White Christmas!

I didn't take the time to edit this photo, which is why you can see Scary Kidnapper Van in the background. Think of it as ambiance.

We Love Walter

Update

We found an apartment! If they accept our application, we will be moving in three weeks, to a remote southern corner of the city. Further bulletins as events warrant. (Also, many thanks to Taekwando Uncle and his family for loaning us the car that took us to the apartment, which is 90 painful minutes away by bus and a breezy 30 by car.) It has all happened very quickly - we gave notice yesterday, our current landlord showed our apartment 3 hours later, and we saw three places today, including the One We Want. But this is just the beginning - if all goes well, we'll be in our new home 3 weeks from today, and lots of things have to happen very quickly in the interim. Dutch has no idea of what the next month holds in store for her. I'd better go buy some packing tape.

Cardboard Boxes!

It's official; we're moving. The letter goes to the landlord today. I feel kind of crushed under the burden of packing, finding an (affordable and not-awful) apartment, arranging moving, etc... also, school starts in a week and a half. And we have all kinds of appointments in the next month, as I've been catching up on all the stuff I neglected all fall quarter, like having the dentist make sure Dutch's teeth aren't screwing themselves up by filling in the gap (where she had a tooth before she knocked it out last spring). Busy!
But I do like moving. I actually like packing, and I like unpacking. I like exploring a new place. I just wish the logistics - finding a place to move, renting a truck, actually carrying all our junk into and out of the truck - were magically taken care of by a genie. I will proceed to squeeze my eyes shut and wish really really hard.

Words of 2008

Check it out - there's a definition for "walkshed"! I love it!

Allowances

We just started giving Dutch an allowance. Well, I did. Cook isn't fully on board. I just think that given how much of modern life is based on the earning and spending of money, you can't start too early. She already asks for things, she vaguely understands the concept of money, she's subjected to targeted advertising, and I think that means she needs to begin learning how to make financial decisions. It's important to know about money. I didn't know until I was 8 or so that when you wrote a check, you had to eventually pony up real money to back it up. (A side note: I also didn't know until just this minute, when I thought I'd be clever and make a cultural reference, that the Dire Straits song goes "money for nothing and your chicks for free" - I always thought it was "checks for free". I'm apparently a cultural moron, as well as a poor financial decisionmaker.) And I'd like Dutch to know that by the time she's oh...six? Of course, checks won't exist when she's six - you'll just give a DNA sample and they'll withdraw money from your universal account.

One big question is whether to pay the kid for doing chores. (An interesting note on the allowance gender gap - parents pay their sons more to do household chores than they do their daughters.) I'm taking the route that she just gets the allowance, and chores will be part of her work as a member of the family. (That's all hot air, as she has no chores. Getting her to brush her teeth and get to bed at a reasonable hour takes all my energy. Maybe next year...) Anyway, she has to save 20%, share 10%, and use the rest on anything she want outside of the basics (clothes, shelter, food, love, etc.). We opened a bank account for her, and I finagled a freebie piggybank with three sections. So far she's just interested in the putting-money-in-the-slots part, which is fine with me. I'm sure we'll get to the how-to-save-for-the-things-you-want part eventually.

Maybe I'll learn about making good financial choices. I'm pretty sure that grad school wouldn't count.

Hi!

All a Blur

About a week ago, one of my contact lenses disintegrated, and I can't get an eye exam appointment until early January. So I've been wearing my glasses all the time, which always has the effect of making me feel kind of sleepy and detached from reality (probably because the prescription is totally inadequate for my near-blindness). Putting my contacts in has always been part of waking up and getting ready for the day, so when I haven't got the option, I feel like I'm always wearing my pyjamas and haven't brushed my teeth. Also, I'm sick, so I've been generally pretty out of it. This is probably affecting my experience of the holiday. But it has been a good one.

First we cooked.

Then we cleaned.

Then we put on our Fancy Clothes and went to the Nutcracker, where Dutch asked many very loud questions about the plot and the characters' motivations, which I could not answer.


Then we had Christmas Eve dinner guests.

Then we opened presents.
Then we practiced Taekwando.

Merry Christmas!

Some Explanations

Dutch came into the livingroom and sat down with a crossword puzzle and a crayon, and started coloring in the boxes.

Cook: What are you doing, Dutch?
Dutch: I'm just sciencing.
Cook: Really?
Dutch: Yeah. I'm just coloring and thinking. That's sciencing.

Later she lay down on the couch next to Cook and he put his arm around her, whereupon she said "Don't cuddle me. I'm a scientist."

The Night Before the Night Before...

We have had a wonderful holiday. Today we cooked a lot, and Dutch helped with the sweeping, the bathroom-cleaning, the cookie-making, the bread pudding-making, the enchilada-making... really, she was amazingly nice all day. All the Christmas shopping is done (finished yesterday), and now all there is to do (besides more cooking) is fend Dutch from her pile of loot. Today she walked over to the pile of gifts, patted one confidently, and said "I decided I can open just ONE present today."

Tomorrow Dutch and I are going to the Nutcracker (the matinee with recorded music, but it's STILL ridiculously expensive) while Cook cooks, and then we'll come home in time to prepare for our Christmas Eve dinner with some Jewish-Swedish friends. Tomorrow we will eat Swedish holiday buns, some sort of tiny pickled fishies, red cabbage, dill potatoes, turnip-pear soup, beet-and-horseradish salad, rye bread, and blue cheese balls. And pecan pie. And ginger cookies, if we can manage it. (This holiday, we decided to make cleaning secondary to Preparation of Vast Quantities of Food. )

Anyway, it's been a lovely holiday. Lots of sleeping, lots of eating and cooking, and lots of pleasure in Dutch's excitement. She put together her Fancy Clothes outfit for our outing tomorrow - suffice it to say that there will be much sparkling.

Childcare, Work, School, Housekeeping, Miscellaneous

I just bought my planner for 2008. I'm pretty excited. I love making lists. I'm not great at actually executing the items on my lists, but I sure do love to organize them. Last year my brother, in a fit of inspiration, gave me a planner that changed my life - it had the week on the left side, and blank lined paper on the right side. Revolutionary! Schedule on the left, to-do list on the right! It was fantastic! It made me a better person! (No, it really did. Incrementally, but still. And then I discovered the magic of Google Calendar, so I think I've really made progress this year.) This year I couldn't find it at the place he bought it last year, and I panicked. I couldn't find it at another bookstore, and then another! I was overwhelmed by Christmas shoppers! Dutch started whining about how she NEEDS a Thomas the Tank Engine book that talks! I almost whacked her over the head with the damn "book"! We retreated home and I started shopping online, and I discovered that what I REALLY needed (oh, thank you, internets!) was an even more elaborate planner. So I ordered it. 2008 is mine, divided neatly into FIVE categories of to-do lists.

Whee! The Box!

Problem Kids

Cook and I discussed our conversation with Dutch's teacher recently, and we realized that it made us both feel much better not only about Dutch's daycare situation, but also about Dutch herself. We had, to some degree, internalized the idea that Dutch was a Problem for her teachers - an unusually inflexible and whiny kid who required extra work. Now we can let go of that and see her as a regular kid, no more or less demanding than any other.

One of my friends expressed relief that Dutch has a much better "fit" with this daycare or this classroom. While this is true, I think the key element of her success at the new place is that it is a better "fit" for EVERY kid. The teachers are trained, they're paid fairly well, and there are plenty of them, so they have time in and out of the classroom to take an extra minute to resolve a problem or preempt a future problem. At the other place, the teachers were pretty much triaging all the time, and they were not able to be flexible and deal with the kids individually. A good daycare makes sure that everyone fits, and that everyone has a positive experience. We are very lucky to have landed in swanky-daycare-land after a brief stint in okay-daycare-land, and it is awful that most people don't.

