Mood Enhancer

I used to color with crayons all the time. In college, David and I exchanged letters and pictures we drew with crayons (back when people exchanged most of their correspondence via paper and stamps and such...), and David even wrote me a poem that compared me to a box of crayons. (The big kind, with lots of colors...it was cute. He wrote it in crayon on the back of a packet of poetry from a class of his...)
I played around a lot with crayons and watercolor paints--decorating most of my apartments with my own cheaply procured artwork...crayons on freezer paper and such.

I can still remember the first time Jabber drew with crayons; I was kind of crazily thrilled by it, to be honest. I remember watching him stand there with a crayon in his fist, standing there barely able to pull himself up on that blue foot locker that served as our coffee table. I remember watching him select a certain color, draw on a certain part of the page, and I thought, "Oh my god, my child just made an artistic choice. He just looked at the page and made a choice and created art."

I know, it's not really all that magical. He picked up a crayon and scribbled with it. But watching him make the connection in his mind between moving his hand and making colors appear on the page...and deciding between different colors and making those choices...it was just an amazing reminder that he was this whole person--an individual with his own will, his own ability to create beauty. It was so cool!

So tonight the Monkey, Jabberwock, and I all spent about an hour coloring. We spend a lot of time drawing, a process which is sort of stressful at times for Jabber, as he is a perfectionist. But coloring in pictures from a coloring book--how can you go wrong?

All of my stress from the day is gone. Crayon therapy.




Here are the space pictures Jabber and I colored, and below are the boys coloring and cutting out their pictures.

I'm Late! I'm Late! For a Very Important Date!

I'm one of those people who really doesn't like to be running late all the time. Really really. Like, it stresses me out terribly to have several things scheduled close enough together so that there is a slight chance I might not be able to make it exactly on time. Prior to having children, I was able to deal with this okay, and I usually arrived a few minutes early for most events, just as I liked it.



I know, everybody knows those people, that family, who are always late. Doesn't matter what time they say they will be somewhere, you can count on them showing up a half an hour later, an hour later, whatever. It becomes a kind of joke; if they actually show up on time somewhere it's a monumental event. People start telling them a time that is earlier than usual in hopes that they will maybe arrive by the real time. I have always vowed never to be those people.



And then we had kids. Suddenly everything slowed down. This week alone, I was late for work every single day. Not LATE late, you understand, but late enough. Late enough so that I had to rush, to skip steps, to snap at the kids about a billion times (which just makes them move more slowly, but ack! what am I supposed to do?)



I do everything I can to facilitate a smooth morning. I pick out the kids' clothes the night before--hunting down little matching socks and clean underwear and onesies and lying them all neatly on the changing table for the next morning. I arrange the boots and snowpants and hats and mittens and lunches and backpacks all carefully by the door. I make lunch the night before, fill my water bottle, bring up the laundry from the basement. Every single thing is set to jump into it the moment we are awake. And still, we are continuously running late.



On Tuesday, I was ten minutes late. Yikes! I had a meeting at 7:30 that I totally didn't get to until almost 7:45! Everything had conspired against me--the road on the way to daycare was a sheet of pure ice (I do thank my lucky stars that I avoided the crash that happened moments after I got to work, however!), Monkey had one mitten go mysteriously AWOL, I got behind a school bus making its stops--anything that could possibly thwart me was there for the thwarting.



So Wednesday, I set the alarm ten minutes earlier. Everything seemed to be working; Jabber woke up without me needing to shake him and cajole him and drag him out of bed. Monkey stayed sleeping in my bed while I washed my hair and put on my make-up and got dressed in the bathroom. Every so often I called in to Jabber's room with a nice little, "How's it going in there, honey? Are you almost dressed?"



"Almost!" he called, each time. I trusted him.



After about ten minutes, I was showered, made up, and dressed. I was about ready to go in and dress the Monkey. I put the toothpaste on Jabber's toothbrush and poked my head in to his room to let him know he could brush at any time.



