoes, sometimes she will come up with an entire scene and I will have to ask Tom if he helped her with it. She makes up songs, dances to anything with a beat, and is exited to tackle any craft I am trying to work on (she is dieing to learn to knit, and is so frustrated that her hands do not just magically know what to do).

That said, she is completely lost when it comes to numbers, and loses interest any time I try to engage her in counting past 5. I trust that eventually it will just click the way letters have for her, and am not pushing it. She gets frustrated with herself easily, and the last thing I want to do is give her math anxiety at 3.

As far as activities, I just try and involved her in anything I am doing, even though it almost always makes a bigger mess when her hands are involved. Cleaning is a race, cooking is an experiment, playing with Alice is ‘teaching’ her baby sister, running errands is an adventure. If she had her way, she would watch Wall-E  fourty-five times a day, so I try to keep her engaged to cut down on the whining for TV. Some days we do better than others. When I absolutely can not have her under my feet anymore, she can play in the playroom (with her kitchen/instruments/dolls/farm/dressup clothes/etc), or she can sit at her little table and draw/play woth playdoh/paint/do her “letters”. We also try to be out of the house at least once a day (YMCA/children’s museum/playgroups) but when they are sick we stay close to home, in an attempt to keep the plague contained.

What is your guilty pleasure?

Coffee and chocolate. Together, in my mouth, nom nom nom. Also: Watching TV after everyone else is asleep. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has to be one of my favorite things ever on television, and it’s free on Hulu.

From Danielle:

Who is your favorite poet? Favorite poem? Novel? Author?

This is hard, since it changes every time I read something new. Right now I am reading The Known World. and it has to be one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. It is a woven narrative, which is an impossible thing to pull off, but he does it so deftly that I immediately started rereading it when I finished it the first time, which is something I never do. No wonder it won the Pulitzer, right?

As far as poetry goes, right now I am enjoying Gerald Stern’s American Sonnets, and Alison Townsend‘s The Blue Dress.  Poems that speak to me are the ones that, when I look up from the page, seem so obvious in hindsight.

Did I miss anything?

It’s been a rough couple days around here. The breathing treatments the girls are on seem to be working, but have the nasty side effect of making them mean. Kicking, screaming, not sleeping, argumentative, angry kids. And I am just not used to it. Ella is a spirited kid, but she’s not aggressive, so when she hit me in the face yesterday, I lost my patience and put her to bed. At 5:30 pm. Of course that did not work, and I spent a good portion of the night trying to calm her back down after I made myself hoarse yelling, so let’s just mark that one down as a big fat “Fail”. I announced to Tom, at 3am when he woke up for work and I was still up with a screaming Alice, that I was taking the afternoon off today, and I woke up determined to have a better day. Of course now there is 8 inches of new snow on the ground, and it’s warming up enough for the roads to ice over, so my plans of a great escape are dashed. But hey, I have a bottle of wine and a bathroom door that locks, I’ll see you in a couple hours.

I know this too shall pass, but it reminds me so much of those early days after Alice was born, when I just couldn’t get my feet under me. Everyone needed something from me right this second, and I just needed to have a minute to breath. I don’t feel like I took a good deep breath for almost 4 months after Alice was born. I spent so much of my day just wishing everyone would be quiet, and poor Ella really got the brunt of my frustration. I couldn’t give her the attention and affection she needed, I couldn’t spend the time bonding with the baby that I needed, and someone was always hungry, or dirty, or crying… All my confidence as a mom went flying out the window, and it has taken me this long to feel like maybe I am cut out for this. I’ve finally been able to cognitively reframe our days to be defined my our successes instead of our failures, and I’m really proud of the job I am doing. Most days, anyway. We all have bad days, but it’s scary for me to feel the edge of that pit again, and wonder how many bad days we can have before we just slip back down into it.

Just writing that out, I panic at the idea of adding more children to our family. If adjusting to two was hard, will I survive three? The other night, I jokingly asked Tom how many girls in a row we’d have to have before he accepted that we would never have a boy. He thought for a minute, and then answered, complely serious, “Seven”. And because I could not figure out how to respond to that, I laughed until there were tears running down my face, because oh no. When we first met and started planning our wedding on the second date, we agreed that three kids was about our max, and I’m thinking I should have gotten that in writing.

Ho Ho Ho.

We called the pediatrician this morning, after Alice’s second sleepless night in a row, worried that it could be her ears again. He answered at home, and agreed to meet us at his office in a hour (despite it being Christmas Eve and there being a snow storm coming in).  And lo, Alice does have a double ear infection , and Ella (who is boogery but otherwise seemed fine) has an even worse double ear infection. Maybe that explains why she has fought me over every.single.thing lately (she kept the same bite of rice in her mouth for HOURS yesterday, because I asked her to please swallow her food before talking). Both girls also have a touch of bronchitis, so they dropped off a nebulizer today. On top of it all, Tom was called into work tonight, so I get to host family Christmas eve  dinner by my self tonight.

