MidLifeMama - A Change of Life

Closing For Business...

2012-01-24T20:41:00.000-05:00

No, this blog is not closing for business. But my uterus is.

Has anyone else noticed the recent inundation of shows and movies about Snow White? We have Once Upon a Time on ABC, which takes Snow White and brings her into modern day. And then there is not one but TWO movies coming out based on the Snow White story, one with Julie Roberts as the evil queen and the other with Charlize Theron in the same role. I am not sure what is up with this renewed interest in this fairy tale, but I have a new take on it myself.

Snow White and the Seven Malicious Dwarfs of Menopause. There is our heroine, Snow White, (that's me) and we have as our seven little leading men: Cranky, Sweaty, Chubby, Itchy, Fitful the Unsleepy, Puffy and Forgetful.

I am currently becoming really good friends with six out of the seven of these little devils. My friend, Flo, has been missing in action for months. The last time she didn't visit for that length of time I THOUGHT it was Lady Perimenopause knocking on the door. But it was her cousin, Madame Midlife Baby. This time the Lady really has come for tea.

I recently saw my doctor to discuss the fact that I am on uncomfortably good terms with a few of these guys, and I would like to fire them from my crew. I have been working really hard to eat right, and working out 4 or so times a week. I have been enduring Lady Wii's mocking. Did you know it makes this little "Oooooh" sound when you step on and you haven't lost any weight but in fact GAINED it? Yes. It does. It is rude. I have been racking up the miles on the treadmill, even getting myself up to a light jog, on an INCLINE, for most of the 30 minutes. I hate running. And still, NOTHING. Or worse, the opposite of what I am supposed to see happening, I gain weight instead of lose it.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I am also itchy. I think I looked just insane enough because of all the itchiness at my appointment that the doc was like "Weeeeeell OKAAAAY, let's check your thyroid" and PRAISE BE it was finally decided I might benefit from some supplementation. It is my fondest and dearest hope that the itching will subside if not disappear, and that maybe it will help with a few other things. Time will tell.

In the meantime, while I am not experiencing night hot flashes, I am surprised that snow doesn't melt in my path just from how hot my face gets. It is both uncomfortable and uncomfortable. Yes, I said it twice. Food doesn't seem to trigger it as much as adrenalin. Like when I work out. So YAY! I work out, get all hot faced, and I don't lose weight. And when I sing. Here I am doing something I love, and I am positive that if I look in the mirror I am going to see this staring back at me:

Studies on global warming are going to have my picture in the sidebar.
(This is really Nicholas Cage as Ghost Rider, new movie coming out in February. Check out the trailer here)

As for the other dwarfs, I am consciously trying not to let Cranky rule the day but by the GODS if my dog Poncho doesn't stop knocking at the doggy door and just COME IN ALREADY he may find himself stuffed and mounted over the fireplace. No not really, but I do get cranky.

I am trying to mitigate Puffy by drinking plenty of green tea and water, but that means the fact that the bathroom outside my office is lacking essential equipment like a toilet and sink becomes even more of an inconvenience. But hey! BONUS! I have to go downstairs to use the bathroom, which means extra exercise! That isn't doing anything!

My favorite dwarf is Forgetful. Much like Bashful in the original saga, Forgetful is cute, cuddly, and thanks to Sweaty is also rosy cheeked. But he is also freaking annoying. I hate making lists, but my iPhone and whiteboard have become my newest tools in the fight against missing deadlines and forgetting to buy milk at the store. I have been reduced to writing down we need milk. We use it ALL THE TIME, and yet I need to remind myself to buy it.

The universe finds me amusing. This is the only explanation I have for my life sometimes.

Lessons in ego, humility and simplification...

2012-01-17T12:29:00.000-05:00

Recently I had to change offices, as did my associate director. We moved from the first floor of our building, which is a house converted to office space, to the second floor.

I had been in the old office for 10 years. It was quite spacious, and had recently been painted a lovely color of blue that I picked out. Nantucket Fog to be precise, by Benjamin Moore. It had once been a porch and possibly sunroom of the house. It had pretty high ceilings, lovely windows and a back door that allowed both for easy access as well great cross breezes on a spring or fall day.

The two offices that we moved into are significantly different in size from each other. One was probably the master bedroom of the home back when it was used as a personal home. It is VAST. The second room is connected to it by a door, with a closet in between. The second room is smaller by more than half of the other office, and probably was used as a nursery or other kind of bedroom. There is a bathroom right outside this office.

When considering the needs of our office, and the fact that we were losing an outside space where we kept four large filing cabinets, it made sense that the filing cabinets go into the large office. That meant that whomever had that office would a) be looking at those cabinets all the time and b) would have to tolerate other people coming and going from the office as files were needed and then re-filed. Note: We are moving toward document imaging, SLOWLY, as a campus and someday may not need these cabinets, but for now we hold all 1500 awarded financial aid recipient's files in them.

As the director I got to decide, with my boss's approval of course, where to put whom. I decided that I could not be in the office with the file cabinets. I had spent the last 10 years in a space that was lovely, but I was constantly being interrupted because I was too close to the files, too accessible to the work study students, and the first stop most people made on the first floor when looking for our offices. Plus the small fridge for our office was in my office.

So I decided to take the smaller office, and put the associate director in the big office. I did offer him the option of swapping offices with our other staff member, who has an even smaller office, so he would be more secluded, but he made the choice to be in the big office.

My desk and the accompanying credenza/bookshelf thing was WAY too big to go into what was going to be my new office, so I decided to give it to my associate director. Anyone who is friends with me on FB or follows me on Twitter knows the drama I went through getting my new desk last week. But we are all moved in and settled. And the process of coming to terms with the move was interesting.

I don't like change much. Never have. I found I was sad to leave my old office, and was kind of grieving the loss of it. Add to that the fact that when you walk into my associate director's office, with the grand space and the big furniture, well, he looks like the director.

I will admit my ego struggled with this. My head said this set up is the right one for the use of the space and the needs of the office. I am more secluded, which will afford me more uninterrupted time to get my work done. But there is this weird thing that our society does to us, this thing that says we should have the biggest, best, shiniest, whatever thing it is we are talking about. And my brain went there at first. I found myself thinking "I should be in the big office, with the big furniture, looking important."

Then I slapped myself across the face, figuratively speaking, and said stop being an idiot. It makes sense for us to be set up this way. And you don't NEED the big desk, the big office. You ARE the director. The big office doesn't make you the director. You like the small office and it's cozy space. The big office has better window space for your plants, but you will work it out.

That is the one thing I have had to really come to terms with, the light in the new space. I really loved the light in the old office, and even in the big office. The light in my new space is like what you would expect in a smallish bedroom. But there ARE windows, which is more than some people can say about their offices, and I can open them, which is key.

But all in all I really had to have a talk with myself about what is important, check my ego at the door and be grateful for what I do have, which is a lovely, quiet, green space to spend 8+ hours a day in. It is better than a cubicle, that is FOR SURE. And if people think that my associate director is actually the director, maybe they will stop asking to speak to the director and take his answer as the final answer. I need to be grateful for what I do have, and not worry about status symbols and appearances. Because in the end, none of it really makes a difference.

Just call me Miss Marvel...

2012-01-11T14:23:00.001-05:00

In case you missed it the 12000 times I have mentioned it here, I have a 5 year old son. Honestly, most days it STILL takes me by surprise. I wake up, pull on some work out clothes and then BAM remember I am someone's mom. And despite my complete lack of training in this area (OK, I did my share of babysitting, but really, my own mom was only a block away most of the time, so I always had back up) the boy seems to be growing. The Bob has more experience in this area than I, since he managed to grow two other boys to almost adult hood. The funny thing about that is if I ask him something like "What age does XYZ happen?" he will be all "Uuuummmm, dude, I have no idea. Can't remember when that happened."

I added the dude. He never calls me that.

Anyway, I have been reminded recently, because I have this kid in my life, that other kids are mean and I already did all of this growing up myself I don't want to go through it all again but I really DO have to have a discussion about best friends, not leaving other kids out, and why sometimes Charlie doesn't want to do exactly what you are doing. Sigh.

There are times when being this mom person is so AWESOME. Like when I go in to wake him up in the morning and he is all cuddly and warm and I get to kiss his head and snuggle with him for a few minutes before the rocket ship we call life takes off for the next 12 hours. Or when I look in the rear view mirror and he catches my eye, and gives me the ol' wink and says "I LOVE YOU MOMMY."

There are times when it is challenging but in a fun or interesting way. We had to spend time at Children's Hospital recently finding out that Cooper MIGHT have some sort of miniscus blahbittyblahblah thing that makes his knee pop and sometimes dislocates slightly, causing it to lock and cause pain. The short version of the visit is that we wouldn't know for sure if that is the problem without an MRI and well, that involves sedation for a 5 year old. Really? I said to the beautiful Benton Hayworth, sports orthopedic specialist with skin so perfect I questioned if he even has pores or grows a beard, as Cooper walked back and forth in the room discussing super heroes. Sedation to get that kid to lay still for an MRI you say. Shocking. No, we will not be doing that right now. It is not interfering with his life or otherwise causing problems. If it does in the future, we will make a different decision.

But that is not what was challenging. Cooper likes for me to make up stories about super heroes. We had time to kill and the power was running low on my phone, so I made up two stories about the Avengers for him. I was particularly proud of the one, which involved a bad guy I called The Weeper. His power was that he cried, and when he cried he made everyone around him so sad and depressed that all they could do was sit down right where they were and cry. While they were incapacitated by the crying, The Weeper's henchmen would rob them. When the Avengers showed up they all started crying too, which interfered with the whole defeating the bad guys thing. The Hulk cried so much he was creating puddles, Thor had no idea what was happening because he is a god, gods don't cry. Iron Man solved the problem by turning off the sound to his armor so he couldn't hear The Weeper, and then sprayed him with laughing gas, which is the only way to defeat The Weeper.

Cooper was so enamored of this story he immediately began telling the story to Dr. Handsome and the nurse when they came in. And as much fun as it is to create these stories, I find it also a little exhausting. Being creative like that on the spot is HARD man. But maybe if this college administrator gig doesn't pan out I can find a new career writing story lines for Marvel.

Year of the Dragon

2012-01-01T09:05:00.000-05:00

Happy 2012, the Year of the Dragon, or as I like to call it, The Year of MidLyfeMama. I am a Wood Dragon in the Chinese horoscope world. There are 12 zodiac signs, and rather than assign one to a month, they assign one to the year of your birth.

Characteristics of a person born in the year of the Dragon include being passionate, opinionated, caring, don't mind taking risks, and while others are drawn to the colorful personality of the Dragon, Dragons tend to like to be alone.

All of which could apply to a lot of people, but I like to pretend that they apply to me ever so specifically. Because I AM SPECIAL.

They break the signs down further into four of the elemental signs, Water, Wood, Metal and Fire. I happen to be a Wood Dragon, which makes me less prickly than other Dragons. We will actually entertain the opinions of others (although if you ask The Bob those opinions are not necessarily USED in any actual manner) and we get along with others really well, but still like to be in charge. Really. I hadn't noticed.

My mother, the great and wise Dee, is also a Dragon, a Metal Dragon to be exact. My poor father and brother just stood no chance whatsoever in our household.

I don't do resolutions. I find that just sets me up for failure. Instead I would like to put hopes out there for the year.

I hope this is a year of financial recovery for The Bob and I.

I hope this is a successful year for the Coop at school - he finishes pre school and begins kindergarten in the fall.

I hope for continued health for all of my family.

I hope for continued emotional well being for all of my family.

I hope to get back to spending quality time with my friends, who I have neglected during the last few years of being a mom among other things.

I hope to lose at least 20lbs. On that point, The Bob got us a Wii for Christmas, and Wii Fit for MLM. The first time you step onto Lady Wii, she evaluates you, mocks you, tells you how out of shape you are and asks you for your fitness goals. She also tells you your "Wii Age" which is based on you having performed some of the evaluation exercises. The first day I used it, my Wii age was 40, which is 7 years younger than I am. Excellent. I have great balance (thank you yoga classes) but I definitely need to lose weight.

The second day I got on it, roughly at the same time of day as the day before, and it told me I had GAINED 5lbs. What the WHAT. I hadn't even gone NEAR the Christmas cookies. But! After performing the body evaluation again, after working out on it for 40 minutes, Lady Wii told me I was in great condition and my Wii age was 31. YAZTEE! I gained weight but lost years. At this rate I will be the youngest, fittest fat person you ever met.

I will not be deterred. I will get back on that Wii, and I will continue to work out on the treadmill and work toward my goal of losing 20lbs. I will also roll the shaggy rug back before using it, because I think it confounds Lady Wii's ability to register my movements and possibly contributed to my 5lb "weight gain."

Finally, I hope for all of you a happy, healthy, and successful however you measure that 2012.

Grab 'em, hold 'em and tell them you love them...

2011-12-23T07:52:00.000-05:00

Yesterday our little college community found out we had suffered another loss. A student, close to graduation has died. His parents will now move through this holiday season without their child.

Several people I know are recently separated or divorced after decades of being married. The families are moving through this holiday season trying to figure out a new definition of "family" and looking for peace and blessings to fill the spaces left by these changes.

On Facebook I heard of a friend of a friend whose 5 year old son is dying from an incurable disease. The family is hoping to have one more Christmas with their precious boy.

And just like that my week long cold/coughing spell seems utterly inconsequential. A minor inconvenience. If ever there were a time of year to remember our blessings, to grab those we hold dear, who are the joy and heart of our lives, and tell them we love them, it is RIGHT.NOW.

To my mother, father, brother and his family, to Bob, Cooper and all my friends, thank you for being in my life and I love you all.

The One in Which I Defend "Lying" to My Kid...

2011-12-16T13:49:00.000-05:00

It has come to my attention recently, on places like Babble Voices and some other blogs, or on Facebook, that some people think it is a bad thing, a scarring and horrible crime against humanity to encourage your child to believe in Santa.

What horrible, terrible, very bad, no good thing happened to these people in their childhood? Childhoods? Whatever...what exactly went wrong one day for them that the joy, the mystery, the HAPPINESS that is embodied by that jolly man in a red suit with his eight tiny reindeer lost it's jingle jangle jazz?

I have a newly minted 5 year old son. We did not go to visit the mall Santa his first Christmas on this earth as he was one month old and a preemie. I was sure he would contract ebola if we went near the mall that first month. I might have been functioning under the irrational influence of mommy hormones and the drugs they gave me during the delivery to keep me from dying. But every year since, we have been to see our Santa. It has been the same Santa every year. And he is a good Santa. He is not scary, he does not smell. (I would know too. I have the nose of a blood hound.) He is kind and gentle and has a soft Kentucky accent. There was only one year, when Cooper was 3, that Cooper screamed bloody murder, and that was not because of Santa. It was bad timing on our part and a long line. When it came time to get Cooper to sit with him, I said "I don't know how this is going to go" and Santa said "Bring it."

Cooper loves the whole concept of Santa. The kid is a born consumer. But he GETS it. He understands the magic around the holiday, the suspense, the spirit of both giving and receiving. We watch almost every holiday special there is, so he has seen many differing messages about how Santa gets around, how the whole sleigh and sack of toys thing might work. He is savvy enough to question the logic behind it all, but still believes it is all possible. Because it is MAGIC.

We have had the chance to talk about the Santa legend what his backstory is, how Santa came to be the dude we know today. This year I purposefully included Cooper in the process of selecting things to buy to give to a charity, and in what to buy through Heifer Internationalso he understands that there are people in this world who don't have much, if anything, and don't get presents like he does. That it is important to give.

I don't consider it LYING when we celebrate the holiday and encourage him to believe in Santa. Because it isn't about whether Santa really exists. It is about embracing, reveling in, the magic of the season. To believe in joy, wonder and at least this year, use the Advent calendar as a way to reinforce learning our numbers and counting to 25. So hands off the mystery all you Scrooges. This gal believes in Santa and her kid will too for as long as he is willing.

I don't like change...

2011-12-14T11:37:00.000-05:00

I am not generally a fan of change. Even good change. It is, well, CHANGE. Ask my parents. Moving from one home to another was always devastating for me as a kid. Even though the new house was sometimes bigger, newer, in a better school system (like I noticed that kind of thing THEN).

You see, I nest. I like my THINGS. My bits and bobs and doodads. When I was pregnant, (which, in case you are not aware, is like the MOTHERLOAD of change, no pun intended,) in a fit of prenatal nesting/cleaning I "decluttered" the house, thinking I needed to protect this little bit of a person who would not be crawling much less walking for 9 months, from the more dangerous breakable, chokable items. I put some of the "precious" mementos away, and 5 years later still live without them. Some have been sold at the annual yard sale, some are still just put away in the attic.

But the point of this is about change. I have been in my current office for almost 10 years. When I first started at this job my office was on the second floor of this house which is an office building. About a year later I and my assistant director relocated to the first floor. I got a newly constructed office space that had previously been a room with pink carpet and two large copiers in it. It has LOTS of light and a back door through which I come and go and is also useful for getting a great cross breeze on lovely days.

This is the door, and one huge window.

As you can see from these pictures, there is great light, and I have a lot of plants. I can't help it. Wherever I go, I grow plants. My dining room is like a botantical garden right now because I have moved some plants inside for the winter which live out on our deck during the summer and fall.

Anyway, I love this office. And in a few weeks I have to move to a different office, back on the second floor. It is a nice enough office, the one upstairs. It is not a lovely shade of blue, Nantucket Fog by Benjamin Moore to be precise, but it is a nice shade of pale green. But I will miss this office and all its lovely light. And cross breezes. The one upstairs has windows, but the ceiling is not as high as in this one, so they are not as big, and the cross breeze won't be there.

There are positives to being in the new office. Where I am now is very accessible to everyone coming into the building whether they are here to see me or not. So I get to be the building receptionist a lot. The copier/printer for the building is right outside of my office. This means I have become the go to person for any paper jam or other technical malfunction of said machine. I won't miss being a very well paid administrative assistant, is what I am saying. Also my current office is always 10 degrees colder than the rest of the building. Since this was once a house, I am in what was probably a pantry with a porch. Half of my office sits over open space, on stilts. It is not very well insulated. In February I have the space heater running all the time and there is a distinct breeze blowing in from the back wall. The new office will not have the heat problem, and is in a location that will not be the first stop for people seeking the financial aid office, or any office for that matter. So I will be able to get more done without as many interruptions.

The one creature that may have the hardest time adjusting to this change is Caper, my boss's dog. She comes to work every day, and every day upon entering the building she comes bounding into my office, looking for love and treat. Mostly a treat. After the move she will be bounding into the office of our director for institutional research. She will have to be reprogrammed to come upstairs. I hope she does, or else I will have to leave a supply of treats with the new office resident. She also hangs out with me when her mother leaves the building, which means she will have to come upstairs in the future. If there was a creature whose habits were more ingrained than mine, it would be Caper. This is going to be hard on us all.

Caper under my desk today...

My life in instagram moments...

2011-12-11T15:25:00.001-05:00

Life has been CA-RAZY and busy and while I noodle around reading other people's posts and facebook and twitter, I spend most of my time recording my life in pictures with my iPhone, then posting them on Instagram. Here is my life recently...

Cooper has a best friend at school, who came over for a play date today. Poptarts, Rudolph on TV, best friend, what more can you ask for.

At the park...

Cooper helping put up the tree.

Me, getting a much needed refresh on the highlights.

Cooper as Ironman, relaxing before bed.

I spent some time recently taking pictures in a local graveyard. I find them beautiful and fascinating in the fall and winter. I hope to get more once it snows around here.

Things are going to slow down around here, I hope for the next few weeks, and we are not traveling for the holidays, so I hope to catch up on some things. I am also turning over in my head a plan, something that I have wanted to do for a long time, that would not replace what I do full time professionally, but could add some fun and joy to it if I can make it work. So I hope to spend some time trying to work out a concrete plan. I may ask the internets for advice in the near future too. Stay tooned!

Pardon me, have you seen my brain?

2011-11-21T09:54:00.001-05:00

Most days start out the same. I might exercise first thing, shower, get the kid ready to go to school, make a lunch for him, things like that. After that I am on a rocket ship that doesn't land until around 9pm. Work, which is generally much quieter in the months of October and November has been non stop hopping, with interruptions 12 times a day. My office is in a space where I am easily accessible, which is good when the work study student needs me, but bad when I am in the middle of a very detail oriented task and students just walk in and start talking. I have had them begin talking when I am on the phone, speaking out loud, not just listening to someone talking. Maybe they don't recognize a desk phone as a phone. If I had my iPhone to my head they might get what I am doing.

My point, and I do have one, is that lately I don't seem to have a brain. I cannot for the life of me remember anything for longer than 30 seconds. I forgot a doctor's appointment for Cooper last week, remembering 5 minutes before we should have been in the office. Then I forgot another meeting I was supposed to be at in another building on campus, but fortunately the other people were running late so by the time I remembered the meeting, I was still earlier than they were.

I needed to get toilet paper for the bathroom, and must have gone in and out of the bathroom 4 times in one day before actually remembering the need for the paper and getting it before I forgot again.