The fact that we had internalized the previous teachers' perspective on Dutch is alarming, too. Dutch isn't even particularly challenging in a classroom environment. She's a whiny, draggy pain in the ass, yes, but she's not biting anybody or throwing stuff, and she's able to explain herself relatively clearly. There must be lots and lots more families with fewer resources and/or bigger behavior problems who are seeing their children as Problems when all they really need is a better childcare situation. If you start seeing your small child as a Problem, that is inevitably going to color the way you treat her and the expectations you set for her. We came into this new daycare braced for more issues to arise, and when the new teacher looked at me in puzzlement after I mentioned that Dutch had struggled at the previous place, it lifted a weight from my heart. Dutch can now be just the kid who drives ME crazy, instead of the kid who drives EVERYBODY crazy.

Updates, which you have been awaiting with bated breath

1) Dutch's collarbone is healing nicely. She seems to be bothered by it only if she bangs it or tries to lift her arm much above the shoulder.
2) The camera is fixed.
3) The new booster seat has arrived. Dutch thinks the box is The Funnest Thing Ever.
4) I finally wrote some holiday cards. I may get them done by Valentine's Day.
5) Today Cook and I met with the head teacher in Dutch's new daycare class, at our request. We wanted to make sure they weren't having the same problems with her that the last daycare had. The teacher wrote us a little report, from which I quote: "Dutch has such a warm and inviting personality that we love to see in the classroom. She seems to enjoy being at school and being with her friends and teachers. Dutch is always excited to try new things and to visit new places in the school and community." Cook and I were kind of shocked. We got so used to hearing negative things about Dutch. I actually was at first worried that she was confusing Dutch with some other kid, but then she said some things that revealed that she actually does know our kid ("Dutch sometimes has trouble asking other kids to play with her, and asks the teachers to ask for her") , and then I was just deeply relieved. My daughter is not a problem for the teachers! They like her! They really like her!
6) Dutch has been practicing Broken-Collarbone-Tae-Kwon-Do, complete with shouting.
7) Four more workdays until my vacation.

FYI

I got a 3.67 GPA for the quarter! I'm very pleased that I managed to avoid getting expelled from the program (a B- average gets you booted). However, Cook maintained his perfect 4.0, so I'm going to have to work harder next quarter to sabotage his studying efforts. Damn the man!

Giving

I'm having my usual holiday kerfuffle, in which I get all tied up in my conflicting feelings and end up being paralyzed and not sending any cards or presents. Leaving aside my essential tendency toward inertia, my miserliness, and the totally-fried state of my mind, I think the problem is that I can't quite shake loose the notion that I should be truly generous every December in a way that I don't come close to reaching.

A couple of years ago I "adopted" a kid to whom to give gifts (through an organization supporting families in which grandparents are raising their grandchildren), at the prompting of a more generous friend, and that was both fun (I got to buy her NEW STUFF!!!) and totally depressing (the kids on the list asked for things like socks, sweatpants, rainboots...). This year I am pitching in in a VERY small way toward a group "adoption" of a family (through another organization), and it's also depressing. The single mother of three asked for pink towels, and a set of sheets for her bed, because she DOESN'T HAVE ANY SHEETS. And she asked for toys for the baby, because he DOESN'T HAVE ANY TOYS. This just kills me. I'm feeling all sorry for myself because I can't buy the expensive shoes I want, and I can't buy that fabulous German riding toy thingy for Dutch. Poor me. We're on a very tight budget... for excessively-educated-people-from-upper-middle-class-families. Because we are EEPFUMCF, we have sheets. Several sets, of the high-quality variety that will never ever ever wear out. Lots of towels (some monogrammed). No debt. A Christmas tree (sort of) already surrounded by lovely gifts from lovely friends and family. A child who will not have to suffer (too much) for our failure to make money. Nobody in our home is lacking for linens.

So... I'm:
-Buying some cranberry sauce and cereal for a family that has no sheets.
-Feeling fortunate to have that lovely pile of gifts.
-Wondering what I'm going to do about the fact that a family has no sheets, and why I let myself ignore things like that so much of the time.
-Speculating about how to joyfully celebrate the holiday season in a way that doesn't feel insanely consumer-y, selfish, or sanctimonious.
-Pondering the daunting task of writing holiday cards...
-Wishing we had our camera fixed so I could post some pictures of our fixer-upper gingerbread house - there's only so much navel-gazing I can do in one evening.

Holidays

Items in our apartment:
1. Gingerbread house, ineptly assembled from a kit
2. Christmas lights, draped over the bay window
3. Dowel tree (handcrafted by Papa Big Cook), smothered in small ornaments
4. Very small live coniferous tree of some kind, in a pot, smothered in small ornaments
5. Miscellaneous large ornaments, hung on anything that will support them
6. Creche figures, probably coated in lead paint
7. Many small satsuma mandarins
8. Sugar cookies, left over from Decorating Night
9. Half a jug of cider, also left over from Decorating Night
10. Lots of little red candles in little red candle-holders
11. Small wreath
12. Blooming Christmas cactus
13. Three stockings, two handmade (one well, one not well)

It's Holiday Time! Dutch is deliriously excited.

Looming

Dutch is getting big. She wears clothes sized for 4-6-year-olds and has grown out of her enormous carseat. Today when I picked her up from daycare, she was wearing the extra clothes I had stashed in her cubby a month ago (due to an incident involving a baby doll getting a "bath"), and the shirt was riding up over her navel and the pants hovering well over her ankles.

Strangers see her as a dim, poorly-coordinated 5-year-old with some behavior problems, and I think even people who know her age expect more from her because of her enormity. When she's the biggest kid in kindergarten, they'll probably nickname her Moose.

Last Night

Premonitions

So I came home this evening and found the apartment empty. I figured Cook and Dutch had gone across the street to our friendly local co-op to buy an essential dinner ingredient. I poked around, tidying up, for bout 20 minutes. They didn't come home. I started to wonder where they might be. I remembered that both the front door and the apartment door had been unlocked when I came home, which is weird. I remembered that the bathroom cabinets had been opened and several items had been strewn on the floor (not that weird, given that we have a 3-year-old). I started to feel a little worried. I went out in the hall and looked around for clues. I saw that all of Dutch's shoes were still here. I started to freak out. I looked in the dining room and saw a note that I had written earlier was placed on top of a heap of other papers, and seemed to have been written over. I turned on the light. I read the note. This is what it said:
"Dutch broke ARM - gone to hospital."

I freaked out. I called the hospital. I finally located them and talked to Cook, who relieved me by explaining that Dutch had fallen off our bed while watching a movie (TV is DANGEROUS!!!!) and they were about to get x-rays. They had gotten a lucky ride from a friend who happened to be in the area and mobile when Cook called. I made my way to the hospital by agonizingly slow public transit, and found Dutch enjoying juice and crackers and a pile of stickers. She's pretty miserable, though. Turns out she broke her clavicle, not her arm, and doesn't even have a cast, but it HURTS. Also, it totally ruined Cook's plans and mine for studying for the next two days - we both have finals tomorrow and the day after - and completely traumatized us both. Dutch heaped extra suffering on Cook by informing him, moments after the fall, that it was HIS FAULT for not being in the room to help her. He was also anxious, particularly after the ER doctor inquired about Dutch's missing tooth, that the hospital might send a social worker to confiscate Dutch on grounds of neglect or abuse. (They didn't. Yet.)

