My town

Here's a seasick-making video that will be terribly boring to almost all of you. In case you're interested, it's somebody else's bike ride in downtown Portland. Bike lanes! Sunshine! Leaves! Light rail! Aw. I love Portland.

I'm the one whining.

*Warning: self-pity wallow ahead!*

I'm having a pretty glass half-empty period right now, as Dutch could tell you, despairing about my job prospects, and Cook's. I am wobbling around in a chronic state of exhaustion and anxiety. I would say that I really need a vacation, except that what I REALLY need is a job, and the gaping holes in my schedule after June 14 are a cause for dread, not for anticipation.

I've talked to Dutch a lot lately about borrowing trouble. She tends to immediately leap to the worst-case scenario for the future when she's under stress. We've talked about how it can be a good idea to prepare for and act to prevent the worst-case scenario, but that there's a line between doing that and just freaking out needlessly and making yourself miserable over something that may or may not happen.

At the moment, I'm trying to walk that line. There are so few job postings that I need to be aggressively networking and sniffing out any and all possibilities. But I don't have TIME! And I'm exhausted! I'm doing some of the preventing-and-preparing work,* but I don't have the capacity to do enough. So I worry, instead, because I can do that while I walk and cook and wash dishes and lie fruitlessly awake at night. I worry a LOT.

I want to buffer the girls from this overwhelming anxiety, but I'm really not succeeding. Dutch knows the facts about our situation (temp jobs, no idea where we'll be in six months, etc.). I've told her that I feel stressed about it. But I would prefer for her to remain ignorant about how deeply terrible it's making us feel.

Instability: not great for family life. Go figure.

*Okay, I'm done. Now, I will remind myself that, in fact, nobody is dumping crap on me, and my life is actually pretty awesome. Unstable, yes, but awesome.*


*I check job postings at all the places I can think of. I check listservs. You know, the bare minimum.

A positive home environment

Yesterday I had one of those alarming parenting moments in which my bad habits are revealed to me. I was telling Cook about my day at work - my boss is about to leave for a vacation, and is giving me some last-minute extra work, which is not overwhelming or actually even unreasonable (my boss is pretty good about that), but still slightly annoying.* Apparently, I was sounding some familiar themes, because Dutch came over, put her hand on my shoulder, looked sympathetically into my eyes, and said "Mom, people ALWAYS dump crap on you, don't they?"

That's the story I tell my daughter about my life, apparently. I had to explain to her that no, people do not always dump crap on me, and that if it sounds like that, I've clearly been using way too many negative words and having too many negative thoughts.

I've got a little work to do on my own mental habits. And I've GOT to stop saying "crap" in front of Dutch.



*Mostly just in the light that hey, she GETS a paid vacation, and I don't.

News Roundup

I'm at home with Skipper. This is the fifth out of the last sixteen workdays that Cook or I have had to stay home with her (and sometimes Dutch). This is a big problem with being a working parent that nobody tells you about before you have kids. They get sick a lot.

Skipper has Hand, foot, mouth disease, of course. And of course she has it so mildly that she seems to feel totally normal, and is currently tearing the room apart while I type, instead of taking lots of naps while I DO MY HOMEWORK, which is what I had planned to do this afternoon.

She was diagnosed at a "well-child" checkup this morning at which we also learned that she's not gaining weight satisfactorily. It's not a big problem at the moment, but we do have to change some things. No more nursing on demand (she demands nursing frequently, but then just snacks for a few moments before getting distracted and dashing off to her next project), mainly.

Then she and Dutch both got a bunch of shots, which bummed them both out. Dutch clenched up her whole body, and said "I hate shots I hate shots I hate shots!!!!" until the nurse said "Well, honey, I hate giving shots."

That's the news from here. In other news, I really, really love Ray LaHood and the younger Swedish princess is having a crappy day.

walking

Criminal mind

This morning, as I was lying in bed trying to delay getting up, Skipper indicated that she wanted to get down off the bed. It was pretty clear that what she actually wanted was to get my glasses from their bedside perch, because she loves to play with glasses. I put her down on the floor, and moved my glasses out of reach, on the bed between me and Cook. She stood on the floor for a moment, then looked at me, signed that she wanted to nurse, and pointed to the bed, clearly intending that I should put her back up on the bed, between me and Cook. I picked her up and scooted over so that she could lie next to me and nurse, keeping my body between her and my glasses. She immediately tried to climb over me to get at them, not even bothering to pretend she was interested in nursing.

