cat named pig

I still have a blog. It’s still sitting here, just waiting for updates. And the weird thing is, the longer I go without updating, the harder it seems. I used to post about anything from messes my kids made to cat barf, and I never cared. Now it seems like, if I’m only going to post once a month, it better be good. Yet the content life throws at me (messes, cat barf) never seems to yield anything that would make for a “good” post.

Actually, that’s not totally true. The cat barf thing reminds me — I do have a quick story and in the interest of not over-thinking my little parenting blog, here it is:

A while back, before school ended for the summer (also known as the Good Old Days, when Siena had somewhere — somewhere free — to go each day where she was happy and entertained) we were at the bus stop and Siena’s usual bus stop buddy was not there because she was sick. Her mom had called me that morning, so I told the kids she wasn’t coming to school because she had thrown up.

(Actually, I said “barfed” because I’m all colloquial like that.)

Anyway, as soon as I said that, Elliot looked at me with wide eyes.

“Is she a CAT?”

Because in his little world, only cats barf. And they (well, ours) do so with such frequency and aplomb (loud, dramatic meowing followed by revolting gagging noises following by frantic devouring of the vomitus, because hey! bonus food! score!) that I guess it makes sense he would associate barfing with cats. Sadly.

And on that lovely note, we are heading out to go swimming. But there will be more posting soon, because I am now on break from work for the month of July and we went to Philadelphia and saw good friends get married and Siena wore fairy wings and it was all very exciting and would actually make a much better story than the above. Yet the cat barf, as so often happens, is what’s getting posted for now. Because I’m out of time and people need sunscreen.

It’s been a while since Halloween, so why not break out the costumes for Father’s Day?

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at the coffee shop, doing some work trying to solve the Important Problem of why my Twitter updates were no longer automatically updating my Facebook status, because people NEED to read my 140-character trivial thoughts yet I don’t want to type them TWICE, can you IMAGINE the inefficiency?, when I noticed the following message from a high school friend turned Facebook friend.

I normally hate hearing about other people’s dreams. (Sorry, that’s harsh, but it’s a personal pet peeve that goes hand in hand with not wanting to hear the details of the cold you’ve had or the annoying twinge in your ankle when it rains. I want to care, really, but I just don’t. Perhaps motherhood has sapped all my ability to empathize with minor aches and pains or feign interest in something someone else finds fascinating, because that’s all I do, all day long, when I’m with my kids. Or maybe it’s because motherhood has left me with an empty shell of an immune system and plenty of weird minor injuries — I am too busy nursing my own ailments to hear about yours, and I sleep too hard at night to even remember what dreams are. Whatever the reason, these stories typically make me cringe.)  This one, however, was awesome. Read on, and anyone who went to elementary school in the eighties is sure to appreciate the Oregon Trail references:

Hey Laura,

I had to write you this morning before I forget it all completely because YOU WERE IN MY DREAM LAST NIGHT! Strange in and of itself, I know, but just wait until you hear the details

The setting was at a private school – I’m not sure if it was [my college] or [his college] but I’m sure it was fancy-shmancy because there was a locker-room with plush dark green carpet and mahogany doors on the lockers with gold trim. Ridiculous right? There’s more.

In the dream I remember lots of people but two in particular: you (and your husband) and Anne*. I’m not sure why, but Mike (Anne’s husband) had died – and I’m not making this up – of dysentery (Oregon Trail style) along with Emily. I’m still not sure what she was doing in there

We were preparing for some sort of event and I recall that you were pregnant (VERY PREGNANT) with your third child. How’s that for a fertility omen? However, before we could have the event, the kitchen needed to be cleaned so you asked your husband to douse the wood floor with bleach and scrub it with one of those rubber-fingered squeegees.

That’s when my alarm tore me away from my slumber. I suppose I’ll never know quite how the dream was supposed to end but I woke up thinking “what the ef was that about!?!”

So, congrats on being a part of one of my top ten most ridiculous dreams. If you have the “what’s my dream mean” books, I think you should look some stuff up – Lord only knows what you’ll find

Hope you had a more lucid dream than I did last night!

~Adam

Once I got over my horror at the thought of being VERY PREGNANT with my third child (and just when I’ve gotten rid of all those baby clothes!) I particularly enjoyed the part where Matt is cleaning the kitchen floor. Only in my dreams, too, Adam.

…..

*Names have been changed (except the author’s) on the off chance that one of these high school friends might read this and be dismayed to learn that they died of dysentery.

Siena (and now Elliot, too) has been singing non-stop a song she picked up from school last week.

What you don’t hear, because Matt cut off the camera to help, are the cries of, “My booty…ow, ow, OW…my booooteeeeeee.”