Apparently, Dutch was pretty worried about what the doctor would do to her. She told Cook tearfully "I don't want to have a mechanical arm!" and he tried to reassure her that it was unlikely. That reminded me of the time my little brother broke his arm, and there was some concern that he might have damaged the "growth plates." Of course, we made lots of jokes about how he'd have one teeny little Tyrannosaurus-type arm. I don't think he thought that was anywhere near as funny as I did. So cruel...

Anyway, it was awful. Seeing her little white (red-eyed) face when I came into the hospital room almost knocked me to the floor. I so wish it could be my clavicle. (But hey! A new vocabulary word for Dutch!)

Planning for the Future

This weekend, we had a houseguest, my Taekwondo Uncle, who was in town to take (and pass!) the test to become a third-degree black belt. Dutch loved every second of his visit, followed him everywhere, and even waited patiently outside the bathroom for him to come out. When he left in the morning, she went into our bedroom, crawled into the bed and cried. When asked why she was so sad, she said "I really miss Taekwondo Uncle!" She also got to see some of his test and attend a banquet of taekwondo-ers, which included a demonstration by a bunch of kids. She announced her intention to do taekwondo when she grows up "but I also want to be a real doctor. I will just do taekwondo so I can travel around. I will hit people, but they won't be able to hit me."

Congratulations, Taekwondo Uncle!

I just want everyone who reads this to know that I have not lost internet access, or gotten desperately ill. I'm just busy. I hope to post more after I get through finals next week. I have all sorts of interesting topics, like "Just How Much Content Can A Small Child's Bowel Hold?" - stay tuned for next week!

One More Photo

This is what happened after the Thanksgiving festivities. Asleep at 6 PM. We did take her out of the carseat and put her in the bed.

We Had a Great Thanksgiving. How Was Yours?

Logorrhemail

One weird thing I've noticed in my return to academia is that my writing style has changed substantially. I write an occasional thankyou note with a real pen and paper (and yes, Farmor, I'm going to sit down with Dutch tomorrow to write those late thankyous for her birthday extravaganza), but otherwise all my writing in the last 6 years has consisted of emailing (and now blogging, which for me is just email writ large). Now I write everything as if it's an email. My essays and "memos" for school are meandering and full of chatty contractions and cheap wit. I have to go over them repeatedly to formalize the language, impose structure and extract the jokes. Luckily, one of my professors is an email-friendly sort of person, and she likes my writing fine. The other professor is more formal and academic, and I have to work much harder to organize and tighten up my writing for him.

The same style drift affects the people around me. My new boss writes sloppily, and she also writes her emails all in lowercase. I do that when I email friends, but she does it even when she's emailing a stranger for professional reasons. One of the people who applied for her job actually sent me an email with about six smiley-face emoticons in it. Not just the regular punctuation emoticon :) but an actual smiley face. Ugh.

Well-Intentioned Parenting Gone Wildly Astray

At dinner tonight, Dutch said this:

"Daddy, don't let me drink too much juice. If I drink too much juice, I will get fat, and then I will die. And I don't want to die today."

The BigTattle-tale

Dutch weighs 37 pounds and is 39 inches tall. She truly is a giant; I'm not just making this up. She also appears to have a crush on her pediatrician and lounged casually on the exam table, making idle chitchat about how her mom doesn't exercise enough, while the doctor prodded and peered at her. The saddest thing we learned at the appointment is that Dutch no longer likes getting a shot.

I was actually pretty impressed with Dutch, who managed the whole event with virtually no verbal or physical support from me. I did help out and tie her little gown in the back for her. (Those little gowns with the cartoons on them are so depressing - they inevitably make me think of kids who spend a lot of time in the hospital wearing them.) But otherwise she was pretty much in charge - she answered questions, she followed directions. She even learned a new vocabulary word - "otoscope"- and drew a very nice face on the chalkboard for the doctor. When asked if she poops in the toilet, she changed the subject very deftly.

Big Girls Wear Ponytails

Mean Mommy

Dutch and I spend the afternoon and evening together today, and I was not being patient with her. She was dawdling and taunting me (she has a knack for suddenly launching into deliberately provocative behavior RIGHT before we're supposed to be leaving for somewhere) and I was pissed off. My good-parenting reservoirs were dry. She was traipsing lightheartedly down the stairs, while I fumed at the bottom, waiting for her (AS ALWAYS!!!!!!), and I said "Come on, honey, we have to go" (in my mean angry voice, so that "honey" didn't sound endearing at all), and she said "Mom, I am COMING" in a very calm, firm voice, like she was my mom and I was a bratty impatient child. It caught me offguard, and tipped my angry mood enough that I had to smile at my goofball daughter, and she said, her voice full of astonishment, "Mom, you're smiling!". Like it was an incredibly rare and improbable event. I can't believe my daughter is surprised when I smile at her.

I made the resolutions I've made countless times before. I am going to be patient. I am not going to indulge my anger at her. I am going to give myself timeouts. I am going to smile more. I am. I don't think choosing to be a parent means signing away your right to be angry, to make mistakes, to be resentful and mean, and generally to have bad moments, but I think it SHOULD involve making an effort not to make your child suffer for your own problems. I am overwhelmed right now, and I feel that it's okay for Dutch to see that I'm grumpy and tired and having a hard time, and that it's part of life to feel that way sometimes. But she should never feel like any of it is her fault, and I think I do sometimes make her feel that way. Not that I would ever say anything like that, or consciously think it. (Which is not to say that I don't think daily about how much easier it was to be busy before I had a dawdling child in tow.) But sometimes I let my general stress and anxiety pump up my small frustrations with her, and she must feel it. So I have to find a way to work out my feelings without having to involve her. Also, apparently we need to start getting ready about an hour before we actually need to leave.

Sleep Dreams

By the way, Dutch isn't sick anymore. She got nearly 15 hours of sleep in about 18 hours that night, though, and woke up more cheerful than we've seen her in weeks. Which brings me to the main problem we're having now - she's chronically sleep-deprived. She has not napped at home for a year (except when she falls asleep in the stroller/bus/car on the way home from somewhere, and sleeps through the transfer to her bed), but she was napping (short naps) at her daycare all summer, 4 days a week. When we switched to the new half-day daycare, we thought she'd just go to bed earlier and that would be that. She is getting to bed about an hour earlier, but she's also having to wake up earlier on the new schedule, and she's clearly missing the nap time. We're not sure if it's just the quantity of sleep, or if it's the timing of the afternoon nap. But she seems to be exhausted all the time, and we think (and hope) that her crankiness these days is due to that rather than a personality trait. The other day she fell asleep on her bed at 6:30 PM, about 2 minutes before we were planning to get her into the bathtub, in a weird kneeling prostrate position, like she was praying to the gods of sleep (Somnolia? Oblivius?).

Anyway, just as we started worrying about this, a study came out indicating that children's sleep deprivation is tied to likelihood of obesity. There's plenty of other data indicating that most American kids need more sleep than they're getting, to make them happier and healthier. We've got to figure out a way to get Dutch some rest. Come to think of it, we could all use some rest.

Big Kids Are Greedy

Parenting a kid in daycare/school has a whole new layer of pitfalls. I'm accountable now to a large group of teachers and other parents, and I have to demonstrate to them that I am a decent parent, and a decent person. I just learned that when a child has a birthday, the parents are expected to provide "a healthy snack" for the whole class. This is even worse than having to provide cupcakes, which I might actually enjoy making and eating. I'm not even sure what exactly I should be making. Celery sticks? (Without peanutbutter - the building is a certified Nut-Free Zone, which is an excellent policy.) Can I go so far as carrot cake? With organic ingredients? With molasses instead of sugar? I'll have to inquire tomorrow. Maybe they have a list of guidelines.

