11.04.2012

 

Your vote doesn't count

Okay, I know the standard message is that every vote matters.  But in a recent discussion with my husband, I realized I don't believe this, and I'm betting a lot of the rest of you don't believe it, either.  We rarely hear of a decision coming down to one vote, except maybe in a classroom or a Girl Scout troop.  Or the Supreme Court (um, almost every time).  But in the electoral college system, in a country of 300 million people?  Nope.  Sorry.

Here's the thing, though.  VotING counts.  It's not the individual vote you cast.  It's the act of voting that matters.  It's partly because your voice is being heard; I'm a firm believer that you earn your right to complain, whine, cheer, and basically have an opinion on anything political by actually showing up and saying, "Yes, I'm here, and here's my vote."  But it's also about much more than which box you mark.  It's about the fact that your co-workers and friends know you voted, so you're influencing them and making each of them more likely to vote, too.  Your kids, if you have any, know you voted, and they'll grow up caring about it, even if they end up making decisions that are different than yours.  And every other person standing in line with you on Election Day, though most of them have places to be and really don't want to stand in a long line, know that you are right there with them, voting.  You're keeping each other there.  Everyone stands in that long line because they believe it matters.  They know that we cast our votes together, and we make these decisions together.

I'm bringing Kent in with me this time, because our polling place is the school right behind our house so we're planning to walk over.  Kent is five now, and he is finally old enough to want to come with me since he's been following the election news and cares about the outcome.  He was supporting Romney over the summer, but he is squarely his parents' child now and is supporting Obama after the gay marriage discussion.  We're thinking doughnuts afterward.  I'm just sad that he's going to be asleep before all the election returns come in that night.  I still remember how anxious I felt in 1988, the first presidential election I really remember (I was eight), going to bed not knowing who the next president would be and thinking how hard it was going to be to wait until the next morning to find out.

Casting my vote in 2008 felt good.  Kind of embarrassingly good.  But guess what else felt good?  Standing in line with everyone else from my neighborhood, waiting for my turn.  I had kind of a goofy grin the whole time.  I get an unbelievable feeling of patriotism when I think about those radical souls nearly 250 years ago who fought, discussed ideas, wrote eloquently and persuasively, and often died, trying to make sure that they could form a country where everyone had a voice, not just the wealthy and privileged who were born into it.  And I feel even more patriotic when I realize that small groups of dedicated individuals went on over the centuries to guarantee those rights to every single adult citizen of our country.  100 years ago, I wouldn't have been allowed to vote.  But we evolved.

So do I vote?  Yep.  Even in the most meager of local elections.  And Louisiana seriously wrote the book on meager local elections, so we had a lot of practice in the last nine years.

Do I vote in presidential elections?  Every single time.  And I get goosebumps every single time.  I still have the sweater I was wearing in 2000 when I voted for Al Gore.

Do I believe that my individual vote is going to be the deciding vote?  Not a chance.  But if I stand up and vote, *and* I spread the word, and everyone who reads this makes a plan for how and when they're getting to their polling place on Tuesday, then I'll feel like my voice is being heard in more ways than one.

Plus, there's that amazing high if the person you voted for actually wins.

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9.28.2012

 

When it gets personal


I’ve been wanting to have a conversation with Kent about gay marriage for a long time now, ever since I found out last year about Chick-Fil-A’s “charitable” contributions to Focus on the Family.  We had been regular attendees with friends at Chick-Fil-A’s family night, scoring a free kid’s meal and fun activities and generally enjoying the kind employees and kid-friendly atmosphere.  I thought Chick-Fil-A was fantastic.  And then I found out almost a year ago that whenever I bought a salad or a milkshake or a fruit cup for my kids, some of my money was going to organizations that directly oppose one of my most fervent beliefs, that of the right of two adults in a loving relationship to marry each other, even if they happen to be of the same gender.  This was long before Chick-Fil-A’s owner had made public statements about his beliefs, spurring a nationwide debate—I was having my own private boycott long before that.  When the flames leapt up this summer and suddenly *everyone* was talking about Chick-Fil-A, I felt more than a little vindicated.

My dad was gay, so this is very personal for me.  He and a lot of other people I knew boycotted Cracker Barrel when it became known that the restaurant chain fired any employee it found to be gay.  (Cracker Barrel reversed its policy several years later and now explicitly forbids discrimination against gays and lesbians in its restaurants.)  He also told me about visiting San Francisco and not being able to order Coors in any bar because of the company’s anti-gay policies and contributions.  And while I agree that a company has a right to contribute money to whichever organizations they want to support, and even that the COO of a company has the right to say crazy things, I also have the right not to give them any of my money to use in support of their beliefs.

About a month into my boycott, I found myself hungry, driving past Chick-Fil-A, and I turned into the parking lot thinking, “Well, maybe I can just get a sandwich anyway.”  But then I thought about my dad.  And I realized that I couldn’t stomach the idea of even one penny of my money funding a hate group that saw my dad as less deserving of rights because he wasn’t heterosexual.  It was pretty easy to turn back around and keep driving at that point.

Kent loved Chick-Fil-A, too, and he definitely noticed that we weren’t going there anymore.  But he was four, and I had no idea how to explain it to him.  The issue is just so big, and simultaneously so personal, that I was afraid I was just going to start spewing vitriol about the whole corporation if I got started, and I didn’t want it to be like that.  So I skirted the issue each time he asked if we could go there.  I’m not so proud of that.  But I was kind of stuck mentally, turning it over in my head and trying to figure out what level he'd be capable of understanding.