Yesterday I needed to use the bathroom, but while doing my business had to chant to myself "Do not flush, do not flush" until I was out of the bathroom, so that I didn't flush it while The Bob was in the basement putting the temporary rubber clamp on the main waste pipe, which has very kindly developed a leak. Which in and of itself is totally awesome.

No doubt contributing to the brain dead nature of my existence, is the dreaming. Non stop, busy busy dreams. I have always had very vivid dreams, and depending on what I am dealing with at work or in life, they can be more busy than others. So I wake up feeling like I have not slept. And depending on the nature of the dreams, I might wake up kind of cranky from the residule emotional tenure of the dreams. I spent an entire day angry at my dad one time, because I was mad at him a dream for something that was completely fabricated and nonsensical. That is always a good time.

On top of all of this, I am itchy. It is ridiculous. There don't appear to be any external causes. I did not get new soap, detergent, lotions, nor did I change my diet. But in the last couple of months, I have broken out in what kind of looks like eczema, but for the most part it fades away after a few days. Then it resurfaces. My skin has never liked its own sweat. I have always had to shower pretty soon after working out or sweating for some reason, but this is new. So I have changed up my soap, and am using Cetaphil or a Cetaphil like product for all bodily cleansing, Tom's of Maine deoderant which is NOT an antipersperant. I have not found it to be satisfactory in the past for keeping me non stinky, but it is winter, so perhaps it can keep up for now.

Then there is my face which feels like it is on fire all the time. Rosacea does that. On the one hand, I have been told recently by someone that I have the best complexion, I always look like I have been sprinkled by fairy dust. I was reluctant to give credit to an involuntary and uncontrollable influx of blood to the fine capillaries in my face.

My fear is this is all an indication of the downward slide that is Menopause. It is maddening when you google the symptoms of menopause, and discover that everyone experiences it in their own special and torturous way. It is not exactly the same for everyone. MADDENING. But brain deadedness, itching and Rosacea, all part of the POSSIBLE signs of the Change Of Life. And it is a train you cannot get off. The best I can hope for it to manage the symptoms. Which probably involves finding a new primary care doctor. My current one is 67 or so years old, and male.

Hey, I just remembered something I am supposed to be doing. Gotta go.

On Mashed Potatoes...

2011-11-17T09:21:00.001-05:00

I love potatoes in pretty much any form. Baked, fried, scalloped, mashed. I had a conversation with a friend recently about some very disappointing, terrible in fact, mashed potatoes I ate at a local restaurant. She had recommended the place to us, and I like to check out local places, so off we went.

I ordered steak tips and mashed potatoes. It is one of the meals I will order if available, to judge the basic culinary worthiness of a restaurant when dining at a new place. It is not fussy, and can be done by a diner or by a high falutin' place. The steak was alright. They had prepared the tips with some sort of sauce, which was a bit too bitey for my taste. I think steak tips are best when done simply and grilled to a medium doneness.

The potatoes were terrible. I could not decide if they were instant or just bad. They had a weird texture, too dry or something, and had a strange flavor. And this is what baffles me. Mashed potatoes have to be one of the easiest side dishes in the known universe. I mean, the most basic version is quite simply potatoes, cut up and boiled, mashed with some milk, butter, salt and pepper. You don't even have to worry about how long to boil the potatoes really. Not like with potato salad. Then you need them done enough to be tender, but not fall apart tender. With mashed, the longer the better.

Of course the kind of potato used can make a difference, but I have used all kinds, mixed varieties in the same batch, and still, it is good.

Sure, the hardest part is the prep work. Washing, peeling if you don't like a more rustic version with peels in it, and cutting. But still not hard like breaking down a whole chicken. Which for the record I have not ever done. Because it is kind of gross.

For the mashing part I use a masher, not a ricer or a hand mixer. Some people like a really light, whipped effect for mashed potatoes, which would make them whipped potatoes, not mashed, and that is fine, for them. I like the rustic effect of a few lumps, a few bits of skin. I add milk conservatively, mixing in between to get the right consistency. This part I think is a personal choice, how thick or thin you like your potatoes. And don't forget the butter, salt and pepper. At this point you are done. Serve.

My boss has said that making mashed potatoes in her large, Irish Catholic family has been a religion and the source of more than one Bobby Flay like throw down. She likes to use cream, or at least half and half instead of milk, and at least one stick of butter. You will of course get some seriously rich potatoes with that method. And I watched The Pioneer Woman's HGTV show where she made mashed potatoes that practically induced a cardiac event just watching her prepare them. She used A LOT of butter AND cream cheese. She stated that these were popular on her ranch. I WONDER WHY.

My point is you can get creative with potatoes if you want, adding cheese, which I do when I use leftovers for the top of Shepherd's Pie. But at minimum it is just a bunch of boiled, mashed potatoes mixed with milk and butter. Go forth and mash it up people.

So here's the thing...

2011-11-09T15:25:00.000-05:00

So here's the thing. Addiction is a lying bastard. It tells you lies, and it gets you to lie to others. It tells you it will make you feel better. It tells you you will be happier with it than without. It snuggles up to you, makes you feel loved and safe. For the moment.

You don't even notice at first the damage it is doing. It tells you it is your family. It helps creates bonds with others that are not real, they are just built on the exchange of services that feed the addicition. It tells you we don't really love you, we don't care about you, that it will take care of you.

All the while the storm is brewing. The clouds are gathering, swirling slowly at first, gathering strength along the way. At first it is just a light breeze making the leaves flutter. Then there is the day the wind blows hard, even makes it hard to walk, but you persist. Eventually, it is a maelstrom, pulling everything it touches down into its vortex.

But you persist. The noise grows louder, turning you deaf to everything else except the sweet whispers of no more pain, the voices being shut up for an hour, a day. You just keep swirling, out of control, everything being sacrificed until eventually you find the bottom.

The bottom is different for everyone. Some are particularly immune to the noise, to the chaos, and so it takes longer. Longer to see there are no more choices, longer to see all of your friends are gone, all of your family has backed away. The bottom is where the fear and the wind crash together and become silence.

Addiction is a lying bastard. You feel worthless so you listen to addiction, telling you you need it to be OK. You listen to it telling you you deserve better, at the same time it tears at your soul with its grimey hands.

The truth is you DO deserve better, and you are not worthless. You are a shiny, precious soul. People love and care about you. But you won't listen. You can't hear them because you haven't found the bottom yet. It is in the silence of the bottom that you might finally hear the words. Our words, our prayers, might finally get through.

So we wait. We do what we need to do to try and be OK with what is happening, but we worry. We can see so clearly what you need to do, but it doesn't matter. We can't make you do it, we can't make you hear us. We try to be supportive without enabling. We can only do so much though. It really is up to you. But you can't hear us yet. We hope and pray you survive this long enough to finally hear us. To finally accept that you are helpless against the lying bastard, addiction, and you need help. We will be here when you do.

The weight of him...

2011-10-22T20:27:00.000-04:00

Almost too big, at 47 inches tall and 49 lbs heavy...but for as long as I can I will hold him, carry him, hug him and despite the protestations of my 47 year old bones I will give him piggy back rides and have ninja fights. Because some day he really will be too big, or not interested in holding hands with his mother. So for now I will bear the weight of him...

Ow.

2011-10-21T13:52:00.000-04:00

Having a bit of a headachy day. Not that surprising. All week I was convinced it was some other day than it was. It was Wednesday morning and I was SURE it was Thursday. By the end of the same day I was arriving at home positive it was Friday. I moved through an entire two days inside of 8 hours.

So my brain has been on some sort of short circuit. The leaves are falling as it is, well, FALL, and that makes my entire system go haywire. I love the foliage, love the crinkle of leaves on the sidewalk, but really hate what it does to my histamine reaction. The Bob hates what it does to my nasal passages at night. APPARENTLY I snore. All I know is I was rudely awakened last night by someone yanking the comforter off the bed so he could take it to sleep in the guest room because sleeping in the same room with me was not possible.

12 more cups of this should help.

The other night I attended a dinner for major donors here at work. There was a re-dedication of a building on campus which was renovated recently and is now home to the admissions office. As part of the dinner, they asked a student to read a history of the house, which was built in 1892. I was sitting with a member of our board and his wife, the wife of our president, and another major donor and spouse. The student is a history major and wants to be a history professor at our school one day. She read aloud this funny, interesting and very well written piece. The thing about this moment in time, the thing that sticks with me the most, is as she finished reading, as people began applauding, the member of the board sitting at my table said one word, "Brilliant." This is a man who in his own right is brilliant, having been a physics instructor at a very large, prestigious institution here in the area, and having created with another brilliant man the concept of enrollment management which most private institutions use today to manage their recruitment and retention efforts, and is the founder and CEO of a very successful business. To have him use that one word to describe what this student had just read, her own words, says something. I have no idea if anyone else noticed, it doesn't matter. I heard it, and it spoke to me. I hope she does manage to achieve her goals and comes back to us to teach. We will be a better institution for it.

Silly is in the DNA

2011-10-10T19:12:00.002-04:00

Buster Keaton. Charlie Chaplin. The Three Stooges. Bob Hope. Chevy Chase. Steve Martin. Martin Short. Jim Belushi. Lucille Ball. Beavis and Butthead. Kung Fu Panda. Spongebob Squarepants. Charlie Brown and the football.

Throughout the history of mankind, slapstick comedy has often been both the lowest form of comedy and the one that seems to be enjoyed most by the male of the species.

Don't get me wrong. I have been known to laugh myself silly to the point of crying watching Chevy Chase on the old, classic SNL. I teethed on I Love Lucy and the chocolates on the conveyer belt episode. I have an appreciation for physical comedy.

But nothing I have experienced comes close to that which envelopes, overtakes and both energizes and immobilizes my child.

By himself he can be pretty funny. He does silly walks, silly voices, silly dances. And woe unto you who laughs at his shenanigans. You will be subjected to the routine over and over and over and over and over again. Especially right before bath time, when it is likely to be sans clothing. There is nothing quite like silly dances performed by a naked kid in the bathroom.

Add in friends, and well, the sense of the ridiculous becomes acute. Beyond silly. Gasping, wet your pants hilarious. I am not kidding. Cooper wet his pants he was laughing so hard when I took this picture.

This is what almost 5 years old is like. I have absolutely no idea what I am in for with 14 years old.

93 Years Ago...

2011-10-07T15:21:00.000-04:00

In 1918 the world was a very different place than the one we live in today.

Ukraine, Lithunania, Estonia, Armenia, Azerbijian, Georgia and Poland all declare independence from the Russian Empire. It was not a good year for the Russian Empire.

World War I is going on and ends November 11.

The Spanish Flu becomes a pandemic and 30 MILLION people die in 6 months.

The Boston Red Sox defeat the Chicago White Sox in the World Series. Which would be their last World Series until 2004. Don't ask me about this year's season. Pathetic is really the only word for it.

There were no computers, the internet didn't exist. 10 million Bell System telephones were in service. Today more than 4 billion people use telephones. Television didn't exist in homes yet.

Ted Williams, Rita Hayworth, Nipsey Russell, Art Carney, Billy Graham, Spiro Agnew, Helmut Schmidt, Madeleine L'Engle, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. and Anwar Sedat, to name a few, are born.

And so was this man:

Tony with my brother and I on what I believe was a family reunion on Lake Superior in Duluth, Minnesota. If I recall correctly, he was giving me the "Don't give me a reason to yell again" look. We might have been whining. It would not be a surprise.

With the Coop on our first visit after he was born.

Anthony Louis DePasquale. My grandfather. A man who for all of my childhood and much of my adulthood was a larger than life character. He smoked smelly cigars and always had a stylish hat and swagger going on.

The sky wasn't just blue, the sky was the most beautiful shade of blue you have or ever will see. My mother didn't just ice skate well as a little girl, she could have been an Olympic contender. She didn't just play the piano, she could have been a concert pianist performing at Carnegie Hall. The dog my mother and her sisters adopted while he was away on a business trip didn't just dislike him. That dog was a man eating carnivore ready to rip my grandfather's throat out if he so much as looked at him sideways. He breezed into our lives every so often on business trips, teaching us random Italian phrases that we would try to remember for the next visit. He and my grandmother relocated to Oregon when he retired. They traveled in an RV around the country, often going to the Southwest to spend a month in the desert. They would golf, bowl, and he would take classes in things like jewelry making, wood working and stained glass. I called him Gepetto when he turned his garage into a wood working shop and made toys and other wooden doo dads.

He was the son of Italian immigrants and made the most of his opportunities here. He is the father to three lovely daughters, husband to my grandmother Agnes.

Today is his 93rd birthday, and their 72nd wedding anniversary. That is a long time to be alive and a long to time to be married. Life has certainly not passed them by, although they are older, slower and a little more frail than they once were. But that is true of most of us.

Happy Birthday Grandpa. I wish we could be out there to celebrate with you and Grandma. Virtual hugs to you both.

Come Now To the Campus...

2011-10-05T16:23:00.000-04:00

Come now to the campus, true sons of Geneva,
In one accord in song your voices raise.
Proclaim loud the glory, those walls old and hory,
The college where I spent such happy days.

This weekend was my 25th college reunion at Geneva College in beautiful Beaver Falls, PA. Home of Joe Namath and the steak salad. TWENTY FIVE YEARS have passed since I was in college, and yet, those were and continue to be some of the best days of my life, and the source of some of my fondest memories.

These ladies. Riley on the left, Jean in the middle, me on the right. One was a roommate at one time, the other was a suitemate. People I laughed with, cried with, yelled at stupid boyfriends for. You know, the stuff friends do.

This is a crappy picture, taken with my phone inside a badly lit theater, but I would know this person in the pitch black dark. She was also a roommate at one time, but more than that, a soul sister. We have not been the best at keeping up with each other over the last 15 years, but during college, we were the best of friends. Her family became a family away from home for me. Her father was a professor at the college, and now in retirement her parents own a B&B at which we stayed this weekend. Her father didn't recognize me at first, since 15 years have passed since last we met, and time has a way of robbing all of us of health and memory, but when I said my name, he said "Oh my goodness, Michele. I look in your eyes and I know exactly who you are."

The McCartney Library on campus is small, but is home to two sets of incredible and impressive stained glass windows. I already loved libraries when I arrived on campus, this one just sealed the deal with these windows.

Then there is the Bagpiper Theater. The first week of the first semester I was on campus, my friend Jean said she was going up to audition for the first play of the semester. It was traditionally a freshman only production, to allow new students the chance at performing without having to compete for parts against the seasoned upperclassman. I had not acted before, officially that is, and was hesitant. But then I said why not. No one really knew me there. I wasn't competing against people from high school that were well known to the theater, I was just little old unknown me. So I went.

From the moment I stood on that stage and heard people laughing in response to my audition, and laughing in the "dear lord in heaven she is funny" way, not the "dear lord in heaven get her off the stage" way, I knew I had found my people and my happy place. For four years I worked on productions in this theater, from acting, to costuming, stage managing and even directing a one act play as part of my theater class final.

It is 100 seats big, so you can see pretty much everyone who is there to watch the show. They are almost as much a part of a production as the actors themselves. It is not an easy theater to work in. You had to find ways to work with the space limitations and the proximity of the audience. But it is worth it.

This present day me, in a mirror in a dressing room that has not changed in 30 years. It looks exactly the same as the day I first walked into it.

This piece of furniture used to live in the lobby of my residence hall, McKee Hall, shown below.

It also used to be Pepto Bismal pink. And under the pink was an odd shade of Wedgewood blue. A travesty had been committed, one that I and my fellow castmates of I Remember Mama decided to rectify, by stripping and refinishing it. We had no idea what we were doing, and yet managed not to completely destroy the burled walnut panels. Yay us! It is now in the Hallway of History.

There are many ways in which I have evolved and changed from the person I was back in 1982 when I first arrived on that campus beside the Beaver Vale. I am different spiritually, emotionally, and certainly physically. I arrived on campus weighing a whopping 105lbs. I remember that because they would not let me give blood. Yeaaaahhhh, that was a long time ago.

BUT! Without a doubt it was a formative, magical, challenging, and educational time. It was exactly what going to college should be. It was a safe place for me to discover who I was, who I wanted to be, and provide a solid basis to launch from into the rest of my life. I found lifelong friendships, both within my fellow students but also within the faculty. I may not always agree with the religious views and philosophy of the Reformed Presbyterian faith, but I am and will be forever grateful for that time and that community. GO TORNADOS!

Turbo, 2011

In Search of One Good Lunchbox...

2011-09-28T16:42:00.000-04:00

You wouldn't think it would be that hard, but it is. The quest for just the right lunchbox is a tricky one. Cooper has to take a lunch to preschool, and for the last two years he has looked like a little construction worker, taking his lunch in a mini playmate cooler.

It was beginning to show it's age, and I had grown weary of washing all the little containers I had to put his food in. So we tried buying a new one from Tupperware, but it was microscopically small. Who do they think is using something that small? Barbie? It also, in retrospect, did not solve the needing to wash containers conundrum.

Then one day Busy Dad had a give away, of the lunch box that his son Fury uses. I was familiar with this lunch box since he began posting his Lunch Box Daily pictures. The lunch box he uses, a Go Green lunch box comes with a little white board inside the cover, so you can write notes to your child, or in the case of Fury, really awesome super hero themed cartoons. Apparently Fury has become very popular at lunch time.

I did not win the give away that was on Busy Dad's blog, but I decided to go for it and bought this lunch box for Cooper. It is sort of a bento box concept, with individual compartments for the food, and the lid locks in place to keep the food in each of the compartments.

This is my first real attempt at a drawing for Cooper. I will never reach the caliber of Busy Dad, but I can pull off a fair looking Spongebob Squarepants when I try. Cooper thought this was too cool, and didn't want me to change the picture this morning when I put his lunch together.

So far this box is working out really well. I encountered a little difficulty with yogurt, since the yogurt container by itself is too tall to put inside the box, but I can put it inside a smaller container that does fit. I could put it directly into one of the compartments, but that seems like I would be risking a complete distaster with yogurt everywhere.

It comes with a little thermos too, but right now we are not using that as he likes this milk that is in a single serving container already.

Go Green did not give me anything for this recommendation, nor did they ask me to make it. I just really like the product and the white board makes me happy.

You'd Think I had the calves of Princess Fiona

2011-09-23T15:15:00.000-04:00

I am currently harboring a serious rage against all dress winter boots. Boots like this for example:

Actually, boots EXACTLY like that, which I ordered, from my beloved Zappos because they have such a lovely and wide selection, because they have free shipping, and free return shipping, and they tell you things like how big around the shaft of the boot SUPPOSEDLY is. But look at that lovely, stable, wedge heel, the lovely tall boot. It was perfect. Except.

This boot is described as having a 16" shaft at its widest. Below is a very bad photo I took with my phone of me measuring my calf at its widest. Note it is just shy of 15". On the 14 and 3/4 side of 15". So one would think that I had at least an inch to spare.

This is another very bad photo of my leg. I know, SEXXHAY. But I wanted to document for the masses that I in fact do not have the calves of Princess Fiona from Shrek, in her ogre mode. I have quite normal sized, normal shaped calves. Even though the angle on it makes it look HUGE, I assure you, it is a normal sized leg. Now, if we were talking about my thighs, we might have a different conversation. But my calves are lovely.

And yet, AND YET! This is the second pair of boots I have purchased, which SAY they will fit, which I cannot get zipped up past the lower part of my calf, just about half way up my calf.

Who are these boots designed for? Any boot for that matter, because this is the second pair that I have had this trouble with. This time, if I am still of the mind that I would like a pair of dress boots for the winter by this time tomorrow, I will go to DSW where I can try on 30 pairs of boots and display my shamefully humungous calves in public for all to see. For now I must comfort myself with sassy reviews of these boots on the Zappo's site. When they ask "How could we have avoided this return" I will remark they should suggest to shoe makers that they make boots women with normal sized calves can actually wear; not just boots for half starved waifs. That'll show 'em.

How to torture your work study student or drive students from your office in one simple step

2011-09-16T13:06:00.001-04:00

Today I was reading The Oatmeal because it is HILARIOUS, and I found this quiz. It is a hearing test. This concept, that there is this frequency, this sound that teenagers are able to hear that most adults over 25 cannot because our hearing has begun losing its range, isn't new. But I saw it on The Oatmeal, wondered if I could hear it, so I clicked on it. I couldn't hear anything immiately, probably ONLY because of this sinus infection/throat thing I have going on, not because I am over 40 or anything like that. So I turned the volume up a little. Suddenly my work study student, who sits about 10 feet away outside of my office says "OH LORD WHAT IS THAT SOUND???" And I said, nonchalantly "Oh, can you hear that?" To which she replied "GOD YES IT IS AWFUL MAKE IT STOP."

And now I know exactly how I can rid my office of annoying students (not that we have any of course). With one little click.

Try it. See if you can hear it. Even if you cannot, but you want to drive the cats or dogs or teenagers out of the room, you may find it handy.

I Have Always Hated Charlie McCarthy

2011-09-07T11:20:00.000-04:00

This is Phil the Cuckoo Bird. At least that is what Cooper calls him. I had a different name for him once upon a time, which I have long since forgotten. I purchased this puppet for some inexplicable reason, on a business trip to Indianapolis. Perhaps something in me knew that 6 years and two husbands later I would have a child who would fall in love with this puppet and begin torturing me.