Dutch is just excited about the prospect of wearing The Birthday Crown. She also told me this morning that when she's three, she's not going to share anything with anybody. (She seems to think this will be a big change from her oh-so-charitable behavior now.)

Dis Ease

Dutch is sick. She has a fever, and she took a very long mid-afternoon nap. Just the fact that she fell asleep at home, without any effort on our part, is a major signal that something's wrong. She seems okay - she's playing in her room now - but she's blazingly hot. Dutch doesn't get sick very often. Every time she gets sick with anything but an ordinary cold, I act pretty casual about it, and I truly do believe that most childhood illnesses are no big deal, but in my secret parent-heart I am convinced that she's mortally ill, and that this is the beginning of a rapid decline leading to certain death. She had a scary vaccination reaction once (at least it was scary to us, and made me pretty mad at a medical establishment that dismisses as a "mild side effect" the experience of having your floppy and fiery-feverish 15-month-old vomit repeatedly in the middle of the night) , and I was absolutely convinced she was going to die within hours. Perhaps I should not read parenting magazines.

Family, Music, Late Nights, Mortality. Etcetera.

Last night after class I went to a club. This is a shockingly out-of-character thing for me to do, which I did because my brother's band was playing. I had a really good time, which was also kind of shocking. Not that I don't love my brother (I do) and not that I don't enjoy his company (I do), but I have always been in many ways a boring old lady, and lurking around a venue late at night with musicians drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, and then listening to loud music, isn't exactly my cup of tea. A cup of tea, actually, is my cup of tea. Also listening to quiet music.
But I did have fun. I really enjoyed seeing my brother. I had a lot of thoughts while talking to him and then watching him perform... I'm too braindead (as usual, these days) to put them together with any kind of coherence. None of these thoughts were new, but they were still nice to review.
1) He's getting old. He looks like a grownup now, and all his bandmates do too.
2) He's been playing in bands for a decade.
3) He's really good at the whole thing - the music part, the social part, the management part, and all the other parts I don't know about. If I had thought about it when he was five and determinedly practicing his breakdancing moves in the living room, I would have realized then that he would be really good at the whole thing. He's pursued this career with impressive commitment and competence.
4) We're totally different people (with different cups of tea), and that's not only okay, it's really good. I'm glad I have him.
5) When he's concentrating, he looks an awful lot like Dutch when she's concentrating. I think it's something about the mouth.

These thoughts all, of course, led to many thoughts about ME, because that's what I mostly think about. My aging, my mortality, my career (and lack thereof), my choices, my family plans, etc.

Anyway, I really enjoyed it. I tagged around with him for a while (and learned that musicians on tour are dreadfully boring, just like everybody at work, and mostly smoke, talk about where they've been on tour, try to remember if that venue with the weird bar was at the show in Albuquerque or Denver, and strive to procure food and drink, including tea, which one guy brewed using a little electric kettle he takes on tour), and then I watched his set. I stood in the audience (I got a lot of weird looks, since I was alone and dressed in my very best frumpy semi-professional outfit, due to a meeting earlier in the day) and felt terribly excited and proud of him, like a weird cross between a parent and a groupie. My brother, the rock star.

Cook stayed home and put the kid to bed while I was out frivolously enjoying getting out of my rut, seeing my brother, and contemplating life. But I got him a t-shirt.

Scholarly

Today I took vacation time so I could spend the day at school. I feel so Student-y. I came to the department, pondered my class schedule for the next three years, met with my adviser for the first time, found my student mailbox (yes, halfway through the quarter - it was empty), wrote my takehome midterm, and made an appointment to meet the Dean (on the advice of Big Papa Cook, who has already schmoozed the Dean for me - I expect he will offer me a job on the spot). I'm using the computer lab for the first time! I put a document on my little piece of the university server! I am a Student! And I have so much time! I can work on my midterm, take a break, walk around, visit the drinking fountain, explore the building... I love it.

I forgot! I finally have a boss! She started yesterday, and I have already passed her a huge heap of stuff that was dumped on me, which makes me feel terribly lighthearted and also contributes to today's general feeling of reckless hedonism. Now we have to negotiate our working relationship while I train her to do stuff I sort of know how to do - it's going to be really weird. But who cares! I only work 25 hours a week now!

So I was glorying in my leisurely academic life this morning, and then my adviser informed me that unless I plan to take five years to complete the degree, I really ought to take 9 credits next quarter, and 12 credits in the spring, making my measly 8 credits this quarter look like a walk in the park. These are the considerations I have to consider while mapping myself a course through the degree program:
1) Do I want to make the effort to cram in all my core courses before next winter in order to be able to take the practice workshop along with my cohort rather than wait a whole extra year?
2) What concentration do I want to do?
3) How will I manage to spread things out so I'm averaging 18 credits a year in order to keep Dutch at the wonderful and cheap university daycare until she starts kindergarten in fall 2010?
4) How will I fit in a 400-hour internship?
5) When on earth will we have a second kid?

So many questions, and all subsidiary to the big one - What Am I Going to Do With My Life?

Maybe the Dean will know.

Catching up

I woke up at 5:11 AM, courtesy of the time change, and decided to go ahead and start my day, in order to get a wee bit of free time to myself. We have to get up earlier now in order to maximize our limited daycare time, so we're taking advantage of the time change to train ourselves to be the early risers that we naturally aren't.

There are all kinds of things I haven't been writing about.
1) If all goes well, I'll get a new boss sometime in the next week or two, and things will get less hectic.
2) We're trying to jumpstart our social life, particularly the kids-and-parents part of it, partially because we're going to need playdates and babysitting swapping, with Dutch home in the afternoons, and partially because Dutch's birthday is coming up (this is NOT a sneaky bid for presents, by the way - that kid has more stuff than you'd think any non-home-owner would need) and we realize we don't have any invitee prospects to a kid-based party. So we're quickly reviving some friendships from last winter's Indoor Park adventures, in the hopes of being able to assemble a critical mass of invitees to satisfy Dutch's desire for "a BIIIIIIIIG party!"
Also, we're lonely.
3) Dutch's new daycare is fantastic. The only problem with it is the part-timeness of it. Otherwise, it's like (nearly) any parent's fantasy of a daycare. Bright, cheerful, colorful, stocked with books and the fixings for interesting activities, staffed by loving teachers with lots of student teacher support. Cook says it smelled like gingerbread when he walked in Friday morning, and he really wanted to spend the day there himself. The part-time kids (second-class citizens that they are) are removed from the classroom at lunch time and taken from the library to await their parents. The LIBRARY! Which is stocked with books and a dollhouse and comfy spots for reading! The teachers say Dutch is doing great, and she seems perfectly happy to be there when she's there - she never cries when we leave, and she never wants to leave in the afternoon. (She's the oldest kid in the class, and substantially more verbal than the rest of them, but she likes being in charge.) Overall, though, she's definitely sad about leaving behind her friends, and cranky about the change. I expect she'll settle in fairly quickly, and then we intend to keep her there until kindergarten (three long years away!), but she's had a lot of transition for one little introvert.

Working Child

Today I took Dutch with me on a bus trip to do a land use inventory (this involves filling out a form for each parcel of land - we had about 85 parcels to inventory), and she was heroic. The poor kid. She's chronically under-rested and under-attended these days. After bravely sitting in the stroller for an hour and a half, looking for streetlights and inquiring loudly whether passersby were homeless or not, while I very slowly inspected many many ugly houses without sidewalks (what's WRONG with these people?!), she finally started vigorously complaining "Mama, you're taking TOO LONG!!!!!" and only cheered up when I took her to an Asian mall and let her hang out for a while in one of those terrific trinket stores filled with Hello Kitty pens and teddy bear Kleenex box covers. I bought her a $3 sheet of dressup stickers that are like paperdolls, except not reuseable. I figured that was cheaper than paying a babysitter.
Then we went home, and Cook took her to the grocery store while I typed up my inventory. A never-ending whirl of fun for this kid!