The conversation finally began yesterday.  I was talking to a friend about how her son Emerson has decided with Kent that they want to live together when they’re older.  Emerson and Kent don’t want to get married necessarily, just live together and possibly marry other people.  (I told my friend that this was a relief to me, since Kent had previously told us he wants to live with us forever and have Dean move out.  She said jokingly that maybe Emerson was just planning to move in with *us*.  Uh.  We’ll hammer out the details later.)

In the same conversation, she mentioned that when marrying someone of the same gender has come up with her kids, she’s explained that some states just have “bad rules”, so they’d have to go to a different state if they want to marry someone of their own gender.  Bad rules.  Yes.  Brilliant.  I had my inspiration.

In the car on the way home from school, I begin.  First I talk to him about how most men want to marry women, but some men want to marry men because that’s who they love.  This makes sense to him (because seriously, why shouldn’t it just MAKE SENSE??).  I say the same is true for women.  Then I say that unfortunately, not everybody believes that men ought to be able to marry other men, even if that’s who they love, because they think that if *most* people are a certain way, they think everyone ought to be that way.  I mention that in Virginia, men can’t marry other men, but I use the word “yet” and convey to him that I think it’ll eventually be okay in every state.  He asks about Louisiana, and I say no, it’s not okay in Louisiana either.  Yet.  Kent seems to think it’s wildly unfair that men can’t marry men if they want to, if that’s who they love, and I tell him that of course I agree with him.  I tell him I think that by the time he’s a grown-up, it’ll probably be okay everywhere, but it takes a long time for people to change their minds.  Then I tell him I would be so sad if I was told that I couldn’t marry the person I love, and then I ask him what if he had to feel that way, or Dean, or one of their friends or their cousins?  He’s still worked up about it and can’t understand why anyone would want to prevent marriage between two people who love each other and want to spend their lives together.

Yes.  Exactly.

We’ve been having another interesting issue in our house lately surrounding the presidential campaign; namely, Kent supports Mitt Romney.  It literally started with me talking about how I want President Obama to win the election, him asking, “Who’s the other guy?”, me answering, “Mitt Romney,” and him saying, “Oh, I like him better.”  I have no doubts that he supports Romney in an attempt to distance himself ideologically from us, which is okay, but it makes for interesting conversations.  Like what kind of yard signs we’re putting up.  And when I got my Obama sticker in the mail, he asked when he could get a Romney sticker.  Hmm.  I don’t want to quash his interest in politics by totally dismissing his perspective, but I do feel a bit like an old codger, rolling my eyes and saying, “You know, these kids today are just totally uninformed when it comes to politics…”

Anyway, back to our conversation about gay marriage: sensing an opportunity that I don’t want to let pass, I then mention that one of the reasons I like President Obama so much is that he believes men ought to be able to marry men if that’s who they love.  Kent asks, “What about Mitt Romney?”  I tell him Romney doesn’t believe men should be able to do that.  Kent asks why.  I reiterate how some people think everyone should be the same, even if that’s not the way they feel or who they are inside.  Kent thinks for a minute, then says, “Then I agree with Obama.”

MAJOR VICTORY AND DEVELOPMENTAL MILESTONE ALL IN ONE!

I tell him it’s okay to like a candidate and not agree with everything he says, so it’s okay if he still likes Mitt Romney, but I’ll be interested to see where this leads, whether we’ll have more substantive conversations about policy and politics in the coming weeks.  That would be very exciting.

I also mention that there are different kinds of love, love you have for your friends, and love you feel for a person you want to marry, and that he might not feel the second kind until he’s a lot older.  But I’m pretty sure he didn’t understand that part at all.  Because at the end of the conversation, he exclaimed, “I’d better hurry up and marry Emerson while Obama is still the president!”

We haven’t talked about Chick-Fil-A yet.  He hardly ever asks anymore anyway, but I figure if Chick-Fil-A comes up, he’ll already have a framework for understanding why I won’t eat there anymore.  And hey, maybe Chick-Fil-A will make some progress, not just the hemming and hawing they’re doing right now, and we might actually eat there again.  I did like their salads.  I would happily reward them for changing their minds, because, as is becoming increasingly clear in our national conversation, it *is* possible to be Christian and pro-gay marriage.  I shied away from calling myself a Christian in high school and college, because I felt like the Religious Right had a stranglehold on Jesus and there wasn’t any room for me.

Thank God, literally, that that isn’t the case.

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7.02.2012

 

Wherein Kent turns five

My baby is turning five tomorrow. The tiny, curly-haired life that I first brought into the world, who carries my father’s middle name, who made me a mother, who taught me things about myself that I could never have anticipated, who made me cry harder, laugh harder, think harder, pray harder, and love harder than I ever had before, is growing, changing, into a unique little person. He reads by himself, makes origami tables by himself, opens the fridge by himself, adds numbers by himself, orders by himself at restaurants, gets himself ready in the morning, and invents entire projects with cardboard, paper, scissors, and tape by himself. He’s practically autonomous. I asked him if he would like some coffee in the morning with his birthday pancakes and bacon, since he’s almost a grownup and I figure he’ll start liking coffee soon. He said, “I might not like it, but I’ll try it. I’ll just have one cup.”

Of course, he still insists that when he’s a grownup, he’s going to live with us and go to work with Jack. He also insists that Dean will live somewhere else. Every older sibling’s dream: getting Mom and Dad to himself again at long last. Maybe the three of us will sit around and drink coffee together and complain that we wish Dean would call more often, or wonder aloud when Dean is ever going to ask that nice girl to marry him.