There he sat, on the edge of the bed, perfectly naked, with one sock in his hand, poised over the edge of one toe. He was lost in thought and looked as though he had been lost there for the last ten minutes. "I thought you were getting dressed!" I shouted. "You said you were almost ready to go!"



"Mom?" he said, looking up from his toe contemplation. "How do we really know about things? Like, really know?"



"WHAT THINGS? THE ONLY THING I KNOW IS THAT I AM GOING TO BE LATE FOR WORK IF WE DON'T LEAVE THE HOUSE IN SEVEN MINUTES! THAT MEANS TEETH BRUSHED, HAIR COMBED, CLOTHES ON, BOOTS ON, SNOW BRUSHED OFF THE CAR, BUCKLED IN CAR SEATS AND HEADING DOWN THE ROAD! WILL YOU PLEASE GET DRESSED NOW????"



I feel awful about that. I mean, he's obviously having some incredible epiphany about the nature of true knowledge, and I'm shoving a piece of gum in his mouth and snapping at him that we don't have time to brush teeth today.



And don't even get me started about the next morning, when I had everyone dressed and ready to go, and then Monkey took off all his clothing while I was out starting the van and scraping the ice of the windshield. Or how he screamed bloody murder while simultaneously thrashing and maintaining an unnatural stiffness to every limb while I tried to re-clothe him.



Late. Running late. Sorry I'm late. Hurry, we're late. Come on, we're going to be late. I feel like the white rabbit.

Road Trips and Renovations!

So this is Jabberwock at the beach, on our trip last week to see my friend M. You wouldn't necessarily think, from looking at this photo, that he was screaming hysterically like fifteen minutes earlier, would you?


So I know I've talked about Jabber's fears, his hesitancies. Dogs, heights, the sound of the coffee grinder, public singing and/or doing hand motions. Well, you can add swimming to that list. Before this picture was taken, he was clinging to me with all of his limbs, screaming at the top of his lungs as I carried him out into the water. No, I wasn't throwing him off the end of a dock, and I wasn't even carrying him out where he couldn't touch. No. I was ON MY KNEES in the water, holding him, with his legs wrapped around my neck and his little razor toes (did I mention he's also afraid of the toenail clippers?) clawing for a toehold to launch himself up onto my shoulders, even as I soothed him and whispered to him and eventually even yelled at him a bit.

"Relax, honey, you can put your feet right down on the ground, and the water is only going to come up to your tummy. I won't let you go, Jabber, I've got you, I've got you, I've got you..." Rinse and repeat. Still he screamed. Loudly.

Friend M. smiled and dove in, leaving us to our own devices, while a couple watching the sailboats sat on the bench and looked slightly worried. Jeez, this lady is forcing that poor child into the water when he is clearly terrified. It looks a little like she might be scarring him for life.

They weren't there last week, though, when we did the same song and dance, almost exactly, at the indoor waterpark pool. That was a little more embarrassing because there was a waayyy bigger audience, though. The thing is, it seems like no matter how many times I take him into the water, his first reaction is just pure panic. If I let him be, he will remain panicky, unable to relax for even one minute next to the water. If the water touches his shoes, he will be afraid that a wave is coming to sweep him off and carry him away. I don't know where this fear comes from, really; I just know that if I hold him long enough and soothe him and keep on trying to make a game out of it until he forgets to be afraid for a little while, eventually he gets comfortable enough to have a little fun!

Like this picture, where he and SuperGirl were making an inland sea or something like that. (Notice, E, there are no pictures of you in or almost out of your bikini top...)
Here is a moment of silliness with friend E and well, let's call him HeroBoy, because he is clearly Jabberwock's Hero!
M has this really awesome guest book that is really a slice of a tree trunk that you sign with a woodburner, and here are E and HeroBoy signing in. Even Jabber got to write his name on the book, although we did have him do it on the practice side, since he still writes it awfully HUGE!

