Lather, rinse, repeat

(Speaking of, who actually repeats? Do the shampoo people really think we're not on to them?)

It's been forever yet again and, during my silence, there have been lots of goings on around here. We traveled to WV/Lynchburg for my 10 year college reunion (more to come on that), Will spent some time with our families in WV, we had our floors refinished, I did some painting, Laura got even cuter and sweeter (I know!), Will had some doctor appointments, and we've done copious amounts of yard work.

Since it's 10:06 and I tend to sort of mentally devolve starting around 8:30 or so, I'll just leave you with some pictures and a promise to try to write something more substantial in the next day or so. Hopefully. It kind of depends on when the yard work situation becomes more manageable, so we'll wait and see when that happens...



Laura has four bathing suits. Each time I put another one on her, I'm certain it's the cutest one she has. I think it's more likely that she's the common denominator here, that each of her bathing suits is cute but really becomes something to behold when she wears it.



I look at her now and can't believe I ever felt anxious about having a girl. Little did I know, right?



Little did I know how much this one would teach me about patience and patience and more patience and also perhaps about boys and their nonchalance concerning the whole wearing pants thing. (He's only wearing clothes on his top half here, which is pretty normal in our house.)

Little did I know that the same man who once lamented the fact that they were required to get Blackberries for work would become addicted to his. (Please also note his computer glued to his lap. One can never have enough screens up simultaneously, apparently?) His job has taken over our lives, it seems. But he hasn't worked yet all weekend so this could be a new record. It's been grrrrrreat!

Happy Memorial Day!

Blogging, interrupted

I feel like I haven't written anything in approximately six months and thus I don't remember where I should start or where I left off (which would be easily remedied, of course, by reading back over my last post but that's too sensible). We've had what I imagine will become the usual May busy-ness, with school events and home projects and landscaping woes and wet basements and rain, rain and more rain and there's more to come (of all of the above).

I managed to infect my computer with some sort of tenacious, hellacious virus so I'm writing this on a new computer after Jamison decided that it wasn't worth dealing with in all of his abundant free time. This wasn't really a bad development, seeing as my keyboard was less a few key players (hardy har har), namely the f, k and u. That sounds like I'm trying to curse cryptically but I'm not. Or at least not at you. Maybe at Will, but only in my head since he repeats every single thing he hears, usually at the most humiliating possible moment that he can. It's also nice to have a computer that actually has a functional CD player (drive?). My computer-ese is pretty limited. Hence the virus.

Tomorrow is Will's final day of school for the year, believe it or not. He says that he's excited for summer but I'm not sure if he grasps that all this really means is that he'll be spending more time with me at home. What he does know for sure, though, is that we're going to the beach in T-minus five weeks and counting. He is absolutely beside himself with anticipation and we've discussed the various details of the trip (driving, hotel, more driving, luggage, ferry, golf carts, swimming, beach, sand, cousins, sun, playground, who's going, who's not, where everyone will stay, what we'll be eating [he is truly mine in this regard, as I like to plan my lunch before I've even eaten my breakfast]) at least four hundred times. Laura is indifferent. Sweet as pie, but totally indifferent.

Speaking of Baby Sister, we finally switched her to her big girl carseat this weekend. Not because of size issues, of course. She's well under the weight limit for her baby car seat and still fit in it comfortably, but I think 16ish pounds is about my own personal weight limit for carting her around in it so we decided it was time she got a more comfy upgrade. Her own personal Britax chariot arrived Saturday (thank you, $3.99 overnight shipping, Amazon) and she appears to be pretty happy about it. I think it's my favorite pattern yet (a very subtle black and gray/grey paisley) out of the three car seats that we have. (Yes, Will is still in his and will remain in it until he outgrows it, which is probably being a little bit overprotective but I'm not messing around after our experience a few springs ago. The weight limit for their car seats is 70 pounds, so Laura will be in hers until 7th grade or so. And then I plan to just transfer it to the driver's seat for me since I'm about two inches and a few more pounds, admittedly, from being required by law to be in a booster seat myself.)