I also told him he’s going to be much taller when he wakes up in the morning. He was almost sure that I was kidding. He always asks if I’m kidding, even if it’s the most ludicrous thing in the world, like if I just said I was turning into a cat, or that we would never have dessert again. I never know if it’s because he really can’t tell — I’m very good at dead-panning it and have nearly alienated friends because they couldn’t tell I was joking — or if he just needs verbal confirmation that I know I’m kidding so he can make sure I haven’t lost my mind.

I’m starting to teach him to play the piano and read music, too. This one totally floors me. He played his first piano piece today from the Alfred book, alternating fingers 2 and 3 on the group of two black keys while singing a little ditty about playing notes with one’s left hand. Someday he’s going to play a real piece of music by an actual composer, and I will probably cry.

Oh crap. I just realized Dean is going to do all of these things by himself someday, too. And then he’ll move out, leaving Kent to reclaim their shared bedroom and have all the trains to himself again.



Seriously, where did this guy go?

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6.07.2012

 

Summer of Yoko

One of our kids' favorite books (and one of mine, too) is Yoko by Rosemary Wells. It's about an adorably sweet Japanese cat named Yoko, who goes to school with a bunch of American kids (all other animals) who don't understand why she brings sushi for lunch. The other kids make fun of her, so her teacher decides to have International Food Day, when everyone will bring in food from a foreign country and try everything that everyone else has brought.



The first schoolday lunch described in the story is kind of a regular smorgasbord of American sandwiches — peanut butter and honey, egg salad on pumperknickel — and then there's Yoko on the next page, totally loving her sushi until everyone starts making gross faces and teasing her.



For International Food Day, everyone brings in delicious-sounding things like Nigerian nut soup and potato knishes and mango smoothies. I've always loved this book for the variety of foods described. It's a great book to read with a picky eater to give them a sense of the wider world of food. It's also just a charming story about friendship.

Kent asked me the other day if I could pack him some sushi for lunch sometime. I tried to gather myself up off the floor after being knocked over by the sheer impact of his request, and then I said brightly, "Sure!" This is hilarious to me because when we go out for sushi, he eats edamame, plain shrimp, plain rice, and/or fruit. When he was three, sometimes he ate nothing. If Jack and I even toss around the words "sushi restaurant" close to mealtime, Kent asks plaintively, "Do they have anything *I* like??" He thought he had hit the jackpot when we went to a sushi place last weekend and the kids' menu had a corn dog. The corn dog had also been on his list of foods he wanted to try, so he went for it.

Incidentally, why don't sushi places have a kids' bento box with edamame, fruit, rice, tempura sweet potatoes, shrimp, and other yummy stuff like that? IT WOULD NOT BE THAT HARD, PEOPLE. Parents everywhere would love you.

Anyway, Yoko has intrigued him, and I think he wants the experience nonetheless. I decided it would be silly to pack a bunch of sushi in his lunchbox that I knew he wouldn't eat, leaving him hungry for the rest of the day, but if he was home, like for the summer, and he, Dean and I could all try it together... then maybe we could try some of the other foods from the book, too... hmmmm. And thus, our plan for the summer. We will eat our way through Yoko.

Care to join us? I made you a handy PDF checklist, just in case. Order the book or get it from the library, print out your checklist, and make a plan with your kiddos, picky or otherwise. We'll probably skip around rather than trying to do it in order, but I think this should fill up our summer fairly easily since we won't want to do a new food every single day. I'm excited about trying some new recipes, and I'll try to remember to post here whenever we make something exotic like Nigerian nut soup or Caribbean coconut crisps. Vegetarians can look for alternatives to the Irish stew, use veggie dogs in the franks and beans, etc.

Personally, I think the main challenge for me is going to be the squeeze cheese on white bread. I might make my own gross face that day. But I also know there will be brownies with green tea ice cream... we might do that one more than once, just to be sure we really did it right.

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7.15.2011

 

Ending the sewing hiatus

A few days ago, I got my sewing machine back from its I-Hope-the-Mississippi-River-Doesn't-Flood vacation at a friend's house, along with our instruments, photos, and other valuable or irreplaceable things. (We live very close to the levee, at a much lower elevation than we previously realized. It was an interesting couple of weeks. You'll be happy to know that the actuary and his family now have flood insurance.) The confluence of my sewing machine's merry return, my finally making time to catch up on favorite parenting and craft blogs for the first time in months, and my rereading of Amanda Soule's Handmade Home have led to a flurry of creative sewing activity in the last week.

I made a family set of reusable sandwich wraps lined with vinyl tablecloth material. Simple squares, two fabrics, fun contrasting thread, zigzag stitching, velcro closures. It took a couple of hours to make four of them, and that includes time to get snacks for my children, arbitrate disputes, change diapers, drink coffee, and start dinner. I was firing on all cylinders. It's totally invigorating. Kent helped by manning the pincushion, which was hilarious. He was very particular about putting the pins back when I handed them to him, and he ended up making my pincushion look sort of like the lunar module.