And here's a cute one of SuperGirl, just looking so cute. I mean, I can totally see why Jabber clear forgot about his peanut allergy when this lovely one handed him a cookie. He was under her spell!

Jabber's mad photography skillz...apparently I am breaking up a pretty intense fight. Just for the record, when confronted with a situation in which punches are being thrown, I am not all that likely to be in the middle of it. Especially if the punchers/punchees are girls. Luckily, even in the middle school, I am not in this situation all that often.


OKAY. End of fun road trip pictures. However, NOT quite the end of this picture post extraordinaire! The next two shots are perhaps not quite as cute as kids frolicking at the beach and teachers throwing punches, but they make me just as happy. Probably happier.

See, about two years ago, actually a little more, my dad called from Topeka to ask me some questions about my fireplace, which at the time we had been using sporadically for the ambience. Nothing like sitting in front of a crackling fire in the middle of winter. Cozy stuff. Anyway, he was asking for things like measurements and I forget what else. A week or so later, he came to visit us and bought us this fireplace insert thing. Well, it was the middle of winter, and the roof was all covered in ice, and David didn't really know how to install the thing anyway, so we just set it on two 2x4's about five feet to the side of the fireplace.

And there it sat. There were a number of issues, one of them being the fact that we had a second child, and life got decidedly more full. Another was the fact that the insert itself didn't really FIT into the fireplace, without substantial alterations to the chimney or whatever. Everyone had their theories. Grind away at the inside of the firebox and take out such and such. No, just bend the sides of the stove in to match the dimensions. Well, and then there's the fact that the stovepipe thing was coming off at such a weird angle that the insert was going to have to stick out of the fireplace like ten or twelve inches. So then before we could do that, the hearth needed to be torn out and replaced. Did I mention we had another kid?

Okay. So basically we had this really heavy, really expensive, sharp-edged end table sitting about five feet to the right of our fireplace. Enough is enough. I almost put an ad in the paper last fall--"Come and get it and it's yours!" But life was too busy for me to even get around to that. And plus, it was a gift, a spendy gift, and I didn't want to hurt Dad's feelings, you know?

So, Father-in-law to the rescue! Here is David and his dad going over the plans for the project this afternoon.

And here, TA-DA!!! Is the fireplace insert ACTUALLY INSERTED! Hurray!!! Of course, it's still not connected to the chimney, but we've got a while before the roof is covered with ice. Maybe it will happen? I don't really care; I've got a little more room in my living room now!

(Room to dance with happiness, that is!)

The Good, the Bad, and the...Ugh-ly

A mixed bag today.

On the good team: (ooh, I think this is my first time with the bullets!)

• I started a new novel yesterday, and I'm really in love with the concept and characters so far. The plot arc is slowly emerging from the depths of my subconscious or wherever the hell these things come from, and the first chapter is written. Genre is young adult realistic fiction, and my protagonist is a fifteen-year-old boy. If it's any good, it should be marketable. (At least, if it doesn't take me five years to finish like my first novel did!)
  
• I sent out five more queries for my first novel, so I'm just plugging away at the list, taking care of business.


• Jabber and I went to see his very first movie today, like at the movie theater. We went to see The Spiderwick Chronicles, which was fun and scary and even got me a little teary-eyed when the boy and his mother have their emotional breakthrough moment. Jabber got a little promotional book or two in his Lucky Charms, so we read it out loud as a family, and he loved it. He promised not to be scared, but I had to admit that I was a little nervous when the goblins started popping out all over the place, so he was nice enough to let me hold his hand. And then he was even more generous and allowed me to have him sit on my lap.
• After the initial bathroom sink-trap excavation session onTuesday night, David dredged up the medicine dropper (both parts) that Monkey had stuck down the drain. However, the drain was still a bit sluggish, and then this morning I turned my back for five seconds to set out Jabberwock's clean underwear, and Monkey "dropped" his toothbrush down the hole. So once again, we (and by we I mean David, with the help of any kids I couldn't keep contained) pulled out the trap and started fishing around with a variety of tools, some commercially prepared for the job and others fashioned out of a metal coat hanger. The prize was a plastic bolt from a toy toolbox, and of course one nasty ass race car toothbrush. And, a drain that flows freely. As Monkey would say, "Ta DA!" Until tomorrow.
  
