cat named pig

My current to-do list is entitled: OMG How To Clean & Put All This Stuff Away? It contains a Googolplex of things I need to do in order to spend another minute in my house without going stark raving mad. But the kids are napping now, so instead of doing those things and risking waking anyone up, I am just getting out of here. Taking some junk to thrift stores, and probably picking up some new junk to bring back home. Which will then be added to The List, and subsequently ignored for the next six months, until I get fed up again and decide to get rid of it. And thus the cycle continues. 

Oh, and were you wondering why blog posting over here has been either nonexistent or eye-stabbingly boring lately? (Like this post?) It’s because of the junk, for one, that is threatening to swallow us all (in the last few weeks, both of my parents have unloaded multiple cars-full of lovely things things that need to be put somewhere things that are slowly killing me with their very presence). It is also because Matt has started a new job (within the same organization) with a totally new schedule, which has him home in time for dinner every night (praises be!) but completely eliminates my morning writing time. And my every other spare minute of writing time has been consumed by articles and writing class assignments, which I promise, will benefit catnamedpig readers any day now, but just not quite yet. (Writing class lesson #1: write something interesting. Laura: FAIL. Good thing it’s not for credit.) 

Also, (because who doesn’t love a good hog pile of to-do lists?) we’re going on two trips this month. Which should be totally fun and laid-back, because Elliot is happy to sit still for long stretches of time. ON A COLD DAY IN HELL.  

Thank you for your time. You may go read something interesting now. Let me know if you need any stuff, furniture or baby clothes or pretty much anything else you can think of. We’ve got it here somewhere. 

Dear One-Year-Old, 

I think it’s neat that you’re so chatty lately. You still don’t have that many words, but those you can pronounce, you use to great effect.

That said, I put you down for your nap and closed the door twenty minutes ago. It’s time to stop saying, “By-yee! Bye! Mama! By-yee!” already.  

Sweet dreams,

Mama  

The other night at dinner, Matt was humming the chimney sweep song from Mary Poppins (the one that Dick Van Dyke sings in a Cockney accent that goes “Chim chiminey / Chim chiminey / Chim chim cher-ee / A sweep is as lucky / As lucky can be” and so forth). Matt started singing the words, and at one point sang “Me likes what me am and me likes what me do.” I laughed.

“Hon, it’s I likes, not me likes.“

Matt [defensive]: “Whatever; he’s English.” 

Me [still laughing]: “He’s not two.” 

Siena chimes in at this point, mimicking my tone perfectly: “Yeah, Daddy, he’s not two.” [Pause.] “He’s twenty-nine and ten pounds.”   

While I appreciated her taking my side, I was somewhat surprised to learn that Bert the Chimney Sweep is approximately my age, give or take ten pounds.

[Nothing has happened lately that seems worth writing about, except maybe this story about Siena falling on her head and scaring the bejesus out of me. So I wrote a draft of it for a writing class I’m taking (I know! there might be hope for a glorious catnamedpig future free of run-on sentences and excessive parentheticals, but we’re not quite there yet) and now I am maximizing my word-typing time by pasting it here as a blog post. Because I have ten thousand other things that I’m supposed to be typing right now, but still, what’s the point of having a blog if you’re too busy writing other things to update it? Lazy, or extremely efficient? You decide (but don’t tell me if you decide “lazy.”)]

I look like I got in a fight. I look like Keith Richards, even though I’m usually more of a three-glasses-of-wine-the-sitter-wants-us-home-by-eleven type of partier. I feel like I got in a fight, too. And lost.

At least the black around my eyes is mostly yesterday’s mascara, combined with some dark circles and puffiness from hours of wakefulness last night. Better than actual bruises. I dab makeup remover on the dark smudges, slowly beginning the process of putting myself back together. I smooth the hair that started to form dreadlocks from tossing and turning. Good enough, at least, to leave the house in search of coffee and throat lozenges.

I thought for a while that motherhood had cured me of insomnia, replacing it with the total self-obliterating sleep deprivation of the newborn period. During those months of round-the-clock breastfeeding, my eyes closed the second my head hit the pillow. And that stage was followed by the current stage of intermittent bad dreams and minor illnesses that continue to keep me from taking sleep for granted. Even now, though, insomnia is creeping back into my life, an old acquaintance I’d rather not run into again. (“Hey,” I smile thinly, trying fake politeness, “It’s you. Just in town for a few days? No? Oh, you’re buying the house next door? I see. Huh.”)