Part of this is Jack's Big Music Show's fault. They have an episode that features Phil the Cuckoo Bird, who looks remarkably like this puppet. Once Cooper saw that show, he began calling our puppet by that name, and insisting that our Phil do all of the things that THAT Phil did.

Specifically, he wants it to talk, ALL THE TIME, in a southern accent, and fall down. He wants ME to make him talk. I am now constantly berated to "MAKE HIM TALK MOMMY" and then a fuzzy pink bird lands in my lap.

I will admit that when I make Phil fall down, which involves him flipping over on his back and plopping down on the couch/bed/whatever we are sitting on, and Cooper dissolves into gasps of laughter, it is probably one of the best parts of my day. But I really hate making him talk. At the end of a work day where I have been listening to students and parents tell me how they cannot afford to pay their balance, or are indignant that they have stop on their account because they haven't followed the directions they were given 5 times in the last 3 months in writing that would have resolved their issues, I find it hard to focus my addled brain long enough to have a conversation as myself with The Bob and Cooper, nevermind find the energy and creativity to be someone else.

I have tried hiding Phil. Short of throwing him out altogether, which right now I don't have the heart to do, I have not been successful in hiding him long term. Cooper has this amazing capacity for not using something for months, even almost a year, and then for no reason that we can discern, he will exclaim "Where is such and such." Then we spend 20 minutes wondering what is he talking about, and another 20 minutes finding the thing he is seeking once we do figure it out. This time he found Phil on his own. It was in a big bag of stuffed animals, and suddenly there he was, in my lap, and I was being instructed to make him talk, please. (Side note: There are more "pleases" being said in our lives these days. Day care almost paid for itself.)

I wonder if Edgar Bergen ever felt this way about Charlie McCarthy. I have heard stories about the puppet being a member of the family, to the point that it sat at the dinner table with the family, but who knows how much of that is true. Did Edgar ever want to just put that puppet in a drawer and go be a shoe salesman? Put him the composter and call it a day? Let a certain Schnauzer known for his destructive destuffing of stuffed animals have his way with him? Did I say that out loud?

What's a Cubit?

2011-09-05T13:11:00.004-04:00

This weekend I was reminded of how outstanding The Bob is. You see, a week ago Sunday, when that lovely little lady, Hurricane Irene blew through our neck of the woods, yet again, despite all of our planning (four, count them FOUR sump pumps, emptying the pool about 6 inches in advance of the storm) our basement took a direct hit.

We had a plan! We pumped the pool like I said, so that it could accommodate the rain that was coming. We left the sump pump out there in the pool, to use if it began filling up. We had another one waiting in the Pit of Despair, in the event that began to fill and threatened to flood the basement. We have the installed pump, that can handle 25000 gallons of water a minute, at the ready.

And we prayed we wouldn't lose power. And we didn't!

But all of that was for nought. At approximately 9am, the rain began falling in earnest, the wind whipped and threatened to take trees down. At 9:10am The Bob said "I am going to pump some more water out of the pool" and a few minutes later I heard "NEED SOME HELP DOWN HERE!!" being bellowed from the basement.

It was like the Poseidon Adventure, sans Shelly Winters. Thank goodness. I don't need her haunting my basement on top of the rest of the muck and ooze that is down there. Inside of 5 minutes, the backyard filled with water, the pool overflowed WHILE A SUMP PUMP WAS MADLY PUMPING WATER OUT OF IT. The water just rushed for the lowest point in the yard, the Pit of Despair, and not even the two sump pumps down there could keep up. It is as close to a flash flood as I wish to be.

Now, we did just buy a new treadmill (we have killed two in floods and one died of old age) so I ran over there, and with the strength of 10 Grinches I hauled the front of that sucker up and propped it up on an overturned Rubbermaid tub. I was not losing another one to flood waters! Then I ran and unplugged the freezer, and ran upstairs to turn off the furnace (the one time I am thankful for oil vs. gas) at the emergency switch. Then we left the basement, and watched the water bubble up out of the middle of my backyard for another 15 minutes.

As suddenly as it happened, it stopped, and the sump pumps began catching up. The water receded and in half an hour it was almost like it hadn't even happened. Except for that residue of mud it left behind throughout the entire basement.

We continued to pump the pool out a little longer, in the event Irene wasn't done beating us up. We turned on fans throughout the basement and a few hours later we discovered that the furnace survived, the freezer still turned on and froze things, and we DID NOT LOSE THE TREADMILL!

But there was still the issue of the mud. Yesterday The Bob began the cleanup work. Shelves were moved out to be rinsed off. The floor vacuumed and scrubbed with my special mixture of a little water and a lot of bleach. Many things are being thrown out. Thank goodness for the Scavengers. These guys show up the night before trash day, and pick your garbage clean of all metal and other usable objects. It is fabulous. But that Bob, he was as sweaty and dirty as I have ever seen him yesterday. He just got down and dirty in an effort to make the basement tolerable again.

In the meantime, I am looking up contractors because somewhere there is someone who can stand in my backyard, who is capable of diagnosing the problem and coming up with a plan for how to make the flooding stop. I don't care if that solution is a big ass drain in the middle of my backyard, and if they told me it would stop if I got rid of the pool, I would be out there with a jackhammer and a standing order from some clean fill to be delivered. In the meantime I will be looking up the instructions for building an ark.

The Last Day of His Penultimate Year

2011-08-26T08:49:00.003-04:00

That title is for The Bob. I have never met a person who loves using the word "penultimate" more. Today is the last day for Cooper as a younger preschooler. He has one more year of preschool left, and then on to the show. The big time. But for one more year he is still a preschooler.

Every year he has been alive has been a year of change, some quite obvious, like walking, talking, losing the first tooth (that second one is hanging on for all it's worth). This year the changes have been more subtle for the most part. Every morning I go in to get him up for the day it seems like the legs are a little longer, the face a little less round and pinchable. There is a maturity to his face that surprises me, and makes my chest tighten a little because it is one more step toward being grown up, independent, the constant movement away from us, his parents. The people who have been needed so constantly, for everything and yet, needed less and less each day.

This morning I told him it was time to go to the bathroom and do his business to get ready. There was no argument, no dawdling. "OK! I don't want to be late!" he yelled as he dashed off to the bathroom. I went to get his clothes for him to change into and he announced he would change his clothes himself. This is something he has been capable of doing for a long time, but often requires assistance if I want to leave the house in less than an hour from that moment in time. Today he was in his clothes lickety split and even put his socks on. His shoes were downstairs or he probably would have had those on too.

To see him excited and happy to go to school is gratifying. I have never questioned that continuing to work and send him to day care/preschool full time was the right decision. Financially we could not afford to do it any other way, and home day care just didn't seem the right fit for him. He has been so happy at The Barn, and they have done a great job caring for and teaching him. It is just nice to have the validation of our decision so apparent.

It is what is supposed to happen, this growing and moving away from who he has been and toward whom he will become. It is the exact definition of bittersweet. I don't have any clue what the next two years much less the next 15 or 20 years will hold. I am not going to worry about it. I am going to try to embrace the moment, the memory of him leaping around the playground this morning, working out his Batman/Spiderman/Ironman moves. My little superhero.

Calling Dr. Freud, Calling Dr. Freud...

2011-08-17T11:07:00.003-04:00

My kid is growing. Like most parents I see him first thing in the morning and think "Where did my baby go?" because I am unearthing a long legged, mature looking, just lost his first tooth kid.

Did I mention he lost his first tooth? He did. At school on Friday. The teachers all agreed they have never had any child in younger preschool lose a tooth before. My kid is ADVANCED people.

He is also exhibiting what I think is fairly typical behavior for an almost 5 year old, but it is still annoying and hurtful to certain parties.

In a nutshell, he totally digs me, but is less enthusiastic about his father. To the point where he will not make eye contact, will not answer when spoken to, and generally pushes away from The Bob.

I think we parent pretty similarly, and I am not a push over or soft touch with Coop. I just think we have entered that phase of his development where he digs one parent over the other and I am that parent right now. I remember my brother going through a phase in this age range where he would say he was going to marry our mom when he grew up. It was cute, and he outgrew it.

But in the meantime, it is hard for The Bob not to take it personally. We have responded to this behavior with various things like turning off the TV if he is watching it and not answering his father when he speaks to him. Take away his SpongeBob and it gets his attention pretty fast. I have sat down with him and talked about how sad Cooper feels when he feels like kids at school are excluding him or purposefully being mean, does he want his dad to feel the same way? Of course he doesn't, so then we talked about how much his dad loves him and Cooper needs to show him he loves him back.

When I am not around this is not as much of an issue, so I know I am the catalyst for this behavior. I mean, I know I am AWESOME SAUCE with a side of FABULOUS. But it still isn't fair. So for the three people who read this blog regularly who might have some insight and suggestions, is this just a phase and it will pass just like his "I want to be up playing for 2 hours in the middle of the night" phase passed? Is there something we should be doing or not doing to assist in its passing in a healthy way?

Finally, this weekend we spent time finding ways of killing time because of rain rain and more rain. Cooper has decided working out is FUN!

Put One Foot In Front of the Other, and Soon You are Walking Across the Floor...

2011-08-16T06:59:00.003-04:00

This is a story I have never gotten around to on this blog, because I generally focus on my life as it currently exists, not on what it used to be. That is not to say I don't remember my history, that I am not informed by it, I just choose to stay focused on now and the near future in my daily thought process. My addled brain and soul cannot handle much more than that quite frankly.

But there is a need to share it, as a way of saying to a couple special people in my life who are all facing something very very difficult, that it sucks while you are going through it, but you can and will survive it.

Much like when a doctor needs to break a previously broken bone that has begun healing badly, so as to reset it and let it heal properly, divorce often is necessary so that all parties can become something else, something new, something hopefully better separately than the individuals had become as a couple.

No one stands in front of the officiant of choice (minister, judge, justice of the peace etc.) and speaks the vows of marriage thinking "Well, I can undo this any ol' time I want and it won't be a big deal." Well, most people don't. I know I didn't. I have been married once before I found The Bob and I certainly thought it was a forever bond. We had been friends for quite a few years before we became spouses. I went into it knowing there were some serious health issues on his part, and that he had some pain and suffering in his past from the loss of a parent, the subsequent poverty and alcoholism that his family had to deal with. I didn't think I could fix him, but I did think that by choosing something so positive as marrying me, he was choosing to look forward. Choosing to embrace the future together as a couple.

There isn't much you can do when someone is very broken in the heart and soul. I decided after a short time that his heart condition was from a scientific perspective the result of a bad infection he contracted while on vacation in Mexico (a sign to his perpetually dark and brooding psyche that he was always going to be punished for thinking he deserved to enjoy life and audaciously chose to go on vacation), but I saw it as a spiritual and psychic breakdown on the part of his body. If you choose to stay so angry at everyone and everything for so long, that is eventually going to manifest itself in your body. And his heart was what gave out first.

After a year of what turned out to be a five year long marriage, I knew our marriage was doomed. It took me another year to grieve that realization, and come to an acceptance that it was OK for the marriage to end, and another two years before he found the job opportunity that would take him to another state. When he first indicated he needed to leave New England because he was miserable being cold for 5 months (the result of his condition and medication) I asked him one question. If he found the perfect job, and he decided he wanted to move to wherever that job was, would this be "I am moving and I want you to come with me" or was it "I am moving and I need to do this by myself." He said quietly that he needed to do it by himself. I nodded, expecting that answer, and told him that he needed to go find that job, but here was what I needed to make this work, and that mostly included assistance paying the mortgage on our house until such time I could afford to buy him out or I could handle moving and selling it.

It took another year or so for him to find the job and move, during which time we lived pretty much as roommates. Roommates who shared a bed and house, but not much else. It was at that point that I began some of the projects he never wanted to get involved in around the house, painting and such, because it was too exhausting for him to deal with. I was beginning to make the space mine, without him.

I helped him pack. I tolerated having boxes in my life that would be sent by UPS or he would come back for later. I just wanted him to move on, so I could as well. I didn't want this angry unhappy person in my space anymore. The anger was never directed at me, but it was just always there.

The day he drove away was a hard, hard day. But I walked through my house, my quiet, slightly emptier house, and said quiet prayers for his safe travels, and for my own safe travels forward.

8 months later I met The Bob. Two years after than we married, and the next year Cooper came into our lives. In the meantime, I managed to find my way back to being friends with him. It has been almost 10 years since he moved to Arizona, and I have been married to The Bob longer than I had been married to him. We have been divorced longer than we were married. It is now all ancient history. Not history I have forgotten, but also not history I choose to wallow in. I am happy, he is finding his way to happier. He has found some physical healing, and is finding his way to some healing of his soul. It's all good. I don't regret anything, but I also don't wish for it to have gone differently. It just is what it is. We had to break something apart that just wasn't working so we could both heal as two better but separate spirits.

Divorce SUCKS. It drains you, it hurts, it makes you question and second guess everything you believed in, that you have decided to do. But you will be OK. If you take it one step at a time, if you don't let the snarky darker parts of you get the better of the situation and get hurtful toward each other, especially when there is no reason for it, if you try to hold in front you the vision of the person you first loved, and the reasons you loved that person, and the reasons that you will continue to love that person, but apart, not together, you will be OK.

Remember that none of you is alone in this. There are people who love all of you who are here for you and will care for all of you in the new world you are creating. We will love the new you you are all becoming.

One foot in front of the other...

On Fire Twirling and Other Life Lessons

2011-08-12T09:20:00.004-04:00

It is a place trapped in time in so many subtle and obvious ways. The general store in the center of town has a new paint job, with a cheerful white facade and brilliant green trim, a jaunty string of lobster buoys hanging across it. But inside the wooden floors still creak, and are just a little uneven and slanted, whispering of years of locals and visitors from away coming in to find a can of this and a bottle of that.

It celebrates it's origins with Friendship Days, which includes a parade as old fashioned and fabulous as any you can remember from your childhood. There are fire trucks, old cars with old citizens and Veterans of old wars riding in them. There is an old style oompapa band, as well as a relatively new addition, a roller derby team showing off some of their tattoos and skills. Candy is thrown from the cars and trucks, and kids scramble to get as much as they can.

We go every year to visit with friends, and the cove, even with some of the changes like new concrete steps on the cabins and a new counter in the kitchen, hot AND cold running water in the house (long gone are the days of a very cold shower on a chill summer morning), seems as changeless as the ocean you can see from every porch.

One of two newer residents in the cove. They came FOR dinner, not to BE dinner...

The Barnstable...

Fishing for the first time...

Conquering the slide that scared him last year...

And yet, while you sit on the porch, in the glider that has been there for as long as anyone can remember, the red vinyl cushions inexplicably undecayed, there is always opportunity to learn something new, to grow and explore and be the better for having been there.

We were sitting on the porch, 15 or so of us, enjoying the late afternoon sun, having wine and appetizers, catching up on a year of kids growing, new jobs, new ailments, when they approached us from one of the other cabins. A man and a woman, who were new to the cove. Newcomers are always interesting, because the cove is not on the beaten path, with regulars who have been coming to stay for decades, if not generations crossing a century. They came to say hi and invite us to a fire twirling demonstration later. I had no reference point for this so I asked what she meant. "Like the cheerleader with the fiery baton" she responded. She was just learning she said, and I asked what inspired her to try it. "I turned 50 this year, and I decided to do something scary as a way of reclaiming my power" she answered. Because I was curious, I went down later to the green in front of the cabin they were staying in to see the demonstration. She was quite obviously a novice, but it was still quite interesting.

Meanwhile, her companion, a 6'5" or so, 300lb man was chatting with a few of the other people, and handing out business cards. She explained it was for a blog he writes. He lives in Cambridge MA and writes a blog. He looked like every computer geek/slacker you have ever met. Some people later commented on how gauche it seemed to hand out business cards to people you have just met while on vacation. Being a blog writer of sorts myself, I didn't really have a problem with it. He just seemed like a big ol' nerd and good for him for trying to get the word out on his endeavors.

The joke was sort of on all of us. The card went forgotten for a few days after I arrived home, but on the weekend I found it again in my card while rummaging for something, so I decided to see what it was about. In the process of finding that out I found out about him. It would appear he is something of a genius entrepreneur. He went to MIT for the first time when he was 16 (seems he has several degrees, two from MIT). Then he created a company, which designed one of the first massive, multiplayer online games. He sold the company last year for 160 MILLION DOLLARS. So. In the category of "do not judge a book by its cover" this guy apparently was a) smarter than all of us on the porch that night, combined, and b) richer than all of us on the porch, or even in the cove for that matter, combined.

I didn't see much of them the rest of the time we were in the cove. I would like to think I would have taken the time to get to know them better if I had. But there, in the cove, which seems to never change, our little world was broadened just a bit, by power reclaiming fire twirling and genius entrepreneurs.

Editors note: I have no idea why some of the text is highlighted and goofy. Something happened when I was editing the photos.

How Do You Manage It All...

2011-07-26T08:55:00.003-04:00

I was asked recently at a college picnic/kayak race "How do you manage it all" in reference to being a mom and holding down a full time job.

My response: To look at her blankly and say "Uuuuummmm, I just don't know...I guess I just DO." The truth is, I make this shit up as I go. I expect most of us in this circumstance do, mom and dad alike.

And right here, right now, in front of God and all the assembled masses, I fully acknowledge the awesomeness that is The Bob. Oh he has his shortcomings, I mean, who among us doesn't. But all in all, he rocks as a husband and a dad. We were reminiscing just last night about the early years, the ones that involved being up in the dread of night (that is not a typo, it is what I call being up at unspeakable hours of the AM), hanging with the Coop. I said I have very vague memories of those first years now. I have snap shot pictures in my head of moments, but most of that time is just a blur. Possibly that is because The Bob did much of the midnight duty. He doesn't seem to suffer for it as much as I do, and it offered him the chance to watch Poker After Dark while giving Coop a bottle.

The Bob also does 99% of the laundry in our house. The 1% he doesn't do involved clothing of mine that require settings other than REGULAR. And he walks the dogs for the most part, and does the garbage and lawn duties. I was sharing some of this with a coworker from another department, who happens to be female and Indian, and recently married to a very traditional Indian man. She had to tell him that if he wanted things done a particular way around the house, he might have to consider helping out. She was blown away by how helpful Bob is. "You are SO LUCKY" she said to me. Yes, yes I am.

And we pay a lot of money for full time day care/preschool. We are fortunate that we can afford to do that, although some months it doesn't feel like we can afford it. But it is TOTALLY WORTH IT. Cooper loves being there, the teachers have all been great, he is learning as well as socializing all day. Not having to worry about that is a huge benefit. I am already stressing about what happens when he transitions to regular school and we still have a year. I keep hoping they will magically create an elementary school wing at The Barn, and I will just have to work here for the next 6 years and keep him in it. A girl can dream.

But in answer to the original question, how do I manage, I don't do it alone. Sure, we don't have family in the area we can turn to like our neighbors do, but we have our network of people who support us in different ways. And I don't dust or vacuum or put things away very often. OK, maybe I wasn't very good about that BEFORE Coop came along, but it really doesn't get done as much as it should, and I am OK with that. Maybe once we are not paying for day care we can channel some of the funds into a once a month cleaning service. I really hate cleaning bathrooms. It would be worth it for someone to come in just for that.

And then I figured out exercise was going to kill me...

2011-07-14T20:49:00.002-04:00

Bootcamp. I had heard tales of people doing horrendous and terrible things like running, uphill, in the rain, with 50lbs packs on their backs and then doing 20 things called Burpees. It seemed like something I would NEVER do. But then my friend Bill's wife, the Lovely Lecia, completed a personal trainer certification process, and decided she would start a bootcamp. So I said to myself, Self, you need to challenge your overweight, out of shape self. Surely the Lovely Lecia would not try to kill you. So I signed on.

And surely she only tried to kill me a bit. It was one hour of activity a week. I figured I could almost anything for an hour, and I was right. I was by far the oldest person in the group DOING the exercises (Lovely Lecia and myself are the same age) and definitely the most out of shape. But I did it. I was jogging, doing push ups (the girly kind), and the dreaded Burpee. For the uninitiated, and I was or I would not have signed on, the Burpee is something from real bootcamp. The Bob was intimately familiar with these from his Marine Corp days. You drop into a squat, then you are supposed to jump your feet back into a plank position, do a push up, jump your feet in, and then JUMP to an upright position. MidLyfeMama did things at half pace. I walked my feet back, did a sort of push up, walked my feet in and stood up. I don't jump. Unless there is a spider involved. Then there is a lot of jumping and possibly screeching. It is my Achilles heel.

That was like, 4 months ago. No so coincidentally, I have come to figure out, 4 months ago I began really struggling with IBS issues. Irritable Bowel Syndrome. It was also a time that was rather stressful at work, so I thought it had to do with that. I changed my diet, eliminated the trigger foods. Nothing helped. Saw my doctor, ran blood tests, found nothing of consequence, except maybe a wonky thyroid, which will be addressed, but nothing to explain the gastric distress. And it was B.A.D.

Then by virtue of a crazy schedule and a random migraine, I had two weeks off from bootcamp. And my symptoms abated. But then it was back to bootcamp last week. And LO AND BEHOLD, symptoms, back.