It's the first time I've ever really seen her conniving. She lied in order to get up on the bed! My one-year-old daughter LIED to me! I'm kind of proud. I think this one's going far.

0 to 60 (pictures from March)

Me and Gail Collins, hanging on the #9.

I'm really enjoying this book. (I read it on my bus commute to work, in case you're wondering. It's so nice being driven by somebody else so I can get some pleasure reading done! Way better than driving a car...) I'm learning a lot, and I look forward to making Skipper and Dutch read it in the future. It's just a little sad that I know how it's going to end, and it's not going to be a totally happy ending.

My relationship with sleep. It is not good.

I should go to bed. I've been so tired that I can't get through the day without caffeine, and I'm having a hard time finishing sentences. But I don't want to go to bed. I want some precious time to myself, and I also dread going to bed because I know my night will not be restful.

We desperately need to sleep-train Skipper. She currently starts the night in her crib and then comes in with us when she wakes up after we're in bed. We did this with Dutch, who woke up about as often in the night, and it worked fine, but there was a much bigger bed involved, and Dutch wasn't so acrobatic in her sleeping habits. Also, Dutch never tried to bite my nipples off, which Skipper has attempted several times.*

However, sleep-training** means getting even less sleep for at least a few nights in a row, which we can't face right now. It also means that Dutch, who sleeps right next door, and Emma and Brendan, who sleep right downstairs, will have their sleep disturbed, too. So it'll take some planning. Maybe in June.



*Skipper seems to be, as best we can tell based on our foggy memories, a more intense and active kid than Dutch. She doesn't walk, she RUNS. She doesn't lean on furniture, she CLIMBS on it. She doesn't nurse, she MAULS

***In our lazy-parenting household, "sleep training" means, more or less, "do whatever it takes to get the kid to sleep EXCEPT putting her in our bed." Holding and singing and walking around and telling jokes for hours? Sure! Morphine and whisky for everyone? Sure!

Mundane miscellany

Yesterday we got the results of Dutch's school lottery - she didn't get into the two language immersion programs (which we really wanted), but she did get into another neighborhood school, and she's waitlisted for the Spanish immersion program there. This means that we don't have to move before school starts, which is a relief. She's pretty excited to have a place to pin her kindergarten dreams to.

Also, four kids in Skipper's daycare class have hand, foot, and mouth disease. Some other kids are out for other reasons, so Skipper was the only kid present yesterday. She had three teachers at her disposal. The teachers sent a handout home with us at the end of the day with information about HFM, including the helpful reassurance that it is NOT the same as mad cow disease. Phew.

Also, Skipper's walking a lot more, demanding to nurse every fourteen minutes, shrieking when thwarted, and hitting people* in the face. Toddlers are so adorable.

That's the news here. Strangely, the employers at the job I really really want have not yet contacted me to beg me to work for them. Maybe I'll get that call today.


*Mostly me, actually. She also specializes in grabbing glasses off people's faces.

Birthday girl

I forgot to mention that Skipper turned one. She's ONE! She's launched on her second year of life. I went through a few phases of feelings about this milestone. I briefly thought about the fourth day of her life, when we thought she wasn't going to make it to day five, let alone year two. I thought about how kids make you see the passage of time so clearly - I've scarcely changed at all over the last year, but Dutch and Skipper have changed drastically. But the real excitement around Skipper's birthday came from her daycare, because she was the last baby in the classroom to turn one. Now that she's hit that milestone, they were officially able to shift from every-hour diaper changes for all the babies to every-two-hour changes for all the babies. The teachers were VERY excited about this birthday.

Indicators

When I moved my blog around this weekend, I opted to have the labels display as a "cloud" rather than a list, which apparently means that the most-used labels are bigger, giving a very clear indication of the trend of my posts: crazy parenting whining talking anxiety. I regret to say that sometimes it feels like that's pretty much an accurate summary of my life. But not all the time.

Hopes/Fears

A long time ago,* in a galaxy far, far away,** I got an interview for a job I really, really wanted. They called me to schedule a second interview. Meanwhile, I was offered a job I kind of wanted. We needed the money, and I was unable to negotiate to keep a bird in the hand until the other bird decided whether it wanted to come to hand, too. Or something. Anyway, I withdrew from the running for the job I really wanted, and took a job that turned out to be kind of awful. Two years later, the job I had wanted opened up again. I applied, got an interview, and was rejected. I was pretty sad. I still think about that job with regret.

