Lazlo is on a "business trip" (we all know what that means) in San Diego, and I'm trying to decide what to do with myself on the gorgeous Halloween. I can still remember almost word for word the annual sermon we got at All Saints Episcopal School every Halloween. All about the true meaning, and "all hallows" and "all saints" and yadda yadda. I, along with ASV alum everywhere, have this one and about 10 other annual sermons memorized. There's the one about what kind of behaviour is appropriate where. There's the one about Christmas, and the one about Easter and the one about how to vote responsibly for student council. Fr. Calcote didn't like to vary his routine much. Which is one reason why I was especially sad to hear that a tree fell on his house during the recent hurricane. He must have been so put out.
I'd like to leave the house today and do something fun. The problem is (for me anyway) it's hard to leave the house and not spend money. Also, if I leave Ramona home alone again there's a good chance I'll lose another pair of panties to her ravenous panty-hunger. I believe it's more of an acting-out thing than an actual craving for panties. She's simply expressing frustration that I don't play with her anymore and I lavish all this attention on Wren. Motives are moot, however, in the face of my dwindling panty supply. And there's another factor. Ramona has recently decided to attempt to actually ingest these clothing items, rather than just mauling them, which has saited her in the past. So now I not only lose the panties, but I also have to clean their regurgitated remains off the (thankfully dark blue) carpet. Ugh.
Anyway, Wren and Ramona and I will probably get in the car and drive to the park and unload the stroller and stroll/walk around for thirty minutes or so until I get sick of Ramona trying to pull my arm off. It all seems like a lot of work for something that's going to make me tired. And then there's the fun part where I try to feed Wren under a blanket while the homeless guy and the fruit cart guy dart leery glances in our direction and Ramona runs away and rolls in poop. Ugh.
I don't have any plans yet for the actual Eve part of All Hallows Eve. I'm hoping to score an invite to someone else's house, since I can't work up the enthusiasm for handing out candy all by my lonesome. Worst case scenario is of course me turning off the lights and preteding I'm not home. I'm sure the neighbors will have their usual "It's Monday!" massive Tejano karaoke party and hopefully Wren will be able to sleep through it. It sort of feels like Saturday night in the dorm, at the beginning of Freshman year, when I didn't know anyone and it seemed like everyone else was having a (lame, but still) party. Maybe I'll go to the library and get some books. Ugh.
If anyone has any suggestions for getting myself out of this crappy mood, that don't involve costumes, let me know. Lazlo doesn't come home for four interminable days. All Wren all the time. Not that she's not a joy, but she can sometimes be not a joy.
Also, the suckiest part of the Golden State is that it's so far away from the Lone Star State. My Granner's funeral was on Saturday and I couldn't go. She was the sweetest and loveliest lady. I wish I could have known her better. Stands With a Fist tells me that she put my name on some rad costume jewelry, so I'm thankful I'll have something fun to remember her by.
I love robots. I asked Baby tonight: "When do you think the concept of robots will no longer be funny to me?" The correct answer is probably "never."
Link one, tangentially related to robots: MUSIC FOR ROBOTS. This entry is a review of BODIES OF WATER's first (?) EP. It's a glowing review, but the important part is to note there is a link at the top of the post to an MP3 of the first track on the CD. It is triumphant. Also -- that chicken on the album cover? I've held her. That's right -- I'm in with a hen (Ginger) who is on an album cover. That's what living in L.A. is all about.
Link two, directly related to robots: THIS SITE. Please look at the third item on the page, which accompanies some of the best copy I've ever read:
Flashy the Fire Dog and his firetruck are the best fire prevention robot team that money can buy or rent. They capture the attention of audiences young and old alike in a creative, powerful, yet fun way. Because your message is vital, Flashy and his firetruck have teamed up: not just a dog or truck -- but both!
Not just a dog or truck indeed. If you click on Flashy, you'll also see AXE, which is probably the most frightening fire prevention robot that money can buy or rent -- nay, that the human mind can even imagine.
There is also a third link today, but it is not related to robots. THE QUAKER has a bunch of pictures of our neighborhood up on Flickr. Come see where I live! Actually, it's about 7/10 of a mile from where I live.
Poor Lazlo has been ultra busy with school and work lately and Wren is doing her best to help him. Here you see us camped out on the bed (read 'study') while he works on a paper. Aren't we helpful?!
With his new extremely hectic schedule we've have to re-impliment the "super promise" for things like washing dishes and taking out trash. If Lazlo promises to wash the dishes and then it turns out that he can't, well that's okay. But if he makes a "super promise" he has to follow through or the world will end. Much like the Unbreakable Vow of Harry Potter. It's a good thing to keep in reserve.