A Long Month For Everyone

Today was a very long day for all of us, coming at the end of a string of long days. Today Dutch started her new daycare, which is only part-time, so she comes home for lunch, and doesn't get a nap. (Not that we're denying her naps - it's just virtually impossible to get her to nap outside the peer-pressure-zone of daycare.) Today, after an early wakeup and an exhausting morning adapting to a completely new place, she fell asleep in mid-draw on the kitchen floor at 6, while Cook was making dinner. He tried to wake her, and thought he'd succeeded, but she fell asleep again when he left her so he could save the burning meal. She's asleep on the couch right now, with a very full bladder and an empty belly. We're not sure what exactly to do with her.

However, I know exactly how she felt. I'm pretty sure that I would fall asleep if I lay down on the floor. But today I turned in a grant proposal, made it to class, and left work fairly sure that I will have a new boss come Monday, which will mean that I can cut my hours back and stop doing two jobs (both badly). So if I can just make it through the 8 billion pages of reading, the takehome exam, and the land use inventory I have to do this weekend, everything will be okay!

First Day

Tomorrow Dutch starts at a new daycare. The university daycare, at which we've wanted her all along (it has an excellent reputation, is overflowing with eager student teachers, and is supercheap for students). The catch is that she's going to be part-time - mornings only. We can manage it for now, and hopefully we can patch together some kind of aftercare. We accepted the opening partly because part-timers get first whack at full-time openings, so it puts us at the top of the waitlist, and gives us a chance of getting her into a full-time slot sometime before fall 2009, which is when we were expecting to get in. At any rate, tomorrow's her first day. She doesn't seem to really have grasped that she's left the old place forever, though I did make her say goodbye to teachers and friends. Cook and I haven't really grasped it ourselves - they called to offer the spot on Friday, and we made the decision Monday. I'm not sure what to expect with the transition. The teachers seem really nice, and the place is lovely, and I expect that they will handle her better than the other teachers, so it could go smoothly. Or not...

In other news, Dutch and I attended a Halloween party at the last day of her old daycare. She is currently sitting in the livingroom with our three pumpkins, eating her loot from the party. Lots of firsts - first M&Ms, first Milky Way, first Hershey Bar, first Milk Duds, first Halloween binge. I stole one minicandy when she wasn't looking (and slipped it into my own bag to eat tomorrow!), but she scored those 4 minicandies, a little box of raisins, a little bag of animal crackers, and an apple. I agreed that she could eat all of it, as long as she shared with me. My first vicarious Halloween.

Halloween

Amendment

I should clarify that I didn't actually mean in my last post that I'm tempted to drown my child. (Given Cook's feelings about water conservation, there's rarely enough water in the bath for that purpose, anyway.) I just sometimes am tempted to wash her hair by force.

I just waved to Dutch and Cook as they trotted off to the bus stop, heading to the zoo for Howl-O-Ween. Dutch is wearing her construction worker costume, minus the helmet (it's waiting at the postoffice for pickup). She's proudly carrying her lunchbox/toolbox, which is full of impressively realistic cardboard-and-duct-tape tools made for her by her handy uncle and his girlfriend, who visited last weekend and thrilled Dutch by playing crazy chase games and taking her tools appropriately seriously. She also learned to make all the appropriate sound effects for each tool, and she knows how to use all the tools correctly. (Antarctic Uncle is a stickler for the proper care and use of tools.) She's ready for Halloween.

A side note: one of the crazy Antarctic Uncle chase games transmogrified weirdly into The Flesh-Eating-Seal Game, in which one person brandishes a cardboard seal at the other person and yells "I'm going to eat your flesh!" - except that Dutch keeps saying "flush," which makes her sound like a demented plumber. Yesterday she yelled "mama, the seal is going to crack you open and drink your flush!" which made me feel both appalled and totally amused. A combination of emotions I'm pretty familiar with when it comes to Dutch.

Nobody Wins

Okay, first of all - PEOPLE!!! DON'T CALL US BEFORE 8 AM ON A WEEKEND!!!

Though I guess I should be grateful to whomever called us and then hung up, because now I'm awake and Cook and Dutch are still asleep, which means I have a few moments of sweet, sweet Personal Time. Which I'm going to spend blogging.

On to my topic!

I am ashamed to admit that I often have a hard time remembering that Dutch and I are actually on the same side. When she wants to do something, and I want her to do something else, it's way too easy for me to get locked into the notion that I have to win the battle.

If I want to go out, and she wants to stay home, pretending to be a drummer playing "grasshopper music" (lingering confusion from my attempt to explain about the music of the Beatles), I frequently feel like I have to grit my teeth and grimly drag her out the door, goddamnit, regardless of how important it actually is. Part of this, I think, is the unconscious desire to follow the parenting advice to not spoil your child or let her manipulate you. But I think that's pretty silly advice. It's her job to figure out how to manipulate the world around her, and it's my job to identify what I think are the important unbendable rules, and then decide what's worth battling over. She has so little power, and I think it's fine for her to know that she has some power over me. My policy is that I pick carefully what issues to take a stand on, and then stand firm on those issues. If I say no, I have to maintain the no. In theory, this makes perfect sense to me. If she wants to go three days without washing her hair, that's okay with me, as long as the rest of her gets washed. In real life, because I'm not really a nice person, when I tell her cheerfully that it's time for bath and she defiantly (and whinily!) yells "I won't wash my hair!!" I look at her matted little head, and I kind of want to dunk it in the bathwater by force. I haven't done anything that awful, but I frequently get into ridiculous pissing matches with her, in which we're both refusing to back down. Realizing that I'm more or less at the same emotional and social level as a grubby-haired 3-year-old is pretty humbling.

Scrambling

I haven't had time to think, let alone post. Which rules out any faint hope of a thoughtful post. Also I should be washing dishes right now, or working on the presentation I'm supposed to give tomorrow. Not writing randomly just because I feel the need to post SOMETHING.

Anyway, we're hanging in there. Dutch and I have major battles every morning due to the conflict between my desire to get out the door at a reasonable hour and her desire to stay in her room all day and play with her stuff. There has been a miserable amount of yelling and crying on both sides.

Magical Thinking

Tonight Dutch told me that her stuffed cow, Tillie, protects her from foxes and owls, just in case. Also, Tillie "gives me instructions about how to not cry and be scared when I hear a noise. Like an ambillyance."

Oh Yeah

I have reached an exciting new level of busy-ness. Today I bought myself some chocolate and I was so busy that I FORGOT TO EAT IT. I think this is unprecedented. Perhaps I'll get so busy that I'll get thin. Though I very much doubt it'd be worth it.

I came into Dutch's room to find that she had laid out an imaginary friend on the floor, ready to sit down to a teaparty. We really need to get some friends. Though probably a kid wearing that expression and brandishing a plastic butter knife should be expected to have only imaginary friends.

Tired!!!!!!!!

Wooooeeee! I'm tired! So tired! Wow! This is what I did last Thursday:

Woke up. Prepared for day. Wrestled child out of the apartment, under protest. Bussed and walked child to daycare. Walked and bussed to a meeting. Met. Bussed to the office. Worked frantically for an hour. Walked and trolleyed to a meeting with a professor at school. Met. Trolleyed and walked back to the office. Worked frantically for 20 minutes. Walked to a lobbying meeting with legislative staff. Lobbied. Left early in order to walk and trolley back to school for class. Got a ride home from a classmate (yay!). Ate dinner (prepared by exhausted husband). Wrestled child into bed. Did homework. Went to sleep.