Detail for those of you who would like to make your own: I cut 14" squares of the outside cotton fabric and 12" squares of the lining fabric, then folded the outside fabric in on itself twice with a 1/2" seam allowance and tucked the lining fabric inside the folds. I zigzag stitched all the way around, then did simple topstitching diagonally across the square to hold the fabrics together. I used the iron-on kind of velcro, which was tricky because I had to get it hot enough to fuse it to the fabric but not so hot that I would melt the vinyl. I failed on the first one, so the first one has a nice little patch on the inside covering the spot where the vinyl melted completely onto the scrap fabric I had thankfully put between the vinyl and my iron. I got the hang of the ironing after that, and I definitely prefer the iron-on kind to the kind you have to pin in place and sew, or the sticky kind that's not really for fabric. Or you could do snaps, but that's less adjustable than velcro if your sandwiches turn out to be different sizes on different days.

A few people have already bought some, which thrills me for a lot of reasons. (1) I'm actually selling something I've made. (2) People are using fewer plastic baggies. (3) I get to keep making more. If you count yourself among the people who might like to own one or more of these, check out my new little Etsy shop. Please email me, leave a comment here, or send me a message through Etsy if there's a different fabric or color combo you'd like to see. I can definitely make custom orders.

Kent is amusing me by falling into the same trap I'm falling into; they are ALL our favorite, and we want to keep all of them. He was very upset when I told him that his best girl friend from school was getting the orange one he had designed, until I told him I could also make one for him and then they could have matching sandwich wraps. He's been so interested in sewing, and the particulars of the machine, that I'm really itching for him to be old enough to learn to sew (and for his feet to reach the floor so he can use the pedal).



This colorful little stack makes me incredibly happy. I am completely re-energized after my long time away from my sewing machine, so glad that our daytime dynamic around here finally allows for some crafting time again.

P.S. I have a new banner. My uncle suggested that many months ago, and I finally got around to it. It looks kind of wonky on the page, but it was fun to make a collage this time. The skill spilled over into making a banner for my Etsy shop as well. Ah, Photoshop. Your many mysteries will slowly be revealed to me. Someday.

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5.11.2011

 

Dean's arm

Here's Dean's big news of the day.



And now, the back story.

Last Thursday, Kent and Dean were both at the top of our slide in the back yard. Kent had mentioned that he wanted to slide down with Dean on his lap, something I've helped them do in the past, but I told him he just needed to wait his turn this time. Kent was mad at me for that, and then he got frustrated that Dean wasn't sliding down right away, so he started to nudge him. I was sitting several feet away, watching what was happening, and I called out to Kent not to push Dean because he might fall. Kent looked right at me, nudged Dean again, and Dean lost his balance, toppled over the side of the slide, and fell flat on the ground below.

Maybe the back story should start earlier. 15 months ago, Kent got a baby brother. He didn't know what to do with him, or with us when we weren't paying attention to him. When Dean started to sit up, Kent started getting aggressive, pushing him over, hitting him on the head with things... he never seems to want to hurt Dean, at least not in a "I hate this baby" kind of way, but maybe in a "I want Mom and Dad to notice me" kind of way. He's had a lot of trouble controlling his impulses to hurt him. A lot of trouble. My reactions probably don't help, because I'm really inconsistent: some days, I can handle it calmly and try to give Kent the benefit of the doubt and teach him, whereas other days, I totally lose it and scream at him because I'm just so sick of him hurting his brother. I went through a period of several months when I felt like I couldn't even leave the two of them alone together, because if I even went to the bathroom while Kent was watching TV and Dean was in the room with him, Dean would suddenly be on his back crying and Kent would be telling me very calmly that he had just pushed Dean over. If last Thursday had been the first, or one of only a few, times that Kent had hurt Dean, I'm sure I would have handled it differently, but after I watched Dean fall three feet to the ground, I immediately leapt up and screamed at Kent to get in the house while I scooped up Dean and tried to figure out what might have happened to him or what he fell on (his head, his back, his arm... it was all a blur).

I worried first that he might have a concussion, but he didn't have any of the traditional symptoms and woke up about every hour that night, so I stopped worrying about that pretty quickly. The next morning, while I was in a near stupor from lack of sleep, Jack noticed that Dean was very reluctant to use his right arm, not wanting to put any weight on it when he was sitting, even though he was still using his hand to grab things. I was flying to North Carolina that morning for a wedding on Saturday, so in the twenty minutes before I was going to leave for the airport, I was trying to figure out whether I should even go, or whether I just needed to skip the whole trip and take Dean to the doctor. Jack tried to reassure me that Dean's injury didn't seem too bad, and that I could take him to the ER once I got to North Carolina if he still seemed to need it, so I got on the plane with Dean. Jack and Kent were staying home for the weekend, and I was honestly relieved to have some time away from Kent so that I could cool down and get some perspective on him.

Dean and I had our merry little jaunt to Winston-Salem for my cousin Beth's wedding, and the trip would have been marvelous if Dean hadn't been so fussy and sad. I thought it was mostly the travel and all the new people, though I kept thinking something must be wrong with his joints or something. I thought if he had a broken bone, it would have been much more obvious, so that couldn't have been it. He was also feverish on Saturday and Sunday, so I was giving him Tylenol and praying he wasn't getting yet another ear infection.

Babies and pre-verbal toddlers are such a mystery, really. There's so much I know about Dean, so much I can tell from his moods, gestures, signs, and syllables, but there's so much I don't know that I'm really yearning to find out. I felt like I was getting to know Kent in a totally different way when his language exploded and he was suddenly labeling everything, and I want that with Dean. It would have been particularly helpful this weekend, but that's not who he is yet, so we deal with who he is in this moment.