I wish I could be doing something to support out household financially, like editing or research or something. It's frustrating to feel like I'm always spending money and never bringing anything in. And yes, I'm familiar with the old "but I'm saving all this money on childcare" rebuttal. And even if we could afford daycare I would stay home with Wren. It's just frustrating that I have these skills just moldering away in my brain while I measure bleach for the diapers and sing 'The Wheels on the Bus' for the fourzillionth time. Blah blah blah. I know. I'm shutting up.
In other news- Happy Birthday Arkay. I hear it's a slow decline from 26 on. We had a nice time at the party but had to skip out pre-hottubing. Wren was not into it. And we also has an excellent time at the recent Bodies of Water show. Wren's earplugs kept falling out so Lazlo had to take her outside. I'm going to ask for these for Christmas, so that hopefully won't be a problem again. Like I always say, "If it's good enough for Apple Martin, it's good enough for Wren."
This is what we're calling Wren a lot lately. It has its origins in the frequent cry, "Oh Wren!" As in, "Oh Wren, you can't play with my knitting needles." "Oh Wren, not my cellphone." Or, "Oh Wren, these blueberries sure came out victorious in their fight against your digestive sytem." I hope it will be quite a while before Wren actually sees any Quentin Tarantino movies, but eventually hopefully the allusion will amuse her.
Lazlo is currently scouring our music collection for any songs featuring the banjo. He'd claim this is for some sort of theme mix cd, but we know better. He's procrastinating from doing his Hebrew homework. He just said to the dog, in a commanding and scornful voice, "Ramona, I know when you're lying." Poor Ramona has had an incredibly boring Sunday afternoon and is trying to convince us that she has to pee so we'll let her outside. We've been staying inside because our neighbors, we'll call them the Yellies, briefly took their screaming alcoholic fight into the front yard earlier. It scared us away from the outdoors.
Wren has been doing this reving up pre-crawl thing, where she gets on all fours and kind of sways forward and backward. She's getting increasingly frustrated at only being able to go backwards, and I don't blame her. I do, however, fear the future. A mobile Wren means a Wren in daily peril at our house. I need to get off my butt and latch some medicine cabinets.
Last night we hung out with some friends and ended up going to Fosters Freeze (where Lazlo claims a coworker once saw someone get capped) and had California's imitation of the Blizzard. It made me homesick for treats and eats, and for all of DQ country. But it also made me grateful for all the friends we've made out here, especially grateful after the total entertainment wasteland of North Carolina. For someone as socially slow-moving and private as myself, it's huge to have made these (hopefully) lasting friendships when I haven't hormonally been at my best since we moved here. And anyway I'll be going back to DQ country for a very brief Thanksgiving visit. My grandmother, we'll call her TBeffingGITWW, has never met Wren, and Wren has had to make do with a sad existence deprived of the "Where's my sugar" game that was the highlight of my life from 0-5.
That's all the news from us, except for a shout out to Stands With a Fist, who's landed a (horrible, she says) job at Kerby Lane. She'd be happy to show you to your seat. Be nice to her; she has a new puppy who's not house-breaking well.
The Wrenelator is officially back in action. She's sweet and dear and (woo-hoo!) independent again. She -likes- to play by herself. And she wakes up smiling again instead of crying.
In other news, Lazlo is winding up another busy effing week as a full-time student, employee and father. I'm still in psuedo-limbo homemaker mode (which I pretty much enjoy, don't get me wrong) and I'm going back to my OB next week to hear about all the different kinds of birth control that either don't work or are too expensive. We're going to have come to some kind of conclusion if we don't want this to happen:
Or I guess, as long as I'm at home anyway, why not just have another? How much harder can two be? Right guys? Guys...?
Not really. I do feel sometimes like I'm in a holding pattern or something. I love being home with Wren, but this was the point in my life during which I'd planned on continuing to -prepare- for my life (grad school, wild oats, what not) and not actually live it. The grown-up part was supposed to come a little bit later. It seems like as long as I'm rearing one child, I might as well rear however many we'll have, and then get them in kindergarten and go back to school.
I'm just babbling now, and Glamour came in the mail today, so I'll be spending the rest of the afternoon playing with my newly restored sweety-pie and trying to keep her from eating my magazine.
I just put Wren to sleep. More acurately Wren put herself to sleep. I was watching, as usual this week, Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I noticed that Wrennel's sweaty little head had neslted into my neck and she was just seventeen and a half pounds of dead weight on my chest. What a dear.
