Terrible/Perfect

Buzz buzz buzz

I love her drawings so much. I need to post more of them. They're funny and wonderful, like all children's art, and such a delightful peek into her funky little brain. She is incredibly sweet, you know. Whiney and fussy and hysterical, yes, but truly deep down inside she is a huge warm welcoming peony blossom of a soul.

Her bee has three main parts and six legs. I like that she knows to do that.

I've been struggling lately, mostly with being tired and irritable, and it's mostly due to not getting enough sleep. But I'm overtired because I'm overtaxed...just stretched kind of thin at the moment. I feel like w'ere never home. A bunch of stuff I really, really wanted to do fell by the wayside (hello, making pickles?) and that bums me out. We've just been too busy outside of the house. We're moving soon, with a birthday coming up and home learning to get back to, so that's not going to stop. I just need to adjust, to control what I can and take better care of what I can take care of.

Tonight I had this moment of a sort of positive nihilism. I felt like we'd been rushing around all summer long, locked into commitments of all kinds and driving, driving, driving all the time, that we'd had no stretch of downtime at all in weeks and weeks, and that I'd been thinking about a bunch of crap, just things I have no control over, like people being judgemental or combative or unkind, and I was so, so tired that suddenly it felt totally pointless to worry about it. Suddenly the only thing that seemed important was getting to bed early. I like that. I like that I'm in a place, in my brain, where the "breaking point" of being overtired and not getting enough rest is realizing that I can stop worrying about what other people think and say and what's going to happen in the coming weeks and just get some sleep.

Sleep is the best. plan. ever.

Oh man, that bee. She's been reading Clan Apis. It's a wonderful book. We're thinking about keeping honeybees. That would be so nice.

Ker-choo

The littler one is sick. It's very sad. The bigger one started at it tonight, too, and I expect the next week will be spent nursing them both through what is, by all local accounts, a bastard of a flu virus.

Everything is put on hold when there is a household illness (unless, of course, the ill person is me). Baby can't sleep because of her gnarly cough and high fever and stuffy nose and whatnot, which means I don't sleep, either. Mr. Terrible is home, but he is Not the Mama on even the best occasions, so when the wee bairn is sick a mere shift of his thoughts in her general direction, or some slight whiff of a suggestion that he might be considering moving towards her, at some point during this calendar year, is enough to make her yell "I want MAMA!" and shoot him a look that, were it to physically manifest itself, would run across the room and slap him right inna face. So through no fault of his own, he's no help. We're watching a lot of movies. I'm knitting when I can, trying to get in some housework here and there or make a dash in the snow down to the library. Mostly, I'm holding sad, sad Baby.

I'm tired, but I feel well. Which is awesome. Not getting sick when everyone around you has some kind of bug, even though you don't get enough sleep or exercise and you historically have eaten a great deal of unfood, is a wonderful feeling. Not in a schadenfreude sort of way, because it sucks to see the people you care about get sick, but in the sort of way that makes you wish your immune system would appear in front of you in the form of the video for Whoomp! (There It Is) by Tag Team, because clearly that's the kind of immune system you're working with. Party on party people let me hear some noise. Wave your hands in the air shake your derrier!

I like not getting sick. I intend to continue doing it.

Here is another thing that I like:

That is sweet peppers, onions, red potatoes and vegan sausage over polenta, not from a can or box, cooked fresh in my home and, this is extremely important, I DID NOT MAKE IT.

Mr. Terrible did.

In the future I would like to invent some way of explaining the magnitude of moments such as this one that doesn't publicly shame and emasculate Mr. T, but I'm in the mood for brevity tonight: dude can't cook. Which was fine, more or less, for a long time, and then I told him he had to learn and I wasn't going to hold his hand but Mollie Katzen would and I told him to pick whatever he wanted to make out of her amazing book and make it. Tonight. To his everlasting credit, he just sort of shrugged and picked out a couple recipes and made a list for me to take to the store, and then when I got home he, ehr, got cooking.

He was absolutely self-sufficient, except for this exchange:

Him, from the kitchen: Can you come in here?

Me: ....no. Why?

Him: I want you to look at something.

Me: No. Describe your problem.

Him: I think the potatoes you got are bigger than the ones that the recipe calls for.

Me: ...

Him: ...

Me: So what's the problem?

Him: The recipe wants me to cut them in half.

Me: ...

Him: ...

Me: Couldn't you just...cut them into more pieces?

Him: ...oh.

Ha! He has a master's degree.

Happily, good sense and old fashioned careful reading and following of directions won the day, and a lifetime of learned helplessness in domestic affairs didn't stop him from making that gorgeous plate of food, which was cooked perfectly. It was subtle and rich and real and satisfying. The whole experience of him cooking was amazing, actually...sitting in the living room with the girls, smelling garlic and sauteeing peppers and onions and not hearing a peep from him, then sitting down at the table to be served and to eat this lovely, nutritious, delicious meal that he had prepared for us. 

My hat is off to him. And, perhaps sadly for him, his "How many cups of water go into the pot to make macaroni and cheese?" bluff has been called: with just a little skillful guidance from a top-notch book, he hit it out of the park. He is now Friday night dinner man.