My daughter seems to have inherited my sleeping patterns. A stressful event in her day, a vacation, any disruption in routine usually results in multiple trips to the bathroom or “scary dreams” at night. As an infant and toddler, before she could hop out of bed and sprint upstairs to our room, she sobbed in her crib whenever she woke. Which was usually anywhere from three times a night to a number so high my exhausted brain lost count. This went on until shortly before her brother was born, when things seemed to stabilize for a brief but glorious moment before his arrival disrupted her life and she went right back to waking up at odd intervals to make sure we were all still around.

I still know the exact pattern of lunging steps necessary to make it out of her room quietly, avoiding the creakiest floorboards.

The nights have gotten better as she’s gotten older; talking through her anxieties seems to help, as does bribery. But she still goes from lightly asleep to wide-awake and agitated at the slightest disturbance. We maintain the habits that got us this far: no flushing the toilet at night in the bathroom next to her room, and never, under any circumstances, opening her door or going in to check on her. (Our small house makes it easy to hear any sound at night, and we use a baby monitor if we’re in the basement or outside.)

Last night, though, I threw caution aside and opened her door twice.

Earlier that day, she fell on the playground. Headfirst, off a high platform. It was exactly like the waking nightmares that have fueled my insomnia since I became a parent, but real this time and exponentially more terrifying. I ran to her and was amazed to find that a mouthful of sand seemed to be her biggest discomfort. She was playing happily again within minutes, while my heart didn’t stop its frantic pounding for hours.

I observed her closely afterward and she seemed perfectly fine. But later that night, I couldn’t stop noticing every detail in our house with a heightened awareness, a nagging sense of how different those ordinary objects would look to me if she had not come home from the park perfectly fine. Her brand-new ballet shoes, sitting on the dining table instead of in her closet where they should be, with their stiff, untied laces standing straight up like antennae. The swimming registration form, partially filled out, where she had scrawled her name and the name of her best friend in bright green marker. When I came downstairs at 2:00 a.m. to escape the replay of her fall endlessly looping through my brain, these things made my throat ache.

I went to her room and quietly opened the door, watched for a minute as she slept, beautifully, on her side.

I tiptoed away and drank a glass of water, made a list, read for a while. All the usual strategies for working my way back toward sleep. When they didn’t help, I went back to her door and stood listening. I opened the door again, as quietly as I could. This time, her eyes flew open.

“Mama?” She didn’t sit up, but reached out her arms to me. I lay down, hugging her, inhaling the scent of strawberry shampoo and crisp outside air. And beneath those, the scent that is just her, that I’ve been smelling since she was a wide-awake baby who wanted nothing more than to be nestled in my arms at night. She sighed sleepily.

“Mama? . . . I like your nightgown.” 

She’s totally fine. Finally, I felt ready to go back to sleep. 

Too tired to post anything of substance, but man does Elliot love his little red shoes. Any suggestion of going outside sends him running to the bench by the front door to grab them. If you aren’t right behind him to put them on, he will follow you from room to room, a shoe in each hand, calling “DOO. . . DOOO?” in a crescendo of impatience. Best to drop everything and answer, “Yes, shoe. Let’s put them on.”  

I think he likes them, social butterfly that he is, because everywhere we go people notice and compliment his red shoes. And he’s always happy to smile back and nod, sometimes saying, “Dooo,” in agreement. Yes, they are mighty fine shoes.

Maybe after I drink a gallon of coffee, I’ll take a picture of the Great Red Shoes and post that. And maybe I’ll print one out and frame it to hang in his room. It’s practically time to start planning for Christmas already anyway.  

Siena has taken to saying “what the heck” in response to just about everything. A simple “Come get your shoes on; we’re leaving for school” will be met with “WHAT the HECK?!? Get my SHOES on?!?” like it’s so outrageous she can hardly believe it.

And woe betide the person who expresses a hint of frustration with her — her father’s characteristic defensiveness (if you’ve ever criticized or teased him, you know what I’m talking about) is revealed in her immediate and angry “What the HECK — I’m just [fill in the blank]” in defense of her actions.