So, if you will excuse me, I have a dinner for 10 to make, two small children to wrestle to the ground for a breathing treatment and ear drops, a house to try to pick up, gifts to wrap, and a pot of coffee to drink. Hope your Christmas Eve is as exciting.

Reason # 30976307 I love having kids: I do not have to be a secret Christmas-lover any more. I can keep the car radio on the Christmas station, sing all the songs quite badly, decorate and bake and plan traditions and if anyone rolls their eyes at my enthusiasm, I can say “But it’s for the girls!”

Since Tom’s parents live about a mile away, and they have a huge party at their home on Christmas day, we decided that Christmas Eve will be at our house. Tom’s mom kept asking “Are you sure, we can bring food, I know you are busy” and I told her it was fine, all the while thinking “We can make COOKIES! And the girls can open one present, and I’ll make cocoa, and maybe we can watch Rudolf, or play Scrabble…” Because as aloof as I act about the whole ‘family’ thing (not having a very tight-knit family myself), in truth I really want the traditions. I want there to be little things the girls look forward to every year (except between ages 14-21, but I’m banking on them being nostalgic for them by 22). I want to have all the cheesy pictures, and I want to be in them, smiling.

***

In semi-related news, the girls seem to be over the hump of this recent illness, in that no one is running a fever over 101, and no one’s lips have turned blue today from coughing. It’s a sad state when that is where the bar has been lowered to to qualify as ‘healthy’, but seriously, it never ends around here. I’m giving us a cautious 60% chance of being snot-free by Christmas, but I’ll turn that around and say that there is also a 60% chance that someone will be sick again by New Years.

Nothing makes the girls stop whining quite like a LSD-inspired cat video.

In an attempt not to talk about how Ella is sick again, or the fact that another snowstorm is on its way (to dump another foot on the two already out there) OR that we had to buy $500 worth of tires this week(there by killing any holiday money we had set aside), I will instead show you pictures of our Christmas decorations this year. Because nothing says “I’m trying to make the most of a frustrating week” like gratuitous tree shots.

I decided not to even try to put the nice ornaments on the tree this year, but I did want to do more than just lights. I have a ton of velum paper left over from wedding crafts, so I made a quick star template in PS, plugged in the alphabet, printed and cut them out. All together, it took about one naptime, and I have not worried once that something valuable or sentimental is being shaken off the tree. Not having to yell at your children = a Christmas miracle. Also, Ella loves picking off letters and ‘spelling’, which makes me smile.

I guess you could say that my theme this year was “She’s going to touch them anyway, so I may as well only put out things that she can’t break”. The advent pouches are strung up, but are empty, because hi, my kid is a sneak and not very good at hiding the evidence. We made those little reindeer the other day (which Ella insists are llamas) from this template, and I think a couple will get packed away in the Christmas crafts box.

Since we’ve been snowed in for three days now, and likely will be through Christmas, I’ve been collecting crafts to do with Ella (when she feels up to it, poor sick kid). Here’s a short list of things we’ve done, or plan to in the next few days:

This gingerbread man felt game. I have a bunch of other felt games, and a large felt sheet (that flips over the TV in the play room when we don’t want it staring at us any more) so this is right up our ally.

Definitely this snowman garland, and maybe a beard or two.

A construction paper version of this tree

And who knows, maybe a bacon scarf.

We’ve built six of these snowmen so far.

Peanut butter and bird seed pinecones

Babyfood jar snowglobes

Cookies, cookies, cookies. No pictures, because we’ve eaten them all.

Last night, we had the most snowfall in the three years we have lived in this house, as determined by our highly scientific snow measurement system.

2006 (or January 2007): Up to Ella’s butt

2007: Up to Ella’s knees

2008: Up to Ella’s armpits

It’s also worth noting that in the 2006 picture of Ella, she is 13 months old, and walking pretty confidently. Here is Alice at 12.5 months old.

Alice refuses to walk. It’s not just that she doesn’t have any interest in it – no, she takes it as a personal insult. If you try to stand her up without a table she will go limp, and if you do get her to stand, she will shriek and wail if you put out your hand and ask her to walk to you. She knows she has a good thing going with this whole “I’m the baby, pick me up” thing, and she is not giving it up without a fight.

Phone photo

Originally uploaded by ivymae

I had to go to Safeway for milk earlier, and am thankful that it is 5 mintues away, on flat land. We were planning to head down the hill today to run errands, but instead we are drinking hot cocoa and watching Charlie Brown’s Christmas for the 48493th time.