I will not describe my particular symptoms, but I really wanted the angry badger that had moved into my colon to move out. And I finally put two and two together. The intensity of the bootcamp workout is causing my issues. There is some documented basis for this idea, as I found when I googled "Exercise causing gastrointestinal distress". Something to do with the intensity of the lower body exercises, and the prolonged increased heart rate.

So I had a talk with the Lovely Lecia, and I am off bootcamp for now. We will work together on making my 30-40 minute morning workouts more effective, but not too intense, with minimal lower body stress, i.e. no damn Burpees.

The moral of the story: Exercise is bad for you.

Three More Years!

2011-07-07T15:50:00.003-04:00

Me keeping cool in the summer of 1965

Today I turn 47. Which means I have three more years until I turn 50. Which I find amazing and startling with a dash of WTF when did that happen thrown in.

It is interesting I was born in July. I hate being hot. It is hard to be joyful and birthday exuberant in the hot humidity of New England, where I was born and have lived a good portion of my life. It seems more appropriate that I would have been born a child of Fall, which is my favorite season. But you don't get to choose those things.

During much of my childhood we would visit my paternal grandparents in Minetto NY for the 4th of July, which meant we were there for my birthday too. Most years I remember my grandmother baking an angel food cake for me, which was not a particular favorite of mine, but is a refreshing dessert with strawberries. So I have fond memories of that cake, even if I really prefer pie. With ice cream.

One year while visiting I got to ride an elephant. I think it was either my 7th or 10th birthday. Thinking back on it now I have to feel really sorry for the elephant, who was made to stand in a hot parking lot in July, giving rides to kids for hours. It is the only time I have been that close to an elephant, and I remember being startled by the coarseness of the hair, the roughness of the skin, and the way I bobbled up and down as it walked around the parking lot. You don't realize how much swaying you will do until you are sitting right behind the ears of this majestic beast and it begins to take those big lumbering steps.

Another memory I have of visiting my grandparents at this time of the year is celebrating the 4th. I have this vision in my mind from these visits of the quintessential 4th of July celebration, which involves parades, bands, Sousa marches, flags, balloons and at night the most amazing fireworks I can remember. Things seem so much bigger when you are small.

One year I got a balloon at the parade, which was two balloons in one. It had a pink Mickey Mouse shaped head inside a clear round balloon. I managed to hang onto it until we got back to the house, where I lost my grip on it and it floated away. My grandfather stood there with me and watched it rise out of sight, telling me he could see it go past the moon, and on to Mars, where he couldn't see it anymore. I cannot see a balloon floating in the sky now, without wondering if there is a small child sad to see his or her balloon float away, and hoping there is someone standing there describing how the balloon is floating past Mars on a grand adventure.

This year we decided to acquire another treadmill for my birthday. Cooper suggested that his father buy me a new computer. Somehow I think his plan was that via the trickle down effect he would gain control of the iPad, or Super Toy as he refers to it. Since I am not in need of a new computer, his plans are thwarted. Otherwise, today will involve dinner out, nothing fancy, and I imagine cake and a swim in the pool. If you have to have a summer birthday, you should at least have a pool.

To Snerkle, perchance to swim...

2011-07-05T12:13:00.004-04:00

This was a somewhat lazy and mostly uneventful holiday weekend. It began with a short overnight trip to visit Big Ma, also known as Sylvia, The Bob's mother. Since she lives in a small apartment, we stayed overnight in a hotel. One with a pool. Cooper is perfecting his swimming technique and in less than 48 hours he was in that pool 3 times.

But before we got there, we had to stop to say hello to this guy:

He hangs out at the state liquor store just over the line in New Hampshire. There is no tax on liquor in NH, so when one finds oneself in the neighborhood, one stops to procure some beverages.

While in Maine we finally got in a full game of put put.

Cooper cannot for the life of him stay standing during any kind of physical activity.

Is there some sort of diagnosis for this? Oh, being 4 years old you say? That is the official diagnosis? Fine.

Because we stayed in one room at the hotel, we ended up all going to bed rather early, after a final swim of course. This also meant that this face was in MY face, at the bright and cheerful hour of 5:30am:

Of course this meant we had 3 hours at least to kill before we could show up at Big Ma's apartment, since she does not rise early. What did we do, you ask. Well of course we went swimming, silly.

And upon our return to our own home, much more swimming took place. The pool is still too cold for The Bob's liking, at a whopping 65 degrees, but Cooper and I manage. Having a "snerkle" as Cooper calls it, helps immensely.

Snacks are always better with a Snerkle, which when deployed with the proper skill set, doubles as a voovoozela...

A view from my office...

2011-06-29T09:30:00.003-04:00

Don't be a Noid.

Dominoes Pizza advertising campaign from 12,354 years ago. Give or take a decade.

On Barnacles and Pier Fries

2011-06-27T08:58:00.006-04:00

Yesterday we had had enough of rain and 60 degree weather. We decided to head up to Old Orchard Beach in Saco ME.

Theme park as viewed from pier.

There is a theme park, where Cooper rode his first roller coaster ride, first tilt a whirl ride, and first Materhorn ride. He deemed the tilt a whirl the scariest, but the roller coaster the most fun. I have yet to meet a roller coaster I do not love. Even the ones that go upside down and backwards. But by far the best are like the one at OOB. Small, fast, with lots of tips and turns. There is nothing quite like the chunk chunk chunk like coke bottles in a paperbag sound as you go up the first incline to get the anticipation flowing.

There are also Pier Fries. I was a Pier Fry virgin until yesterday. I had heard tales of these delectable fried bits of wonder. They did not disappoint. However, point of order: I do NOT like vinegar on my fries. This could be item number 3 on the list of things The Bob finds astoundingly baffling about me. I like fries with salt. Sometimes ketchup. These fries needed no help. Tragically, a sea gull got to the remaining fries in the box when we were at the beach.

I do like to color coordinate things, but not even I could plan for my kid to match the colors of the ocean and sand.

Despite the fact that we were headed to a location with the word "BEACH" in its name, we went completely unprepared for beach related activities. No swim suit for anyone, no towel. So Coop went into the sea in his shorts, Bob procured a replacement pair that are so big Cooper will probably wear them for the next two summers, but who cares. Fun was had.

On the way home, at Coopers' request, we stopped to play some Miniature Golf. Unfortunately, we only managed to play 3 holes before giving up because there was a gigantic family of like 16 people playing ahead of us, and we determined we were uninterested in staying for the next 3 hours to play. Cooper got to play for the first time though, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

All in all, a great day was had.

Editors note: Apparently I was mistaken. Old Orchard Beach is in Old Orchard, not Saco. Who knew.

On Becoming THAT Mom...

2011-06-20T15:42:00.004-04:00

As I have annotated rather thoroughly here at Casa de MidLyfeMama, our foray into organized sports this spring season was met with mixed results.

T-ball was a raging snorefest. They had the "season end event" this weekend. This included EVERY team in the league, not just the ones that practiced and played on our night, meeting at the fields, and spending an hour running "clinics" and playing a game against another team. Then there was to be a BBQ. THEN they would hand out the trophies. 2 hours in the rather blazing sun. For the 4-6 year old group, this was JUST TOO LONG. They should have made it an hour. Take the big league photo, do the BBQ, and then hand out the trophies. About half way through the "clinic" for his team, which wasn't going much better for anyone than a regular practice, Cooper said, "I want to go home." And I could not blame him. I pointed out that meant he would not get a trophy. He was OK with that. So we went home.

Sunday after a lovely breakfast for Father's Day, we had the last soccer game/event. We played a regular game, and then everyone picked up a trophy on the way out. One hour, in and out, and he got a trophy for his efforts.

However, I had a special MOM moment during the game. At some point Cooper really got into running back and forth and attempting to kick the ball. So when the coach said it was his turn to step out so another kid could play, he didn't want to. He began whining "I don't waaaant to rest" and refusing to leave the field. I stepped up to walk him off, and he turned away from me and ran back out there. Of course I turned to see 20 something pairs of judging parental eyes looking at me. YAY. I walked further down the field, got him to come over to me and took him off the field where we sat down near two of his teammates and another dad. Cooper asked if everyone would get a trophy. I said yes, but I wasn't sure he really deserved one the way he was acting. And as I said these words, I am thinking about how that must sound to the other parent sitting there. Like I just became that parent who belittles her kid in front of other people. When he said he waaaaanted a troooooophyyyyyy, I said he would get one, but he wasn't listening very well and that was not how the game was played. But still, I was pretty sure that guy went home and told his wife I was a royal witchy poo.

So who is happy organized sports is over for at least 3 months? ME! Who signed her kid up for fall soccer AND volunteered to be an assistant coach in the fall? That's right - ME! We will see if they take me up on it.

Abundant Rodent Nooky - A Sign of Apocalypse?

2011-06-17T10:12:00.005-04:00

Don't let my beauty fool you...

I don't know about your neck of the proverbial woods, but in mine, the rodents have Barry White on an endless loop on their little rodent iPods, and are getting their business ON. Especially the chipmunks. They are EVERYWHERE, and there is so much chipmunk nooky happening you can practically hear it as you sit outside on my deck trying not to think about chipmunk nooky.

Now it is all you can think about, isn't it. You are welcome.

But the weirdest thing that is going on is the rabbits. I am sure it is a sign of something, most likely some harbinger of the coming apocalypse, but there are more rabbits in our neighborhood than ever before. OK, it may have SOMETHING to do with the drop off in the feral cat population, and that is a story for another time, but when I walk the dogs in the early AM, we see no less than 6 rabbits inside of 30 minutes. In a very densely populated residential suburban neighborhood. No wonder The Bob saw a coyote running up the middle of our street recently. Between the rabbits and chipmunks and squirrels OH MY! it must be like a Vegas $4 buffet to a coyote.

But I digress. The rabbits. They are trying to nest. To have their little rabbit babies. In the middle of my back yard. Also known as Schnauzerland. I have two Schnauzers, one of which already has a notch on his bedpost for having killed a rabbit almost as big as he in our back yard about a month ago. Schnauzers were bred for catching and killing rodents. They are fearless and relentless in this pursuit. Gus, featured above, is a death machine. Rabbits, chipmunks, mice, moles, birds. All have come to an untimely demise in my yard.

So you would think that there would be a tiny sign put up by the fauna on our yard "Caution, beyond here be Schnauzers...Pass at your own risk" but no. The other day there was a rabbit, sitting stoically in the middle, smack in the middle, of my back yard, on top of a hole. Maybe more IN a hole, it had begun digging. When Gus got out there, the rabbit had taken its leave, but he began digging the hole up. He came up with a mouth of rabbit fur. I began pulling it out, and it was like a magician pulling scarves out his mouth. It just kept coming, but there was no rabbit. Just fur. Then I began cleaning the hole out. More fur, lots of grass, but no rabbits. Thank goodness. But obviously it was trying to build a nest.

All I can say is if it persists in this endeavor, Darwin may have his day in court. Survival of the fittest will be demonstrated. But I would rather NOT be dealing with more dead rabbits and baby rabbits all over my back yard. So I filled that hole in, and so far, no more digging. But my neighbor has been even more unlucky. After spending a pretty penny on new sod in his front yard, and watering it religiously to keep his investment alive, the same day we found the rabbit digging in our yard, he found one had dug a nice fat hole in his front yard. Right in his new sod. I have offered to rent the Schnauzers out to him.

Whining Wednesday - The Crank Edition

2011-06-08T20:52:00.003-04:00

Yes I would like a little cheese with this whine:

At the risk of sharing way too much, (is that even possible on the internet?) Irritable Bowel Syndrome is rearing its ugly head in my life again, and quite frankly is ruining eating for me. So far the foods I have eliminated in an effort to stop the madness include: Eggs (what's NOT for breakfast) in any form. Corn in it's purest form, like in the kernel, which stinks because I love corn on the cob. But since it is the one food that comes out looking exactly the way it goes in, I am wondering if it has any nutritional value at all. Salad. Specifically leafy greens, celery, or any source in INSOLUBLE FIBER. Because, say it with me now, it is insoluble. Which my colon takes issue with.

So, food that is normally considered good for you, eggs, corn, salad, yeah, I am not eating them. I generally also avoid all sources of soy, because soy, especially in the form of tofu, tries to kill me.

In other news, I have developed a raging ragey rage against bras. You heard me, ladies undergarments of the bra variety. Especially in the hot weather. Itchy, hot, awful. Combine that physical discomfort with my colon issues and you might say I am generally kind of CRANKY.

So, if anyone has any suggestions for solutions to either issue, I am open to hearing them. Except from sickos and spam bots. You all can keep your comments to yourselves.

Sunday...

2011-05-29T16:55:00.003-04:00

My azaleas finally bloomed, and are almost gone again.

Today was spent wandering around Newburyport, at their Springfest.

There was a playground...

And a balloon guy who obliged Cooper by making an X-man X vest.

Otherwise it was walking around and checking out the sites. Hope you are all having a good weekend.

The one in which I learn to hate T ball...

2011-05-27T14:52:00.007-04:00

I like baseball. I love the sounds of baseball, specifically if it is being listened to on the radio while someone is washing the car and there is a cold beer glistening on the step nearby. The hum of the cicada in the background, the buzz of a lawn mower in the distance. The sounds of summer.

I hate T ball. This is our first year experiencing the exquisite torture that is the one hour of T ball. And I am pretty sure my kid feels the same way.

The glove is for what?

Spinning in the outfield. Similar to spinning in soccer, but with a hat and glove.

And finally giving up and just laying down.

If he isn't doing these things, he is doing this (he is in the center of the picture being spoken to by The Bob):

The problem is, you see, that 4 - 6 year olds, with a few spectacularly talented can hit and throw like they are in Little League already exceptions, are not any good at baseball. And no one expects them to be. But this means that those batting take FOR.EVER to hit the ball, and the ones out in the field, who barely understand the difference between first base and a sandwich are B.O.R.E.D. Which leads to spinning, laying about, goofing around and generally not listening or paying attention.

Two weeks ago Cooper was so bored and got so sassy with me about doing what the coach was telling him to do I ejected him from the game myself. I gave him 2 chances to get off the ground and go up to bat, and he chose to first tell me "I caaaaaaan't heeeeaaaaar yooooouuuu" and then lay down in the grass between second and third base again. So we left. Because while I don't particularly care if he is any good at anything he does, I do expect he will listen to the adults in charge and follow basic instructions.

I want him to experience team sports, and if eventually he tells me he does or does not want to play again, we will do what he wants. But Lord have mercy I dread this hour where it seems like it is one long discussion about just paying attention. We have two more "games" this season, and I have already told The Bob that unless Cooper expresses a distinct interest in it next season, we may be sticking to just soccer, and possibly clown school.

This Day Will Never Come Again...

2011-05-25T13:19:00.004-04:00

A friend, the endlessly talented David Hansen wrote in his own blog "Let the basement crumble. Let the garage collapse. This day will never come again." He took the moment to revel in the accomplishments of his daughter, the wonder of his son, and just the general goodness of life.

It is a lesson we forget too often, to JUST BE. To embrace the moment, let the grind of the day fall away. Last night our little band of merry men had the inaugural sprinkler moment courtesy of neighbor Dave and his new sod. While reprimands to STAY OFF THE LAWN were needed frequently, it is quite obvious that the moment was siezed.

Spring has finally sprung here, the weather is fine and my garden may actually grow! Have a glorious day everyone.

On Growing and Remembering...

2011-05-10T10:11:00.007-04:00

Summer Savory

Well, nothing is actually growing, yet, other than the plants I purchased as plants. But if all goes well, we will have heaps of herbs, tons of tomatoes, pounds of potatoes, lots 'o lettuce, and plenty of peppers of all varieties.

I have never tried potatoes before, but I figure if they can be grown on almost every continent, in almost every condition, by almost anyone, I certainly can get them to grow in my yard. I purchased a small bag of seed potatoes, although supposedly you can use the ones you get from the store. They can be treated with a product to suppress eye growth, so that is not always successful. Seed potatoes are, so I have read, the best bet.

In other news, my parents graciously gave me a new camera. I have been jonesing for a dSLR, and now I have one!! A Canon Rebel iT1, I think. It is at home, I am not. But it is definitely a Canon Rebel. I was a bit overwhelmed by the buttons and doodads and features, but at least I have figured out how to take a basic picture, using auto focus AND manual focus, and I can download them to my computer. The rest is stuff I can figure out when I have time and brain power. But it did allow me to document the spinning that goes on during soccer practice:

Ah to be young and carefree again.

Finally, today is May 10th. Since I can remember, I have always thought of May 10th as Donna's Birthday. She was my first best friend, someone I had known from birth. She and her large Irish Catholic family lived next door to us for the first 8 years of my life. She was a year older than me, with firey red hair and freckles, with the kind of skin that went straight to 2nd degree sun burn in one afternoon. We didn't always get along, particularly when I didn't agree with what she wanted to do, such as Swing and Sing. It is exactly what it sounds like, we would swing on the swing set in her back yard and sing really awful renditions of the latest songs. In particular I recall singing Bobby Vinton's Beer Barrell Polka (Roll Out the Barrell). I often wanted to ride bikes. Especially after my fifth birthday, when I scored a very sweet ride, metalic green I think, with a banana seat and streamers on the handles. It looked much like this:

Who WOULD NOT want to ride that all afternoon long? Donna. She would call me a creep and go in her house and tell me she was never going to play with me again. But she always did. It was my first lesson in how mean kids can be to each other, but I still recall our hours of playing together, making up an entire world of people who lived in the woods next to our houses, and story lines to go with all of these people, with extreme fondness.

I went to her first communion, which as a non Catholic was a very odd and fascinating ritual. All I know is I was seriously jealous of the very cute little white dresses and vails all the girls wore. Congregational churches are so BORING.

I stayed at her house the night my brother was born. I remember very clearly my dad coming into their kitchen first thing in the morning to tell me I had a baby brother.

I remember her uncle - there was always some extended family member stopping by their house - who owned a Vespa or some similar type of scooter. I wanted to ride that SO BADLY but sadly my mother, who loves and adores me I KNOW, did not allow it. Something about safety and dying a horrible tragic death.

Donna was diabetic, severly diabetic, and over the years struggled with it. She was a real life Steel Magnolia. After having two children, her body no longer could handle the stress, and began shutting down. She was on a list for a kidney and pancreas transplant, getting dialysis daily. She lost that fight years ago. The last time I saw Donna was at her oldest sisters' wedding back in the late 1980's. Yet, someone who was so pivotal in your early life lives on in your memories, and every year on May 10th I remember Donna and the fun we had. Happy Birthday, my first very best friend.

Pick up the phone, talk to someone

2011-05-03T10:50:00.005-04:00

Today is the day they officially say goodbye. Goodbye to a friend, a sister, a daughter, a wife. But they will never stop wondering. They will never stop missing her.

Reading the posts on her memorial page on facebook, you would never know that there was a desperation so deep, an aloneness so wide, that she could feel compelled to take her own life. How does someone who by all accounts touched so many lives with joy, laughter, happiness, singing, and love feel so sad that she could take a gun and end her own life.

Suicide doesn't create just one victim. It takes one life, but it brings pain and suffering to many, many more. Every family member, every person who cares about and loves that person is scarred. The people left behind cannot help but wonder what if...What if I had called at just the right time. What if I had reached out and been more persistent. What if I hadn't missed the signs. What could I have done differently to make this end differently. It is impossible to stop the questions, the wondering.

The suddeness of it, the absolute starkness, the switch that has been irreversibly flipped from here she is, now she isn't is probably the worst. There are no more chances to say I love you again, no possibilities for good bye. Just silence and space.

I have never been in a place so bleek that I contemplated ending my life, and for that I am extraordinairily grateful. I have not experienced depression that envelopes me like a heavy wet blanket of doom and makes it hard to think much less move. I have never been so sad, even at my saddest that I didn't want to keep living and breathing. But people do experience this, more often than we realize. And some of them succeed at ending the pain by ending their lives. But that is not the answer. No matter how dark it gets, no matter how useless you feel, there is someone who loves you and thinks you are worthy of that love. Someone who wants to see you again, hug you again, laugh with you and cry with you and eat popcorn with you.

For anyone who has been in that place, or knows anyone who has been or is in that place, there is help. You are not alone, and you can find someone to talk it through with. There are many resources, but one is The Hope Line a project that grew from a tragic loss of one mans' wife. He decided to help people like his wife find hope and help.

It is as easy as dialing 1-800-SUICIDE (784-2433). With that last bit of energy, that last small voice in your soul telling you to try one more time, pick up the phone and talk to someone. Don't give up, don't leave those who care about you here, wondering and missing you for the rest of their lives. You are worth so much more than that. Nothing is so broken it cannot be fixed, nothing is so damaged that it cannot be renewed. There is always help.

