Light and Momentary

Go Round and Round

That's what my thoughts do these days; they go round and round. Friday is the application deadline for that local faculty position. I think about it all the time. If they offered it to me, would I want it?  I think about that half-time post-doc an hour away. If they offered it to me, would I want it? I think about having a little home-based private practice. Is that what I want? I think about staying home for a year and catching up on all the things I have let slide around here, and having gingerbread ready for the boys at 3:30 every afternoon, and making really fabulous Halloween costumes.

I think I might run out of gingerbread recipes.

I think I am sabotaging myself by procrastinating on the application packet. I think that in my heart of hearts I don't want to teach three classes each semester in a field that's not my own. I mean, it's close enough that I could make it work. But do I want to?

Maybe this sounds elitist -- heck, maybe it is elitist -- but it's a less competitive program than the one I'm trained for. It's more satisfying to work with more motivated students.

Elwood and I have been struggling a bit with division of labor and I am trying to see it as a providentially timed struggle. If we disagree now about who ought to call the insurance agent and get up with a wakeful baby and handle the swim team drop-off, what should that tell me about next year?

Huh, that sounds really stupid now that I have typed it up: I might turn down a challenging job to stay home because I hate arguing with my husband about who will follow up with the state department of revenue. But it's a consideration. I have read that most marital arguments are about money, sex, kids, and in-laws. We never fight about any of those: we fight about time and responsibility.

Look at that-- I was just about to type something like "so I don't know what to do next year." But then I realized I'd already said it approximately 45 times already in this post and stopped myself. There is a line in an Anne Lamott book that was very helpful to me the last time I didn't know what our next step should be: she quotes the pastor of her church, saying that God doesn't shine a big floodlight on the path ahead. Instead He illuminates the next patch where we should walk, and then the next, and then the next, until this funny Charlie Chaplin gait gets us where we ought to be.

My next little Charlie Chaplin step is to write up a research agenda and a cover letter. And then we'll see. If I keep singing "go round and round" to myself, maybe I'll wind up as the roller derby queen. Dr. Roller Derby Queen -- it has a nice ring, don't you think?

The horror! the horror!

It's not just the 9yo with lice. It's also the 12yo, the 7yo, and I have my suspicions about the 4yo. And...shudder shudder SHUDDER SHUDDER I pulled a little crawling nymph off the baby's head.

That is deeply wrong. It also means I have to consider myself infested. I just don't see how I can sleep next to her every night and not pick them up if she's got them. Dr. Sears never warned us about that particular hazard of co-sleeping.

So. I decided to try the smothering approach on the two of us. I am not putting insecticide on a baby's scalp and I cannot be systematic about nit-combing an 8-month-old's head. I am not putting insecticide on my scalp because it will get absorbed into my bloodstream and into my baby's food supply. (I assume. The active ingredient is lipophilic so I assume it gets into human milk. Anybody know for sure?) If this doesn't work I will buzz my head because my hair is crazy thick. Won't that be attractive? Almost as attractive as this look (baby with butter which is less trickly, mom with olive oil which is less smelly).

She's still cute even with butter on her head, if you ask me.

Last night after baths I found four lice on three boys' heads and they each asked me -- separately, without knowing that their brothers felt the same way -- why we had to kill the lice. Couldn't we keep them? Couldn't we set them free?

My head did not explode (which is too bad, because that would have to be an effective lice management strategy, don't you figure?) but I did say, "What part of BLOODSUCKING PARASITE do you not understand?"

Here is where I kick myself for my tree-hugging peasant-skirted Birkenstock-wearing home-birthing co-sleeping tandem-nursing hippie-ness. What is this stupid "gentle with living things" mantra I have been spouting? Why didn't I say "MOSTLY gentle with living things BUT when you see bloodsucking parasites then go all Rambo on their sorry little heinies"??

I am adopting an alter-ego for dealing with lice: Jambo, the Mighty Louse Hunter. I thought about pretending that I had to find as many lice as possible to feed my family but you know what? Even my imagination doesn't stretch that far because ICK, and ICK some more. Jambo the MLH kills with relish and perhaps a very small louse-sized M16. Plus, she lives for laundering the bedding and the towels. Now if you'll pardon us, the dryer just buzzed. I'll be back, she says, sounding remarkably like the Terminator.

Musing

So I was a wreck on Wednesday evening -- weepy, irrational, overwhelmed. Thanksgiving itself was very nice; the preparation was anything but. This makes me think I need a better plan for Christmas. I will be 41 weeks pregnant on Christmas Day (or perhaps newly postpartum, though I doubt it), and I have never found a state of such advanced gravidity to be in any way sanity-enhancing. Quite the opposite, in fact. And if I've had the baby, I'm really not going to be up for hosting.