I used FOUR forms of transit! Trolley, bus, car, and feet. I am disappointed that I did not fit in any biking or at least light rail. This week, I will try to do better...

But my point is that I'm tired. Perhaps I should not have signed up for 35 hours of work (in which I must do my own 30-hour-a-week job, the ED's fulltime job, and hire a new ED) plus 8 credits. We'll make it through the quarter, but my relationships are being compromised.

Tomorrow I have a work meeting, two school meetings, and five hours of class. So tired!!

Milestone!

Dutch has claimed that her art was representational before ("this is a person wearing stilts!"), but suddenly she is producing actual pictures of things that are vaguely recognizable as the things she says they are.

This is an octopus:

Apparently it's got some major mutation problems, and is hanging out with some pretty spooky creatures. But look! It has eyes! She's a genius! (She also draws spiders. I'm impressed - I think it's a smart move at this developmental stage to specialize in things that can be drawn as blobs with sticks attached.)

Also, note that the octopus has been given pride of place on our fridge, using the very best magnets.

Time to Do Some Chores

I took this picture to show to a friend who sent the shirt (a new favorite) from Newfoundland (hi KP!), but then I opened it up in Photoshop, and realized that the notable thing about it (other than the way that Dutch looks oddly like a frat boy with very strange taste in clothes) is the profound mess in her room. The place is an utter disaster, every which way. This is our fault, as decorating, cleaning and tidying are not high on our priority list, and we've never put any kind of cleaning chore system in place. I guess it's time.

Babies

A friend of mine became a father this week. I got pictures of the kid (let's call him Tiger) and they thrilled me. The new daddy has been a staunch and beloved friend of mine since we were kids ourselves, and I'm very happy for him (and Tiger's mother, who is a lovely and astoundingly competent person - somebody who I expect will be entirely undaunted by the upside-down-inside-outy-ness of having a new baby on hand). But mostly I'm just thrilled to see Tiger himself, brand new (and sometimes yelling). Babies are so spooky and exciting - here he is! He's here! We know NOTHING about him! (Except that being bathed apparently pisses him off. ) He's all in there, and his personality will slowly be revealed and developed over the next two decades or more, and we get to see it unfold! We are so lucky to have him in the world!

Anyway, Tiger, congratulations, and welcome! I look forward to meeting you someday, and I hope and wish all the best for you.

An addendum to my musings on boys. I was doing my homework in the dining room while Cook got Dutch ready for bed. I could hear that she was sad, and I listened to this:

Dutch: Daddy, Q and J said they were going to tell my mama!
Cook: Oh?
D: Q and J said they were going to tell MY OWN MAMA!
C: What were they going to tell her?
D: They said they were going to tell her... (an ascending wail of misery) that I WAS A BAD GIRL!!! They said I was a BAD GIRL!!!

I cried. MY OWN GIRL! Those little monsters! I feel like storming into the daycare and shaking the snot out of Q and J.

I know that Q and J are actually perfectly nice normal kids. I know that perfectly nice normal kids are mean and weird and scheming and that Dutch will get her little heart bruised and broken many times over (and do some bruising and breaking of her own) before she even reaches the terrible shoals of adolescence. But I really don't know how I'm going to weather it. I can tell her she's the best girl in the world, and that she should just leave Q and J alone when they're cruel, but it doesn't really help. She wants to play with them, and she likes them, and they know it, which is why they're testing their power over her by being cruel. They have a lot of power, like all loved ones do.

Before we put Dutch into daycare, we thought Dutch was really wishing for interaction with other little girls who like to play ornate pretend games with dolls. In the last few weeks, it's become increasingly clear that she actually much prefers the company of the roughhousing boys. The teachers (and Dutch herself) tell us that she spends most of her time running around with J and Q (the adorable biter). Dutch says that when J and Q hit her too much, she plays instead with R, a little girl who likes to play ornate pretend games with dolls.

In spite of all my lip service to the notion of not wanting to trap Dutch in any fixed idea of her, I repeatedly get ideas about Dutch, and they get fixed very quickly. She is not, however, always the same. She does like to play ornate pretend games with dolls, but she likes to play them by herself, at home, where she has complete control over the scenarios. At daycare, she apparently prefers to play in the rockpit with the boys, where the subtle arts of social negotiation are somewhat less subtle, and easier to master. (Also, she's learning to say "shut up" and say that things and people are "stupid" and "stinky." Not that pottymouthing is the exclusive province of boys.) Must...unfix...convictions...

Fall Weekend

We are winding up a crazy weekend that was unusually social and strangely thematic. We made and canned applesauce on Saturday, and on Sunday we went to one of those bizarro, sprawling places where they sell pumpkins and hayrides and tours of the corn maze and whatnot.

Dutch threw some fantastic whining fits in the vast pumpkin field (she was ticked off that we didn't spring for a ride on the Cow Train, which we totally would have sprung for had it actually been as cool as it sounds), but cheered up when we got back to the "farm" and she got to climb on a hay-bale mountain. (Also crawl through the 20-feet-long parent-freakout-inducing culvert pipes placed under the haybale-mountain.) And see the animals in the "Animal Barn," which featured a dead goat. (Seriously. They removed it in a cardboard box while we were there. Dutch didn't notice, fortunately.) It was all both creepy and delightful, and I felt like I was getting to fill some sort of gap in my childhood that I hadn't even realized existed. Picking pumpkins out of a HUGE field, with lots of other people! Cool! We got ourselves $5 worth of pumpkins and some pictures of Dutch ogling squash.

And stepping on rotten pumpkins.

And admiring the peculiar photo op. Aren't these usually supposed to involve bodies for your face? Or is the kid supposed to be a worm in the pumpkin?

Also, we got to ride the tractor hayride, which was very exciting for Dutch, and almost made up for missing out on the Cow Train.

My Brain

Our Saturday Autumnal Adventure in Applesauce took place courtesy of our friend the Wordsmith, who is smart and funny, cooks gorgeously, and does not suffer fools. She also loves to play games like Scrabble, and we played a wordy game with her while we waited for the applesauce to simmer down. I was expecting that the Wordsmith would win, but I really had no idea how very badly I was going to lose. At the end of the game, this is how the points fell out:
Wordsmith - 465
Cook - 263
Me - 212
This was utterly humiliating. I used to pride myself on being good at word games. Cook beats me more often than not, but I have still managed to maintain my self-image as a wordy sort of person. Either my brain has rotted due to senility and disuse, or I am not a wordy sort of person at all. More of a grunty and pointy sort of person, apparently.

Anticipating Spooky

Dutch is excited for Halloween. She wasn't really on top of it last year, but what with daycare and being 50% older, she's ready for it this year. She's seen the decorations that are already out, and she tried on some costumes at the thrift store a few weeks ago. I asked her yesterday what she wanted to dress up as for Halloween, and she answered without hesitation "a construction worker!" and proceeded to list all the things she would wear. Boots are the key to the outfit, it seems. Also a helmet.

I don't know where she got this idea, since the costumes she tried on were more along the lines of cute little animals, but I'm pleased, since it'll be relatively easy to assemble, as long as I can convince her that construction workers frequently wear pink cowboy boots on the job. (This may be true, for all I know.) I'm not sure how one makes a hardhat out of cardboard, but I'll do my best.

Earth Girls are Hungry

Dutch just informed me that her name is now "Setta Wooby" - a name which she explains means "tea" in the Kthill language. Also, she demands some ice cream. Take me to your leader, indeed.

Shivers of Excitement!

The New York Times is all free all the time again! No more evil Times Select! Yay!