For Alicia ~ Peace

Existential baseball and the unbearable lightness of soccer

2011-05-02T16:13:00.005-04:00

My dear child is 4.5 years old, and since it is that time in life when one begins trying out organized sports, we signed him up for both soccer and T ball. We have been to two soccer games. Games is a term I am using veeerrrrrry loosely. So loosely that one might consider finding a completely different term to define what goes on for that hour when 8 or so kids in the same color tshirt assemble in the same rectangular space on the field, which butts up against many other rectangular spaces on the larger field where kids in different colored tshirts congregate accordingly. For the first half hour, the coaches run some practice drills. Dribbling, shooting at the net, passing to each other. These are 4-6 year olds. There is a lot of time being spent chasing balls that have wandered off into other teams' rectangular space. If you are my kid, there is a lot of time spent on your back, having flung yourself on the field after pretending the ball has exploded. Every time one of the coaches turned and looked at Cooper, he was on the ground. They would pick him up asking if he was OK, not having seen the preceding 10 seconds where he very elaborately fell to the ground acting out the blow up sequence. The other kids on the team may not be any more interested in playing soccer than he is, but at least they appear to be listening and make a half hearted effort to follow instructions. The second half of the hour is spent in a scrimmage against another team. Usually in 5 on 5 pods, with no goalie. So far our orange team has scored one goal each "game" and the other teams have scored a bazillion goals. I don't really care that our team has not "won". But watching my kid play, when it is his turn to be in one of the pods, makes me wonder for his future in ANY organized activity. Because while he is running down the field trying to move the ball in one direction or the other, he is usually in the back of the pack, doing a series of leaps and kicks and flinging his arms in a way that only because I am his mother do I know represents him acting out any number of super hero moves. That one with a kick and leap is probably from Avatar, the Last Air Bender. That move with the arms and legs is Iron Man fighting Whiplash, with a dash of War Machine thrown in.

On the one hand he just makes me laugh. I mean, I have always wanted to be someone who didn't care at all about who was looking and what they were thinking, and just do what I wanted to do. To revel in the joy and exuberance of whatever was going on, leaping and falling all over the ground. On the other hand I worry that my kid is The Weird Kid. Or is at least well on his way to being that kid.

T ball went pretty much the same way, except he had a partner in crime. His best friend from next door is on his t ball team, and the two of them could not have cared less that they were supposed to be practicing batting, or fielding balls. At one point there were about 20 kids in the outfield, with 5 third basemen and not one kid out there had the foggiest clue what they were supposed to be doing. It was a baseball game in theory only. Coop was out there with L, fake fighting and falling on the ground every 12 seconds. Then when it was their turn to bat, they were in the "dug out" which was a box spray painted on the ground, rolling around having super hero fights. Or knocking each others' hats off. I do not want him to squash down and extinguish that enthusiasm, but I do want him to pay attention and participate. So we have to find the balance. I don't care if he is good at any of it, but I want him to focus and try. In the meantime, I might have to suggest to the coaches that if they were to design their practices with super hero moves in mind, they might make more progress.

This video is from t ball. This gentleman is the grandfather of a kid on Coopers' team, and he kept us all quite entertained with his guitar. It was a good night.

They Say They Come in Threes

2011-05-01T07:08:00.003-04:00

First was Great Aunt Lucy. She had lived a long, fruitful life to the grand age of 95. She came from a long line of proud Italian Americans, with names like DePasquale, Cerretto, Gambino and Pannoni. She was a wife, mother, grandmother, great grandmother, great-great grandmother. She loved sewing and crocheting, making afghans for her children and grandchildren. She was my grandfathers' sister-in-law. I met her only a few times, but she always struck me as a woman full of grace and was devoted to her family.

Second was my good friends' sister, only 23 years of age. Again, someone I had only met a few times, but you couldn't be in her presence and not know it. She was larger than life in many ways, living with an energy most of us can only imagine having. Her death is a tragedy that her family will likely never fully heal from, because it is like having a vital organ removed to lose a child, a sister, a wife. We can hope to remember her as she was at her best, laughing and loving and dancing like that moment was the only moment that mattered.

Finally we had to say goodbye to our devoted, ever faithful companion, Buster the Beagle. Buster lived a long good life too, managing to make it to 14. Unfortunately Buster had a long list ailments, and being a Beagle, he was devilishly smart and had one fatal flaw - he loved food and he figured out how to break into the lazysusan cupboard. I came home on Thursday to find he had gotten into the cupboard and ate a large quantity of chocolate chips. The toll on his already challenged internal system was too great. His pancreas couldn't handle the toxins, and we had to bid him farewell yesterday. He had been The Bobs' dog for longer than I have known The Bob. He was silly, exuberant, crafty, devilish, and a couch hog. He snored, shed, and gave the best kisses. He will be greatly missed. But in heaven you can as much chocolate as you want. Happy travels Buster.

Everyone, every living being, eventually passes from this life to whatever comes next. These losses remind me that each moment is important, and reminds me to stop being so worried about the stuff that doesn't matter. To focus on the things that really are important - To hug the people I love as much as possible, to laugh as much as possible, to breathe, and be grateful for the joys and blessings I have. And to enjoy a good back scratch as often as possible.

The not so objective observer

2011-04-11T08:30:00.003-04:00

We cannot ever really be totally objective observers. We bring to every event we observe all of our own experiences, hurts, successes, prejudices, our own world view. The observer may not be involved in the moment, but experiences it and applies her own perspective to her observations.

There was a gathering happening behind the observer, in the yard next door. She was casually reading a book, letting the sound wash over and around her, not really paying attention, but consciously acknowledging the random chatter every so often.

"So you guys are going to Disney again this year..."
"Hey, that was a hit" and the corresponding petulant "FINE. Now it is 2 to 2."
"I'll be right there I have to get the food..."
"Molly stay out of the sandbox. MOLLY GET OUT OF THE SANDBOX. I am counting to 3...Thank you Molly."

Then, at a point when the chatter and laughter seems at its height, in the middle of it all, "MOLLY. Give that back to Jenna. Give it back right now or I am coming down there and giving you a time out."

In that moment, with those few sentences, all sound ceases. All movement stops. Every parenting decision you have made up to this point is suddenly on the line, called into question as everyone, even the not so objective observer who has not turned around to see what it is Molly has taken from Jenna, has stopped her reading and is listening, waiting to see exactly what Molly will decide to do.

Every parent, at some time, secretly longs to let moments like this go a little Lord of the Flies, to let the kids involved find their own balance and to see who is alpha, who is decidedly NOT alpha. Who are the mediators, the peacemakers, and who will lay the smack down on the kid who just took whichever beloved toy of the moment. But Parenting Protocol of 2011 requires that we intervene, especially in these social moments with family and friends. So we say these things we swore we would never say as a parent. We issue the mandate, the edict, and then wait. Wait to see what choice the child will make, what kind of parent the child will color us to be with this choice.

With the faint click click click of the toy lawn mower being defiantly pushed across the yard by some chubby little legs in pink shorts, the child has called your bluff. Every parent within earshot smiles an internal smile, knowing that yes dear parent, we have all been there, done that. We don't really judge you harshly, knowing it could happen to any one of us, even within the next 10 minutes.

And now the ball is in your court. The child waits, already knowing whether or not you will follow through on your threat, already aware that she is alpha.

A Safe Place To Be...

2011-04-05T08:58:00.003-04:00

It is easy to forget she has a mental illness. It is easy to chalk it up to being eccentric, being quirky, being a little egocentric and entirely too smart for her own good. It is easy to laugh off the semi paranoid comments and the avoidance of interpersonal contact as That Is Just The Way She Is.

But then there are the reminders that this is really mental illness. Reminders that just because you have felt depressed about the loss of a boy, or job, or have declined an invitation to a party because you just don't feel like mingling, you do not have any clue about the depth of despair that is clinical depression, nor do you know the paralyzing fear, the fight or flight response in overdrive, of a full blown anxiety disorder.

It is clear when she says she was so depressed this week she really wondered why she was here. She feels like a waste of skin. She feels worthless, incapable of making decisions and finds no joy in anything. Her mother is the same way, only she drinks to dull the pain, to quiet the voices that tell her she is worthless and unlovable. Mom uses her vast knowledge of Henry James to keep people at arms length, attempting to make them feel small while trying to bolster her own fragile ego and keep people from seeing that she is actually afraid of everything, of breathing, of living. Mom is killing herself slowly and she can only watch when what she wants most is a loving, laughing mother she can talk to.

Anything can be frightening, and is. So many opportunities not taken, words not written because she is afraid of being ridiculed, or worse, discounted as a hack with no talent. She is a writer who doesn't write. Her twin sister makes a living writing, even if it is JUST technical manuals for a governmental division. It is writing. She feels like a failure, but even with medication and the attention of a seemingly competent therapist, she makes little progress.

This is hard, when the reminders are there, to know where to help, if help is even possible. To say the words you want to say without sounding idiotic, condescending or insipid. To reach out a hand in a way that won't push her further away, but allows her to feel like you are a safe place to be. At least she told you that is how she felt, at least she still came to dinner and ate your food and laughed a little. She can be so annoying and entertaining, generous and selfish all at the same time, but you would not want her to not be here. So you keep the door open, and call to make sure she is still there, and hope she knows she is worthwhile.

The Dude Abides...

2011-03-23T15:58:00.002-04:00

This weekend was full of small moments where my son managed to give me insight into the inner workings of his mind.

First there was the moment during an opportunity to play with our neighbors in their backyard, in which one neighbor child was playing in the sandbox and the other neighbor child, who even at the tender age of almost 6 is quite the natural athlete, was shooting hoops, my son was laying on the ground with a small soccer net on top of him, pretending he was trapped in Spider Man's web. This gives me pause and makes me wonder seriously how organized sports will play out beginning next month.

Another moment came when we had a friend over for a play date, and the friend was bouncing around our living room investigating things while Cooper, in an attempt to get his attention to show him a DVD, kept saying "Dude. Dude. DUDE." Dude? Really? I will admit this is probably my "fault" as I call him dude, or Little Dude, all the time. But it made me stop and realize I really DO need to watch what I say because he WILL repeat everything.

We have also instituted the marble jar at home. They do this at school, where the students get to put a marble in a jar if they have been behaving particularly well, or are very helpful with something, and the goal is to get some prize at the end when the jar is full. At school they will go to lunch at the college cafeteria with the big students. Not sure that is really a PRIZE, I have eaten in that cafeteria afterall, but the kids will think it is cool. At home we have not been making much headway with putting marbles in, mostly because we forget about it. This weekend I decided since the weather was finally turning a bit, we needed to institute the Family Walk. This is basically a walk around the block after dinner at the moment, but has the potential to be expanded once we get into the routine.

My child wanted nothing to do with this. You would think I was asking him to wrap a skunk around his head while making him eat. Eat meat, which he refuses to eat. So I told him he would get 5 marbles for taking a walk, and did he know what he would get when he filled his marble jar???? A new bike. A two wheeled, big boy bike. "With small wheels too???" meaning training wheels. He was ready to take that walk now. We decided to take one dog with us, and as we got out front, Coop tried to talk me into "just walking back and forth, up and down" not around the block. Oh silly boy, that is not the deal. Then as we TRUDGED around the block, and Cooper was drooping from exerting himself, he kept muttering "This is taking forEVEEEERRRRR."

I deny everything and demand proof. I have no idea where the drama gene came from. But I can hear my mother laughing all the way from Oregon, and thinking "Karma is a bitch."

The Social Butterfly

2011-03-15T16:06:00.003-04:00

So my kid is a bit of a social butterfly. He has recently taken to wanting to have people over, or arrange play dates REGULARLY. Saturday morning, 8am, he says "Mommy, I want to have a play date with Aidan. Let's go to his house. Now." Of course I had not arranged anything with Aidan's mother, for that day or any other, and didn't know if it was going to be possible, but certainly wasn't going to go to their house at 8am on any day. So I emailed her. Then I texted another friends' mother, to see what they were up to. Neither of them was available Saturday, but we did manage to have play dates with both of them on Sunday.

First up was another super hero summit with Aidan.

Then we met our friends William and Kathy at a park near their house, which had a HUGE slide and fabulous views of the Boston skyline.

I am having fun with the Instagram app on my iPhone, can you tell? This is Cooper chugging up the giant hill he had just run down. There is nothing like running all over hill and dale on a blustery March afternoon to work up an appetite and wear a boy out.

But about this social butterfly thing. It kind of stresses me out. First of all, it is just not in my nature to plan my day away with activities. On the weekends I like things to be a bit more spontaneous, with few actual scheduled activities. But that is BOOOORIIING if you are four, apparently. It is also hard if people just are not available. Cooper must have asked 12 times in one hour to make a play date. I know in a few years he can be more in charge of his own arrangements, possibly just running next door to see if the kids are home and want to play. The problem with that plan is at least one family often is not home. They are on the go. We did manage to get in half an hour playing with Cooper's favorite neighbor, his brother on Sunday too, which was great.

Next month we begin two sports, T-ball and soccer. Both are just once a week, for like an hour, but it will be a social opportunity, a chance to meet more people in the neighborhood, kids he will go to kindergarten with in another year (GAAAAH! My kid will go to kindergarten in a year! ON A BUS.) And they will offer the chance to run around and burn off energy. Because Cooper loves to run. It might be that The Bob finally got a runner in one of his kids. That is his thing, and so far neither of the older boys showed much interest. But Coop runs whenever he gets the chance. He acts out being The Flash, moving his arms really fast. And he is fast. If he can eventually figure out the coordination needed for kicking a ball while running, he might make a great soccer player. Or if he can catch a football, hang on and run, he might make a decent football player. Who knows. For now I just need social activities for him that burn energy.

But I also don't want him to be over scheduled. He needs to understand the value of quiet time, of being by himself, playing alone. That will come. It is all about balance I guess. He will force me to stretch beyond my comfort zone, for the zillionth time, by becoming his social coordinator, which is not such a bad thing. But I fully intend to put The Bob in charge of some of this activity too! Share the wealth and all.

The heckity heck of being middle aged

2011-03-08T10:27:00.002-05:00

I am 46 years old, due to turn 47 in July. Any time I have taken those inventories that tell you to what age you will survive, I come out around 82-84 years old. I am in the middle of my life, just slightly past it in fact, by that measurement. As a woman that means things are, well, CHANGING.

My skin. What the heck, skin? So far I am not breaking out like I am 14 again, but recently I found out I have Rosacea. For which there is apparently no cure, but you can treat it with an antibiotic cream. While it comes with the fun side effect of having super rosy cheeks without any help, it also means my face feels like it is ON FIRE from the inside. If I exercise, it is a quadrillion times worse. I feel I could melt all the snow in my yard just by walking outside. And the skin can get a bumpiness to it along with the redness. YAY. I lay there at 5:30am thinking I should get my butt on the treadmill, but really don't want to have Hot Face as I am calling it, for the next 5 hours. Can we find MORE ways to dissuade me from exercising, PLEASE?

Also, skin, what is with the super shine? On top of being hot and rosy, and getting a bit wrinkly and puffy and saggy where there never used to be wrinkles, puff or sag, I am always shiny. I have switched foundations recently to see if that helps. So I am trying to moisturize appropriately, to deal with the wrinkles and sag, but also don't want to walk around reflecting all light in the room with my shininess, while glowing from the heat in my cheeks. I might rent myself out as a light house.

This is on top of the fact that about every 4-5 weeks I have to change my deodorant. Because the one I was using stops being effective. AKA, I smell funny. I have three different deodorants in my cupboard now, that I rotate. On really desperate days, I even resort to using The Bob's. Hi Bob!

So let's review: Red, hot, glowing, shiny, wrinkly, sagging face, randomly smelly pits. I have not even begun to discuss the hairs growing where hairs have no business growing. It isn't bad enough that I have extra pounds on me that my no longer functioning metabolism refuses to deal with, and my skin is on strike and I cannot rely on my deodorant to keep me from offending, I have to take a plucking inventory every morning to make sure that overnight I didn't become a Baba Yaga look alike.

This getting older stuff is not for the faint of heart. At least I don't have much of a chance to wallow in self pity, as I have a child who right now doesn't know his mother is falling apart at the seams. As far as he is concerned, there is no better sparring partner to perfect his super hero moves with than his mom. Speaking of which, I need to go take some ibuprofen.

On American Idol and crazy mad musical talent

2011-03-04T10:56:00.002-05:00

I wasn't going to watch American Idol this season. I thought there was no way it would be good with batshit crazy Steven Tyler and how much does Marc Antony owe on his taxes to make Jennifer Lopez need to do this gig anyway?

I stand here, humbled. First of all, yes, Steven is a nut job, and he leers a leeeetle too much at the cute women in my mommy/female opinion. But he is, as I think many have known for years, a musical genius, and has stayed viable in an industry that throws away talent like used kleenex. And he actually has GREAT COMMENTS and critiques for the contestants. Who knew?

And Jennifer brings heart. She has talent, so brings credibility to the table, and she wants them to succeed.

Now that we are down to 13 finalists, and on the big stage, they are in theory the kids with the STUFF. The men are much stronger than the women on the whole this season. But there are some standouts. And my favorite, because a) I always like someone who swims against the tide a little, but also has the chops to back up their audacity, is Casey Abrams. Randy Jackson said it is always like watching three people perform when he is on stage. He is a red headed and bearded teddy bear, with the most ridiculous sense of musical timing and jazz sensibilities. He plays the upright bass and makes it seem like the hippest instrument around. Someone recently equated him to Taylor Hicks, a winner from a prior season, who was certainly the underdog and not at all the likely candidate for winning all season. But Casey has so much more going on than Taylor ever had. He has sizzle. I don't know that he will win, but I think he will manage to stay in it for a while.

So yes, while I am sure I could find any number of more useful things to do with my time, I watch American Idol. I don't like to call it "reality TV" because frankly, while I know one person who tried out for it back when they came to Boston (she never made it past the producers), I don't know anyone for whom this is reality. And I have enough reality in my life, I need a little dreaming, shooting for the stars with a dash of crazy Steven Tyler and his flouncy pink ruffled shirt throw in.

Tap tap tap, is this thing on?

2011-03-03T08:50:00.003-05:00

So heeeeeeey, anyone still out there? It is been a whole month since I logged an entry here. I feel like I have been riding an airplane by hanging onto the wing for the last couple of weeks. It is that time of year at work where we are heavily into the recruitment cycle for new students, so I am banging out awards for them, meanwhile those pesky currently enrolled students want their financial aid processed and disbursed for this current term too. The nerve. So the day starts in a whirl and ends when the kid finally goes to bed.

Which I might add, no matter what time I begin the process of exiting the living room and getting him into the tub, always ends up being somewhere around 8:45pm. His skill at deploying the delaying tactics is untouchable. And time passes much more quickly these days so by the time I realize it is taking him way too long to eat that last piece of penne, it is 8:30.

My kitchen floor is probably growing a cure for some obscure disease, but BY THE GODDESS I will kill it Saturday morning when I apply a judicious amount of toxic cleanser to it and scrub it all away. Advancements in modern medicine will have to happen without my assistance.

In other Cooper news, he is kind of a sassy kid. Recently we were coming home from work/school, trying to get in the front door, but in typical 4 year old fashion he was being distracted by all manner of interesting things, like his sled on the front porch, the boot scraper shaped like a frog on the porch, the container of snow melt on the porch, pretty much ANYTHING ON THE PORCH. So I kept saying things like "OK, get up here" or "Please move over so I can open the door" or "GET INSIDE NOW", you know, fairly typical mom things, when he said "Shut up mommy."

Hmmmm. NO. I responded by saying OH NO, we do not say that to me, or anyone for that matter. We do not say shut up. "But Dexter says it" he responded. Dexter is a character in a cartoon that he has recently discovered. So I explain "Dexter is a cartoon character. He is not real. If you cannot tell the difference between what Dexter can do and what you can do, you will not be able to watch it." "I want to watch it" he responded. "Then you need to learn the difference and understand you cannot say shut up." This is, by the way, all happening while we ARE STILL ON THE FRONT PORCH. He looks at me, squints his beautiful blue eyes at me, and says very softly, almost a whisper "Then be quiet mommmy."

Doomed. I am so doomed.

The sun will come up....some day

2011-02-01T10:46:00.002-05:00

A reminder of the days to come. They are not TOO far away. Really. They aren't. Warm days, days of sunshine and BBQ's and walks in the woods.

You can't tell, but this place, the place of ferns by the ocean, smells better than almost any other place I know.

And this place, the sunny dock, with a breeze blowing and rocking gently...

This is in our future again. It really really is.

Snow fatigue and parenting styles

2011-01-31T09:32:00.005-05:00

Lord have mercy we have A LOT of snow here in Boston. Because of all of the snow blowing and drifting, the snow mounds in my front yard are as tall as I am (64 inches) and we have received officially a total of 60.7 inches of snow so far. We are due to get 5-6 more inches tomorrow, and a possible 12-20 inches on Wednesday, depending on where the snow/mix line falls. The entire metrowest area and downtown Boston has no where left to put the snow. Roads are down to one car width at most, and roofs are collapsing under the weight of the snow. It is getting tiresome.

So, in an effort to distract myself from all the blinding whiteness, the exhausting routine of boots and hats and coats and gloves and carrying all of our indoor shoes around from office and school to home, I have been catching up on some reading and found two articles on parenting styles that fascinated me.

I had been thinking I would just avoid talking about the first one, because it sort of caused a big stir and people got a bit hot and bothered about it. But it is such a stark contrast to a) my own personal parenting style and b) to the style discussed in the second article I want to talk about, that I decided it would be fun to compare them.

