Mayberry

With the beautiful weather we've had the last two weeks, all of our neighbors have appeared out of the woodwork. We've discovered two 7-year-olds and a 5-year-old, all within a three-house distance either way. Dutch forced me to go over to introduce ourselves to the kid across the street yesterday, and then spent an hour playing with him in his back yard.*  and today we were ambushed by the kid who lives two houses to the west, and Dutch spent 40 minutes playing in HIS back yard. The kid in the house just to the east of us was having a play date this evening, but I expect would otherwise have been involved somehow. We've also been told that the Bad Kid who used to live down the street moved away last fall, so it's all innocence and sunshine now. And pogo sticks.

Not much news, otherwise. Dutch has branched out from figure skating to luge (which she prefers to skeleton), but I think we've watched all the available videos. And Skipper has developed a truly delightful habit of pooping only at daycare; neither Cook nor I have changed a poo-ful diaper in weeks.  She must have realized that her nighttime waking habits were diminishing her popularity.


*I made awkward conversation with his dad for a while, and then just ditched Dutch and went home. I figured the family seemed pretty nice, and probably wouldn't kill and eat Dutch. I'm not a full-on let-your-kid-make-his-way-across-New-York-City-alone free-range-kid parent, but I'm not too worried about the neighbors. She had a great time, too. Apparently, this kid thinks that magic potions and fairies are really cool.

Dutch and I watched more skating last night. We watched Joannie Rochette's short program. Then I looked her up, and read a blog post I liked that captured some of what I felt about watching her compete.

Dutch and I have been arguing quite a bit about the Olympics. She says things like "they're so lucky to be in the Olympics!" and I say things like "Well, there's some luck involved, but mostly they work really really really hard," and she nods and says "Wow, they're so lucky!"

Anyway, I'm really enjoying the brief glimpses of the Olympics that I'm getting. I love the winter Olympics. There's something so loveable about Scandinavians (and some other people) getting to do their demented winter sports in front of the world, wearing hilarious outfits. I'd like to have taken a few weeks off from my life to just sit on a couch and watch all day. * And if I got to do that, I'd totally say "Dude, you have GOT to check out Kim Yu-Na. Wow."

Also, heja Sverige!**

*While I was writing this, Cook came in and said (unaware of my topic), "The Winter Olympics is so weird. It's the Rich White People Olympics!" Which is true. Damnit, now I can't enjoy it quite the same way anymore. Taking two weeks off to watch the Racist Elitist Olympics just doesn't feel right. Fortunately, it turns out that the Summer Olympics are also Racist Elitist Olympics, so at least I can feel okay about liking curling and not hurdles.
**It's totally okay to go nationalist when it's on behalf of a small country that doesn't beat up on other countries. That's a little-known rule of jingoism.

So, so beautiful

Tonight Dutch elected to watch some internet videos of Olympic ice skating rather than hear a story about Pippa and the Penguin meeting a princess. We watched a completely ridiculous ice dancing routine involving operatic music, fluttery swan-esque costumes, and hilariously melodramatic facial expressions, like a telenovela on ice. I enjoyed it; I like telenovelas, and I do appreciate how difficult the athletic feat is, even if they try their darndest to make it look silly. But Dutch started making strange choking noises halfway through. I thought she was laughing at the silliness, but no.

D:Mom! I feel like I'm going to cry! It's so beautiful!
Me: Hm.
D: Why do I feel like this? They're just ice skating.
M: Ah.
D: But it's just SO BEAUTIFUL.

A few minutes later, she informed me that she could definitely do a triple flip. She doesn't think it looks hard.

The grass, it is greener, in patches.

Our housemates have So. Much. Free. Time. It boggles my mind. Granted, they have even less enthusiasm for housework than we do, which frees up some extra time. But mostly, they have free time because they a) have only one job apiece,* b) are not in school, and c) have no children.

Lately I've been so exhausted and hectic that I've been babbling even worse than before, and frequently find myself talking incoherently and (apparently) unstoppably while the people around me look confused, or, worse, look anxiously around for some excuse to escape from me. One of my babbling topics last week was about how freaking hard it is to be in grad school while raising young children. I'm pretty sure that what I effectively communicated was "Don't have kids! Oh my god, don't have kids!" Living with Emma and Brendan reminds me daily of one big difference between having kids and not-having-kids, as they crash on the couch to watch a movie or read or chat after dinner while Cook and I scramble to get the kids to bed, prepare for the next day, and then report to our respective work stations. Free time. What is that, anyway?**

I love both of my incredibly burdensome children. But I want some free time. I can't believe how much free time I used to carelessly squander. What was I THINKING?! I used to play the Sims (a game Cook dismisses as terribly boring, but which I loved). I want the hours I spent playing that game back. It was a mistake, and I'm sorry, and I think I should get a do-over. I will take those hours now, added on to the 24 I get each day. I will be happy to spend them sleeping.