I really didn't start that last paragraph with the intention of writing an entire paragraph on car seats. I could have easily summed it up as: Laura got a new car seat, a Britax just like both of Will's. We love them and they'll be in them forever. Moving on.

We're having the floors in our bedroom refinished this week before we head out of town for my college reunion. (10 whole years. What the?) This has turned out to be a surprisingly loud and cold operation, since the front door has to be left open to accommodate the various hoses and tubes since we opted for the fancy no-dust option (code for "we are lazy and anything we can do to make our cleanup easier, we will be a sucker and pay for").

So. Those were my words. Now for some pictures:

Will remains Laura's favorite person in the whole world, which I alternately find completely heartwarming and mildly terrifying.

Crazy flower that popped up out of nowhere for the first time since we've lived here. It's purple and white and very vivid. And tall.

Speaking of vivid, I'm breaking my usual black and white routine since I really like the colors of these flowers. And the fact that it wasn't raining the day I took this.

As for her, I like her equally in color and in black and white. She's such a little worm.

(Speaking of worms, Will got his first little tangible lesson in death the other day when he found a worm outside. Instead of allowing this worm to just slither around and be happy in the dirt, Will decided that it [Slimey, or Swimey, as Will says] needed to "swim" so he put it in his sand and water table so he could swim. Needless to say, Slimey didn't fare so well.

The mailman walked by and Will showed him the worm. When he asked Will if the worm needed a bath, Will acknowledged that the worm had been "wiggling around" but now it was "still." He then looked up at the mailman and deadpanned, "He's dead." No emotion whatsoever. Then he dug around in the dirt until he found another worm and repeated the exact same scenario, except for letting this worm escape the bath of death before he or she met his or her ultimate demise. Not sure what this says about Will, but I'm thinking that it's going to be a while before we get a more complicated pet, like a dog.)

Hopefully this computer will remain virus-free for the duration of its life with me. Regardless, more coming soon!

A rare event (and some butterflies, too)

It's 6:46 am and I'm just now starting to hear Laura stir. This is, in case you don't know, a big deal for her since she's been up at six (or well before) pretty much every day since she was around four months old. So I'm taking this time to have a little bit of coffee and some quiet time before the madness begins. (The "madness" being mainly of the Will variety.)

Yesterday was Will's last field trip of the year (only five more school days left!) and we got to make it a family affair since Jamison was able to go with us. Besides the 30-minute wait in the holding area/tent outside the actual room where the butterflies were, things went pretty smoothly, considering there were 15 or so antsy three, four, and five year olds involved.

The field trip was at the conservatory here, which was really nice. The kids went to see the butterfly show after learning about butterflies and their life cycles at school. The butterflies in their classroom had conveniently hatched (is that the right word?) right before the field trip so they were excited to see other kinds of not-caterpillar-or-boring-chrysalis butterflies (butterflies of Brazil, to be more specific) flying around everywhere.

After a while, Will figured out how to coax the butterflies from the flowers onto his finger. He was (surprisingly) gentle and let them crawl around without bothering their wings like the nice volunteer ladies had instructed the kids to avoid doing. Laura was also interested in looking at the butterflies but wasn't quite as gentle. (I had to act quickly to avoid a tragic homicide-type situation when I held one too long too close to her curious and quick little hands.) She decided about half an hour into the butterflying that she had kind of had it and so we had to make our exit and go have some lunch.

A few pictures from yesterday:

Will's fake smile is slowly improving. Now he just looks like he may be in some type of pain when he smiles for pictures. Maybe by kindergarten he'll have it perfected.

Moving on

Jamison says that I've been "too dark" in my recent ramblings and I think maybe he's right. Of course, it's also been "too dark" weather-wise here for the past month (the wettest April on record in Cincinnati) and I think that's part of everyone's problem, including my own. So...

I'll just say that perhaps I was a bit unfair in my last post. I fully realize that I'm judging others based on small talk and that I probably shouldn't do that. I understand that we're not going to discuss Shakespeare or existentialism or the pros and cons of a free market economy in the hallway while waiting to pick our preschoolers up. In case I rubbed anyone the wrong way, I apologize.