Article one is the much discussed Wall Street Journal article by Amy Chua, whose book on the same topic was just released. The article is an excerpt from the book. I read the article waiting for the punch line. The "Ha ha, just kidding" kind of comment. But she was serious. You need to read the article for the full effect. I won't be buying the book myself, and while I am all for parents parenting the way they feel is best and works for their kids, I will admit to being horrified and slightly nauseated by the description of her piano lesson episode with her daughter. I suppose if this is the parenting style you have always known, as a child it is not necessarily upsetting or disturbing. But I am fairly sure I will never take this approach to parenting. The short version is she has very high standards for her children, they must get all A's in school or she may resort to calling them garbage, and if one of them can't play a piano piece correctly, no one leaves the room until she learns it. There may be screaming, ranting, threats of donating all toys to charity, but the child will learn that piece, by God.

In contrast is the parenting style of Mayim Bailik, known to many as Blossom and as a recurring character on The Big Bang Theory one of my favorite shows. She is now writing a blog about her own experience as a parent. The short version is she is a huge fan of natural childbirth, breast feeding, co-sleeping or the family bed approach to sleeping, there is "gentle discipline" used in her family, they do not ever demand their children say please or thank you. Everyone sleeps together on the floor on two futon mattresses.

I see these two approaches as different points on the parenting spectrum. Both articles have caused a great deal of discussion, and some flat out hostile reactions. Some called Ms. Chua abusive, and some have said Ms. Bailik's decision to breast feed her child up through age 2 as disgusting.

They are extreme positions to be sure. To their credit, in both cases neither woman said "This is the way YOU should parent your child." They are simply sharing how they choose to parent. And making money doing so. Kudos to them for parlaying their world views into a paycheck.

No one is paying me to share this, but for what it is worth - I will take the categories that Ms. Bailik used in her first introductory blog and share our experience with them.

Birth. We planned on delivering the old fashioned way, in a hospital, probably with an eipdural, but nature intervened, I got sick and because continuing to be pregnant was going to kill me and my baby, we had an emergency c-section at 34 weeks. Fortunately it worked out in the end and Cooper is a healthy 4 year old.

We do NOT bed-share. I certainly appreciate why people do, but Cooper started out swaddled and in a bassinet in our room, and after one night was wheeled into his nursery because the kid was the noisiest sleeper I have ever shared a room with. Now, the fact I was not breast feeding helped make this possible. I know when you breast feed on demand, keeping the baby close by helps to facilitate that. Perhaps if we had gone full term and he had been able to breast feed we might have made different choices. But we did what worked for us.

Which leads to her next topic, Breast Milk. I would have loved to breast feed. I did pump for a month, but ultimately Cooper was so tiny he never had the energy to do it. He was very happy with being bottle fed, and eventually he became a formula baby. Again, we went with what worked, and he is a fully developed, happy, healthy 4 year old. We are OK with it.

Baby wearing. Ms. Bailik carries her children in a sling or carrier almost exclusively, and avoids strollers. Again, we gave that a try. I tried a bunch of different slings and carriers, and it worked for awhile, but Cooper was not a baby who really enjoyed being worn. Some kids don't. So we took our cues from him and all is well in the world.

Discipline. Ms. Bailik believes in gentle discipline. She does not negotiate with her children, there are no time outs, but they do set boundaries and have expectations for them. I have used a time out on occaision, but don't find them particularly effective, but I DO negotiate with Cooper. He is, if nothing else, highly motivated by rewards. And I don't think it is ever too early to find out that life is one big negotiation. Whether you are negotiating with your sibling or friend over a toy, or with yourself about how you will spend the next half hour (I can sit hear and read this book, or I can vaccuum the living room, if I don't vaccuum now, I will have to do it later) we are constantly making choices. Cooper is given options all the time. It offers him the opportunity to feel in control, and get something he would like, and I get him to do something I need him to do. Sometimes there really isn't a choice but still he gets to choose to either do what I am asking him to do, or he doesn't get to watch TV, play with that toy or he goes to bed.

I guess our approach has been to figure out what worked at the moment and then do that. We didn't go into this parenting gig with an expection for HOW we would do it, we just knew we HAD to. I appreciate when people have ideals and asipirations and then live them out. I just hope that when they do that, the first question they ask themselves is "What is the best choice for my child in this scenario" and not just do something because it is on the list of things you do when you are X kind of parent. I have seen plenty examples of people who make decisions based on some principle or set of rules they apply to their lives, without really considering if those rules or principles WORK. Are they functional? Do you really get the result you need? It really is okay to change things up if you need a new result.

There is no right or wrong way to parent, in my humble opinion. There may be right or wrong FOR YOU, in that moment, but really, we are all out here just trying to get through life. And find a place to put all the damn snow.

I live in a frat house...

2011-01-07T14:29:00.003-05:00

I have always appreciated the companionship of the male of the species. Other than my mother, the roommates I had in college and grad school, and my cats, everyone I have lived with, and a good percentage of my friends throughout life have been male. Every dog we had growing up and all of my dogs right now are male.

The male of the species can be funny, and often, although not always, they are less emotionally complicated than their female counterparts. I have appreciated the lessons I have learned about communication, both the good and the bad, from the men in my life. "The facts and just the facts" is often the key to communicating with men/boys. Making sure you know WHICH facts they need can be critical, but once you know that, learning to hone your message to just those facts is skill that will serve you well. Don't muddy the waters with extra words that they will just ignore anyway. Simply state "Please take this over there" or "No you cannot have another cookie" and leave it at that. Adding phrases like "...which you would do if you had a considerate bone in your body without being asked..." just makes their brains go a little numb, or irritates them and will delay getting the results you desire.

However, males have their flaws. The fact that Beavis and Butthead were so popular might be one example. And farts are HILARIOUS.

This week I realized I live in a frat house. I spent time cleaning up puke at 2:30am after Buster the dumbass beagle ate a large quantity of food that was not good for him - a bag of flour - and then experienced the unpleasant side effects of that decision. Too much pizza and beer is to a college kid what flour is to a beagle.

Then I watched my son laugh himself silly - I mean bent over, giving himself knee slaps gasping for air laughing - while he was naked, standing in the bathtub, because he was saying "Poophead" and "Fartbutt" or "Poopbutt" and "Farthead" over and over cracking himself up. Cooper spent time at his grandparents house, watching Daffy Duck get shot in the face by Elmer Fudd, laughing out loud by himself the whole time. He didn't want to watch any other episodes. To say he has a highly developed appreciation for physical comedy is not an exaggeration. He now acts these scenes out for me while telling me I am "despicable" with a lateral lisp, just as Daffy Duck does to Bugs Bunny. I cannot wait for the Monty Python years.

In the meantime, he also has begun repeating things that have been said by his father and myself, and using them appropriately. Example: when he muttered "Jesus Christ" after knocking over the baby gate at the bottom of the stairs that is used to keep Buster downstairs. That one goes to Bob. "Dammit" will be mine.

To review, I have overindulgence induced barf in the middle of the night, fart and poop jokes, and swearing. And a bathroom lined with superhero costumes. For Cooper, not me or Bob. That would be weird.

New Year's Eve - Party like a 4 year old.

2011-01-05T11:46:00.003-05:00

Well, Happy 2011! I am not one for major new years' celebrations, but we did have fun with it this year as Cooper was very into the concept, thanks to Max and Ruby. He has seen this one episode several times where Max and Ruby (brother and sister bunnies) stay up with their grandma bunny (they have no parents, a situation that has been the point of discussion in many forums for YEARS) to celebrate the New Year. They make clock cookies, i.e. sugar cookies with the face of a clock pointing at 12 and wear hats and eventually fall asleep before the big event.

So there we were on NYE, with Big Ma, Bob's mother, our friend TR and Coop, having eaten our body weight in BBQ stuffs and hanging out, when Coop announces he wants to make "Craw cookies" which I figured out were the clock cookies. Fortunately, he and I had made some sugar cookie dough two days before, and it was sitting in the fridge waiting to be used. So off we went to the kitchen. But how to put the clock face on it? TR came up with a quick egg wash paint her mother used to use, which you put on before you bake the cookies so it gets cooked. Raw eggs are not my idea of yummy. 10 minutes later, clock cookies were in the house, along with some seriously deformed gingerbread guys.

Then Coop said he wanted to stay up til midnight. *I* didn't even intend to stay up that late, he sure wasn't. So at some point he was in the kitchen being distracted, around 8pm, and I ran and changed the giant clock we have to say 11:50. This will never work again as he will likely learn to tell time somewhat proficiently in the next 11 months, but this time it worked. He came back in, we all exclaimed over how it was almost midnight, we yelled happy new year 10 minutes later and he went to bed. And we followed not too long after. Because that is how we roll around Casa de MLM.

That was how we rung in the new year. 4 days into 2011 and so far, so good.

Where have you been?

2010-12-22T18:34:00.003-05:00

Hi there! It's been a busy few weeks over here at casa de MLM. First I caught the dread cold that everyone at work has had, but managed to perform in our end of the term "concert" with our jazz group on campus. Then we went away for a week to Oregon to visit my family. I have not been out there for 2.5 years, Cooper hasn't been since he was 9 months old and The Bob hasn't been since before Coop was born. So it was time. The flight had me the most concerned, as it is a long ass trip. Turns out Cooper handled better than either of the grown ups. It helped that I had downloaded a bunch of games onto my phone he liked.

The visit went really well. We did all kinds of things - Salem has a lot to offer like a beautiful, well preserved carousel, the A.C. Gilbert Discovery Museum (he invented the erector set among other things. Bob calls him a show off) and at least one vineyard where the grown ups did a wine tasting. We also went to the Evergreen Aid and Space Museum which is great, but fabulously frustrating if you happen to be a 4 year old who wants to sit inside every plane, jet and rocket on display, which is generally frowned upon by the management. The simulator for one of the Gemini launches was mildly satisfying but really, but inside the Spruce Goose, the gigantic plane that Howard Hughes built out of birch and made float on water by using beach balls for flotation devices, you only get to stand in a space about 12 feet by 12 feet. You cannot go anywhere interesting, like down below where they kept the fuel, so Cooper was all "NEXT, what can I touch NOW?.

We came home last weekend, and it is back to reality for a week, and then the holidays hit. I have wrapped NOTHING. I am considering piling everything unwrapped under the tree and letting people sort it out for themselves. No not really.

Last night I performed again with Harvey and Matt in our little trio at the retirement center on campus. We did an hour again. It felt more comfortable than last time, but now Harvey says I need to front more. Which is to say I need to do the chit chat in between songs, introduce the band, etc. I think I need to watch many hours of old Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin shows. I can hold a conversation with anyone, really, I can, but the idea of doing the "Heeeeey, how's it going, where are you folks from, don't forget to tip your waiter" chatter adds another layer of crazy to my brain. He says it should be FUNNY and light, and I am thinking it is hard enough for me to stand there and sing the right words and notes, now you want me to make JOKES?

OY. That is all. OY. I will have to work on it. Just another opportunity to stretch my wings a bit, step out of the comfort zone and grow. Or crash and burn. It is currently a toss up.

Here is hoping you all have a lovely holiday weekend!!

A view from my desk, the mythical monster series

2010-12-06T10:53:00.004-05:00

Several items I have on my desk have been given to me by either The Bob, or our friend TR. Who, by the way, people think is named "Tiara" when I say her name for the first time and if you ever met her you would know that she is the LAST person in the known, and unknown for that matter, universe who would be named Tiara. But I digress.

Introducing the most mythical, shy and sought after office dwelling creature: Loch Desk Monster. AKA Desky. I asked him if he prefered Deskie, but he felt that was too feminine.

He is joined by two other mythical creatures of the deep,

Octavias "Otto" Octopus

And SnailBit, of the giant snail species, more rare and harder to find than the giant squid.

I acquired these two at the Venetian in Vegas many moons ago when there for a conference. I cannot abide Vegas but that is another story.

An ocean view from my desk

2010-12-03T09:17:00.005-05:00

I haven't had much to report lately, Thanksgiving was lovely, we still have no snow, one of my dogs might be really sick or not sick at all, we are waiting for some test results, and work is work.

So I decided to show you a picture of one of the favorite things I have on my desk. I have A LOT of things on my desk. I am a chachke person. This is a paperweight I bought for myself probably 10 years ago during my divorce. It is handmade by Robert Held of Cananda. I just googled him. I guess he is kind of a big deal. I loved it because it looked like the ocean inside a glass ball. I love the green and browns. It is very peaceful. Which may be why I was drawn to it during my divorce. A small enclave of beauty and peace I could keep on my desk and disappear into as needed.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend! I will be trying to see the student production of Cabaret on campus. That is no small piece of theater to pull off.

Go Mommy GO! Sing Mommy SING!

2010-11-22T09:21:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I stretched my wings again and sang FOUR songs at Ryles Jazz Club during their jazz brunch, with Harvey Finstein and the bass player from our little jazz group, plus Harvey's regular trio. Cooper behaved himself quite nicely, despite having to tolerate SITTING and EATING (or not in his case). It didn't hurt that I brought bribes. Oh yes, I bribe my kid to do things I want him to do. I am sorry, I REWARD him for behavior I find useful. Like sitting still and being quiet while I am performing. M&M's are MAGIC.

This video is one and a half minutes of Black Orpheus, a song I did not know prior to Harvey suggesting it and Cooper made a contribution at the beginning.

The Big Man Turns 4 or How Legos Ruined My Life

2010-11-15T11:25:00.003-05:00

Thursday Cooper turned four. FOUR. Seriously. When did that happen? He had his 4 year old check up this morning. I am happy to report he is 42 lbs strong and 43 inches tall. For those who are keeping track, he started out at 4.4 lbs and 19 inches long. He was long but lean and 2 months early. I would say he has made up the distance.

He and I both had Thursday off as it is also Veteran's Day (thanks to all who have served including the Bob!) and we gave him one present first thing in the morning: A Batman costume. Which he rocked all day. He even wanted to wear it to Target when we went on a shopping spree to spend the money his Memere gave him. We compromised on just the mask. We had cupcakes that evening with our neighbors who couldn't make his party on Saturday as they were heading off to the Happiest Place on Earth, i.e. Disney. They gave him a set of Buzz Lightyear pj's. Awesome.

Saturday we had his party. We invited his class at school, plus a few other friends. We thought we might get half of them to come. All but TWO kids could go. We had 18 kids and accompanying adults at this shindig. I have almost no pictures. We held it at an ice cream place in town, Lizzy's. Everyone declared it a roaring success.

Reasons to invite that many kids to a party: Really awesome gift ideas! I am always puzzled about what to get kids this age, and the presents he received were varied and interesting and in some cases will put me in an early grave.

Case in point:

Lego's. I had said to Bob I felt Cooper wasn't quite ready for them, as they have pretty small parts and he has the attention span of a...well...4 year old. And we have three dogs. Buster the Beagle lived on Lego's during the Lego years of Alex and Nick, Cooper's much older brothers. But someone gave him a set which has the parts to build three construction vehicles. Thank all that is holy it comes with instructions. But I have a suggestion for the Lego people. How about putting the parts for one truck in ONE BAG. Not all the parts for all the trucks in three separate bags based on no discernible pattern. You have to open all three bags, dump out hundreds of little parts, sort through them all for the 20 you need for one truck. Obviously no one was thinking of the parents.

Also acquired: Our first Hot Wheels cars AND one loop di loop Hot Wheels track with motorcycle. The testosterone levels in my house rose exponentially this weekend.

My kid capped off the weekend by watching a Spider Man movie, while wearing his Spidey costume, and playing with his Thomas the Tank Engine stuff.

All in all, it was a good birthday.

Tasks that are hard to describe over the phone...

2010-11-09T08:30:00.004-05:00

Cooper and I may or may not be slightly addicted to popcorn.

An indication your child might love popcorn a little too much: He asks for it for breakfast.

But what is not to love? It is low calorie, at least the way I make it, it has the salty/crunchy factor and is portable. Oh, and costs like 2 cents to make per batch, at least the way I make it. And I am fairly sure it qualifies as a source of fiber, and is considered a vegetable. Or starch. Whatever.

I LOATH microwave popcorn. It is an abomination. Too salty, too, I don't even know what that other texture/flavor is that they all have. It is not exactly greasy, because microwave popcorn is super dry to me. Can something be greasy and dry at the same time? Whatever it is, it is gross. And heaven forbid you burn it. Just throw away the entire microwave at that point.

I make popcorn on the stove. In a pot. Kernals, oil, pot with lid. Salt to taste when done. If I am feeling decadent, I will melt a little butter, or put parmesan cheese on it. If I am feeling fiesty, I will add a little cayene/chili seasoning with a tiny hint of sugar. Seriously, TRY IT if you doubt. But mostly, especially if I am sharing with Cooper, it is just salt.

Last week I was away for two nights at a conference for work. The Bob called, asking me how to make popcorn. This is when I realized that making popcorn is deceptively difficult. You think it is easy, since it is just kernals, oil and a pot on the stove. But there are the ratios. How much corn to how much oil? How hot do you make the burner? How long do you wait, listening to the popping before you pull the pot off the burner and let the corn finish popping without burning?

There is almost nothing worse than burned popcorn. No matter how you make it, when it burns it all smells and tastes the same. BAD. And you can ruin a good pot. Not to mention you have been jonesing for popcorn, and now it all tastes burned.

Here is my recipe for good popcorn:

I am not picky about the corn itself. I usually buy the bulk bag at the store for like 2.99 but one store I frequent only sells Orville Redenbacher kernals, so we get that every so often. I just bought two big bags from a fundraiser for the Boy Scouts from a friend at work, and this stuff is very nice. But stale kernals make for lame popcorn, so keep it fresh!

Use a heavy bottomed pot. I prefer a stainless steel, 3 or 4 gallon pot. Cover the bottom of the pot with a layer of kernals. Pour in roughly 2-3 teaspoons of oil. You might need to experiement with that to get it to your preference. I use corn oil mostly, because olive oil has a lower burn temperature, and will start smoking and burn sooner than corn or canola if you are not careful. But I have used a very mild flavored olive oil as well. Put the lid on the pot, set burner (we have an electric stove) at not quite high. If 10 is high, set it at 8. Let it sit until popping starts. Once popping starts you have to be right there. Once the pot is pretty full, and the popping has slowed down to just a few pops a second, take the pot off the burner, turn burner off, and wait until there are no more pops. The pot stays hot enough to finish the job leaving only a handful of old maids. I pour into a bowl, and season.

This makes a lot of popcorn, obviously you can adjust the amounts to get more or less.

Bob very successfully followed those instructions, and Cooper got his fix. And yes, I DID make some this morning to bring to work, and yes, Cooper did eat some on the ride to school. But he had other stuff for breakfast first. There are worse addictions to have. Just keep plenty of dental floss handy.

And then it was November

2010-11-01T16:03:00.003-04:00

Does anyone else feel like it was just July? I can tell it isn't anymore, by looking outside and seeing all the leaves on the ground, and the colors have changed from all greens and pinks and oranges of summer to the steel gray of the clouds with the yellow and copper browns of the leaves up against them with the blue blue sky behind it all. Nevermind that my pool has been closed for over a month now. Cooper did not understand that at all. Where did the pool go? Why is it closed and why can't we swim anymore? The dogs like it when the pool is closed, because they can run across the cover, making the trip to the back corner of the yard where they bark like a murderous pack at the neighbors' dogs much shorter. They don't run as much as bounce like little astronauts on the surface of the moon because it is like a trampoline.

We had a very successful Halloween, although between our office party, Cooper's school celebrations, the Halloween parade we do in the neighborhood, and then finally trick or treating last night, it feels like we have had a week of celebrations. Cooper was Wolverine this year, which he rocked with his usual flair for the dramatic superhero.

Finally, the lovely and talented Karen Waldron of Chookooloonks fame, finally has her book out, The Beauty of Different. I will be getting a copy for sure! You should be checking it out too. Because we are truly different and beautiful because of it.

Happy November!

Doing things that scare you

2010-10-26T08:37:00.002-04:00

Everyone has something that scares them, or at least makes their palms sweat a little bit as they face the task at hand. For me, it isn't heights, cats, dogs, snakes, public speaking. Spiders give me the shivers, but I will take them down if they make the mistake of being in my house.

Lately it has been singing in public that has had me nervous down to my core. I have been singing with a jazz group on campus for two years now, but in that setting I am one of a couple of singers with a four or so member band backing us. I have become more comfortable in that scenario. But every so often Harvey, the "leader" of our little jazz group, and someone I have come to call friend, will invite me to spread my wings a bit more and I have sung with him at Ryles Jazz Cafe in Cambridge a few times. Recently he suggested that he and I along with our bass player Matt, could form a trio and work up a repertoire of music and try to get a regular gig. I feel RIDICULOUS even writing the word "gig" but that is what it is. We have not worked very hard at getting one, so it hasn't happened yet, but we did perform for an hour at the retirement community attached to campus here at the college two weeks ago. One whole hour. Of just ME singing in front of what turned out to be Harvey on a beautiful Steinway, Matt on his upright bass, and one of our students, Brett who is a genius on saxophone. 10 songs.

I have never been so terrified, and that includes when someone was about to cut my abdomen open and pull a baby out. OK, I was on some pretty good drugs for that, so maybe these are not comparable experiences. But seriously, I have never, even in my college days of doing theater, been so nauseatingly petrified. I did not try to go it without some lyrics handy. I have discovered that in this setting my brain freezes up and if asked to sing a song, it is as if I have never ever ever learned any song ever in my life. No Happy Birthday, no national anthem, nothing will come to my brain. My voice works, my brain doesn't. So I created a small cheat sheet of lyrics, and really didn't need it most of the time, but the fact it was there made it better.