Sometimes, just to mix it up a little, she limits it to “WHAT the,” which is not really much of an improvement. Like how rubbing my arm instead of, say, my leg, with a cheese grater would not really be much of an improvement.

And it grates on me, this constant eruption of shock and outrage. Especially when I can tell that she’s just repeating it because she enjoys the sound of it, or maybe because she senses that it’s getting to me. It really grates. So much so that I’ve asked her several times to find something new to say, to use a different expression for a while.

Every time I’ve asked her that, compliant and helpful child that she is, she immediately switches to “What the FUNNY?!?”

And that really doesn’t sound good, especially not when said slowly. I am anxiously expecting to hear from concerned teachers and soccer coaches, not sure how I’m going to respond. If they catch me at a bad moment, I’ll probably go with a defensive-sounding “What the HECK?!? At least she’s not ACTUALLY SWEARING.”   

About the time we bought our MacBook and started spending every possible spare minute online (for we now had his and hers laptops and mostly reliable wireless), we stopped getting the local paper. I didn’t miss the extra clutter one bit, especially since our home decor still includes end tables made of stacked New Yorkers and other magazines. No shortage of reading material lying around here. 

I didn’t realize this meant our kids would grow up not realizing that newspapers are traditionally a source of important information and interesting stories. That people read them to find out what’s happening in the world or the neighborhood. I also didn’t realize the extent to which I would utterly fail to impress Siena when I showed her, today, an actual newspaper article with my name next to it.

I agree with her that writing five-hundred words for a local weekly publication that a handful of people might read is not, in fact, all that impressive. But still, I thought my kid might be like, “Cool, Mom, you wrote that?” Instead she just rolled her eyes and said she would look at it when she checked her feed reader. And then rolled her eyes even more when I explained that it wouldn’t show up on her feed reader, it being only a print publication at this point. She shrugged and said, sorry, she didn’t know how to read hieroglyphics but the cave-painting graphics that accompanied the piece were nice, and could I get back to her when I found a more modern writing job? And could she please have an iPhone? 

Anyway, if you’re in the Twin Cities and come across El Heraldo in the doorway of a coffeeshop or something, check it out. Spanish translation courtesy of Google, not the classes I took in high school. In the Paleolithic Era.  

Siena came out of music class tonight with a large watercolor painting she had made. In addition to some colorful explosions, which I assume are the visual depiction of the percussive instruments they explored in class, there is also a girl wearing a dress, and the words “SIENA AVERY.” The only thing that differentiates this painting from every other work of art she has created in the last two months? Lipstick. Just kidding; doesn’t even make sense. The fact that she painted their names with watercolors instead of writing their names with crayons or markers. Otherwise indistinguishable from a thousand-billion-hundred* other recent pictures of girls in dresses that say SIENA AVERY.

…..

*Actual number, recently discovered by Siena. Like new species of insects, if you discover them, you get to name them.  

Because if you lived through this particular photo-taking nightmare experience, you’d deserve to show the world your results, too. My therapist says it’s good for the PTSD. Actually, my therapist, Dr. Netflix, doesn’t say much of anything, but we have been watching a lot of Six Feet Under lately. (Last disc should arrive any day now!)

On to the photos. None of the following will be on our family holiday card, although Rob Mueller is a genius and did manage to capture some that involve all of us looking relatively normal — just not this first one:

You can’t see Elliot’s face, but you can see two of my chins. 

Elliot quickly lost interest in the whole process. (Quickly being, like, thirty seconds into it.) 

Here he sees an opportunity to make a break for it, while Siena smiles patiently and tries to hold onto him.

And here’s Elliot having a diva moment, demanding his sippy but actually sitting still for a second, while Siena continues to patiently hold onto him:

Talk about your diva moments — Siena demanded a wind machine for this one:

She wanted to try out some stuff she saw on Top Model, apparently.

And finally, another family portrait: 

I clearly thought that the sheer force of my enthusiasm was the only thing getting us through this photo session, which explains why my gigantic open-mouthed smile is about to shatter my face in so many of these pictures. I may even have been singing as this was taken. Apologies to everyone at the Walker that morning, including the homeless person sleeping right behind us in this shot. No one deserves to wake up to that.