And now I will complain. (Doesn't that make you just want to keep reading?)

1) The rain. It is never going to stop. The rain has resulted in our (finished) basement being soaked, which means that all of the toys and furniture and everything else down there has been shifted and lifted and moved and I'm really ready for some drier weather. For many reasons.

2)The landscaping. It is never going to stop either. We've actually made a little bit of progress but it's so overwhelming a task that I sometimes wonder how on earth we ever thought we could keep up with it before we bought the house. The man who lived here before us was someone who truly enjoyed working out in his yard and really knew what he was doing. He was retired and basically saw his yard and flowers as his job, so that's all he did. One of our neighbors stopped to chat this weekend while we were out (during the one sunny day) and mentioned that the previous owner often gardened with his wine in hand. And I said that I understood why he did so now. I think he had to combine his wine and his gardening because it helped him deal with the sheer amount of shrubs, plants, flowers, and trees packed onto this small lot and all of the tasks, time, and money it requires to keep them looking good.

The good news, though, is that I actually enjoy being out there when I don't think about how much we have left to do, not to mention the state of our house when I spend the majority of my time outside.

3) Jamison's job. It, also, is neverending. He's never home. When he is home, he's either working, thinking about work, or laboring in the yard. (Speaking of laboring, my mother-in-law was here this weekend and watched the kids while Jamison and I picked up dinner. [Thanks Mamaw Di!] We were still in our working outside clothes and, on our way in, Jamison looked down at his dirty clothes and said that people were going to think he was a simple laborer. That probably doesn't seem very funny but I've laughed about it for probably way too long.)

4) To continue with the neverendingness, Will has what I believe is the World's Longest Ear Infection. We're on ear recheck #3, and what I think is Round Four (or maybe Five?) of progressively stronger antibiotics. He's not complaining, though, so it hasn't slowed him down any. We have another recheck at the end of May, so hopefully everything will be cleared up then.

Enough with the bellyaching, right? Our week ahead looks to be full of field trips, swimming, and, shockingly, rain. With a little bit of yard work and mulch thrown in the mix there, too. The next time you hear from me may be from the pontoon that I think we should start constructing in our basement.

A confession

I'm going to say something that I'm not terribly proud of. This may just serve to reinforce my strangeness in your mind, and I'm okay with that. I think. But I digress.

I'll just go ahead and say it:  I find a lot of other moms insufferable. I never really had occasion for these feelings to surface until I did the preschool pick up and drop off this year with Will and after nearly eight months of it, I can honestly say that I still think this, unfortunately. Pretty frequently.

Now, I will be the first to speak up in defense of moms in general, the working sort or the stay-at-home sort. I've never bought into the whole "Mommy wars" thing that nefariously pits moms in the workforce against moms who stay at home. Never, not once, since I've had Will have I had a working mother dismiss me or act superior in any way, shape or form. I like to think that women in general, and mothers in particular, have so, so much more in common than any differences between us. We are, regardless of race or socioeconomic status or political identification, in possession of a great many commonalities. We are multitaskers and caretakers and friends and allies and fiercely loyal and capable and competent. We all want the best for our families, even though "the best" is a relative term, I suppose.

That said, though, there is a specific type of mother (or father, really) that I just can't for the life of me make myself want to be around. The kind that is constantly so on, so happy, so ready to praise her genius child's every effing move. The chirpy kind, whose voice seems to carry miles and miles to my eardrums, boring seemingly permanent holes there. Seriously. I don't know how they do it. I realize that it's not in my personality to be effusive in any way and I don't begrudge others who are more emotive than I ever will be. What I take issue with is just how crazy it all is. No one could possibly be that happy, that excited, that enthralled with their children, that often.