Dean and I got home late Sunday night, and his fever seemed much better. I stopped giving him Tylenol. I was still wondering about his arm, but I wanted to wait another day to get acclimated to being back home. Monday and Tuesday passed with him acting okay, but not great. He didn't want to use that arm very much, but again, I was mostly thinking that he'd be in a lot more pain, and I'd be able to see something obviously wrong with his body, if it were broken. This morning, though, he was very upset and was pulling at his ears a lot, so I figured if I was going to take him to the doctor, I might as well do it today and get his ears and arm looked at all at once.

Our appointment was at 11:30, right after I picked up Kent from school, so I had brought some granola bars with us because I figured lunch would be a while away. The doctor confirmed that both ears were infected, then sent us to radiology to have Dean's arm x-rayed. Kent and I watched through the glass as a stranger-averse and screaming Dean got x-rays, with one tech holding him while another took the pictures. I explained to Kent what was happening, and his curiosity about the whole thing was satisfied when they were able to show him one of the pictures on their computer. He's very into skeletons, so he thought it was interesting. Dean also needed to have blood drawn to check his hemoglobin, which I would have done at his 15-month checkup last week except that I needed to leave to pick up Kent and figured I'd just come back another day. So as long as I was in that part of the clinic, I just had them do his bloodwork, too. On the other arm, of course. Kent sat quietly on a little stool while they stuck a needle in (yes, screaming) Dean's arm to get a blood sample. Then we headed back to the ped's office to await the radiology results and talk to our doctor about the next step. She was at a meeting, but she and the nurse texted back and forth for a few minutes (I think it's funny that even doctors pull out their phones to text during a meeting), and in the meantime the nurse told me that Dean did have a fractured radius and ulna (the two bones of the forearm) and would need to see an orthopedist.

After the doctor came back, I asked if I could talk to her without Kent in the room, so she had one of her nurses ask him to come play with her. I spilled my guts about how frustrated and upset I've been about Kent's aggression toward Dean, how it seems almost constant, and how broken bones take it to a whole new level in my mind. Of course, Kent didn't actually break Dean's bones, but he was careless and refusing to listen to my warnings, and because of that, something really serious happened to Dean. It terrifies me that Dean could have just as easily gotten a brain or spinal injury if he had fallen in a different way. So our doctor (who I'm coming to love more and more) had a stern talk with Kent about how he needs to treat Dean, how someday they're going to run around together and have a wonderful time, but that Dean is so much smaller than Kent right now that Kent really needs to be careful with him. All the months of Jack and me telling him this have not stuck, obviously, so I'm desperately hoping that an authority figure might drive the point home, or that he'll just age out of it. Soon.

When we saw the doctor again, it was after 1:00, and I knew I needed some food and some co-parenting assistance, so I called Jack and told him he needed to leave work and meet us there. He took Dean home to wait for our appointment time at the orthopedic clinic, and Kent and I went to find some lunch. It was the first time in a week that I had been alone with Kent, and I really wanted to feel like I was connecting with him. He clams up any time I ask about school (totally age-appropriate), so attempts to discuss school fell flat, but I asked him about what our doctor had said to him and asked how he felt. He reiterated what she said to him, but I'm still not sure how much is sinking in. Sigh. Anyway, we enjoyed a lot of good pizza and happened to see a preview for Cars 2, which we didn't even know about, so it was a fairly light few moments in the middle of a crazy day.

Kent announced that all that pizza was making him feel tired, so I thought there was a good chance he'd want to take a nap, Jack would stay home with him, and I'd be taking Dean to ortho alone. I had posted quickly on Facebook about what was happening, and my friend Jennifer responded that she'd be glad to help if I wanted to call her, so I called her almost the moment that Kent fell asleep and asked if she'd be able to meet me at the clinic at 3 just so I'd have someone there with me. I opened the conversation by saying, "So you remember a few minutes ago when you said I should call you if I needed anything?" and she said jokingly, "Boy, you just jumped right on that one, didn't you?"

Jennifer earned the Most Dedicated Friend award today.

I got home with an asleep Kent, just in time to swap children with my husband and take Dean to get his cast. Jennifer met us at the clinic, and between filling out paperwork, paying our copay, and waiting back in the doctor's waiting area, it was an hour before we saw the orthopedist. Our pediatrician had said she wasn't sure if they'd need to do any anesthesia on Dean, so we shouldn't feed him anything just to be on the safe side, but this is a kid who eats a meal or snack about every two hours, often nursing in between, so going several hours without eating or nursing was starting to wear on him (besides the obvious physical discomfort he had already been in for several days). I paced around the office, holding him and singing to him to keep him happy, for probably 30 minutes, while everyone who had gotten there before us went back for their consultations on various broken bones. Nobody else had a screaming child.

[Are you tired yet?]

Once we saw the orthopedist, things went very quickly, and Jennifer helped carry our stuff and asked a couple of questions here and there that I hadn't thought to ask. The ortho doctor showed me the breaks on Dean's x-ray, talked to me about the cast and how we'd need to follow up with him, and then sent me straight to a nurse who'd do the cast. He was great, as was his entire staff. The nurse who put on Dean's cast was so empathetic to him, and another nurse came in to help hold his arm. They offered him a lollipop, which I was more than happy to give him even though I'd never given him one before, so he ate the lollipop, cried in between licks, and thereby drooled green sticky goop on himself and me. I also got cast goop dripped on my arm, which I'm pretty sure is going to stay there until that skin eventually sloughs off. I was in great shape by this point, let me tell you. But it was almost over (it only took about ten minutes for her to put the cast on him), and I knew he could nurse as soon as she were done and then we could get back to our lives.