I decided not to record it, but to just let it happen and leave it to the universe and those present to remember it. It went really well. I flubbed a bit on Fly Me to the Moon, which I can sing in my sleep, but for some reason had a hard time hearing and finding the tune at the beginning. I seem to do really well, oddly enough, with tunes that fall into the Latin category. Two of them I had never heard before Harvey introduced me to them, Beautiful Love and Black Orpheus, aka A Day in the Life of a Fool. They seem to be in my wheelhouse range wise, and suit the quality of my voice.

What I learned is that I can do things that scare me and not only survive it, but conquer it, maybe even kick a little ass in the process. It will make the next time that much easier, and maybe by the time I am 60 it will be old news. By then I will have something new that will be scary to worry about - Cooper will be about college age by then. That is if I survive him being 4. But that is another blog post for another time.

It's been said, but it is worth saying it again, and again, and again until there is change

2010-10-15T11:51:00.002-04:00

Over the past weeks we have been hearing in the media about a series of suicides by teenagers who were bullied, or harrassed by classmates, roommates and others in their lives for either being gay or being perceived as gay.

Many blogs have commented on this, and have said it more eloquently or with more passion than I probably can, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't say something or pay homage to these lives cut short so soon and so sadly. They are:

Justin Aaberg, 15, MN
Asher Brown, 13, TX
Tyler Clementi, 18, NJ
Billy Lucas, 15, IN
Seth Walsh, 13, CA and
Tyler Wilson, 11, OH

And it isn't just gays who face this sort of terrorism. Here in MA we had the case of Phoebe Price a teen who moved to the US from Ireland, who had the audacity to be different, and to date, however briefly, a boy from the popular group in her school. That made her the target of unrelenting harrassment from classmates that became so unbearable she hung herself.

This isn't new, being ostrasized for being different. People of color have been fighting this battle for equality and respect for centuries in this country. People who dress differently, talk differently, have earrings and tattooes, you name it if it makes you different it probably makes you a target for some level of unwanted attention.

As a mother of a young boy, I am more than a little terrified of something or someone hurting Cooper, and cannot make room in my conscious mind for the idea of him being dead for any reason, much less by his own hand. I can only hope that he never finds himself in a place of such despair, loneliness and torment that he feels that ending his life is a better option than seeking help. From me, from his father, ANYONE.

The world needs to change for the better. WE NEED TO CHANGE. I don't care what your religious belief system says about being gay. This isn't about that. I don't care what you were told growing up by your parents. This is about common decency, about treating people with basic respect for their humanity.

I went to a college which is a very conservative Christian college. Being gay was not okay there. My first roommate there had experienced a great deal of negative attention because she dated a guy who was a different race. It just wasn't done. I remember hearing that AIDS was God's way of punishing people for being gay. This is all unacceptable. I would like to think that in 25 years a more progressive, accepting attitude has been adopted, but I don't know.

You do not have to agree with someone in order to respect them, to treat them as you would like to be treated yourself. We need to rise above the hatred, and embrace that which makes us interesting, makes us beautiful. I want my child to be able to laugh, love and experience joy in his life no matter who he loves, what color his skin, eyes, or sports team he cheers for. It is our differences that make life such a blessed and beautiful experience.

I am quite sure no adolencent, teenagers are reading this blog, but if someone out there needs resources to deal with harrassment and bullying, they are out there.

The Trevor Project is there for gay teens who are in trouble, considering suicide as an option. The It Gets Better youtube channel has hours of videos from people talking about their own experiences with bullying and harrassment and how they stuck it out to find out it truly DOES get better.

No one should feel so lost and alone and harrassed that death seems a better option than living. We need to stop the hatred, and start the loving.

Time flies and then he is at the dentist

2010-10-08T15:48:00.006-04:00

We have achieved yet another milestone in Casa de Cooper: the first trip to the dentist.

Don't look now but he might have a crush on Shannon, the dental hygenist.

Look Ma, no cavities! He has however, inherited my propensity for tartar and plaque, so I was glad he would sit still and let her scrape his little teeth. And then polish them. The lure of a new tooth brush is strong.

In other news, we went to the aquarium this weekend, Cooper and I. The Bob had to work, so off on the train and into Boston we went. Cooper was all about seeing the sharks, which led to serious disappointment, as it turned out the sharks were on a vacation at a different location while the main tank was being treated for some parasite or bacterial infection. Once he discovered that, he was all done being at the aquarium. Glad we spent that $40.

This is the face of No Sharks.

The world has plumb gone crazy

2010-09-27T11:10:00.002-04:00

OK. I have this child, he is almost 4 years old, and I would like to state for the record right now that I would like this world to FIGURE ITS SHIT OUT before I have to launch him into it. Because the evidence so far is everyone out there has gone LOCO.

First there was the guy in New Mexico who decided it was a good idea to kill a dog with a chainsaw. WHILE HIS CHILDREN WATCHED. What level of demented do you have to reach to think, as Cooper would put it, this was a good choice. In fact, this was a series of bad choices with a side order of raving lunatic.

Then there was the mom who was arrested for watching her high school daughter fight a girl from school and coached her while she was fighting. Oh yes, and it was caught on MANY videos, posted on the web and honestly, every person who just stood there while the fight was going on, hooting and hollering, should have been charged with something. Sadly being stupid isn't illegal. Yet. The problem is who gets to decide what is considered stupid.

The woman said she went to the fight, to make sure her daughter wasn't hit in the back of the head by her opponent, as she had sustained a skull fracture, from a "previous incident." I am sorry, WHAT? She didn't go to STOP the fight, but to make sure her daughter, who apparently has a history of getting into "incidents" where she can sustain a skull fracture, didn't get hit in the back of the head. You know, possibly causing more injury. She was arrested on charges of child abuse.

Then on the news this morning was the story of a 14 year old boy in Providence RI who stole a van from a local organization, caused one accident which got the police after him. He refused to stop for the police, and during the pursuit he caused another accident, killing a 9 year old girl and injuring her mother and siblings. And himself.

I am not providing links to these stories as I really don't want to connect to these ridiculous and revolting stories, but they are out there. Google it if you would like.

What is wrong with these people? Why don't they have that thing in their brains, in their souls that says "HEY, this is actually a really bad idea. People will get hurt, I might get hurt, I AM HURTING OTHERS. And hurting others is bad." What happens to someone along the way in their lives that causes them to stop thinking that way?

If I thought moving to a farm in the middle of nowhere would help, I would do it. But it won't. The world has a way of finding its way in, so you need to learn how to deal with it. But I don't know how you explain things like this to a small person. So far I don't have to. He is blissfully unaware that the world can be this wrong. He gets glimpses though. When a little boy he doesn't even know tries to take a toy away from him at the park, Cooper's toy, not a generic it belongs to anyone toy, he sees that people can make bad choices. And it makes him sad and confused. We were at a different park recently, and there was a line to get up a slide. There was a group of little girls who were maybe his age or a bit older, who had no problem just cutting in line in front of whomever they chose. And I could see Cooper working this one out in his head. That it is wrong for HIM to cut and not take turns, but somehow these girls didn't observe the same rules. But they should. You could see he thought that. And eventually one of their parents intervened to support that in fact, they should be waiting their turn, but it was interesting watching how he responded.

But seriously, the world has lost its mind, and I want someone to fix it. Maybe if we all just take that moment before doing something and ask "Is this a good choice" we might, one choice at a time, make a difference. Because let's be honest, I am probably not cut out for raising ALL my own food and living the Laura Ingalls Wilder lifestyle. I need the world I live in right now to be a better place.

Swash Me Buckle, What have ye been doing in here?

2010-09-19T08:35:00.005-04:00

Avast! It has been a few weeks since I posted, and you guys have made a mess in here. Me decks need swabbing and the bilge needs, um, bilging. No one has dusted or vacuumed and there are empty rum bottles in the crows nest.

It is Talk Like A Pirate Day. Ahoy!

Things have been hectic and exhausting lately. The opening of the semester was ridiculously busy. We spent the last two weeks hunting down missing students, clearing late arrivals, and generally putting out fires. Everyone is wiped out.

On top of that, Cooper began pre-school. He is still at the same school he has been at since he was 9 months old, but now he is upstairs in the Big Kids room. There are 15 kids in the class, 11 are boys. If I thought *I* was tired, I can only imagine how the teachers of his class feel. I have done day care, and it was the best birth control I could imagine. However, Cooper is having a great time. He gets to take gymnastics once a week in this class. When we get to class in the morning, there are all kinds of activities set out. Most of the time I just want to stay and finger paint or play with trucks too. But not enough that I want to change careers to be a day care teacher again.

In other news, have any of you ever tried growing cabbage? I planted 6 plants months ago. Gus pulled one out and ate it right away. I don't know why. He is a strange dog. But the others have been growing and growing, but have never developed any head. Stop it, all of the adolescent males out there. The picture on the tag shows a standard cabbage head, you know, like a smallish bowling ball. But all I have is a very large plant of loose leaves. It said they should mature within 70 - 85 days, and it has been that long. I am not sure if the leaves are edible, or even tasty. Next year I will have to try a different species.

And when did it become fall? Suddenly it is totally dark out at 7pm and it is dark when we wake up. There is one benefit to that, Cooper stays asleep past 6am. Most of the time. This morning he woke up crying at 5:20 from a bad dream. I have been awake now for almost 4 hours. On a Sunday. We should probably go apple picking or something, but honestly, my whole person just screams "Sit on the couch matey and drink grog." Or tea. Not very piratey but then, neither am I.

Grace in small things

2010-09-05T08:45:00.002-04:00

There is a blogger, Schmutzie, who began the idea of noting officially the things for which she is grateful. The little things, because it is the little things that often have the most impact.

My list for this Sunday morning:

1. Cool almost fall mornings that dawn bright, and fresh and crisp.
2. Almost 4 year old boys who tell you "I like you mommy" because sometimes being liked is as important as being loved.
3. Watching a squirrel for two hours this morning methodically climb across the electrical wires, and down the pole with nuts in his/her mouth to bury for the winter. I don't know where they are being buried, but this squirrel is going to be ready when the first snow flies.
4. Coffee.
5. Friends.
6. Coffee is worth mentioning more than once.

Hope you are all having a nice Labor Day weekend.

The wind blows in a new direction, finally

2010-08-23T19:03:00.003-04:00

For the last year and a half The Bob has been for all intents and purposes unemployed. He did make a few dollars in real estate, but it didn't take off in a way that made it possible for him to make what he was making as a software engineer. We worked our way through the severance, then through the savings. We were looking serious financial crisis straight in the eye. Finally he found a new software job.

This month is the first month where the financial situation will finally take a turn for the good. The first pay check should arrive soon. We switched over to his health insurance coverage, which is significantly less than it was through my work. Cooper's day care costs are going down this month since the older classes cost less than the younger kids classes. And our mortgage is going down.

Back when people thought we were crazy, we got a 5/3 ARM. The original rate for the first 5 years was good, and we figured when we got to the point when it would reset, we could reevaluate the rate and refinance if we needed. The good news was that this month it resets and for once the crappy economy is working in my favor. Mortgage rates are lower than ever. We could let the rate we will have now ride for 3 years, but then it will reset again, and I am fairly sure that unless the world REALLY goes in the crapper, interest rates won't be lower than they are right now. Our lender offers the option of locking in to a fixed rate now if we want, at this nice new low rate. And yes thank you, we do. And it does NOT involve refinancing. So without paying all the refinancing costs, we are going to lock into a new low rate, and save $300 on our mortgage per month.

Even before we get a paycheck for The Bob, we should save almost $900 a month. Now, if we are smart, we will funnel that right back into our savings account, to begin rebuilding that, because there is NOTHING in it right now. Nada. Zippo. Zilch. The universe could not have waited any longer really, to cough up that new job. But I will not spend any time whining about the past 18 or so months. I will be grateful what we have now, and try to plan very carefully for the future.

Now if I could just feel better physically. The throat feels better, but this cold/virus will not let go. I guess it will eventually.

Kicking my butt and taking names

2010-08-17T18:51:00.004-04:00

Hello! In case you were wondering, I am alive, barely. Three weeks ago I came down with a cold, but it started as a migraine, followed by full body aches, then congestion and a sinus infection, capped off by what is apparently a virus that has attacked my throat. I have felt like a thousand bees have taken up residence in my throat and are stinging me regularly. Today is the first day I have felt even remotely human. It has seriously been kicking my ass and taking names. The doctor (I have spent $75 in copayments in the last month visiting his office) said it sounds like I caught a childhood virus, probably from that petri dish I live with called my son, but it has settled in my throat. Only time and diligent consumption of pseudofed and advil will provide relief and eventual healing.

In the middle of all of that Cooper and I went on our annual pilgrimage to Friendship ME. This year two out of the three sons of my friends we visit with were there with their respective spouses and children. It was great to visit with the eldest, as I have not seen him in probably 10 years, and we are almost the same age. He and his wife met later in life like The Bob and I did, and they had a child in the same time frame that we did. I spend so much time around parents who are at least 10 years younger than myself I appreciated being around people who are facing parenthood with the same set of limitations and perspective I am.

This is the cove we saw every day while there.

This view is why I go back every single year, along with the great friendship and relaxation we experience.

Our friend John is a train enthusiast, and each year we have taken Cooper up, he has taken us to see this train that is being restored in the Sheepscot/Wiscasett area. The track has been restored for about 2 miles, and we get to ride out and back on original cars pulled by an original engine. This year Cooper and John also got to ride and work a real hand truck.

And here is Cooper on the train, holding his ticket. He loves doing this and John enjoys having an enthusiastic friend to share his hobby with.

In addition to the train, Cooper also went on his first motor boat ride, to go looking for seals, which we found. He loved it. It couldn't go fast enough as far as he was concerned. Can you tell he was loving it?

He also went on his first kayak ride. Since I was piloting the kayak I did not get any pictures of this momentous event. However, he loved it. We used a friends double kayak and he sat back enjoying the ride, until he asked me if there were any whales in the water. I said I didn't think so, but there could be. It was then he said he was ready to go in. For the record, there have never been any whale sightings in the cove.

All in all it was good trip, I just wish I felt better. I got sick right before going up there last year too. Now I need to recover because the semester is starting in two weeks and I will need all of my energy to get through that.

The Memory of Pain

2010-07-28T11:26:00.002-04:00

I remember with great clarity the first sinus headache I can recall having. I was 6. It was a lovely sunny day. Sinus headaches always blast me the most on sunny days and there is little humidity. It is a cruel irony. They also happen when there is a weather front on its way to change conditions from whatever to something else. I am a walking barometer.

Anyway, this day when I was 6 I was in pain. My cheekbones hurt. My teeth hurt. Moving my eyes hurt. I lay down, it hurt. I sat up, it hurt. Our neighbor noted that it was too bad I was in pain, but my eyes were beautiful. Big and shiny.

Yesterday I had a migraine. I don't typically get them, although my father and brother have been plagued by them all their lives, and we are quite sure my paternal grandfather was as well. I generally can still manage my day, but I leave lights off and try to minimize the noise in my life. Which, hello, I live with three dogs and a three year old, not easy to do these days.

When I picked Cooper up from school yesterday, they said he had had a tricky day. He was weepy a lot of the day. Whined for me for 15 minutes after I dropped him off, cried whenever someone even touched him as if they had punched him or cut him. I looked down at him and saw big shiny eyes. Dark circles under them. "Oh my little bean, I bet you have a headache" I said.

Last week he was in this sort of state, and I decided to ask him if anything hurt. I didn't suggest WHAT might hurt, just if anything did. He nodded and said his teeth hurt. Ah, I know that feeling well. A little childrens motrin or tylenol and half an hour later he felt MUCH better. You could see it in his eyes.

The Bob rarely feels unwell. He hardly ever has a headache, a body ache, and when he gets a cold, he sniffs and moves on. I can see that sometimes my experience of pain which can be a full body, don't touch me or I might cry kind of experience is frustrating. It is hard to explain that sometimes the change in pressure in the air can make me feel like my head is going to implode and all my joints ache. Or like rabid porcupines are trying to crawl out of my eyeball. That loud voices resonate in my cheekbones as if a dentist was drilling without benefit of novocaine. But that is my experience and there isn't much I can do to stop it. You just take some stuff and ride it out.

Seeing the same symptoms in my child makes me a little sad. I hope for his sake it is mostly a sinus/weather thing, and not migraines. It won't surprise me if we do see a migraine or two in the next couple of years, but I hope it is not like it is for the other men in my family. But at least I know what I am dealing with and what can be done. Like not living where tornadoes are prevalent. I mean, that is a good idea for many reasons, but that kind of pressure change could put me in a coma. And then how would I get into the cyclone shelter?

The Strength and Power Within...

2010-07-20T11:52:00.003-04:00

I give up. That whole posting everyday thing is for the birds. By the time I think about the fact I haven't posted for the day, I am in bed half unconscious and am NOT getting up again to post.

In other news, I have two stories of two friends. Both have extraordinary strength and courage and deserve to have that noted for posterity.

First is a story of sadness, but within that sadness is strength and a future free of fear and pain. I have known this woman, L, for more than 10 years, and for all that time up until 2 years ago, she was a single person who lived her life fully. She is a runner, she has a life full of family and friends who love her. She is one of the most positive and joyful people I have ever met. It remained a mystery to many of us that she continued to be single, but then she finally met a guy. It was a long distance relationship, as she lives here and he lives in a more southern state. But eventually they decided to marry, and had a beautiful wedding in Hawaii.

Last week I saw her and noted that she did not wear what most would consider a traditional wedding band. I couldn't even recall if I ever noticed her wearing something more traditional. I asked if what she was wearing was her wedding ring. She paused, and in that moment I knew I would hear that she was getting divorced. What I wasn't prepared for was the rest of the story. The short version is he was an incredibly abusive man, who was vastly insecure and would belittle her, verbally assault her, and even went as far as to abandon her in another state, without any ID, cell phone or money during a road race they were running in. She ended up having to go to the police to find her way back to where they were staying.

It is an all too familiar story, how she didn't see it before they got married, and I am sure the long distance relationship helped hide any flaws, and then after they were wed the demons surfaced.

Fortunately for her, they own no property together, they have no children, and getting divorced will be relatively easy, especially since they live in separate states and he is not contesting it. I give her so much credit for standing up for herself and saying she is worth more, she deserved more. She feels humiliated and embarrassed, but that will pass. No one I know will judge her, we all care too much about her and want her to be happy and safe. Having been through a very amicable divorce, but still feeling a little bit of a failure, I know it is hard. But she is strong and positive and will survive.

The other story is completely different. There is a man I know who is gay and has been in a long term relationship with his partner and they have just adopted a little boy. Adoption is crazy on many levels, and most people attempt to adopt an infant, either privately, domestically or abroad. This couple decided to go through the Department of Social Services, and have adopted a 3 year old boy.

As a mother of a 3 year old, I think this is heroic and amazing and they deserve some sort of serious award. With sparkles and flowers. Sure they are skipping all of the infancy crap - no midnight feedings, no colic, no projectile vomit or diarrhea, but they are getting a fully formed personality handed to them, that they had no hand in shaping. They are getting a kid smack in the middle of the "WHY" stage. The "But I HAVE TO" stage. They are taking a child who has spent most of his short life in foster care. No matter how good a foster family is, that comes with baggage. They have chosen to do something that is hard to begin with, adopt, and adopt as a same sex couple. As advanced as we are as a society, we still seem to have issues with a few things. And they are adopting an older child. If that isn't love and commitment, I don't know what is.

I am so proud of these two people. Well three if you count M's partner. But these two individuals are examples of how to persevere, to stand for what you believe in. Don't let other people define you, be the best you you can be. And I am grateful for knowing them and having this example in my life.

Will you please stop talking...

2010-07-14T21:46:00.004-04:00

Lately everyone in my life is talking A LOT. Not The Bob, but the Coop is definitely on some sort of talking marathon. And I cannot find the off button. The other day I was getting ready for work and he decided he should be upstairs with me, and it was NON STOP. "Mama, what are you doing", "Mama, what was that sound you are making", "I am pretending this belt is a rope, I swing on it", "Mama, where are you" and so on. I was exhausted and it wasn't even 7am yet.

Tonight we had a new yoga instructor, who was subbing for our regular instructor. His name is Fez, and he talked the entire class. I know most people think of yoga as this very spiritual, quiet experience. And that is true of some classes and styles of teaching. Not so much in Iyangar yoga, and DEFINITELY not for Fez. And I found it just a little annoying. Like when you go for a massage and the massage therapist talks through the whole thing. Hellooooo, I am here to RELAX, not talk to you. I don't know you that well, and frankly, I am paying a lot of money for you to just give me an awesome massage and NOT talk to me.

It is likely Fez will become the regular instructor for this time slot, once the new studio opens. I will probably continue to take his class, because there was something he said that I really liked. He shared that he was a cancer survivor. Prior to treatment he had been at a pretty highly developed level with his yoga practice. After treatment was done, he had lost a lot of his drive and ability to practice at that level. His instructor advised him that he needed to be gentle with himself, and that sometimes it is when you find the middle of your ability that you find the greatest opportunity for healing. You can see the outer or upper edge of your ability, but you don't push to get there. You work in the middle, and heal.