And not only that, I can't help but wonder what effect this will have on our kids. I realize that I am in no way a perfect mother and that I never will be. (I could list my faults and mistakes here but it would be so long and so boring that even I would lose interest. Trust me.) I realized early on in my first year in the classroom that praise in any form is to be used sparingly and only when it's truly deserved. A teacher can't possibly praise all of the students equally in her class on any given day, especially for things that really aren't that big of a deal (i.e. putting their attendance stick in the right container at the beginning of the day or putting library books back in their correct bins or leaving notes or permission slips in the right pocket in the hanging organizer on the wall, etc.). So my takeaway lesson there was to never praise the expectation. Some things truly warranted praise but they were a bit fewer and far(er) in between. So the kids in my classroom always knew that, when I pointed out something that they did well, it was (a) deserved and (b) pretty exceptional.

There's a boy in Will's classroom who is the son of one of these mothers. She's younger (well, around my age, which appears to be young as far as the parents at Will's school go) and she makes such a big deal about everything her son does. For instance, the kids had gone out on a "fall walk" around the school and collected some fall items like leaves and acorns in a paper bag that was sent home (don't ask why--I would rather they have been thrown away but maybe I'm the one who's being weird here). This mom took a peek inside her son's bag and exclaimed, all wide-eyed and animated,"Oh, Billy, just look at these TREASURES!" I was, in the meantime, trying to put Will's shoe back on him after he inexplicably took it off in the hall as we were putting his coat on, with Laura sitting on the dirty floor between my legs and it took everything in my being to not say, "Really? Your precious kid found the exact same shit my kid did and, moreover, it's going to be all over our floor if I don't find a way to discreetly dispose of it before we get home." (This is the same three-year-old who still refers to his father as "Da da" so there's more than a little bit of babying going on there.)

I just fear that this type of constant excitement and "you're the best thing ever in the whole wide world" is creating a world of kids who expect to be patted on the back for everything, who can't handle any sort of adversity or can only handle it with the assistance of their parents. I realize, though, that some of this enthusiasm is probably done for the benefit of other parents and (hopefully?) isn't the norm when they're home  and that I may be a little overly critical here.

However. And I'm getting back to my original point here, eventually, I promise. I stand there three days a week and am privy to conversations between these mothers and they just make me cringe. I know that they're only short snippets of conversations and that these same mothers (I can only hope) have discussions about more important matters with their spouses, maybe, or with their close friends. But seriously. If I have to listen to one more mom prattle on about (a) the minutiae of her exercise routine or (b) the latest extracurricular activity sweet Sally is in these days I may go crazy. (Sidenote:  The vast, vast majority of moms at Will's school stay at home with their kids. And if they don't, they have nannies. The vast, vast majority of these mothers also dress  very similarly to me, go to the same music classes with their infants, take them to the same places during the summer, etc. So I guess it's not surprising that they seem to discuss the same things over and over and over. I've become a cliche myself, I'm afraid.)

Some days I feel like I'm in some sort of alternate reality, where I will never fit in (and don't ever really want to, honestly). I kind of imagine the labor and delivery nurse handing these moms their newly-born, swaddled sweet baby saying, with a sinister shine in her eyes, "Here's your baby. Now give me your soul." Yes, being a mother is the most defining role I'll ever have. It's the most important. It's the one that I enjoy most (or don't enjoy most, depending on the day). But it's not all of who I am. It never will be. There is more to me, to any mom, than what she does with her children and what her children may grow up to be and do. We are complex people who have significant thoughts and ideas, who have opinions on important things, who are capable and strong and intelligent. We are more than that woman with the annoying voice praising our four- year-old for knowing that it's lunchtime after the school day is over. I hope, at least. I hope.

A daddy and his daughter

I took these pictures the other day when we were outside during a break in the seemingly endless rain we've had around here for the last few weeks. I have said this before, but I can't imagine how she could get any sweeter. The final picture is what I found after Will was playing his version of "dress up" with Laura. (Tool belt compliments of Aunt Jess, Uncle Mark, Luke and Jake--it's a well-loved staple in the toy rotation...)

Still here

We've had a busy few days and I've not gotten around to writing anything recently, so this may be a little bit jumbled. Or a lot jumbled.

