Light and Momentary

Opportunity Knocks (With Grimy Little Knuckles)

Remember last week when I was grumping about my invitation from God to clean the basement? Well, it worked out astonishingly well. The basement is only partly cleaned, but the garage is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Or at least a joy until we pile too much junk in there again. I am optimistic, though, that it will be a joy for a good long time.

The best part was that we all worked on it together. The kids hauled boxes of record albums in the basement and wheeled out all the bicycles from the garage. It was filthy in there, from the roofing last fall and the painting in '06, but they worked together to scrub down the table and chairs and shelves. One of them had some sulky moments, but mostly they worked hard and they got along and they didn't whine. My husband got out the shop vac to suck up all the debris, and we put back a modest fraction of the stuff we took out.

I keep going out to stand at the door and admire it. It makes me very happy.

We have just been handed a similar invitation to straighten out the boys' room. Three of them share a room with approximately a quattuorvigintillion Legos. As you might imagine, this is not conducive to tidiness. (<- understatement alert)

Today an electrician came to install boxes for overhead fixtures in our living room and in the boys' room, something we've talked about doing since we moved in more than four years ago. He had to move the bunkbed to get to the wall, and OH MY GOODNESS the wall is appalling. Four years' worth of grimy prints along both top and bottom bunks -- it is crying out for a bucket of soapy water.

I think we're going to move the Legos into the secret room, the low-ceilinged space over our porch. It's a poorly insulated space and so it's an imperfect solution (too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter), but we'll give it a whirl. For now I am going to wash the plaster dust off the bedding and the prints off the wall. I'm going to do it cheerfully, even, remembering how good it felt to finish up the garage. Here's hoping round two of Gladlys Get Organized goes as well as round one.

Shore Leave

Hershey bar: Hey, Captain, looking for a good time?

Willpower: Are you addressing me? An officer in Her Majesty's Navy? I have a ship to keep on course, madam, and I'll thank you to keep your trollopy offers to yourself.

HB: You look like you've been running that ship a long time, Captain. Shall we dally?

WP, icily: That, madam, would be fraternising with the enemy.

HB, meltingly: It's awfully lonesome here in the refrigerator. Can't you bring a girl out where it's warm?

WP, wavering: Maybe there's no harm in succouring a lady in distress.

HB, inwardly: I'll show you suckering...

***

It occurs to me that if I am imagining a candy bar thinking devious thoughts, there might be something hallucinogenic in my salads. It could be. I've been eating a whole lot of salads. Scale was down 4 pounds this morning, though, in spite of last night's indiscretion, so I see more salad in my future. (That's probably a blip -- I'm betting it will be back up by a pound or two tomorrow. But still, progress.)

Quick Takes: Glisten Edition

1. I am hot. Do you know the southern saying about how horses sweat and men perspire but ladies glisten? I am glistening up a storm. Usually our house stays pretty cool in the summer, courtesy of the big trees on the south side, but not this week.

2. Something is wrong with our AC drain and it has been emptying into the middle of the basement floor, pouring silently under a little carpeted area where my husband stored his ten or twelve linear feet of LPs. Something is also wrong with the expensive system we had installed last spring to deal with the water that leaks in from outside when the rain is heavy. Both repairmen are coming in the early afternoon. Here's to quick easy fixes. Cheap or free would be good too. (The perimeter system is supposed to have a lifetime warranty, so it had better be free.)

3. When I was in college, I lost my passport. I needed it to complete paperwork for a new job, but it was nowhere to be found. In the search for it, I wound up doing a thorough tidying of my disaster-area desk. I found the passport only after I had put away all the other odds and ends. I remember thinking that it seemed providential for the passport to disappear temporarily, because I needed the kick in the pants to clean my desk.

I am trying to be cheerful about the basement leaking water from two different sources. We have long talked about making better use of our basement, and now we will have to get down there and do some work on it -- throw out the carpet, probably, and find a better place to store the LPs, and set up a dehumidifier and hit the mildew-y places with bleach or something (any suggestions for green antifungals?). We might as well do some organizing while we're at it. A providential kick in the pants, just like in college.

I'd rather have a desk to tidy, I'm just saying.

4. On the happy side of the ledger, I am going to see a dear friend this weekend for the first time in a year. I am done with my seminar and it was fairly painless. I think I might take next week off from school and dive back in after the Fourth.

5. In further happy news, the bulging tooth I mentioned last week is through. The boys are all excited about it and have been reaching in to feel the little nub. It's just barely above the gumline, not far enough to do any damage. I'm guessing her first good chomp will cure them of sticking their fingers in there.