His next culinary move is clear: he has to learn to make Tom Kha Gai so that when karma comes calling and I get this ripping flu myself he'll be all ready to nurse me back to health with spicy coconut milk broth, even though I made fun of him on the internet.

Moonshine monkeyshines

I'm trying on "optimist" as a personality trait, so, again, I'm trying to avoid whining about things like "teething" and "wildly unpredictable sleeping patterns" and "living in an enraging shithole of a house that looks like a bomb's went off" and "being so tired you almost fall asleep in the bath". 

There are pretty much always silver linings. I mean, not always. I think sometimes truly horrible things happen to people but as of yet nothing truly horrible has happened to me. So I'll take the half full cup.

I was awake last night with a fussy, disruptive Baby until 1 a.m., but that means we got to take her outside and point out the vanishing moon. Which she didn't understand, but she saw it, which is cool. It turns out that sans seriously telescopic lenses, tripods, huuuuuuuge apertures and filters of some kind, it's hard to photograph the moon.

Sunglasses held over the normal lens will do in a pinch.

And flash photography does have to happen sometimes. Grudgingly.

Anyway.

My children are shrieking and my husband is angry and we have anniversary breakfast to eat and Solstice critter feeding to accomplish, but I wanted to wish everyone a happy new year, at least according to the way the sun-Earth relationship functions in this particular place.

Enjoy.

Tomorrow today

The dreaded TOMORROW became TODAY and all was well. Our car was an easy fix, some medical weirdness was straightened out (pulled out, actually), the dog was started on antibiotics and seems more comfortable, and some family troubles are being soldiered through as I type. Life moves on.

After a very hectic morning and early afternoon taking care of these emergent situations, my dude took Big Kid to soccer practice in the hot hot heat while Baby and I went out to do a little thrifting:

...and a couple of other little things, all for $25.

I particularly love the little strawberry sweater, and if Baby outgrows it before the heat subsides, well, sometimes other people have babies.

The surfeit of toy scores happily highlighted one of the things I love most about my husband: he genuinely enjoys getting down and playing with kids and toys and kids-and-their-toys. It's very charming.

Since the dude was nearly as excited as Big Kid about my finds, we were treated in short order to a Fiddlestix ferris wheel (which really spins):

...and a moving Wedgit frog:

 
Today, over. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Best laid plans

I had plans for yesterday.

But Saturday night Big Kid kept waking up in crying pain and eventually she was running a fever. When she woke the next morning at an astonishing 11:30, just as feverish as she was through the night, she informed me that her "ear felt a little better".

Oh. Well, then.

After three and a half hours of waiting in the after-hours clinic on a holiday weekend, we went home armed for biological warfare.

Fortunately this stuff tastes like candy, so she'll happily suck it down and in a couple days she'll be feeling right as rain.

We bundled her up on an armchair with some "cold cow milk" and let her watch My Neighbor Totoro. She ate nothing all day, put herself down for a two-hour nap in the late afternoon, cried when I washed her hair in the bath, and was asleep again more or less by her regular bedtime.

I would say this is all why I got nothing done, including blogging, but the primary reason for that was the freaking migraine that hit me right at Big Kid's bedtime. So a lot of stuff didn't get done. Like brushing my teeth. Or taking my pants off before bed.

I have high hopes for today.

Sit down

Right now Baby , who is 5 months old as of yesterday, is going through a "frequency period". What this means is that for some reason, whether it's teething or a growth spurt or sheer bloody-mindedness, she wants to nurse constantly. She is generally complaining to me or refusing to sleep if she does not have a nipple in her mouth, and since neither of my girls ever took to the whole pacifier or bottle thing, I am yet again spending a few days with my buttocks glued to an armchair.

While this is happening, The Mongoose tends to get full run of the house, and I find myself coming upon weird tableaux like this on a regular basis:

What is going on here? I have no idea.

While I do not claim to be a tidy person (noooo ho ho...au contraire, as I will demonstrate repeatedly!), I do have some kind of subterranean post-humanoid level of social awareness that leads me to pick up and even apply common household cleansers now and again, and during the times that The Mongoose is on the loose, nothing at all gets done beyond a valiant effort to keep the crap more or less inside the house. This bothers me.

So does this lunch:

GOD. Let's just pop the top off a gallon of milk and drink it straight out of the container, why don't we?

Fortunately, my partner (husband, really, but where's the Free to Be You and Me in that?) decided to take The Mongoose OUT OF THE HOUSE this afternoon, leaving me and the baby behind in blissful milky peace. They walked down to Yashiro Japanese Garden together, to look at koi and steal some rocks:

No, not those rocks, although she's probably thinking about it. She is definitely trying to determine whether or not those are asteroids.

While Big Kid and her dad were away, Baby and I played with her toys:

It's a little rainbow playsilk! This thing is pure silken baby crack. Fun fun fun. I've said it many times and I will say it again, wooden blocks, playsilks and household objects are all the toys any kid really needs, ever. The other stuff's just for show.

But the point of all this: where did this vicious Mongoose come from, anyway? Did she get in through a hole under the kitchen sink? Can she digest bamboo? Because if she can, we could let her go live with the pandas:

She'd like that.