• Last good for today would be these two pictures that show just how much fun a four-year-old can have in about five inches of water.

The Bad

• We're all a little disappointed this evening. David got an offer for this job he's been interviewing for and whatnot, and they didn't want to pay him more than he's making right now. With the change in hours, we would end up with the boys in daycare for about twenty-five more hours a week, and that's just impossible on the same salary. So, even though he really likes the place and the work, he can't accept the position, not for a whole lot more pay. We figured it out, and even without taking into consideration the cost of gas, he'd need about six dollars more per hour. There are still some negotiations on the table, so who knows. But still, it's disappointing.



• Here's a picture of Monkey NOT enjoying the swimming pool. I don't know if it's the hand-me-down swim vest from Jabber's pink and purple period that isn't doing it for him, or if he's just against the whole concept of swimming, but he is clearly not happy. OH, wait. It could have been the TWENTY MINUTE nap today. Yeah, we'll file that one under Bad.

And last, we have The Ugh-ly:

Balancing the checkbook and paying the bills. Excuse me while I have an anxiety attack. Or, I could just keep on blogging!

Lost and Found

I lost my wedding ring today. I was standing in front of my 8th grade class, giving instructions, and suddenly I realized that my ring finger was empty, bare, naked. My heart skipped a beat or ten. I made my class stop journaling and search the room. They did not really help, saying things like, "It's your wedding ring, Ms. Lissnkids, aren't you SUPER upset?" I was. I was heartbroken, truly.

Obviously from the title you can infer that my ring was found, and indeed it was. I called my husband and in a quiet voice told him what had happened, and he promised to search as soon as he got home. My next class was doing debates, and in the middle of a very convincing argument about the ethics of human cloning, the phone rang. It was David, calling to let me know that the ring was found in the bed, where it had most likely fallen off while I was getting Monkey dressed. I was so relieved!

Before it was lost AND found, my students had offered up their usual explanation for something going missing: that is, somebody stole it, of course. I explained that it wasn't really worth a lot of money but that it was extremely important to me. "You got a cheap wedding ring?" one student asked. "Well, you should make your husband buy you a better one, then." I simply smiled and reiterated that the ring means so much to me, much more than its monetary worth.

As I struggled to keep from crying while searching my classroom (I have a firm no crying in school rule), memories associated with my "cheap ring" were flooding over me. I remembered how David's friend Loren had painted a picture and sold it to David so that Loren could use the money to purchase my engagement ring--a sterling silver Claddaugh ring--and give it to David as a gift, since tradition says the ring shouldn't be purchased by the giver.

I thought about the night he asked me to marry him, how we drove toward the setting sun on our anniversary and reached the ocean just as it was slipping down below the horizon. I remembered the way we walked in the darkness then toward the sound of the surf, walked hand in hand into the unknown, giddy with the uncertainty of that sound, the distance from land to sea indistinct and blurry. I felt like I was stepping off a precipice that night, not knowing which step would be my last one on solid ground, but he got down on one knee just before we stepped off the edge of that abyss and started talking about loving me forever.