So yes, they finished his cast, Jennifer sat with me and chatted about all kinds of funny things while Dean nursed, and then we did return to our lives. And I'm just going to say right now that Dean is a superstar. He is powering through everything, delighting in banging his cast on the table at dinner and already figuring out how to transfer food from his right hand to his left to get it into his mouth.



Did you notice that the cast matches his eyes? That was no accident. A mom has to focus on something like that to get through the day.

I have no idea how he'll sleep with this thing on his arm — my guess is badly — but he seems so much happier in general that we all finally clued in to what was wrong with him. He seems to actually like his cast, or at least he's relieved that his arm doesn't hurt any more. We also have antibiotics to fight his ear infection (#6, for those keeping score at home), so he's well on the way to recovery.

I am trying SO. HARD. Not to stay mad at Kent. I know things like this happen with siblings, but that doesn't make it any easier for me to figure out how to teach Kent to do better. I don't want every step of this cast episode to turn into a guilt trip. He didn't hurt him on purpose. But he did hurt him. Anyway, I hope we'll get through this with Kent having learned something. Or maybe it'll be like Danny Kaye's character in White Christmas, where Dean will just have to grab his arm and wince every time he wants something from Kent.

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2.26.2011

 

Demolition Day

The hardest part of our bathroom remodel is finding a chance to work. Two small children tend to need our attention, like ALL THE TIME. Go figure. So after a couple of months of biding our time on the bathroom repair, Jack had scraped away at the popcorn ceiling little by little, and he and his dad had pulled out our fake marble shower walls. Then Jack took out the drywall around the tub this past week, but with as much as we still had left, it felt like it was painfully slow to get things rolling. We finally caught our big break on Friday afternoon. A friend volunteered to watch Dean for a couple of hours, so I called Jack at work and told him to come home early. We put Kent in front of a movie (Wall-E, which we all love), and then we launched into our long-awaited demolition.

I had pulled up some of the baseboards and quarter-round a few weeks ago, very satisfying at first, until I realized there was a second layer of flooring underneath the linoleum that was standing in the way of the baseboards coming out completely. So we had this big plan to yank up the flooring and get the tub out all at once, whenever we both had a chance to get in there and work. The first layer of floor came up fairly easily in large pieces. Then Jack started in on the second layer, which came up in one big piece and revealed — yep — a third layer. Jack remarked that it was one layer for each decade the house has existed. Actuaries think of things like that. So this bottom layer was linoleum that was basically stuck right on the slab. It peeled off in unruly chunks, kind of like one of those bad price stickers that doesn't come all the way off, but 37 square feet of that. It'll require a lot of scraping to take care of it and reveal the nice clean slab underneath. Honestly, it makes me just want to coat the whole floor in Goo Gone. Bleh. At least the baseboards came out really easily after all the flooring was gone, and we can chip away at the residue in the coming days.


The first major item to leave the house was our old toilet. Thank goodness our city does large-item pickup every week.


Here's the floor after we took out the toilet and part of the top layer of flooring, and you can see the second layer of flooring where we started to take up the floor next to the tub.


The third layer of flooring, some very crusty, yellowish old linoleum.


See my pretty chunks of baseboard? P.S. The mask is for mold, not fashion or comfort.


The awesome do-it-yourselfers.

The second major undertaking of the day, removing the tub, required a sledgehammer. As we've learned about bathroom remodeling, we've realized that almost everyone busts up their tub with a sledgehammer to get it out, because they're so darn heavy that it's nearly impossible to get them out in one piece. We already called the Habitat Restore to see if they wanted to come pick it up, but after they told us they don't have a lot of demand for cast-iron tubs, we figured there was no reason to try to get it out in one piece. After the flooring was out of the way, Jack was free to start whacking away at the tub. Observe.





It took a while, and Jack was tentative at first but really got into a groove and would shout triumphantly every so often when a big piece came flying off. Kent was very concerned about the banging, though not enough to stop watching Wall-E. Jack managed to break the tub into two large, ridiculously heavy pieces that he and I carried awkwardly out to the curb, plus several medium-sized chunks and about 100,000 tiny shards, one of which later took up residence in my foot before we had a chance to sweep thoroughly. Better me than my kids, I guess.


This is what remained after we carried out the first big chunk of tub. Note the small tear visible in the drywall just above the tub.


Here's our bathtub alcove after all the pieces were removed, but before sweeping.


And here's that same space after sweeping. Stark contrast.

Did you notice the tear in the drywall? That came from a flying piece of metal. Here's what it looks like on the other side, which happens to be in our guest bathroom:

Oh well. Patching comes with the territory. And we're probably going to be replacing the flooring in this bathroom (boy, I hope it has the same three layers) and repainting it when we're done with the other bathroom, so we'll hardly notice the extra work. Ha.


Kent is very happy to walk around the bathroom again and see the changes unfolding.

On their way to us from various corners of the internet are a new, deeper bathtub and all our shower/tub hardware. Amazon really does sell just about everything these days. We've also been all over town for research and price comparisons, to tile and plumbing stores, hardware stores, and paint stores. (Painting still seems somewhere in the distant future, considering all the other work that needs to be done first.) We have this saying in our house every time we start a project, no matter how small: "There's never just one trip to Lowe's." This time, though, it's getting out of hand. They're going to start recognizing us soon. "Oh, there's the mom with the screeching baby who always carries around the same tile mosaic to different parts of the store to match it to everything..."