I would just like to add, in case it seems callous to post a video of my child falling down and hurting her booty, that this short clip has become our household’s most popular form of entertainment over the last few days, with Siena herself usually being the one to request another viewing. They both laugh themselves silly at the part where she falls down.

I would also like to point out the more subtle hilariousness of what Elliot is doing at the beginning of the video — carefully rifling through Siena’s backpack looking for Tic-Tacs or pieces of gum that might have fallen out of their packages and gotten lost in the bottom of the bag. The only reason he is getting away with this is because she is too busy singing and marching around to notice.

If you follow Matt on Twitter, read his status updates on Facebook, or have simply had a conversation with him in the last few years, you will know that he is obsessed with Surly beer. (And with good reason; it kicks a lot of rear end in the beer community.)

So recently I’d been noticing an… umm… accumulation… of tall Surly cans lined up by the sink in our basement. Since this seemed to involve more deliberate effort than simply forgetting to recycle them, I decided to ask Matt what was going on with the Surly cans.

Me: So, what’s going on with those Surly cans?

Matt: I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with them yet.

Me: You haven’t…  decided… what you’re going to do with them yet?

Matt: [shrugs]

Me: What, like, you’re going to build a raft with them or something?

Matt: Yeah, you wouldn’t need to use as many cans as with a regular beer because these are bigger….

I might have to help him with this project. I do love the Furious. And the Abrasive Ale.

“How’s working from home going?” you ask (well, maybe not you, reading this, but a lot of people have been asking me that question lately, and the answer varies wildly depending on the day).

Today’s answer to that question would be the following story about how I spent my morning:

I got up, got dressed in workout clothes, and threw my laptop in my bag before heading to the gym. (This was after dropping Siena off at school, because we missed the bus when she announced upon arriving at the bus stop corner that she absolutely HAD to go potty, right that minute, couldn’t wait till she got to school, etc., PANIC, etc., etc.)

So we got to the gym, I signed Elliot in to the kids’ gym, and grabbed a table to do some quick work before going upstairs to exercise. . . aaaaaand proceeded to sit there, working, for two hours. At which time I had to go get Elliot and take him home for lunch. The only muscles exercised were my fingers from typing (and from dialing the number of the Montessori program where Elliot goes one morning a week, to ask if we could add a morning because clearly this is not enough work time).

So that’s how working from home the gym is going.

[The poem (or statement of fact) below was transribed letter for letter from the original document, which was written in brightly colored marker on lined paper. All random capitalizations reflect the author's original stylistic intent.]

My aMaganary Frend
Is a Drem SckArer It SckAers
Bad Drems oway
He Is vary sckary

Who knew? Who knew I could feel such a deep and fiery hatred for a calendar event I used to look forward to more than anything except Christmas?

If I had to illustrate the week so far in a photo essay (which I can’t, because I am too tired and just generally defeated to go look for the camera), it would be just one photo of me, head buried in my hands, weeping silently. Possibly with my kids in the background beating each other to death with the same two or three toys they won’t stop fighting over. Possibly also with my husband (let’s pretend he isn’t the one taking the picture) in the background relaxing with his laptop, scanning Tweetdeck and casually asking if I want to buy tickets to a show or get a midweek hotel deal. Clearly, Spring Break is not affecting him in the same way it is me.

Maybe that’s because I happen to be dying, slowly and miserably dying, my life’s force ebbing as I type this. . . and from what? From a cold. I mean, it’s not just any cold; it’s the Worst Cold Ever, but I almost wish it was something worse, like malaria, so you would understand the depths of my misery here. A cold is just (*shrug*) something that’s kind of a bummer, everyone gets them, etc. Malaria, on the other hand, garners some respect. Anyway, I guess it doesn’t matter what I’m dying of — the important thing to note is that this post may be my last. Whether Spring Break causes me to off myself, or whether I succumb to the Worst Cold in the History of Colds, No Seriously, No One Has Ever Been This Sick From a Stupid Cold, I may not be around much longer. . . .

I leave all my worldly belongings to the person who can make my kids stop fighting. (I assume stating my final wishes on my blog is the same as updating my will, right?) Enjoy the iPhone, MacBook, and some clothes that aren’t really in style any more.

I’ve been talking about work a lot lately, so instead of telling you that I’ve been too busy working this week to post anything here, I’ll just say we’ve been too busy constructing this in our basement:

No, seriously, watch it again. And then come over and watch it with Elliot, because he hasn’t stopped asking about it since the second it ended the last time he watched. Siena’s pretty obsessed too.

Siena falls asleep as I’m reading our nightly chapter of Betsy Tacy. I give her a kiss and whisper, “I love you,” before getting up to leave the room. She wakes up and asks, sleepily, “Will you give me some cuddles?” I lie back down and pull her close.