On Monday, I found a listed job that I really, really want. I REALLY WANT IT. It's pretty much the job I went back to school to get. I know that there's no guarantee it would actually BE a good job, and I'm sure there are plenty of other jobs that I would love, but it feels like this is The One. Which, of course, means that if (and when***) I get rejected, it's going to break my heart and plunge me into the pit of despair.

I submitted my application last night, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. I lay awake last night thinking about how wonderful it would be if I GOT the job and how awful it would be if I DIDN'T get the job and how wonderful and how awful and how wonderful... it was terrible. I keep ambushing Cook (usually when he's deeply absorbed in solving a problem or lost in thought) and saying pointless, no-good-answer things like "They'll call me for an interview, at least, won't they?" or "Do you think they'll call my Reference One?" or "Cook! I REALLY WANT THIS JOB!!!" and finally he semi-gently suggested that I come up with a better way to spend the next six weeks. My current plan is to apply for as many jobs as I can find, to spread out the anxiety a little.

There's more here than just the pain of rejection. The thing is, I never thought when I was young and feckless that I'd be this desperate in my adulthood to find a job, any job. I thought I might have a hard time finding my dream job. I didn't think I'd be grateful to have a part-time $12/hour job, and be struggling to find anything else. Now a door has opened just a crack, and I can catch a glimpse back into that lovely world I thought I could live in, where you GET a chance at a dream job. All this anxiety is (I think) the emotional equivalent of cringing from a door that's about to slam on your foot.



*Six years

**Oakland
***That's not false modesty. I've been involved in enough hiring processes to know that it's kind of a crapshoot anyway, and when there are about 800,000 other applicants in the crapshoot (many of them very well-qualified), even a fabulous candidate like myself has to acknowledge that the odds are ominous.

Happy Tax Day, Everyone!

Here is a little article for you to read.

We are one of those 47% of American households who paid no federal income tax. That was nice. We can certainly use the break. It kind of makes me want to go out and buy some sort of American-made product, if I can find one.

Family Portrait

From March. Thanks, Papa Big Cook!

Addendum

Last week, Dutch watched a movie for her weekend screen time. (Shirley Temple. Again.) I told her she needed some exercise afterward, and she suggested that she could walk around the block. Okay, I said. By myself? she said. Okay, I said. She seemed somewhat anxious about the possibility that the door might be locked when she got home, so I sat out on the porch and waited for her.

We reviewed the rules. Don't cross any streets. Don't dawdle too much. I feigned casualness, because I WANT to be a cool, non-helicopter mom. I'm perfectly aware that the odds of anything bad happening to a large child clad in bright pink, walking around a Portland neighborhood for ten minutes on a rainy Sunday afternoon, are extremely low, but actually I'm not that cool. I felt a little uneasy, casting her little ship off into the big, deep ocean. However, I wanted her to feel that this was not that big of a deal. She's FIVE, after all, practically grown-up. She's also very responsible and thoughtful, for her age, and she's had traffic safety rules (and a healthy wariness for cars) drummed into her pretty thoroughly. So there was no reason for her not to take this tiny step toward independence, and she was pretty excited about it.

I stood on the porch and watched for her to reappear (keeping an eye on the guy leisurely biking down the street in the rain with a sixpack of beer dangling from his handlebars), and as soon as I saw her pink-hooded head bobbing along over the fence at the end of the street, I hastily flopped back onto my chair, and looked thoughtfully across the street, trying to look as if I was so confident in Dutch's competence that I didn't even have to look out for her and thus was easily distracted by pondering whether or not the neighbors are still selling meth. When Dutch came in the front gate, she was grinning, extremely proud of herself. She told me that she had kept up a brisk pace because she started to get worried that people might call the police and get me put in jail for letting her walk around the block alone. SHE was worried about ME.

Today she picked out an outfit of purple jeans and a blue turtleneck. And a belt. She explained that big kids wear jeans. Big kids wear turtlenecks. Big kids wear belts. She's noticed that the other kids wear blue jeans,* and she would like to get some blue jeans. (This from a kid who's refused to wear pants without a stretchy waistband for her entire 5.5 years of life, because she doesn't like having her belly confined.) She is very proud of being able to work the button and zipper on her purple jeans. Later in the day, she came into the kitchen where I was washing dishes, and she was crying; she had been unable to re-button her pants after going to the bathroom. She wailed "I'm a LITTLE KID!"