We were married three weeks later, in a beautiful ceremony that we wrote ourselves. Our altar was a fallen log on the banks of the Clackamas River, and our friend Doreen married us while wearing a wall tapestry and reading from a black leather binder that was only slightly less solemn because of the small Tasmanian Devil on one corner. We had eight or ten guests, some of whom we had just met in the woods, and one of whom was living in a tent a little ways beyond the spot we pitched our own. He brought us a wedding gift of dry wood for our fire. Another man took photos for us and then disappeared. Loren's car broke down, and he and Michelle finally made it just as the ceremony was starting, walking with us between the two cedar trees that made our archway. We passed around a bottle of wine while soaking in a huge barrel full of steaming hot spring water and Brian gave a toast while his dogs ate our smoked salmon off the bench. Shae and Jerome sprinkled rose petals all around our tent and smudged the whole camp with sage and cedar. All this loveliness is tied into that small white gold band and silver Claddaugh that I have worn ever since. Irreplaceable.

It's not a good sign...

When I've got writers' block for the title.

Mostly, since I've started doing this blog thing (less than a month ago, and already I'm a hopeless addict), I just go about my daily life and then a topic starts twisting and turning in my mind. By dinner time, my fingers are itching, and by the time the kids and husband are in bed, I'm ready to roll. But tonight I've just got a slew of little random thoughts in my head. So why not form a list? A list of today's thoughts, in no particular order.

1. Deadlines. I have literally fifty million of these coming up this week and next for the end of the school year. Fifty-two million if you count the bills I still haven't paid for the month, but until school is over, I have to limit my attention to the work deadlines or I may explode. Or implode. Some kind of plosion, anyway. Sometimes I like to think of myself as the type of person who performs best under a little bit of pressure, and in fact I often use that very thought as a great excuse to procrastinate (like, say, blogging instead of finishing my work?). So far, I'm doing okay with this philosophy, although the periodic episodes of racing heart and dizziness may be an unfortunate side effect. I am going to blame the crushing headache I had this afternoon on all the data I had to enter and analyze on reading scores, though. Hello? English teachers are not made to analyze data. I would, however, be perfectly happy writing a poem on said analysis.

2. Making lunches. I really despise this, though not as much now that my kiddos are in a new daycare with a woman who makes them food, even with Jabberwock's food allergies. Now I only have to make one lunch instead of three. I did go grocery shopping this evening, after I got done working out at the fitness center (after I washed three Tylenol down with a cup of coffee and took a twenty minute nap, of course), and that makes lunch-making much better. Which brings me to thought number

3. What the hell are they doing to the strawberries out there in California??? Those suckers were the size of my baby's head! Granted, living in Minnesota I have a bit of a skewed perception about fruit and vegetable growing, since we aren't even close to being able to put them in the ground yet, and the average farm strawberry around here is about the diameter of a nickel. OK, maybe a quarter. But these strawberries were monstrous. I know, I should have taken a picture, but hey, I'm lazy. They are tasty, though.

4. I'm still on the lunches. I think what bothers me the most about this mundane chore is the fact that I am physically incapable of making my lunch until AFTER I clean the entire kitchen. My husband cooks for me (I know, I'm completely spoiled, but srsly, NOBODY would survive around here if I did the cooking!), and unfortunately he has no issues with cooking in a dirty kitchen. He doesn't really seem to see the mess, and he definitely doesn't clean up when he's done. I'll say, "Honey, thanks so much for dinner, but couldn't you just clean up a little bit as you go?" and he'll look around, genuinely puzzled. "I did," he says, his eyes sweeping blindly past the saucy fingerprints on the fridge door, the cheese wrappers and empty bean cans on the counter, the tomato pulp pooling on the cutting board, dishes and silverware littered all over. So on an evening like tonight, when I took off right after dinner and nursies to work out and grocery shop, there's quite the array of crapola waiting before I can make my lunch.

5. Five is a nice round number, so I thought I'd share one last thought for the day. I debated posting about this, since I don't really want my son to be too embarrassed, but it's just so darn cute I can't resist. We dined quickly last night in a lamentably fast food nation style (but at least with milk, apple slices, and string cheese and sweet potatoes from home for the kids) and then went down to throw some rocks in the Lake. Jabberwock discovered halfway through our walk that he needed to use the (nonexistent) facilities, so we beat a quick retreat to the van. Shortly after he realized his need, he tugged on my sleeve and said, "Mama, I think I pooped in my pants a little bit. I thought I was just going to pass some gas, but some came out." Poor guy, we were still quite a ways away from our car. David carried him back and got him all cleaned up, and he was a really good sport throughout the ordeal.