As I’m lying there my mind wanders. Work, and then other things we have going on, and I find myself thinking about languages. The kids have been making great progress learning Spanish. Elliot adds vocabulary at a rate that amazes me, and his conversation is peppered with random Spanish words for shapes and colors. This morning he casually asked, “Where’s my oso polar?” We all knew he was looking for the paper polar bear he made in class on Wednesday, but I hadn’t realized he had even picked up on the Spanish name for it. Siena, for her part, corrects my pronunciation of almost any Spanish word I might try to say. Her accent, at least to my ears, sounds amazingly close to the real thing.

I remember that feeling, when I studied in Paris, of finally starting to sound like I had some business speaking French, like I wasn’t just a tourist looking for a buttery croissant and a halfway-decent free public restroom. (The former, easy to find. The latter, not so much.) I loved being able to really converse with people, asking questions not formulated by a textbook and actually understanding the answers. I loved being able to use slang without everyone chuckling, like “Oh, cute, the foreigner just said a slang word.”

When I started dreaming in French, I was hooked. I wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of my life moving from country to country, staying long enough to develop a certain level of fluency, or at least competence, in the language and culture. France, Spain, and Italy were first. Four days in Morocco gave me just enough time to learn the Arabic alphabet and start recognizing letters in street signs (it helped that all the signs were also in French and Spanish), and I wanted to stay much longer. I was fascinated by how different it seemed from Spain, just a short ferry ride away. And I have always wanted to learn Japanese. And Greek. And Portuguese — similar to the languages I’ve studied, but just different enough that I’m intrigued.

I crave travel, but not just visiting — I crave living abroad, meeting people, becoming a regular at the corner bar, fumbling around in an unfamiliar language and city until suddenly it feels less fumbley and more like regular life.

***

It’s been a little bumpy lately, with the new job(s) and reconfiguring of routines. Not all bad, necessarily, just up and down. Siena, as I’ve mentioned, told me she didn’t want me to ever get another new job again. Or words to that effect. We had a rough couple of days this past week when she was home sick and Elliot went on nap strike. I couldn’t get anything done; we were all pretty unhappy with each other. Even when Siena felt better and went back to school, she seemed extra-emotional and would fall to pieces over every little thing.

I decided she and I needed an afternoon outing, just the two of us. No work, no boys. I weighed the options — we could go out to lunch, see a movie, go to a museum/zoo/library. All fun, all worth doing. I’m not sure why I suggested instead that we go get her ears pierced. I mean, it sounds insane as I’m typing it. Who takes a child who’s tired, emotional, and recovering from a cold (and possibly seething with resentment about Mama’s new work commitments) and brings them to a crowded mall store for a procedure involving sharp objects being jabbed into soft flesh? I do, apparently.

She’s been talking about wanting pierced ears since her fifth birthday, with equal parts dread and longing. Terrified of pain, she agonizes over every doctor’s appointment where she might get a shot. I didn’t know when she’d actually want the earrings badly enough to go through with the piercing. But I know my daughter, and I know that she is as tough as she is dramatic. And she could use something to feel proud of and excited about, after the week we’d had. And she really, really loves earrings. . . .

***

We watch two other girls go first, one slightly older than Siena and one a teenager. No one cries or screams or faints, but Siena still tugs my arm and steps out of the store. I kneel down; we confer.

“I’m not sure I still want to do this.”

“You don’t have to do this. It’s your choice, but I want you think about whether you’ll be sad when we leave if you don’t do it.”

She wavers. “Can we go back in and think about it some more?” I say yes, but when we step back in, they’re ready for us. She climbs reluctantly into the chair and the Ear Piercing Specialist (this may not be her actual job title) shows her the equipment, then gives her a teddy bear to hold, a large bear with five earrings pierced into one ear. I find this both hilarious and heartbreaking — who are these mothers, taking girls young enough to still be comforted by stuffed animals to get their ears pierced? Oh, right. What am I doing? And then, suddenly furious with myself, This was a terrible idea.

I sign the forms and Siena chooses her earrings. Tiny round rubies, her birth stone. Then follows a long analysis of the precise placement of the marker dots showing where the earrings will go — I’ll say this, the Ear Piercing Specialist is more meticulous about her job than I could ever be. Siena grips my hand, squeezes the bear, and click, one ear done. A handful of women in the store murmur approvingly about how great she’s doing and click, the other one is done. Siena looks shocked that it’s over for about half a second before her face explodes into smiles.

The whole way home, it’s all she can talk about: “I didn’t think I’d even be able to do it; I thought it was going to hurt sooo bad, and I did it! I feel like such a really big girl now. Like my big girl cousins. I can’t believe I can wear earrings now!”

I grin back, relieved that it went OK, thrilled to see her so excited and proud of herself. Maybe I did make the right call, after all. Maybe I do know what I’m doing.

After weeks of fumbling around, there it is: that feeling of fluency.