Still Alive

This week I have been thinking, "Whose crazy idea was it to get to candidacy before the baby arrives?" ...oh, wait, that would be my crazy idea. I know that I can do it; it just feels a little overwhelming right now. It's not even the dissertation that's making me feel overwhelmed, but the dissertation on top of the rest of life with four children in three schools and a baby due the month after next and all the holiday organizing that has to happen between now and then and also an 85-year-old house and and and...

Anyway. My advisor says I'm in good shape, and I trust her. She's not worried about the fact that the powers that be have to approve my committee and the head of the department predicted they'd kick back the application because we requested voting privileges for an MD who's on clinical faculty and not a tenure-track academic. Worry, not adding days, hairs on head numbered -- I know all that stuff but I'm having a little trouble applying it this week.

Petely fell at preschool today, trying to slide down a pole on the playground, and doesn't want to bear any weight on that foot. I'll take him in first thing tomorrow if he still is complaining. Do you know, I have been kind of scarred by that wretched CPS experience. I was figuring out how the morning needs to run and I thought, "...and they'll need to confirm that this wasn't child abuse so I should take in both the director's cell number and the general preschool number, so the doctor doesn't think I'm just asking a random person to pretend to be my son's preschool director to cover up negligence on my part..." Which is ridiculous for a host of reasons, not least that I spent the entire day in a different area code from my son and could not have abused him even if I didn't think child abuse was heinous.

At the beginning of the week Elwood told an agitated boy that he needed to go outside if he wouldn't stop screaming, and I had a little inner freakout. What if a neighbor heard? What if a neighbor assumed the worst and reported us? So yeah. Just in case the short-term stress wasn't enough, two months later I am worried about going to the doctor and responding appropriately to a tantrum. Big sigh.

Gloom and doom and doom and gloom. Maybe I should stop grousing and go to bed. Another one of those things I know but have to be disciplined about living right now: each day has enough trouble of its own.

Stressball

I have been over-the-top anxious lately, but in a weird way. I am not stressed about the work that's actually in front of me, but about the future. I am confident about getting a draft of chapter two to my advisor by the end of the month, but I am worried about getting the revisions finished by December. (No! Ack! Late November, to give my committee two weeks to read the document before my preliminary exam.) I am worried about getting five children to adulthood intact, but not about anything that's a problem at the moment. I am worried about world financial collapse, worried about Christmas, worried about how I will fulfill the terms of my fellowship next summer -- just constantly jittery about things that are in the future. Or things that might not even be in the future.

Anxiety is a chronic issue for me. Sometimes it's better than others; right now it's worse. I am going to wean myself off caffeine (a little today, less tomorrow, none on Thursday) and try to spend some time walking in the sunshine today. I think I may resubscribe to FlyLady so things are more orderly around here (it just occurred to me that I could filter all the testimonials right to trash). I might up my fish oil a little, because baby is working hard to build a brain right now and maybe there aren't enough EFAs to go around with my current intake. Maybe.

One of my favorite things about the Proverbs 31 woman is that she laughs at the future. I might stick that up on the wall over the computer, as a reminder. In this exact state of mind, actually, that might feel more like a rebuke than an encouragement. Maybe I'll get to that in a few days.

Twitching

Oh, help -- can anyone help me? I am lost in an eddy of the space-time continuum in which addition is not commutative.

I have a confession: I am a checkbook obsessive. I will spend an hour searching for a nine-cent error. You can tell me all you want to about the value of my time being higher than that, but I get an absurd amount of satisfaction out of tidy rows of numbers, all of them RIGHT. Conversely, if one (or, horrors, more) is wrong, then something is deeply wrong in my little world.

Tell me tomorrow if you think that's whacked. The acoustics are too bad here in my eddy for me to hear you today.

The bank and I agree that the last time I balanced the checkbook, we were square. We also agree on amounts deposited, checks cleared, and electronic transactions. So if I go back to my last balance and add the deposits and subtract the withdrawals and remove the transactions that haven't cleared yet from consideration, I should get the same number as the bank, right? Right???

Euclid help me, it's not working. I have added up and down and sideways. I have combed through my entries for errors. No dice. There is a stubborn $24.92 difference between my bottom line and the bank's. Aaaarrrggghhhhh.

I decided that there was a maniacal little gremlin in my calculator, cackling away as he spat out the wrong numbers. I decided to use the calculator that lives in the computer instead. But I also decided to share the woe before I tried again to paddle out of my eddy. Any fellow obsessives out there? Please send chocolate.

The Reluctant Scrapbooker

Oh, my friends, I hate dealing with pictures. I love having the pictures neatly arrayed in albums. I love looking back at my sons when they were two, five, eight years younger than they are now, and seeing how much they have changed. I love the details that the pictures bring back to me, like how utterly un-childproof our house was before Alex started crawling, and how bright the orange living room wall really was in our rented Edinburgh house. (Britons seemed to us to go in for brighter interior walls than Americans, perhaps as a remedy to the all-too-frequent drabness of the weather.)