When we got home, I said to him, "Jabber, I'm really proud of how well you handled this whole situation. You did a great job with this." He looked up at me, and with a wry little grin said, "Oh, yeah. I did a great job. Four years old, and I pooped my pants. Great job." SARCASM! Perfectly executed sarcasm from my sweet four-year-old! Mama was so proud!

Super Stress!

Feeling a bit mundane for only my third post ever, but seriously a lot has happened/is happening over the last 24 hours, and I'm just feeling a need to save my sanity by making a list.

These are the things that have been giving me super stress:

Item #1: Last night (Sunday night), I opened my son's lunch box to make his lunch for daycare this morning. Inside, I found the bill, which I was expecting. I also found a complete and total shocking surprise--a note saying that last Friday was the last day that our lovely provider can do daycare, due to a serious medical condition. Uhhhh...yeah. Meaning I had nowhere to bring my children today. I want the world to know that I have the utmost respect for this woman; I truly am in pain thinking about (speculating about) whatever tragic news she received from her doctor. I feel for her family, and for the loss she must feel giving up all of her daycare children, whom I know she loves immensely. I feel helpless, as I would like to help in some way, but I don't even really know what is going on. I also completely, totally understand that she was unprepared on Friday for discussing whatever it is with each parent, as she was in the middle of trying to hold on and get through the day.

Still, I really, really wish that she had said something along the lines of, "Hey, you should check out Jabberwock's lunchbox as soon as you can. I put a note about something important in there."

That said, today I ran around like crazy, all by the grace of my wonderful boss who let me come in early, leave halfway through the day, and miss a very important meeting with some honchos from the state department of education about something that I totally forgot to prepare for because I was busy trying to figure out what the heck to do with my kids. (Unlike my soul mate's boss, who told him he must have this figured out by tomorrow, no exceptions.) In the end, all is well. I got a great recommendation for a new daycare, I called five minutes before the other two groups of parents that were scrambling like me, I met with Michelle today and really liked her, and she has openings for my boys starting tomorrow morning. I am going in early to hang out with the kids and help them transition, and then I am going to breathe a big sigh of relief and hope that Jabberwock will be able to recover from this strange and sudden disappearance from his life of a person who has partially raised him for the last three years.

Item #2: About twenty minutes after I found the note in J's lunchbox, I got a call from my mother. Currently her brother, my uncle, is lying in intensive care with some freakish disease that suddenly struck him down in the middle of a normal cold. His optic nerve swelled up, and he lost all sight to his left eye. Then his brain was swelling, and he suffered from an excruciating headache. They told him he had viral meningitis, then encephalitis. Steadily, he has gotten worse. Now they are discussing Lyme disease and other possibilities. He's on a Lyme-fighting antibiotic and a powerful anti-viral. He has lost the ability to walk, and at the last update was pretty much paralyzed (a palsy, I'm told) on his left side and his optic nerve is twice the normal size. They don't know what to do. He and his wife and daughter are all alone in Ohio, far from all family. Again, I wish I could help in some way.

Item #3: My midterm grades are due tomorrow and I am blogging about it instead of correcting papers.

Item #4: I have to create sets for our play that opens on Thursday. Currently, I have about 1/8 of the set completed.

Item #5: I have not had a chance to exercise today, nor does it look like I will get one, unless I do not sleep.

Item #6: I keep writing my blog instead of working.

Item #7: I am avoiding making my lunches for tomorrow.

Item #8: Instead of being able to make sets tomorrow, I must attend a benefits meeting, at which they will be telling me how my super good but awfully expensive health insurance package is being discontinued in favor of a less expensive and thoroughly useless health insurance package.

Ugh.