(I'm REALLY looking forward to being done with school, too. But school work can be put away for an hour, and a sad baby or a frustrated preschooler entangled in her swimsuit cannot.)

Tonight after dinner, Dutch and I started some seeds for our new vegetable garden. My tall girl, terribly serious about The Big Responsibility, standing next to me carefully counting out seeds and reading*** packet labels, didn't feel burdensome. She felt like my life. There's no second-guessing; my life has no computer games in it,**** no leisurely mornings, and very little coherent conversation, but it also has two lives nested inside it.

If you happen to talk to me in the next four months, I'm sorry about all the babbling.


*Though Emma is a union organizer who disappears into 120-hour work-weeks when she's on a campaign.
** Oh, right. It's the time I spend frivolously writing blog posts.
*** "P.E.A.R.... puh-eh-ah-rrr. Peru!"
**** just blogging.

This is my life.

All you need to know about what I'm doing right now (lots and lots of group project work, both at school and at work) is summarized in this cartoon.

(I rotate between A, B, C, and D, in case you were wondering.)

Learning to say no.

I have this awful awful group project at school right now. It's SO awful. It makes me feel sick to my stomach whenever I think about it. A few weeks ago, I came to class a few minutes early, and some of my classmates, including one of my slacker groupmates, were there, and somebody asked me how I was doing. "Oh," I said, "I'm a little overwhelmed!" and my slacker groupmate helpfully said "You just need to learn how to say no."

Oh. Oh, that's what I need to do. Like you! You, who refuse to do stuff that I then have to do, because SOMEBODY has to do it, and this professor can't be bothered to figure out how to grade this project, so nobody knows what we have to do or when or WHY. If I said no, who exactly would finish this awful project?

Anyway. She's right, too. I'm bad about saying no. I don't like to upset people, and I want people to like me (especially when I'm babbling incoherently at them), so I do say yes too often. If I said no to more things, I'd probably be less stressed out at the moment. But it's definitely possible to say no too much, and I guess I'd rather err on the side of saying yes.

Also, tonight is the last one of way too many over the last few crazy-making weeks in which Cook or I have to attend some sort of evening thing. So things will be a little gentler for maybe a week.

AND we started working on our little starter vegetable garden this weekend, which was pretty exciting. I said yes to tomatoes and basil and zucchini! YES!

Happy Valentine's Day!

The sun came out here today. We went to the park. Dutch and Cook played some frisbee, crushing my hopes for a slot for Dutch on the 2020 Olympic team.

Skipper swang. Swinged. Swung. Whatever.

Also, here is Skipper napping on Cook yesterday.

Our camera is still out of commission, so Skipper's infancy is going to be recorded only on video.

And here is the result of my experiment to see if I could make my own "single baby" video. I don't think it's going viral, but you never know.

Career prospects

Dutch has now had three acting classes.* She loves them. The night before her third class, she said "tomorrow is going to be the best day of my life, because I have acting class!"

My ulterior motive in encouraging her theater interest is I feel that being a theater geek in junior high/high school might be a safe haven for her. Theater geeks, after all, usually have a happy social clique, and also usually welcome talkative, eccentric kids with glasses and strange fashion choices. And acting class is a great place to bring your crazy feelings, no matter what your age.

Though maybe I should be looking for science classes, or a debate club for preschoolers. Dutch has an alarming combination of my righteously indignant convictions about The Way Things Ought To Be plus Cook's dogged persistence in the pursuit of details, and is lately driving us completely bonkers with her interrogations about Exactly How Things Work.


* One class happened to fall on the day when she was nearly mute with a bad cold. She insisted on going to daycare and class, because she really really didn't want to miss class, and she tried to conserve her voice as much as possible by NOT TALKING. It was really weird spending time with Dutch when she wasn't talking. (In case you haven't had the pleasure of her company lately, you should know that Dutch talks almost constantly, and fills any spaces between sentences with gibberish songs and chants.) I vacillated between really enjoying the peace and quiet, and feeling really uncomfortable and worried.

Up in the air, without George Clooney

I'm going to graduate in June.* I have no idea what will happen after that. Actually, we know that Dutch will be in kindergarten. Somewhere. That's ALL WE KNOW about the fall. There are all sorts of scenarios. Cook and I both have remote possibilities of permanentification of our current jobs. I have to start applying seriously for permanent jobs all over the country starting in April-ish. The public school transfer lottery takes place in mid-March, though if Dutch gets into none of the programs for which we apply, we'll probably just have to move to the catchment area for a different school before September.** In the meantime, we have to attend six meetings for the various programs, and fill out a ton of paperwork, just in case.

We really have no idea what we're doing.