The farm. We went, we saw, we petted, we smelled (the animals, that is, although now that I think about it, we probably smelled afterward as well). We also got a little bit wet and muddy but Will loved every second of it. It was nice for me to see him with his preschool friends (the little ladies' man was holding hands with a little girl at one point--does it really start this early?) and to witness the fact that he is actually capable of sitting still and listening to someone who isn't (a) his mother and/or (b) holding his chin, positioning herself directly in his line of sight while he twists this way and that to avoid her and repeatedly saying things like "Look at my eyes while I'm talking to you" or some other such nonsense. I have no idea why he'd not want to sit still and listen for me.

Learning about what goes into compost. This was a hit, mainly because they got to hold worms.

Planting some sort of bean.

And, finally, "gently" petting a baby chick.

The following evening, Grammie (my mom) arrived and Will nearly imploded from sheer excitement and anticipation. We always love when Mom visits, but Will gets especially "exciting" for Grammie time. For us, it's a powerful reminder of how incredibly nice it would be to be closer to our families (we actually got to go on a last minute Easter bunny shopping trip with only one of our offspring--the one who's still immobile for shopping trip purposes--and not two! It felt like a vacation!) for a wide variety of reasons. But...we're pretty much staying put and I don't think anyone's uprooting to move to Cincinnati so I'll stop there and snap back to reality. 

(Tangent alert:  Back to my reality where I drag both of the kids everywhere with me, like this morning when we were at Target and I had really tested Laura's limits, in part because I tried to cram in a visit to the athletic clothing section for some more comfy pants for me, of all things. She was starting to get fussy in the checkout line and I turned around to see her screaming and Will trying to shove a handful of Cheerios into her wailing mouth. Of course, she got madder, I did the old finger sweep of the mouth, she continued to get madder and started coughing and gagging. All the while Will was petting her head telling her "I'm right here, Baby Sister" and everyone around us was staring uncertainly at our traveling road show. Surprisingly, these types of scenarios don't even phase me anymore. If it had been Will gagging on a handful of Cheerios, I'd have stopped, ripped him out of the buggy posthaste, called 911, performed an elaborate dance approximating CPR since I only have a dim recollection of the actual procedure, and then taken him immediately to his pediatrician's office despite the fact that he was obviously perfectly unharmed. This time, though, I patted her on the back a few times, kissed her, paid for our stuff and went to McDonald's for some coffee without replaying the scene in my head a thousand times. I'm not sure if this acquired laxity about the second child is just a coping mechanism or if it's actually detrimental to all of us.)

Where was I? The Easter bunny made a quick stop here and left some goodies, including a bike for Will. (Laura got a little shortchanged this year, as she got some board books, a Very Hungry Caterpillar toy and candy that was actually for me. What does a one year old really need?) While Will was excited to see that the Easter bunny had left presents on Sunday morning, he went straight for Laura's caterpillar and ignored his basket and bike until we directed him to his own stuff. I guess that just says that he would've also been pleased with just a few board books and a caterpillar of his own. Duly noted.

We took Will to the high school parking lot to test out his bike and he was just beside himself. He kept racing by Laura and me shouting, "I'm having so much fun, Mommy! Can we stay here longer?" I kept thinking about how much older he suddenly seemed, navigating around the parking lot on his own personally-designed obstacle course, testing just how fast he was comfortable going, just how far from us he was willing to wander. (Too fast and too far, in case there's any doubt.) A passerby would have seen a little boy on a bike, decidedly not a toddler anymore. His mommy, though, saw her big boy but thought about a tiny little baby in a blue linen romper and gingham hat, snuggled in his never-before-used car seat under too many blankets (see? paranoid first-time parent), on his way home from the hospital. Four years ago. 

How is he old enough to ride a bike?

This picture perfectly captures my typical stance at any given moment. Laura is breastfeeding and Will is on the move, so I'm positioned where I can assist if need be. An accurate title for his vignette could be something like "The Story of My Life."

And speaking of the story of my life, the laundry is calling my name. (Metaphorically speaking, of course, even though we currently have enough laundry to be done that it warrants being labeled as a Situation.) More soon...