While it feels to me that time is passing astonishingly quickly, for Dutch it's dragging along far behind the pace she'd like to see. The beautiful future, in which she will easily fasten her own pants, help herself to as much dessert as she wants, and dash off on her own to enjoy all sorts of unimaginable big-kid/adult delights, feels frustratingly far out of her reach.

*She also announced last week that she's noticed that the other kids her age at the daycare don't wear dresses very often, and she's not going to wear dresses very often any more. While I'm VERY glad that the dresses-only period is over, I feel a little sad that it was peer pressure that ended it.

Small, but getting bigger

Skipper is about to turn one year old. That's AMAZING. Wasn't I just pregnant about 3 days ago? Wasn't she lying around weighing 8 pounds, making weird noises and aimlessly waving her arms about thirty seconds ago? Where did this massive practically-a-toddler come from? This kid who signs sentences* at me, confidently slides down off the bed backward, invents** her own signs, and thinks (obviously complicated) thoughts about physics?

While I'm on this topic, holy shit, where did that OTHER kid come from? The one who can reach the cup shelf, recently learned that 3 is not actually pronounced "free," is losing her fourth tooth, and can ALMOST snap? Where did that kid come from? Wait, wasn't SHE just a baby, too?

Now I begin to understand why people who remember my infancy never quite seem to have gotten used to the idea that I am an adult.*** It really just seems impossible. I know, in theory, that Dutch and Skipper will become grownups, and will come over to visit me and irritatedly attempt to teach me how to correctly tune the reality anathemizer.**** I will control my impulse to tickle them, most likely, but I probably won't ever quite believe their adulthood.

*Okay, that sounds way more impressive than it is. Her one and only sentence so far is this: "More. NURSE." and I'm sure that if she knew a sign for "Right NOW, goddamnit," we'd see a fair amount of it.

** She invented a sign for "tickle." Go ahead and tell me that isn't the cutest thing in the whole freaking world. Well, except this.

***Well, okay. Point taken.

****"Mom. Just tap this zone over here and then blink three times. MOM!! Come ON, Mom, this is NOT HARD."

Distracted

I've been reading the DOT Secretary's blog lately.* A while ago I read a post about a woman whose 5-year-old son was killed in a car crash.**

A few months ago, Cook was riding home at night on his bike, and he stopped at a light behind a bicyclist who was pulling a trailer with a kid in it. A truck came up next to them and the driver leaned out and yelled at the kid-puller that he was putting his child in danger. Neither Cook nor the kid-puller said anything, but Cook fumed all the way home.

I can't find the perfect statistics online, but it is true (transportation dorks tell me so) that driving a car is much more dangerous than riding a bike. Certainly car crashes are a lot more dangerous than bike crashes. Or pedestrian crashes.

I have been thinking about how dangerous driving is. As a non-driver for the last ten years, I've become increasingly afraid of cars. I never much liked driving, because I was always thinking about how FAST the car was moving, and how dire the consequences could be if something went wrong. I still think about that whenever I'm in a car. I think about it when I'm NOT in a car. One of Cook's coworkers learned recently that his 21-year-old daughter had just been killed in a car crash, and thinking of what it would feel like to receive that call just shatters me.

As an urban pedestrian, I've had my share of close calls and upsetting moments with cars. I am amazed by how blase people are about driving, how they do all sorts of stupid things. Not just talking on the phone, but putting on makeup, or fishing around in the backseat for a piece of gum or whatever. My buddy Ray LaHood has been talking a lot about distracted driving. The part that boggles my mind is that people assume that they're going to get away with the silly thing they're doing, and that they are lucky/amazingly-skilled enough to not suffer any consequences. My buddy linked to a series of ads about distracted driving that feature the texts that were sent or read by people the moment before they were killed or killed somebody in car crash. The texts say things like "Yeah" and the point of the campaign is to remind you to ask yourself if your text is worth your life or somebody else's. The 5-year-old I mentioned who was killed was hit by a truck driven by a man who was hunting for the unlit cigar he had dropped.

So this is my public service message, which will reach, I'm sure, almost as many people as Oprah's campaign. When you're driving, please just drive. If you've got to do something else, please think about whether, if something went wrong, it would be worth it.