I wish I could get someone else to make the albums, though.

Last summer I caught up through July 2007, but I hadn't done a thing since then. I had my FIL's vacation pictures from August to deal with, perhaps three dozen of them. No one needs three dozen pictures of a week-long vacation, but I wasn't looking forward to culling them.

I find album duty stressful because I'm worried about what will happen if I don't do it -- the younger siblings who will say, "But where are the pictures of me?" and the queries that will be unanswerable if I don't answer them soon ("Why does Pete have that colander on his head in fourteen separate pictures?" "Uh...he had a secret yearning to be a noodle?"). I do not have grand ambitions; I do not own a corner rounder and I have never put cute little die-cut soccer balls around anybody's first soccer pictures. I slap them in albums, with occasional captions if I know I'll want to remember something later.

Today I bit the bullet and started organizing the five envelopes of pictures from Snapfish that had been awaiting my attention. I finished August, vanquishing the messy pile of vacation pictures, and September, and all but the last day of October. I am out of blank album pages or I would have cruised ahead into November. I suppose it should feel like I accomplished something, but all I can think is UGH! Eight more months to go!

Do you like scrapbooking? I probably can't even call it scrapbooking, what I do, but albuming isn't a word. (Scrapbooking wasn't a word fifteen years ago, I guess, so maybe I could lobby for albuming: Is scrapbooking too hardcore for you? Do Creative Memories parties fill you with performance anxiety? Call Albumers Anonymous, where we will assure you that we are also months behind and don't even plan to make up for it with pretty little patterned background papers.) Are you caught up on pictures? Do you feel guilt about the whole stupid thing? Any success stories of child conscripts who have come to love scrapbooking and have taken the noisome task off their weary mothers' hands?

Was this the whiniest post ever? Here are some pictures to compensate. Here's Pete last summer, washing the van. Elwood is building the kids a treehouse, and here the younger boys are enjoying it. Here is the treehouse in perspective. (I love that tree. It blooms beautifully every April and it shades the south side of our house all summer long.) The older boys are getting ready to dig into Alex's half-birthday baked Alaska. (When you have a birthday that falls between Christmas and New Year's, you get a half-birthday celebration too.) And last, here is a pair of Quill Lace socks, which I finished weeks ago but for weaving in the ends. That took me until this week to accomplish. Even for a person who loves crazy socks, they're pretty...vivid.

Deliver Us From Banners

Last week I didn't quite get Marty's First Communion banner finished before CCD started, but I thought I could still pull it together by pickup time. I spent a frustrating 45 minutes at Hobby Lobby, where all the dowels are 36" long and the teenaged girl at the counter said, wide-eyed, "No, I don't think we have any saws in this store. I don't think we can cut that for you." This is a quarter-inch dowel, one which a frustrated person could bite in two without incurring too much soft tissue damage. I decided instead to find the framing guy. As you might expect, he did have a saw and was willing to slice the dowel for me. Unfortunately, I realized 20 minutes before pickup time that I had forgotten to sew the pocket at the top to hold the dowel. And I still didn't have all the stupid letters cut out and glued down. Argh.

I went in and said, "Can I bring this by later tonight?" The deacon waved an unconcerned hand. "Next week is fine."  A more organized person, or a person with a less fierce and fiery loathing of felt banners, might have finished it up that night to get it out of the way. But I am typing this with gluey fingers, having put it off until just before my extended deadline.

And I must ask: what is the point?? Surely I am not the only person whom this project filled with dread and resentment and the urge to tear at things with her teeth in public places. (Well, maybe that last one was just me.) I am on board with the idea that handcrafts can be meditative and imbued with prayer. I'm the person who gave her goddaughter a pair of prayer socks as a First Communion gift last year, after all. Is it a sign of spiritual immaturity that I cannot pray, just cannot do it, with fabric glue and felt fuzz stuck to my fingers?

These banners happen every year, and it's nice to see the names of all the kids preparing for the sacraments. Isn't there an equally effective way to get their names in front of the congregation? I very much doubt that this is a fun parent-child bonding experience, because not many second-graders have the fine motor skills for the necessary cutting and arranging. I am imagining a parish chock full of exasperating* mothers, swearing under their breath as their children say, "No, wait, I changed my mind about which saying I want."

*ETA: Meant "exasperated." Perhaps I spoke truer than I knew.

It seems like a 70s leftover to me. We are required to include a host (ivory), a chalice (gold, or painful sunshine yellow (and I love bright yellow, so you know this is a seriously ugly color)), a bunch of grapes (or an alien from the planet Blob, in my case), the child's name, the date. The 70s part is that we can also include a bunch of other stuff, like rainbows and hearts. Okay, yeah, the flood as a symbol for baptism, the heart representing love of God, I get it -- but doesn't that scream 70s to you? Doesn't it sound like they only cut "unicorns" off the list in about 1981?