6. My boys have asked me to plan a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for them, and some temporarily insane version of me said yes. I played a bit when I was a kid, but D&D is more complicated than it used to be. The last game I played featured a dragon that said "Cowabunga!" when it burst onto the scene. My boys are not so interested in the whimsical -- they are asking me if the hostile zombie wombats will have titanium armor and if the dragon-born paladin can invoke the assistance of a [brain overload here].

To their questions I replied knowledgeably, "...ummm...?" This could be a time sink.

7. On our kids' bookshelf we have a 70s version of Robinson Crusoe in which the men have Leif Garrett hair. It is fairly true to the original, with lots of text and old-fashioned language. Pete, surprisingly, loves it. He told my MIL that she shouldn't just describe the pictures; he wanted to hear all the words. I am ending this post to go read it again. I suppose I should be grateful that I can deal with my glistening problem by calling a repairman, instead of making my lonesome self a goatskin parasol to keep the tropical sun away.

More quick takes here.

Declaration of War

WHEREAS 180 days have elapsed since the conclusion of our most recent pregnancy, and

WHEREAS the final 10 pounds (known variously as 4.5 kilos, 9.57 minas, or 0.15 talents) accrued during that pregnancy have most rebelliously, incorrigibly, and unlawfully declined to remove themselves from our sovereign borders, and

WHEREAS our preferred royal shorts can only be zipped in a supine position, and

WHEREAS this state of affairs is most unbecoming to our royal dignity, and

WHEREAS in four short weeks we shall celebrate the commencement of our quadragesimal year, and we are earnestly desirous not to cross the bounds of that year in our present steatopygian state, and

WHEREAS our previous desultory attempts to evict these unlawful trespassers have proved unavailing,

BE IT KNOWN that we hereby declare war on those accursed ten pounds.

Seven Quick Takes: Tiger Lily Edition

1. I am halfway done with something I'd been dreading, and it's not so bad.

Shiny Things Abound

Picture me, my friends, singing out my heart's desire like Snow White trilling "Someday My Prince Will Come": someday nobody will pee on my bathroom floor.

What's that you say? You don't like the scansion? I'm telling you my heart's desire and you're quibbling about its meter?

I do not understand how all this peeing on the floor happens, exactly, not having peed on the floor myself since I was a wee small child who was appropriately embarrassed about it. Perhaps it's a mark of Zorro kind of thing. Swish to the left! Swish to the right! And back to the left, spraying tub, floor, and, for the hat trick, the wall! Maybe it is bred in the bone for males to mark their territory, in which case I might prefer that they find a fire hydrant in lieu of marking the vanity as theirs and theirs alone. There are five males marking territory here, after all. That's a lot of marking and not so much territory. (My bathtub! No, mine! Hey, I was here first! My scrubbing arm is tired just thinking about it.)

Do they just get distracted in the middle of things? Stop in to pee and -- oh, look, something shiny over there? There must be a lot of shiny in my house then -- a veritable silver mine invisible to the untutored female eye.

This post was inspired by yet another late-night trip to the bathroom in which I wound up with soggy pajama cuffs. I have one son who wanders a bit at night -- gets up to relieve himself (which is, of course, better than staying put to relieve himself) but is pretty disoriented doing so. It was worse last summer, when he would get just to the door of the bathroom and let fly on the floor, or occasionally even stray into a bedroom. I would wake up from a dead sleep when I heard the faint jingle of bunkbed hardware, vaulting out of bed to steer him toiletwards. "Waitwaitwaitwait," I would tell him, and it seems to have worked, finally. Puddles around the toilet are better than damp spots on the carpet any day of the week.

I'm still tired of puddles around the toilet.

No one ever owns up to creating the puddles around the toilet. Sometimes I can nab an offender -- if he walks out and I walk in and spot the evidence, then he's going to be wiping down the bathroom. Mostly, though, they all aver that they had nothing to do with the mysterious puddle. They always aim front and center, every time, just like their mama taught them.

I used to envision an intruder in disguise, slipping in the back door expressly to pee on the floor and then slipping back out again. Maybe I should call the police about that. Help, I would say, it's the Masked Mystery Micturator!

These days I am taking the long view. Someday they will all leave home and pee on their own floors. Given their current enthusiasm for making puddles and reluctance to clean them up, I might need to take a paddle when I visit their homes.

Somebody needs to tell Snow White that when her prince finally comes, she may find herself singing a new song.

Quick Takes for a Quiet Stretch

I've been out of the blogging groove lately. It's been hard to find time to write, which is part of it, but some of it is that the urge to record our life has its own ebb and flow. Recently the tide has been at ebb.