(And please don't yell at bicyclists and pedestrians. I know they piss you off,*** and maybe they deserve to be yelled at for the terrible thing they surely just did, but you're all cocooned in tons of steel, and they're NOT.)


*Yes, I am aware that his staff probably write all of it. But it wasn't his staff standing on the table to talk to bike advocates.
** One of my favorite traffic safety things I've learned is that you're not supposed to call them accidents. An accident isn't preventable, but a crash is.
** They piss ME off, when I'm not being one of them. Today I nearly got run over, a situation that I didn't notice developing because I was reading a book as I crossed the street. Thank god I don't drive.

Maintenance

So I bet you've been burning to know how our "no 'poo" experiment is going... here's your answer. I'd post photos, but the camera is still broken, so you'll have to take my word on it that after 23 days with no shampoo or conditioner (baking soda and vinegar only), Dutch's hair looks fine, and Cook's hair looks fine (and his scalp is much happier). Dutch's hair, in my opinion, has a richer color now than it did before, and a little more wave, but that's pretty speculative. What I can say for sure is that their hair looks/feels/smells totally normal, not greasy at all, and they never had a greasy stage. We've actually been oiling Skipper's head after baths, because her scalp was so dry, and after an initially greasy period of a few hours (during which we style her hair into an excellent fauxhawk), it looks totally normal (presumably after the oil soaks into her bedding and our shirts and whatnot). I'm still not ready to go for it, but I've been reducing the amount of shampoo I use, and concentrating on really rubbing it on my scalp rather than lathering all the hair, and though my hair doesn't feel "clean"* when I finish the wash in the shower, it feels and looks totally fine afterward.

That's the exciting news. I promise not to write about this again for at least three months.

*You know - squeaky.

Spring

It's spring, in spite of the fact that it's been raining almost continuously for a week. Time seems to be passing. Skipper is growing up. She's signing a few things now (most notably "nurse," which she somehow manages to sign in all caps with multiple exclamation points), and is determined to start walking before we get our seedlings in the ground. This is a video from yesterday, when she screamed and writhed in her insistence that she be allowed to get her feet on the ground.




Also, it's Easter! Dutch has had a whizbang of a holiday, which took us somewhat by surprise, since we're not particularly gung-ho on the Easter tip. We hadn't really talked about it at all until yesterday. I told her in the morning that it was going to be Easter, and that, as usual, we would dye some eggs, and the Easter Bunny would hide some eggs for her to find.* She got excited. She and I walked over to the grocery store to buy eggs and food coloring.

At the grocery store, on our way to check out, we heard an announcement that some sort of "bunny hop" activity was about to take place. We hied ourselves over to the customer service desk, where Dutch decorated a set of bunny ears and then joined in the mysterious "bunny hop" activity, which turned out to be an opportunity to win (by random drawing) a large chocolate cake from the grocery store's bakery. I was slightly alarmed, as I don't much care for grocery store cake, and didn't really want to carry home an enormous cake decorated with plastic bunny heads, but I figured the odds were good that we'd escape. Of course, she won. The look on her face when they handed her the enormous cake was absolutely worth the minor inconvenience, though, and her delirious delight and astonishment lasted for a long time. And the cake isn't bad, actually, especially with a lot of ice cream. In the store, however, after I finished laughing (which took a while), I panicked slightly and asked Dutch if she wanted to give the cake to somebody, like maybe another family, or a homeless person, or a bus driver or... well, anybody. She said "Yes! I want to give some cake to the Easter Bunny!"

We decorated eggs (this was totally fun, and I managed to remember my Easter lessons), and she shoveled in a plate full of cake and ice cream after dinner, her bunny ears nodding silently over her serious, cake-smeared face. Then she went to bed, after preparing a large slice of cake for the Easter Bunny, like a snack for Santa Claus. At midnight, she came to our room and asked "Mama, is it morning? Because it looks like maybe it's almost sunrise!"

In the actual morning, eggs were hunted, and found. Dutch also insisted that she and Skipper both wear their new springy dresses. It rained all day. Happy spring!



*The Easter Bunny rounds up all her plastic eggs and uses them to hold stuff that the Bunny brings. The Bunny doesn't like to carry a lot of eggs, you see.

I'm kind of loving April Fool's Day.

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future.

I want to live in a communist chocolate hellhole, someday.

Thanks, Sarah!