In other news (consistent, though, with the theme of total cluelessness), today Dutch had an Art Sale, in spite of my efforts and Cook's to persuade her that she needed to think the idea through a little more. She stood at the end of our driveway with a crumpled brown paper bag containing three battered (and, truth be told, ugly) artworks brought home from daycare over the last year. She had no sign and no table, and it was raining. And cold. Plus, the foot traffic on our street is pretty much limited to the crazy guy with the bandages wrapped around his head and the dog with the poop-crusted back end, and a steady trickle of down-and-out trudgers walking to the stab-n-grab convenience store down the street to get cigarettes. No art was sold in her 45-minute shift. While I was peeved by Dutch's cranky insistence on doing something so ridiculous, and even kind of embarassed by the whole venture, I also felt grudgingly respectful of her determination and slightly charmed by the sheer weirdness of it. She may not have a ton of potential as an artist or an entrepreneur, but she has the courage of her convictions.

*I AM! No matter how hard my group project buddies try to drag me down.

** We believe in public school, and in investing in your neighborhood school. But we don't want to continue to live in our current neighborhood, due to the long bus commute downtown, and we have reason to believe that Dutch is not a child who will do well with school-switching. So we need to start investing in a different neighborhood school in a neighborhood where we might be able to stay. Besides, the neighborhood school in our neighborhood burned down in the fall, so the kids are busing across town, which is crappy.

Life with Jaws

Our girl is growing by leaps and bounds. She stands and sits and stands and sits and stands and sits. She lets go and stands unsupported for ten seconds at a time. She loves being upside down* and in water, but not at the same time. She screams bloody murder when we leave her at daycare. She bites if she gets a chance to sink her 3.5 teeth into sweet flesh. She does this weird air-biting thing that makes her look like a moray eel.**


Skipper loves having her cheek gently stroked. She dances like an epileptic woodpecker. She loves books - one of her teachers told me that Skipper's the only baby in the room who will sit for the reading of entire (super-short and simple board) book. I'm very proud.

She's different than her sister was. I vividly remember one morning when Dutch was around this age when we went out for breakfast with another couple and their baby, who was very close in age. Their baby was adorable and flirted and made happy baby noises and threw stuff on the ground, and just acted like Your Basic Adorable Baby model. Our baby sat in her high chair and fussed obsessively with a grimy pack of miniature cards that was her favorite toy at the time, looking up occasionally to glower like a grumpy old man at the poker table. She wasn't interested in throwing stuff. Or dancing. (She did like books, though.) She was careful with objects and actions. She was interested in Doing Things Correctly, Even if They're Very Strange Things. Skipper throws stuff. And flirts. She's more like Your Basic Adorable Baby model than Your Weirdo Scowling Baby model. I'm sure her weirdo tendencies will become evident in due time, and to us, the whole romping flirty baby thing actually seems sort of weird, since we haven't had one of those before.



*One of my fabulous cousins used to love being upside down. When we were kids, he would lie blissfully on his back on a parent's lap with his head hanging down. We would have thought this was weird, except that we already knew he was weird, and anyway he could beat everybody else at brainiac games like chess, possibly due to all the blood directed to his head, so we probably figured that he knew something we didn't.

**Seriously.

This is definitely going to increase my site traffic.

Yesterday Dutch and I had The Conversation About Sex. You know, The Conversation. This is how we led up to it. Dutch didn't want to eat her soup. I said she had to eat soup before she could have bread and cheese. She asked me indignantly how I would feel if SHE made ME eat my soup before my bread and cheese. I told her that being an adult means making yourself eat the soup. I mentioned other things, like dental appointments, that I don't like but know I have to do. She said "I know another hard thing! Giving birth!" and I said yes, but that's a little different, and when you choose to get pregnant, giving birth is the only way the baby's coming out. She said, after a minute of thought "You don't want to have any more babies, do you?" and I said no, I will not have any more babies. She said, after several minutes of thought, "You mean you can CHOOSE not to have a baby?" and I said yes. And then she said "How do babies happen?" and I thought "Nooooooo!!!! I'm not ready!" and I got all flushed and shaky.

And then I explained.* I tried not to provide too much or too little information. Fortunately, I escaped having to explain HOW one goes about preventing pregnancy, and we completely left out the notion that people do actually like to have sex even when they don't want babies. We can get to all that later. However, it's also clear that she didn't get all the details nailed down, as she went straight upstairs and told Cook that "men put their penises in women's uteruses!"

Anyway. Later that afternoon, on the way to the library, we walked past a meth house that had been busted and is now closed for decontamination, with big yellow "DANGER" signs posted on the door. So Dutch and I talked about meth.** I wonder what we'll talk about next weekend - domestic program spending freezes?


*Egg, sperm, baby, choice
** Drugs, dangerous, hurtful, choice