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12.22.2010

 

DPP Day 22



Life with a three-year-old. He's fine. Just insane.

Kent was mad at me, I was out of the room changing Dean's diaper, and so he pushed the green chair into the window. The 137 times I've told him not to push the chair into the window because it might break did apparently not sink in. Maybe now he'll understand. Or maybe not. It's so hard to take your mom's word for something.

The upshot is that we've now had long conversations about broken glass (including talking about stitches and hospital visits, which easily could have been part of today's broken window but thankfully weren't) and financial responsibility. He voluntarily gave up his accumulated change collection of roughly $1 to help pay for the window, after I explained that when we break something, we should help fix it or pay to fix it. I asked him if he thought it would be a good idea for him to help pay for it, he said yes, and then when I asked if he wanted to give part or all of his money, he said all of it. He gave me the change, I thanked him for helping to fix it, and then he asked, "Is it fixed now?" Uhh, no. That'll have to wait until after our trip, so we'll just have a cardboard likeness of a window until then... so it goes.

You might be thinking I sound rather calm about all of this, but I'll remind you that you didn't hear me five hours ago. That's all I'm going to say.

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12.14.2010

 

DPP Day 14



This afternoon, my boys shared a cinnamon roll for the first time. It was pretty healthy, as far as cinnamon rolls go. I made a batch of wheat bread dough, rolled it out, brushed it with melted butter and sprinkled it with cinnamon and brown sugar, then rolled it up. I was making a loaf of cinnamon bread, actually, but when I roll it up, it's always too long for my loaf pan, so I have to trim the ends and bake them up as rolls with a little extra cinnamon sugar on top. Have to.

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12.07.2010

 

DPP Day 7



We had a hard freeze last night, so this morning some of our less hardy plants are starting to shrivel up. The basil plant looks terrible and will be completely brown by tomorrow, I'm sure. The pumpkin vine has also started to wither, so today, Kent and I scooted out to the garden with a large knife and cut one of the pumpkins off the vine. The second one may never completely ripen, depending on how that vine is doing, but I figured the one that's basically ripe can stand to come inside now. I washed it off, then weighed it, and it's a whopping 13 pounds. It will surely make many delicious pies and raviolis. And it's already made one little boy very proud of himself and his budding (ha) gardening skillz.

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12.01.2010

 

DPP Day 1



Kicking off the December Photo Project 2010, I thought I'd share a photo from our trip home. This is (my goofy son in front of) a training model of the lunar module, used to train astronauts in the 1960s. It's at the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, where we always stop because it doubles as a rest area.

We had a lovely trip, including visits with all sorts of people we almost never see, but after several hours of Dean crying off and on, we were very, very ready to be home and get the rest of our December on.

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11.13.2010

 

Side-by-side fun

Tonight's Photoshop project has been on my to-do list for months. Enjoy!


Kent and Dean as newborns, in the same PJs


Nurslings


Self-feeding


Reaching for a handful of Patti


Again with another pair of PJs


Family photos at Kent's and Dean's baptisms


Proof that even if they don't *look* that much alike, there are still moments when we know for sure that they're brothers


Oh, I almost forgot about this one:


Obviously they both know a good place to sleep when they feel it.

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10.31.2010

 

October wrap-up

There were a couple of milestones I had been meaning to blog about this October, and here we are, hours away from November, so I figured I'd better get to it. Forgive my absence from the internet, but my three-year-old is, well, three, and has decided to turn into a monster every time I open my laptop and attempt to check my email or write anything. If I don't get back to you, do not take it personally. If it's important, please email me again. I have to believe that my life won't always be this way... otherwise my head will break.

So the first milestone is that our sweet cat Patti is ten years old this month. We don't know her exact birthday, so we've just always had kind of a general month of Patti celebrations each October. She's been such a great cat, and we feel so lucky to have her around. She says "meh" instead of meowing, and still has unexpected bursts of silliness like chasing her tail in the hallway, or just now when I looked over to see her jumping with both front paws up in the air to catch a bug in the kitchen.

The second milestone is that October 2010 marks four years that I've been pregnant, nursing, or both. Yep. Some women wait several years between pregnancies, and very few nurse up until the next pregnancy, so I feel like I'm in some kind of club for moms who just get all their fertility done in one straight shot. (Incidentally, Jack's mom also belongs to this club, and I suppose my mom does too since she only had me.) I'm 98% sure that we're done having kids, even though it took me several months to decide that. I know I'll have baby pangs at some point in the future; we'll just have to see how loud they are. But two feels good. Two brothers against the world. It means saying goodbye to the hope of having a daughter someday, but I'm becoming more okay with that as time goes by and I grow into my role as Mom of Two Boys.

I know a lot of you have been wondering about the Halloween costumes this year, so here they are. I found Dean's monkey costume last year when he was still in utero, and since the best costume to go with a monkey was already done last year, I asked Kent if he would like to dress up as a tree. He was super-excited. Thank goodness, because that was my one idea. I bought a leaf garland to cut up, then intertwined the leaves with florist wire to make a leafy hat and some wristbands. Kent helped me glue the rest of the leaves to a green t-shirt, and some brown pants and brown shoes finished off the look. Most people have gotten it when they've seen him, though a few weirdos have asked if he's the Jolly Green Giant or a dragon or something. Apparently he had been telling everyone at school about his costume all week, so his teachers were thrilled to see it at the fall festival on Friday. I love seeing my son's oddball costumes among all the princesses, animals, bugs, and superheroes, but I am absolutely sure that this was the last year I got to pick his costume. We'll just have to wait and see what the opinionated Kent of the Future will choose. Hopefully something I can make. I get such a kick out of making costumes.