She hardly ever does that anymore. Putting her to sleep is usually a marathon session including feeding, swaddling, jostling, pacing (I'm guessing about 2 miles) and the occasional deep knee bend. Accompanied, of course, by the white noise of a hummidifier and a window unit. She has to be pretty damn tired (or drugged on infant tylenol) to just fade out in my lap in front of the noisy laptop. But we're in the traditional week of post-immunization hell, and Wren's not up to her usual standards.
When she's asleep and I'm holding her and rocking her and smelling her hair (in a non-creepy way) she's so heartbreakingly perfect and it's so easy to love being there and taking care of her. And then I sneak over to the crib and slide her so so carefully onto the mattress and back away slowly avoiding that one creaky floorboard and ease open the door and slide out, and then suddenly watch her eyes snap open accusingly and hear the start of her thin piercing wail...
Argh.
Of course the shots make her feel crappy. She doesn't say, "Mom, I feel crappy" in so many words. But she cries and cries and cries, and it's like, for three days, my sweet-tempered dear-hearted easy going baby girl is switched out with every awful clingy monster baby I ever nannied (you know who you are). The whole time I'm trying to remember that she feels awful. No one's happy when they feel sick. But there are moments (backing away from the crib, for one) when it's so frustrating. I just want to snap to 20 or so years down the road, Lazlo and me puttering around the house (assuming we're homeowners), getting phone calls and emails from our happy, well adjusted (perhaps even college educated) brood of adult offspring. Looking forward to seeing them home on Thanksgiving. Having years of fond memories of child-rearing successfully accomplished, and looking forward to passing any fussy grandchildren back to their own parents.
But for now we just have to get through the next few days, of course also the days when Lazlo is gone for 14 hours at a time. Poor Lazlo is so busy with school and work I'm surprised he can keep his eyes open during either one. He's on his way home now, from some class or other, and I'm going to abrubtly end this overly long post to make him a snack.
I like to oblige H.C. Price whenever possible, so folks, here's the record-breaking fourth post in a row:
The potential quilt recipient occasionally reads this blog, so I can't go into specifics on design and what not. I will say that the borders have been completed and it's now a matter of filling in and a little of the dreaded echo quilting. That's what I get for using cotton batting instead of polyester. Catherine, I'm sure you can relate.
Wren has jumped sizes in everything from onesies to shoes, and I had to unpack two more garbage bags of cute cute clothes from Sarah. Well actually, I guess, from Zoe and Ava. Either way Wren is a fashion plate. These days she's wearing up to five outfits a day, due to her inability to control the fluids leaking (and sometimes shooting) from her body.
She's six months old now, and I wonder if I should worry that she mostly fits into clothes with a 12 mo. tag. I don't want to give her body image problems, but (to steal from Ben and Birdy's mom) she's a little fattykins. Her current faves are: pears, Ramona, long walks in the stroller, trilling, snorting, her jumper, her carseat (!) and pulling on cords. If these cords are attatched to something (say, a laptop) this can have sad consequenses.
Lazlo and I are contemplating trying to Ferberize her again tonight. If we were carebears we would both be Tenderheart. We're pathetic. But it's honestly a pretty tramautic thing for all involved. She just seems so shocked that no one's coming to get her. I don't know how we'll do it. One mom told me she just left for the first few nights and let her husband do it, but Lazlo has almost as hard a time as I do. Of course he has the good sense to turn the baby monitor OFF, whereas I insist on listenting to her scream for hours on end. The problem for us is that 4 out of 5 nights, once she's down, she sleeps through the night with no problem.
In case you're not a parent, the key parts of that sentence were "once she's down" and "4 out of 5". 5 is a real bitch. And it can take a good long while for her to go down.
We'll see how it goes.
What is this? Blogamania? Blogapalooza? Three days in a row?! But Lazlo is really to blame for this one. It's another one of those 14-hours-alone-with-the-baby days and I don't have the car (Lazlo took it to work) so my resources are limited.
I had originally planned to spend the morning quilting and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but due to an embarrasing 4 AM incident involving me and fear of vampires, Lazlo made an executive decision and took the DVDs with him before I woke up this morning.
THANKS HON.
I really think it's perfectly understandable. If you were bending over the baby's crib in a dark room in the middle of the night and someone snuck up behind you silently and put their hand on your back, you might freak the eff out too. Sadly it resulted in me scaring the baby and all of us being awake much longer (poor Lazlo had to stay up with us because obviously I couldn't be left alone again- Vampires.) Anyway, now I'm stuck at home with nothing to do and nowhere to go. I've read every book in this house.