The boys like it, at least. "It's splendid," said Marty, who is chary with praise. Pete wanted me to make him a Thomas the Tank Engine banner for his very own. Pete, my love, I would give you a kidney in a flash; I would pluck out my eye for you if you really needed it. But I'm not making any more stinking felt banners.

The Cruellest Month

April is kicking my butt, y'all.

Pete has chickenpox. His doctor was kind of a jerk about it. As in, I almost cried in his office this morning. I was biting back tears. Ugh, embarrassing to remember.

Shingles: 80% of the way back to normal; still hurting intermittently. Now I have a cold, complete with wicked headache and ooky eyes.

Major revision is proceeding at the pace of molasses in April (an unpleasantly cold and windy Midwestern April, which is to say, not fast enough), though I did get through one section that has been making my head hurt for a long time. No, a sub-section, really. Not even a section.

Communion banner, due at 6:20 tonight, is about 25% done. Taxes are untouched.

My mother turned 60 this week and I sent her...a text message. How's that for discharge of filial duties? I have a plan but just have not executed it yet.

Blogging is not going to get me any further forward on any of these things, I know. Maybe I will go right now and take care of the birthday delinquency. Prayers, kind words, good jokes or funny YouTube links (short ones, 'cause I don't need any help procrastinating) would be much appreciated, because I am kind of a weepy mess today.

Oh, dear, poxy Pete is driving his riding toy through the articles I had strewn on the floor around the computer during naptime. Damage control time.

Found and Lost

Hello out there! We got back last night from a spring break trip to Colorado, and I found the missing pills almost as soon as I got into the house. I am still a little puzzled about their disappearance, though. Sometime after I put the pills into a snack-sized ziploc, someone (who??) added Easter candy to the bag. The little bag wound up in the pantry, inside the big bag of leftover Easter candy. This is mysterious. It's possible that I thought it was a good idea to take along some Easter candy. But I would not have packed myself a private stash of Easter candy without also taking some for the kids. I would never have put candy for the kids into a bag with medications. What happened? Your guess is as good as mine.

I am trying not to think about all the things I have to get done in the next few weeks here, because panic is never good for the to-do list. I told the director of my project that I would get her a major revision of my draft by the weekend, which means I have to majorly revise it. Eek. Soccer season starts this week; taxes are due in two weeks and I haven't gone beyond entering names and SSNs; I could go on but other people's lists of things to be accomplished are never very interesting so I shan't.

My second-grader is getting ready for his first communion on April 27th, Pete's third birthday, and I am supposed to have made a felt banner for him by tomorrow. I forgot about banner day at church, when they were handing out dowels and cording, and now I have lost the instructions for making the banner itself. UGH! I finally have felt but I have no directions, no stencils, and no clue about how to wing it. Before we left Elwood suggested that I could work on the banner in Colorado, so I am wondering if I packed the instructions?? Maybe I will check the Easter candy bag. If there aren't any banner instructions hidden there, at least there will be a little chocolate consolation.

Argh

I mean, Alleluia. Happy Easter. But also, argh.

Remember a couple of months ago when I was having trouble with losing things? I've been mostly better. But. Tonight I emptied out my prescription vial and put my last three antiviral pills into a little ziploc bag to take in my purse tomorrow. Gone. Vanished. Into the ether.

Where could they be? I have fished in the kitchen garbage. I have retraced my steps. Hey, you can almost sing those lines, and then come in with... But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

I suppose if I were a wiser and more mature person, Lent would teach me good habits that I would carry over into Easter. Unfortunately, I usually spend Easter eating too much chocolate after a season of fasting. (Note to me: temperance is a virtue for all seasons.) And my Lenten resolve to be patient about having shingles has vanished as well: blah! shingles = icky! I want this rash to go away noooooooww.

This week I have been so grateful for pharmaceuticals. (<-- not a sentence that ever came out of my mouth before shingles) I am trying to imagine what it would be like for these hundreds of spots to swell and blister and burst and crust over with NOTHING anybody could do about it except point me to the ibuprofen (or the narcotics). Noooooooo thank you. This is quite enough of a drag as it is. I shook those last three pills into my little bag with real gratitude, thinking that I would pay a whole lot of money for them. Where can they be? Where where where?

Tomorrow is not a good day for me to try to get in touch with the nurse practitioner who prescribed them, or to try to replace them if that what she recommends. I'm hoping six days of antivirals will do the trick. But I'm really hoping they turn up before I have to be out the door in the morning.

If you find my little plastic bag with three fat blue pills in it, please speak sharply to it about not running away like that. And have a blessed Easter Monday.