Dean, Kent, and cousin Blythe (Morgan's little girl, they were in town last weekend): trying to get a good photo of all three of them was interesting. Blythe trying to eat Kent's costume while Dean looks off in the distance pretty much encapsulates the experience.


Dean and Blythe, just 6 weeks apart and destined to be buddies.


Kent's alternate costume, courtesy of Chick-Fil-A family nights, wherein they made a different part of the costume each week and then had a pirate party this past week.


Today's caramel apples, shared with the friends we went trick-or-treating with.


Our jack-o-lantern, which Kent insisted should be "silly" and not "scary". Before I added the eyebrows, Kent got mad at me and told me the eyes were too scary, like maybe I hadn't been paying attention to his directions. I'm just not artistic enough to get "silly" right on the first try. At least he agreed that the eyebrows helped.

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9.08.2010

 

School and development

Kent has officially started school at La Printanière Montessori. We had a visit last week to meet his teachers, he's been going for an hour each day since last Friday, and he'll go for his full three hours each day starting next Monday. I love the way they phase the kids in, making sure everyone is acclimated and that the older kids are settled before the newer kids arrive. They have 3- through 5-year-olds in the same room, so the newer ones rely so much on the older ones to model things around the classroom and to show them the routine. We've been very impressed with how comfortable we all feel as a family in this school, and Kent's teachers are terrific, so patient and warm with the kids and so helpful to first-time parents.

Kent has trotted off with his teacher each day in the carpool line, and then when I come to get him an hour later, he has a huge grin and is immediately bursting with stories from his day. He always starts with a report of what they had for a snack — snack duty rotates among the families, so the snacks are pretty different from one day to the next — then moves on to where they went on their walk that day, what things they learned in the classroom, what he played on outside, what puzzle he might have worked on, etc. Montessori is very big on empowering kids to do daily tasks by themselves, so he's getting some practice with scooping and pouring (what they call Practical Life) from actual glass containers. He's learning to do other things for himself like swing without being pushed, eat and clean up on his own, choose what he wants to work on, and even potty on his own, though he's been there for such a short time each day that he hasn't gotten to that last part yet. When his teacher brought him to the car today, she mentioned that he's been doing great so far, which I had already expected but was still happy to hear. It's a perfect environment for him.

I've been musing this past week that this is my first time being on the outside of his learning, rather than right there next to him while he's learning. I'm usually the one explaining, showing, singing, spelling, modeling, and all the other things teachers do, but now, for the first time, Kent is learning without me. It's incredible. He's completely blossoming. And I know that for the rest of his life, I'm not ever going to be as intimately connected to what he's learning as I was for those first three years, but that's part of him becoming his own person and coming to rely more on himself than he does on me. I was ready to let him experience that next phase of his development, and he's taken to it beautifully so far. I've felt very contented all week. I also breathe a sigh of relief each time I hear my friends talking about their kids' experiences in more traditional schools, with uniforms, scheduled potty breaks, and token reward systems. I feel like Montessori places such a high value on trusting our children, making these things unnecessary, and it really mirrors how I try to be as a mother.

We've revamped Kent's room a little, giving him different spaces and making an attempt to put things on his walls that are more relevant to him and what he's doing. This is partly inspired by school, partly just a revamping I've been meaning to do for a while. [Read: people have given him things to put on his wall that we've never managed to put on his wall.] My mom got him a cool little peg rack that holds dress-up clothes and doubles as a curtain hook to hold his curtain open during the day, so he can do that himself when he wants more light. He also has a reading corner, the most exciting aspect of which is his new red bean bag. It's also adorned with some wall art, including a "k" sign that his Aunt Morgan made him, a drawing Mom and Bill bought for him of jungle animals reading together, and a print of Marcus Pfister's The Rainbow Fish that I actually bought back in college because I loved the book so much.

For now, the reading corner is mostly another place to play with his trains and cars, but someday, I tell you, it shall be for reading.



This past weekend, we also put up a clothesline and bought little binder clips to hold photos Kent has taken. I had fun looking back through the "By Kent" folder of photos on my computer to find print-worthy ones he'd enjoy seeing in his room. I did briefly ask for his input, but he wanted to get every photo printed, including the hundreds of blurry photos of his and other people's feet, or just the floor. It will be a bright day indeed when he fully absorbs the "point" aspect of "point and shoot". Anyway, this is what the clothesline looks like in general:




And these are a few of my favorite photos:


He captures the best Dean faces.


I think this must have been his finger.


This is a drawing he made that he told me at the time was dolphins. That was one of the first times he had mentioned something specific he drew, so I insisted he take a photo.


Using macro mode (which I turned on for him), he took a cool series of the stacking cups that used to be his and are now Dean's.



This last one is clearly awesome. Show him macro mode, suggest he put the camera on the floor for a different perspective (bonus: it holds the camera steady), and just look what he can do.

He's also starting to be really funny on purpose, not just making faces/noises, but actually crafting his own humor. I love it. This evening, we were on our way home from dinner, and he was holding a set of puzzle blocks he had been playing with in the restaurant. He started saying something about how he was never going to see his puzzle again, and I figured he had dropped it on the floor of the car or something. When I turned around to look at him, though, he was holding it on top of his head, completely stone-faced. He let out a little guffaw when he saw me looking at him.

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