What makes the whole Buffy situation all the more galling is that I was in the middle of an episode. In addiiton to taking the box of DVDs, Lazlo also turned on the computer (sneakily, I assume, so as not to wake me up) and ejected the disk I was watching. You can say this for him, he's thorough. So now I don't know what happens to Seth Green after he changes back from being a werewolf. Does he know he's a werewolf? Does Buffy have to kill him? When's the next full moon? And most importantly- is he dating Willow?
These are valid questions. And when Lazlo comes home for lunch I will have answers. Until then I'll be forced to amuse myself by blogging and occasionally taking care of my baby.
It's funny how the urge to blog comes in spurts. Two days in a row! Goodness! But today is just going to be lists, a la Julie Andrews:
A few of my favorite things
- Stacking a load of freshly laundered diapers in the baby's room
- Finding the Netflix envelopes in the mailbox
- Finding a magazine in the mailbox
- Painting the house while listening to talk radio
- Starting and finishing a quilt (I could do without the middle)
- Diet Coke with lime, fresh from the freezer
- Hot Pockets. mmm....
- Coming home from the library with a stack of books
- The minute the baby goes down for a nap and I know I have One Whole Hour to myself
- Cold weather and everything it entails- stews, sweaters, quilts, Christmas, pies...
- When people hang out at our house
- When Lazlo washes the dishes after people hang out at our house
- When Ramona walks in the room and Wren is so excited to see her she can't contain herself
- When Lazlo builds something rad and useful (like a gate) and is so effing proud of himself
When the Dog Bites
- Or in Ramona's case, throws up on the carpet
- Stepping on a sluggy/crusty banana chunk that fell off the highchair
- The new world of solid food baby poop. It's like A Bomb to H Bomb. They're both bad but one's a lot worse.
- Overdue library books. They sit around the house and judge you.
- Accidentally killing every plant I've ever touched.
- Teething. Can't we just buy her some dentures?
- Our yelly fighty alcoholic neighbors. Poor Carole and Charlie.
- Finding junkmail in the mailbox. We've never gotten so much. I fill up a garbage bag a week at least.
- L-O-N-G roadtrips with the baby, like the one we'll be taking in a month and a half. Ugh.
Lazlo is taking Hebrew now and it's so fun to relearn all those words and vowels and everything. I wish I'd never stopped taking classes. I wish my retention was for Semetic languages what it is for Jane Austen novels. Oh well.
This is just a general update post. We've all been sick and feverish, with whatever weird flu is going around. Poor Lazlo can't shake it and spends most of his time trying not to throw up. Yesterday he said, "I don't think I'll ever feel good again." And I wondered if maybe he was pregnant because if memory serves, that's pretty much what the first trimester is like.
In other news, I went to a La Leche League meeting last week to meet the Lactivists, and overall they weren't terrifying. There were, of course, many many unclothed breasts on display, but my main fear, the hordes of pasty pre-pubescent school kids still nursing, didn't show. It was mostly babies. And the moms gave laid-back common sense advice, which seems to be in scarce supply. What I get from the pediatrician is basically "A constant state of terrified vigilance is your only hope in not killing your baby. Good luck, that'll be a $10 copay."
My almost non-existent germaphobe side came out at the meeting though. I'm the mom who cleans the pacifier by sticking it in her mouth and who "sterilizes" bottles by taking them out of the package and putting them in the cabinet. I let the dog lick the baby in the hopes of fostering friendship. But at LLL they have these huge baskets full of communal toys from the last 40 years and all these babies are crawling around shoving everything in their mouths. Hacking smoker's coughs come from their tiny little mouths and I can basically see the croup and strep and foot hand and mouth diseases swarming over the toys like ants. Poor Wren had to sit on my lap the whole time and play with her own toys. At least I didn't slather us in Purell after we left.
No other news, except a certain seminary offering me another job and backing out yet again. I should start a seperate blog called "Disappointed Hopes" and list all the times I've been screwed over by their misguided over-eager irresponsible kindness. Apparently I'll hear back in a few weeks (FTS speak for NEVER) and I'm going to take a big gamble and say, regardless of the fact that they already offered me the job (and I accepted) they're going to give it to someone who won't bring their baby to work in a pack n play.
I don't want to end this long post on a down note, so I'll say what I don't say often enough: I am so so incredibly grateful that I get to be at home with this amazing kid. I complain about it sometimes, but I wouldn't miss it for the world. Thanks Lazlo.