More school

Also, my school approach is making me think a lot about school for Dutch. (Because EVERYTHING in my life comes back to Dutch. Phew.) The school system is geared toward encouraging students to do well at tests and turn in their homework, and succeed at school, and I don't think it's served me very well. I did well at school, but somehow never really figured out that doing well at school has nothing to do with doing well at life. I wish Dutch could learn that earlier than I did. Obviously it can't be learned by just being told - you pick up values like that from the environment around you. I absorbed the understanding that it was important to do well at school, and that if you succeed at school, future success will just unfurl from that.

This is what I want Dutch to absorb, magically, from the world around her:

School is a tool. Going to school teaches you some important logistical skills, like showing up on time, working with other people, and getting work done by deadlines. Going to school gives you the opportunity to identify what interests you. Going to school gives you the chance to move forward toward your future life of work.

I guess I should look seriously into alternative school options for this kid, since what I'm describing is starting to sound like one of those schools where kids don't learn to read until they decide they want to...

Also, on an unrelated note, this morning I overheard Dutch, engrossed in one of her complicated, mysterious narrative games, saying "and then I punched the wise man in the face..." - apparently they're starting preparing for Christmas early at her daycare.

School!

Two things about school:

1. It's HARD! So much work! And my classmates are so freaking smart. I have to fight the urge to compare myself with them. I try to remember that I'm doing this for myself, and it's my job to get out of this program what works for me. My approach to school has always been that I want to do well AT SCHOOL. I want to get As. Or Bs. (Because I'm lazy.) This is my first school experience where I'm thinking explicitly about the future. I want to get a good job with benefits and a 401(k), and I want to have it sitting in my lap by the time I get my degree. So it doesn't actually matter what grades I get, as long as they're good enough to stay in the program. I'm going to get a job by aggressively networking and by building a portfolio of interesting and practical class projects , not by getting an A. I should be looking at my classmates as resources - people whose intelligence and histories can help me move forward. Not as people whose test scores I need to beat. Which brings me to...

2. I get to converse! I talk to everybody! Apparently I racked up a huge conversational deficit while I was home with Dutch fulltime, because I've become a conversational whore. I will talk about anything with anybody, anytime. (Okay, not really. There was this guy on the bus yesterday who wanted to chat about his divorce, and I didn't talk to him. I have some limits.) It's fantastic. I don't expect to become best friends with anybody, but I'm loving the superficial chats. I came home last night supercharged on conversation (my extroversion showing through, I guess) and the heady thrill of spending time with lots of like-minded people. People who wish to debate the pros and cons of quantitative versus qualitative research! People who think it matters whether or not a community has sidewalks!

There are a few flies in my ointment, of course. The work looks to be pretty hard, and between school and job and family, I'm not predicting much free time in my future. (Though I'm finding time to write this...) Some of the work is going to be seriously boring. Also, yesterday I was forced to listen to a smug conversation that indicates the dark side of both 1 and 2. Two of my classmates were discussing their GRE scores (bear in mind that this program doesn't even require submission of GRE scores) ad nauseam while walking down the stairs after class. One of them was very disappointed in her math score (but of course did spectacularly well), and the other was very pleased with her overall scores and was condescendingly explaining that she did so well because of her choice of prep book. Agh. I fought back by rallying up my twin skills of Conversational Whoring and Being the Class Idiot and started up a loud conversation with another classmate about socks.

More Death

Tonight Dutch told me "I wish my parents would die so I could play by myself."

Extreme introversion? Deliberate provocation? Testing conversational boundaries? Testing our relationship? Failure to understand that wishing somebody dead isn't really very nice?

Too tired to reflect.

Totally Batshit Crazy

This morning, some time in the witching hours, I woke up to hear Dutch crying in her room. I went down the hall, and found her sitting up in bed wailing. I asked her what was wrong, and it quickly became apparent that she was in a state she occasionally reaches when she wakes up in the middle of the night - desperately, inexplicably, inconsolably upset. She was pretty hard to understand, what with all the bloody-murder screaming, but I did make out several things she was upset about. She had to pee, but refused to pee in the toilet, potty, or the training pants she was wearing. Her leg was angry at her (this freaked me out, since it rang some bells from the article I had recently read about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, one aspect of which is that patients have adversarial relationships with their hands and will chew their fingers off or claw their own eye out). She couldn't lie down. She was SO tired. She wanted to be alone. She didn't want me to leave. She wanted to hug me. She didn't want me to hold her. She wanted to drink milk. She wanted to wear pants. She wanted to be naked.

I wanted her to be quiet so I could go back to sleep. I really really wanted that.

Nothing I did (including, to my shame, yelling at her) could console her. She was drooling, screaming, hitting at me, gasping, shoving her hands down her throat and gagging. She finally calmed down, after the episode had gone on about 10 minutes, and fairly quickly fell asleep. It felt like it just drew to a close by itself, but not through anything I did, though I did find that keeping up a stream of soothing talk (drawing from my experience with the self-hypnosis guy!) seemed to help. It was an unpleasant but kind of interesting window into the weirdness of the brain. I asked her about it this morning, after she woke up all cheerful and ready for the day, and she didn't want to talk about it, which I can understand. It's scary to meet your unfettered emotional wiring in the middle of the night.

The Ephemerality of Life, and Possessions.

Lately Dutch and I have been talking a bit about death, for various reasons. The other day she asked me "Mama, do girls ever die?" and I told her that kids do sometimes die. I can't bring myself to lie about this - it seems like too important a thing to lie about - but I can't imagine that she can really understand it, since I can't really get my own mind around it, so I should probably just have said "No." Anyway, I told her that people die when they get really old, or really hurt, or really sick. She processed that internally for a few hours, and as we were walking home from the park, she asked me "If I die, mama, what will you do with my room?"

I'm not sure why that emerged as an important Death Question, but I was surprised that she clearly understands that when you die, you're not around anymore. And your loved ones have to decide what to do with all your stuff.

I told her I didn't know what we'd do with her room, that we'd be so sad that we wouldn't know what to do. Then I told her it's our job as her parents to keep her safe and healthy. Then I pointed out a cat on the sidewalk, and successfully escaped the conversation, probably leaving all sorts of weird emotional/psychological scars. I prefer the questions about things like how many leaves are on a tree.

To add to the List of Phrases You Never Expected To Hear

At 4:15 AM, woken from a sound sleep, I heard this: "Mama, hey! Hey, mama! I put boogers and crusties in your hair! There's no trashcan in here, so I put boogers and crusties in your HAIR!!"

I forgave her only because I'd been worried 8 hours before that her appendix was about to rupture (damn you and your overload of information, internets!), so I was really just relieved that she was awake and cheerful, even at the expense of my hygiene. (I couldn't find any obvious boogers, in case you're concerned, but she did inform me that she put them DEEP in my hair.)

Company for Sunday Brunch

Phew

It's been a long week. Come Monday I will start working a lot more, as my boss is leaving on fairly short notice and I will have to do her job as well as an additional project we're just starting. And school starts. I have been lying awake the last few nights panicking about having made a Terrible Mistake. Spending all this money to work too hard seems like a bad idea. Yesterday and today I attended Orientation, which made me feel old and slow... my program seems to be full of young people with sharp wits, interesting jobs and interesting plans. The faculty and returning students hosting the Orientation reiterated with alarmingly frequency the theme that this program is REALLY HARD and we will have to work ALL THE TIME and if we want to do anything extracurricular like laundry we should DO IT NOW. This made me feel really tired. Also, I already have a homework assignment, though my first class is 4 days away, and I am already procrastinating it, which is possibly a bad precedent.