Speaking of tides, I've been having a lot of fun with the Aubrey-Maturin novels. I didn't really expect to enjoy them, but they are a blast. I persuaded my husband, who rarely reads fiction, to tackle the first one, though I doubt he'll go the distance. Since I went back to grad school I've been reading a lot less for pleasure. I've been required to do so much reading that I've sought out other leisure activities, like knitting. It was strange to go from being a person who read three or four books each month to a person who only manages one book a month, and so it's been fun to be immersed in this series -- snatching odd moments to read the next few pages.

I decided that when I finished coding transcripts I would take a little time in which the most complicated thing I thought about was whether to cast on a new sock using size 1 needles or size 2 needles. I chose...both! The toe-up sock is the mate to this one, made from Knitty's Azure pattern in some luxurious locally produced yarn.

Kids are doing well here in the second week of summer vacation. No bloodshed, minimal howling. (My standards are pretty low, you'll notice.) Here is a funny thing -- I have often noticed similarities between Marty and Pete. Pete is the first person in the family to wake up in the mornings, and he often climbs in our bed and tells me his dreams -- long wandering dreams involving Star Wars clones. This morning he was so excited that he was talking on the inhale and the exhale both. Marty did just the same thing when he was that age, the only other boy in our family to do so. Isn't that a funny thing for them to have in common?

Baby is growing beautifully, mostly happy and curious about the world around her. She is inching toward mobility and she has figured out how her hands work, which means that the days in which she would sit quietly while an adult did something else (like grading) are gone. Thankfully I won't have any more grading to do until fall.

One of the posts in my drafts folder is about trying to teach my kids to be diligent without sending messages that will leave them trapped in perfectionist hell. Perfectionism has been breathing down my neck lately, the familiar feeling of not doing anything well enough. Why do I bother knitting when there are always flaws? Why am I working on this dissertation when I will never understand hierarchical linear modeling thoroughly? Let's not even talk about the feelings of mothering inadequacy. This struggle has plagued me for as long as I can remember, sometimes more intensely and sometimes less so. I am not sure quite why it's rearing its head with renewed viciousness right now.

I have high hopes for this summer -- habits to build and habits to break. One of the things I want to do is lots of reading aloud with the kids. At the moment I'm about a third of the way through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with Pete and about two-thirds of the way through The Two Towers with Marty and Joe. I am going to wrap up this post and see who wants to curl up with a book. More quick takes here.

Guess what I did today!

I finished coding transcripts for my dissertation. I'd been working on it 5 or 6 days a week since January. I started when the baby was just two weeks old, knowing that it would be harder when she was bigger than when she was tiny. It was a bigger undertaking than I thought it would be. More than once I kicked myself for being so ambitious in my prospectus.

But I finished.

Peonies

When I called to tell her that Joe was finally going to be born, seven years ago today, my friend Shannon brought me a peony from her garden. It had been tightly furled just that morning, she said, and now it was blooming beautifully. She wanted me to have the visual, so I could think "open open open" through my labor.

Our peonies have been blooming, spilling forth that same luscious pink. I can't look at them without thinking of Joe's birth, which might well have been the finest day of my life so far. It was my first homebirth and I was astonished at how joyful it was. Of course birth is joyful wherever it happens, but I did not know there could be so much joy in the process, joy in the laboring.

It was hard. He was 9#12 and his head was gigantic. But it was my pain and I was not afraid of it. (No matter how much it hurt, when it was over I wasn't going to be pregnant anymore. I was very tired of being pregnant.) I remember using a technique from Birthing from Within in which I tried to ride the pain, like a surfer. I remember seeing kaleidoscopic colors when I closed my eyes; I remember wave after tremendous wave. 

I also remember a confidence that was absent in my two hospital births. I was on my own turf on a glorious day in late spring, there with a doctor I trusted and a dear friend as well as my husband. We laughed all day long -- that's what I wrote about it when it was all over. I said I wanted to live my life, and eventually die my death, the way I had gone through that day -- "with courage and laughter even in the hardest places."

In each of my pregnancies I have asked the Blessed Mother to intercede for my unborn baby and me. Joe came along in late August, on one of the feasts of St. John the Baptist, and so for months I had prayed daily for the intercession of Our Lady of the Visitation. How fitting, then, to wake up in labor on her feast day. I still ask daily for the intercession of Our Lady of the Visitation, in hopes that my children will recognize the hidden presence of Christ whenever they encounter it -- that they might see the truth of their redemption written plainly in unexpected places.

That's what I think of when I see those tightly closed peony buds. You would not guess that they could contain such extravagant beauty, and yet they do. Tonight I am wishing my Joe -- my seven-year-old Joe -- a year full of joy and beauty, hidden in unexpected places.

Yet Another Conversation

Pete was snuggled up next to me. "Mama," he said slowly, "when I grow up and move away from you--"

    "Yes, darling?"

Eyes filling up and overflowing, he finished, "--I will miss you."