I had to work late last night, after a long day of orienting and working, and when I got home, just in time to put Dutch to bed late, she was wonderfully pleased with me - "I missed you mama! I like you, mama! I love you, mama! You're so nice, mama! You have nice eyes, mama!" - I expect that my increasing absence will mean more preschooler-style flattery, and also more withdrawing and punishment.

However. The weather is fantabulously lovely, which helps with my feelings about the change, and I am excited to be learning new stuff! I can't wait to open my mouldering brain and see what I can fit inside. I hope that I will be able to remember that it is a joy and a privilege to get to learn cool new things, even while I'm struggling/juggling through the term - I may need to be reminded.

Also, I'm a student again! I get to use the gym! I get to use the computers! I will have to get many thousands of dollars of use out of the experience, so I intend to drink from every campus water fountain, use every campus bathroom, swim in the pool every week, pick the brains of all the faculty and staff I can corner, order lots of interlibrary loan books, and so on.

Postscript Post

After I mentioned my fondness for nerdy reality tv, I got several recommendations, and the library had them all on hand. We're working our way through "Pioneer Quest" at the moment, and have "Colonial House" and "1900 House" piled up in the wings. Having watched half of "Pioneer Quest," in which 4 Canadians sign on to spend a year pioneering in Manitoba, I can't help but compare it to "Frontier House," in which a larger group of Americans spend 4 months pioneering in Montana. Based on this scientific comparison, I've concluded that Canadians are both tougher and nicer than Americans.

However, none of them had it that bad - I haven't seen anybody find a rat in the outhouse yet.

And I Thought It Was An Urban Myth.

Tonight Cook came out of the hall, his face alight with slightly hysterical amusement, and reported that he had just found a rat in our toilet. Really. We flushed it, after consulting the wisdom of the internets, and it went down with only minimal panicky scrabbling. I will never ever again use the toilet in the middle of the night without turning the lights on first. Cook's greatest regret is that we failed to take a picture.

Keep your lids down, folks.

Virtual Navel-Gazing

There are good things about not having Selfish Time. Having a kid can be helpful in providing a central theme for your life. I do a lot of narcissistic navel-gazing, but much less than I used to. I don't have to cast around much for A Reason For It All. Dutch makes it much simpler. I am deathly afraid of flying (afraid of dying while flying, actually), but when I fly with Dutch I am making sure she's all set, so I don't get to worry so much. (Though now that she's so much more self-sufficient, I can worry more. Thank goodness.) Now she keeps me so busy answering her questions ("is a toad a kind of a turtle?") that I don't get a chance to gaze at my midsection (speculating about where, exactly, my navel has gone). When I do, I know that there is at least one reason for my life.

This is dangerous, though, because it can also lead to the Smug Mommy Syndrome, in which the Mommy uses the kid to make herself feel good about her life. The kid is both the most difficult child in the world, and the most wonderful, and oh yes, parenting is SO hard and also SO rewarding, and if you don't have a child, you couldn't possibly understand the amazingness of parenting, and if you DO have a child, your child and your parenting skills are deeply inferior to hers.

Anyway, I guess my point is that while my life has reorganized itself around Dutch, reducing the need for existential angst, I still need to find other themes.

Meanwhile, I have finally learned what it means when you poke somebody on Facebook.

Digging in My Heels

Next week I will be attending orientation for school. The following week, I will start classes AND simultaneously start working substantially more hours at work. I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed; the increased income will be very welcome, but things will be enormously more hectic. I used to handle busy-ness pretty well, but I haven't really been busy since Dutch has been around, and I'm having a hard time imagining how busy my life is going to be. The biggest effect parenting has had on my day-to-day life, as I've mentioned before (frequently!), is that I get a lot less Selfish Time. Days when I feel really worn out, I can't be surly and lazy and fall on the couch with a trashy book and a dinner of crackers-and-cheese. I still have to be reasonably reasonable, and make sure that Dutch eats a reasonably decent meal, gets a reasonable amount of family attention, gets reasonably clean and goes to bed at a reasonable hour.

Soon we will begin the first week of what I anticipate will be several years of coming home feeling really worn out, and every evening I will still have to be reasonable. For the moment, I'm chalking it all up as character-building.

Communicado

We just got our first cellphone. We have mixed feelings. Dutch is excited - she loves cellphones. Cook is sad. I decided to get it because I wanted to be available to the daycare, and I've had several moments in the last year when I wished I had a phone. We got a prepaid package that gives us 1000 minutes for a year, which should be more than sufficient for our needs.

I don't like cellphones. I certainly see their utility, and I wouldn't mind if they were used just for emergencies, or even for briefly calling a friend to let her know you're running exceptionally late for a date. But I hate how people use them to insulate themselves from the world. I think people should interact with the world around them, not just with the people they choose to talk to on the phone. I also hate how they have affected socializing. It seems to be increasingly difficult to make concrete plans with people - they just say "I'll give you a call when I'm done with (grocery shopping, work, the gym, whatever), and then we'll figure something out." - I'd much rather just say "let's meet at 3."

But, then, I'm kind of misanthropic. Also hypocritical, which makes me worry that I'm going to become a cellphonophile. Cook took his first look at the phone and said darkly "this is the slippery slope..." - to what, I'm not entirely sure, but I'm sure it's a bad place.

No, you can't have my cellphone number.

My Plummeting Household Prestige

I made the mistake of cutting Dutch's hair again tonight. I've gotten the haircutting bug with my own hair pretty often (and yes, I do always cut my hair when I'm feeling out of control), often to disastrous effect, but this is the first time Dutch has been victimized.
Cook declared the final product "awful." I maintain that it is is simultaneously adorably elfin and whimsically punk, but he's just appalled. Also, I taught Dutch her first knock-knock joke tonight, so I'm in the doghouse. Not the dollhouse, which is too bad, because there are some fantastic parties going on in the dollhouse these days.

I'm so proud of both of us.

1. Today Dutch spontaneously (and correctly) used the word "residue" in conversation.
2. Yesterday I cut Dutch's hair, and I did a reasonably decent job. Her hair, like mine, is fine but gnarly, and it turns into a ball of tangled fluff about 12 seconds after brushing. She won't let me do anything to restrain it (a few days of ponytails aside), and rarely lets me brush it. I told her we'd have to cut it if she wouldn't let me tame it, and she enthusiastically embraced the idea - "I want short hair like R and Q and J!!!" she said, bouncing with excitement. R and Q and J are boys in her daycare, all of whom have hair less than an inch long. I'm not ready to go quite that butch, personally, but something clearly has to be done. I started with the back. We'll see where that leads us. Cook is resisting the idea of an all-over short cut, but I'm not sure if he's clinging to gender rules or if he's just afraid that my barbering may render her completely ridiculous.

Weirdo

We went to the zoo today. School has started for lots of kids, so the crowds were down, and the Busyness Quotient in our household will be skyrocketing in a few weeks, so we figured we should get to the zoo now, while the getting is good. It was good. We were there for hours, and there were no tantrums, no whining, and no crying (except after the incident in which Dutch somehow managed, while sitting on a toilet seat, to pee on my shoe), and for some reason lots of the animals were out and about. Cook and I got pretty depressed watching the animals do their psycho repetitive pacing, and I got angry at the parents who let their kids scream and bang on the glass and otherwise terrorize the beasts. That was normal, though - neither of us are very comfortable with zoos. We were fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of some sort of punked-out monkey with a very new baby, which she was diligently sheltering from observers. We also saw my beloved orangutans, and the stinky but amazing naked mole rats. Dutch amused bystanders by announcing that there were "canteloupes" in with the zebras.

Anyway, it was cool. Every morning, Dutch asks if it's a "daycare day" or a "family day" and today was an excellent family day.