And I really appreciated that. Sometimes the whole idea of constantly growing, pushing, challenging is EXHAUSTING. I want to do X, whatever X is - yoga, singing, working, what have you, but there are times when the status quo, the place where I am comfortable and NOT challenging myself to grow, change, be more, is JUST FINE BY ME. Sometimes you need to just be in the middle, and be. To heal, to enjoy feeling a level of expertise at whatever I am doing, to feel competent for a moment. Most of my life is spent feeling like I am catching up, learning or just plain making it up as I go. I like the idea of working where I feel competent for a little while. So I thank Fez for pointing that out and giving me permission to give myself a break once and awhile.

And the knot unravels just a little...

2010-07-13T21:53:00.004-04:00

Today Bob was offered a job. A year and half after being laid off. And it is a HUGE relief. That knot that has been living just below my belly button unraveled just a little bit today. I was so happy for him when he told me. He had been working so hard at trying to make the real estate thing work, and unfortunately given how hard it is to break into that industry AND the lovely economic climate we are living in, it was not panning out quite as we had hoped. He is still going to keep it going as an option, but the full time job is what we needed.

Here is my kid enjoying his Buzz Lightyear action figure. For some reason Buzz says "Tally Ho!" when Cooper is in charge of his adventures. I do not know where that comes from. He cracks me up.

Today George Steinbrenner died. I am not a Yankees fan. Never have been, never will be. The Red Sox and the Indians are my teams. But I have spent most of my life hearing about Mr. Steinbrenner, and he was certainly a force of nature. His feuds with Billy Martin were legendary. He will certainly be missed for a variety of reasons.

I think today's lesson has been that I was more anxious about our financial situation than I was willing to admit. The relief that this job represents is astounding. I am so happy for him, for us.

This is working out well...

2010-07-11T10:23:00.002-04:00

Well, I am already an abysmal failure with the whole posting every day thing. This is why I never kept a diary either. That and rereading my adolescent blathering was beyond painful. Why anyone wants to revisit that angst I do not understand.

Friday I took the day off. I usually have Fridays off during the summer but with the holiday falling on Monday, we didn't have it off. But I decided to take it, since I have had to sacrifice some days off recently due to work related emergencies. The Bob had a job interview in the morning, Cooper went to school, so I got to have HOURS to myself. Gloriously alone. It doesn't happen very often anymore, and I forgot how nice it was to just BE. Not have anyone else around, talking to me, needing something from me, climbing on me. I worked out, took a swim and went shopping for some items I needed to celebrate my friend TR's birthday that evening. I also had rehearsal for the jazz trio in the evening. And here is my thing I learned for Friday. In preparation for rehearsal, I listened to the recordings of previous rehearsals I had made. I can tolerate listening to myself sing, but I HATE listening to myself talk. I am not sure I can even do justice to what I think I sound like. Most people do not like hearing recordings of themselves talk, so I am not unusual in this. But I was surprised at how flat my voice sounds. It annoys me to no end. So my solution to this is that while I am recording the rehearsals, I pause the recorder in between songs. That way I don't have to hear my annoying, flat, toneless voice. Weird. I am sure it is not that bad. Really. Yes it is.

Then on to Saturday. Because Cooper is completely into cartoons right now, and VERY into Wolverine, we have been watching the X-Men cartoons. Over and over again. I grew up reading the X-Men comic books my brother had, so I am pretty well versed in the X-Men characters. But there are some that I cannot remember at all. So, because I am good mom and love a good research project, I spent time on my friend Wikipedia, looking up the more obscure characters I didn't remember. I now know more than the average 46 year old woman should know about Gambit, The Banshee and Jubilee, as well as about some of the "bad" mutant dudes, like Juggernaut and Omega Red.

I SAID that not all the lessons I learned would be deep and life altering.

That brings us to today. The morning is not even over, and yet, I have learned something. My child is a consumer of the first order. I said I needed to go to Target for a few things, like razor blades and some lotion, and Cooper lit up like it was Christmas morning and said "GO TO TOY STORE??? BUY TOYS???? BUY BUZZ LIGHTYEAR????" He has not even seen any of the Toy Story movies, and he knows who Buzz Lightyear is. And he loves shopping for toys more than almost anything. I said we could look at Buzz stuff, so when we got to Target, we went off to the toy section. Cooper bopped from one isle to another, finding another and another and another thing to look at. At one point he stopped, put his hands up and said with wide eyes "There is SO MUCH stuff!"

Since I recently received some birthday money (Thanks Mom and Grandma!) I decided we could get Cooper one thing. So he opted for a Buzz Lightyear action figure (not figurine as I have been reminded more than once). Now Buzz, Iron Man and Spider Man are having an adventure in my living room. It is his own Toy Story in action. At least he puts these things to use.

Gratitude...

2010-07-08T20:57:00.002-04:00

I shall just say it - I work with some incredible people. That is something I already knew, but today reinforced it. The big ugly thing that has been somewhat consuming at work is nearing an end, and part of today involved dealing with that. And through that interaction, I was reminded that I am truly a very fortunate woman. I work with smart, talented and gracious people, and this means more to me right now than I can express. In particular I learned how great the president of my college is. I have heard people express that they think he is a cold person, or not interested in knowing people at the college, but I know without a doubt that that is just not true. And today confirmed that.

My lesson for the day: It is easy to take for granted the people you see every day, that you talk to every day. But when the chips are down, sometimes you find that those are the people you can count on to be your champion, who hold you up and make sure you know they believe in you. And for that I am grateful.

One thing...

2010-07-07T13:23:00.002-04:00

Today is my birthday. HELLOOOOO 46. I like my age, for now. I haven't worried too much about it other than when I realize how old I will be by the time Cooper is in college. Older than the average bear for sure. I am the same age, if not older than, most of the parents of the students I work with now which on some days is disconcerting and other days makes me wonder WHAT WERE THEY THINKING having kids at such a young age.

Anyway, I have been puzzling through, wandering around in my head considering things I could do on this here blog each day for a year. A lot of people have done things with their blog like that. A picture of themselves a day for a year, that kind of thing. I don't feel the need to torture myself or any of my thousands of readers with a daily picture of MOI, so that was not the answer.

This morning my boss asked me if I felt wiser, for having advanced another year. And I realized that was the thing. Rather than consider just once a year what I have learned, I think I will attempt to put on here once a day one thing I learned that day. I said I will attempt to do it once a day, because if the interwebs conspire against me or I find myself in a black hole of access to technology on any given day, I might not be able to post.

I don't promise it will be profound every day either. It might be something as obvious as Do NOT put a liter of soda in the freezer. Unless you want to defrost and clean your freezer. You have been warned.

Today's thing I learned: Apparently one could say I have a very eclectic taste in music. My boss was asking me about iPods, as she is JUST getting one for the first time, and I was showing her mine and how iTunes works. She noted that I have Bach and Bossa Nova in my library, along with jazz, blues and blue grass and Aerosmith to name a few. She asked how I get exposed to music and find new things to listen to. I thought to myself, good LORD I don't even come close to having the exposure to new and different types of music that other people I know do, like my brother or some of my more creatively inclined friends who spend way more time on iTunes or Pandora listening to music. But in her mind, I have a broad range in my musical tastes.

So there it is. I am musically eclectic. Who knew.

And I miss the ducklings. I don't miss all the poop, but I miss their peeping and their little fuzzy selves. Apparently I am a duck person.

Ducks in the house!

2010-07-03T07:52:00.003-04:00

This weekend we are hosting some exchange students. Some fluffy, yellow, peeping exchange students.

Meet Jack, Mack and Baby Quack. Only 3 ducklings survived of the original dozen Cooper's class incubated. They do not have a permanent home to go to yet, and they are a little young still, so they needed someone to keep an eye on them over the long weekend. I jumped at the chance, because I am a nut. I love these little fuzzy guys. Makes me wish I lived on enough property that I could keep them. However, I do believe that ducks are counter indicated with Schnauzers. Since my one dog, Ghengis Gus as I am calling him, has been at least partially if not completely responsible for the death of one mole, one bird and one chipmunk so far this summer in my yard, I think ducklings would be right in his crosshairs.

This is their home in my dining room for the weekend. They kind of smell. Actually, the ducks don't smell, their food smells. I thought it was the poop, but when I mixed the food the first time, I realized THAT is what smells. It is just a corn kind of smell, but it is stinky.

The easiest way to clean their cage is to put the top of the cage on the ground outside and hose out the bottom. They can't swim yet, they don't have the oils needed to float and stay warm, but they love to splash around in a shallow pan of water, so we put them out on the front lawn and had the neighbors visit.

And has anyone else noticed that my 3.5 year old is a giant? When did he get that tall???? I swear he grows an inch every night while sleeping. He is going to be 6 feet tall by September if he keeps this up.

For Audobon Ron

2010-06-26T10:16:00.003-04:00

Cooper's class is the older toddler class at school, and it is the class that always hatches some ducks each year. So far we have two ducklings, Jack and Baby Quack. Two more will have been born by Monday, as they had broken through their shells yesterday afternoon.

Ron raises ducks on his property down there in the wilds of Mississippi somewhere. I thought he would appreciate a shout out and a picture of ducklings.

How you park your car...a window into your soul

2010-06-23T12:53:00.003-04:00

From my seat at my desk in my office I can see part of the parking lot behind our building. Which gives me something to look at while pondering the deep and imponderable depths that is college financial aid and other related topics. Like how the federal government is going to define a credit hour and how that impacts life at our college. It is RIVETING over here people. RIVETING.

Anyway, as I stare out the window wondering how to implement the next oh so well thought out financial aid regulation, I notice things like how people park their cars. This time of year I have fewer examples to go by since there are very few students on campus, but sometimes that gives me even MORE information to go by.

It is my theory, and I am sure I am not breaking new ground here, that how you park is a direct reflection of your personal gestalt, your world view and how you view your place in the world.

Most people observe quite nicely the painted lines, the signs that indicate that spot is for handicapped parking only, or for faculty and staff only, or for visitors to campus only, or that a particular spot is, in fact, NOT for parking in at all because that would block the fire lane. These people are also probably the people who share easily and graciously, wave people in front of them at a 4 way stop sign or let the person trying to cross a busy street go before driving through an intersection.

But inevitably, there are those who think that rules are not for them, or that they are merely guidelines which, should they need to, can be ignored. My personal favorite is the person who chooses to park in the aforementioned no parking because people might die when the fire department cannot get past your stupid car spot. There is always one of those each term. Parking there has the added benefit of also blocking in at least two other cars who are legally parked in spots perpendicular to the no parking spot. So someone parking there thinks they are more important than a)leaving the fire lane open and b) the people who are legally parked and might need to get their car out when you are blocking them in.

Then there are the people who decide to park where there is no spot, at the end of a row, despite the fact there are perfectly usable, open spots in the lot, but just further way from the buildings adjoining the lot. Because college students are notoriously unfit and debilitated and cannot possibly be expected to walk an additional 20 feet.

These are the "me first" people. The ones who turn right on red even when the sign says NO TURN ON RED (and usually that sign is there for a reason, like it is a dangerous intersection for doing that) or who zoom around you erratically if they deem you are not going fast enough on the road, or you are waiting too long to make a turn.

Lately though, the most entertaining person in our lot is the person who parks her car, head in, but 5 feet away from the front of the parking spot. So her tail is sticking several feet out of the spot at the back. I know who this person is, and I cannot say that this level of caution combined with cluelessness is surprising. The fact that she is so overly concerned about bumping into something in front of her that she risks her car being bashed into from behind completely aligns with her personality and general approach to life. She has, more than once, made life difficult for me because of her blind devotion to something, and completely disregarding the need to pay attention to something else. She does not work in my department, but we have reason to work together a few times a year and it usually involves me groaning and bashing my head gently on my desk.

It is probably not a surprise to you that I am an observer of most rules. I would not do well in my chosen profession if I wasn't. I park where I am allowed to park, neatly, within the lines, leaving enough room on either side for people to open doors and not smack into the next car. And that pretty much sums up my world view and my view of my place in the world. Play by the rules and no one ends up needing body work. It doesn't always work out that way, but it could, if people would just observe proper parking lot etiquette. A girl can dream.

What to say...

2010-06-16T13:23:00.002-04:00

I have been putting off writing this post because the topic is sad, and it is hard to know what to say and it strikes fear into my heart, truth be told.

Katie Granju is a blogger I have come to appreciate through her writings on Babble and at her personal blog. She is a very honest, open writer and blogger and has just experienced a loss that is probably the worst a parent can ever experience, the loss of her oldest son, Henry.

Henry was 18 when he died on Memorial Day. He died as the result of injuries he sustained from a brutal beating during a drug deal gone wrong, and then from the drug overdose he took after the beating. The ordeal is outlined pretty clearly on both of her blogs.

I have cried many times while following her updates after he was hospitalized, and I have been reading her updates regarding the investigation into the beating and drug deal, as well as what she has to say as she revisits Henry's struggle with addiction and how she and the family dealt with it.

It is horrible to lose a child, of that I have no doubt. It is probably terrible no matter what the circumstances, but I can see how she is struggling with the idea that somehow she failed him, that this might have ended differently if they had only found that one thing that worked for him to get him into recovery. He had been through a variety of addiction programs, including two extended stays at residential facilities, and yet within weeks of his return from the last stay, he was using again. It is safe to say that Henry was not at the point where he was ready to let go and let God.

I have never smoked pot, or taken any illegal, controlled substances. It just scared the crap out of me to consider doing it as a child/young adult, and as an adult I came to recognize that my own chemistry was not one that mixed well with certain kinds of drugs. I also come from a family with a history of addiction. Katie's story is one that hits close to home, and makes me stop and wonder how things will go for Cooper.

I don't question at all how Katie and her husband and ex-husband handled the situation with Henry. It is not for any of us to judge. When you are dealing with addiction, you are up against a tornado and quicksand covered in fog and slime. It is a life out of control, and only at the point a person says "I am helpless against this" can they begin to heal. Sometimes it doesn't happen soon enough. I cannot imagine the pain that Katie and her family feel.

This is where all of my fears about parenting crystalize. Now that Cooper is in my life, the idea of losing him, in any way, or of him being hurt by his own hand or by others, is just nauseating, potentially paralyzing. Can you even protect them enough, and yet allow them the freedom to be their own person, learn about life and grow? How do you educate them about the dangers of drugs - and I will say this out loud here - POT IS DANGEROUS. Specifically if you are an addict. The problem is that people often try pot before they ever know if that is an issue for them. It is the way they found out they are an addictive personality. Sure there are some people for whom it is nothing. They try it, they move on. But for many, it is a dangerous and slippery slope.

Dealing with the question of drug use, experimentation, alcohol use, etc. is something that we, his parents will learn to navigate I guess, as he grows. Bob has been down this path with mixed results with his older children. Ultimately though, no matter what, you have very little control and that is where the anxiety lives.

I pray for Katie and her family, hoping that by writing his story she finds some solace, and brings more awareness to the issue of drug addiction and treatment.

The one in which I eavesdrop on a yoga class and see a better world...

2010-06-11T09:38:00.002-04:00

As I have mentioned before, I am taking yoga again. In exchange for one class a week, I do a few things for the studio, including checking in for our class, and maintaining the Facebook page for the studio. I wrote this note on the FB page this week after taking class.

I usually take the Wednesday night 5:15 class, and because I handle check in for that class, I try to be early. This means that I am there when the class before ours is ending. This is a class for young girls, taught by Christyn S. As I stood in the foyer yesterday (it was rainy and cold otherwise I would have been outside on the steps) I could hear her walking the girls through a pose that involved partners. I didn't peak in to see what they were doing, but it sounded like one person was being supported in a position by the other person.

I could hear her telling them what to do, and then I could tell they were doing the pose, and there was a lot of "Whoo hooo!" and "Yes, that's IT" and general sense of accomplishment going on in there. After they had switched and done the pose with the other person being supported, Christyn said something that I thought was fabulous. She congratulated them all on doing the pose and doing it really well, and she was proud of them because she saw that not once did the person being supported in the pose ever seem to expect to just be supported, that that person worked just as hard to maintain the pose as the person who was providing the support. The pose was about team work, and in all the cases, she saw each girl working together with her partner to do the pose well, as a team and she was so proud of them for working so well together.

I don't recall if I have said this here before, but I sort of loath partner poses. I am a Yankee born and bred, and I like my personal space and I REALLY don't like touching other people, other sweaty people, or having them touch my sweaty person. I mean, I don't KNOW most of the people in our class nearly well enough to, you know, TOUCH them other than to maybe shake hands. I am being a bit dramatic, but that is what my brain says when any instructor - JUSTINE - suggests we do a partner pose. I really do get a bit weirded out when someone stands too close to me, or, heaven help me, hugs me and I am not prepared for it.

But as I stood outside of that class yesterday, I thought what if I had had the opportunity to do yoga when I was 8, 9 or 12 years old, and had gotten used to doing things like partner poses early on, and how would my personal outlook on life have been altered if someone had in such a positive and encouraging manner praised teamwork at that age, you know, outside of my parents who did a great job, making sure I knew how to share with my brother and friends? I am a pretty good team player, but I am also 45 and have had 20+ years of working life to get good at that.

These days it seems the message we get from the world is ME ME ME and ME first. We have seen first hand what that kind of self centered approach has gotten us as a society - a credit crisis that has us looking at the worst unemployment numbers since the Depression, companies closing after decades of being in business, and an oil spill in the Gulf that is threatening to ruin the environment and way of life for fisherman and coastal communities for a very long time, to name a few.

The fact that Christyn was, in such a positive and enthusiastic manner, encouraging and reinforcing the concept that teamwork is good, that all parties have to put out effort to make something work right, to me is awesome. I don't know if in the moment those girls heard the message the way I did, but I assume that this is probably a normal part of how she teaches class, and I hope that because these girls are taking this class, and might continue to take classes after this one ends, that they hear that message, and it sinks in and sticks. Because I truly believe they will be better citizens of the world for it.

So kudos to Christyn, and thank you too, for helping in your way, to make a difference in this world, one yoga pose at a time.

Hello Universe, it's me, Midlifemama...

2010-06-06T21:24:00.002-04:00

So yeaaaaaaah, after that week with the auditors and blahblahblah, I had another week where I felt like every time I turned around, I was doing something wrong. Turns out some of that was PMS. Whee. But the other part was me, kind of being distracted and doing stupid stuff. Awesome.

Then on Monday we got word that The Bob's mother was admitted to the hospital with funky heart stuff. She had a mild heart attack, and what had previously been diagnosed as "a touch of emphysema" was probably full blown emphysema, and now might be more than that. He went up Thursday, and Cooper and I went up Saturday. She is in a rehab facility now, trying to work toward a point where she could go home again. But she has to be able to take care of herself, which is starting to look iffy. Whee.

Cooper refused to sleep by himself in the second bedroom in her apartment. Which meant he ended up sleeping with me in the other bedroom. Where the cat was. 4:30am and Cooper is awake announcing to me that the CAT! She's in the WINDOW!! KITTY!

Did I say Whee already?

The good news was we didn't hit any real traffic going up or coming back. She lives in Lewiston Maine, which is a hotbed of activity. If by activity you mean they had a tornado touch down in the town next door, and you too can have dinner at Dudley's at the Ramada Inn where they have a buffet with 30 senior citizens. We know how to have a GOOD TIME. But we realized that dinner buffets are perfect when trying to dine with a 3.5 year old whose idea of eating out is "how fast can you get in and out of any dining establishment".

Speaking of dining out with Cooper, my friend Harvey the jazz man performed at Ryles Jazz brunch a week ago, and invited me to sing with him. Below is a 1 minute segment of me doing Summertime. I had never performed this song with him other than in rehearsal before. I was a bit nervous. Harvey has invited myself and Matt, the bass player from our college group to work with him as a trio to perform out in the big wide world. This is an exciting and nauseating prospect. More about that another time. Let's leave it at Midlifemama is trying to find her bliss where she can and taking whatever opportunities the universe offers her to stretch her wings and not think about financial aid for a few minutes. One of the most gratifying moments of my life recently was Harvey's face when we were done with this song and I knew he was proud of me. He told me later it was a very professional performance. Which is a high compliment coming from Harv.

Can anyone say LIFE COACH?

2010-06-01T11:12:00.003-04:00

Oh HEY there! Long time no post. It was a horrible no good very bad week here in MidLifeMama land. Summer is supposed to be a carefree, lazy, floating in the pool staring at the clouds time of life, right? Not so much. I think I want to move to Australia.

Side note: I must say that a lot - not so much. Because the other day we offered Cooper a sampling of a new cereal, Chocolate Cheerios, which The Bob seemed fond of, I am kind of on the fence about. He took a bite, and handed me the bowl. I asked him if he liked them. "Not so much" was his response. That kid makes me laugh.

Which is a good thing, because I need all the laughter and happiness a soul can get these days.

Thursday was the breaking point. I had spent all of my time at work working on two huge and very stressful things, one is the evil thing I cannot talk about, and the other is the annual audit of our office. The audit is stressful because this is an outside agency who comes in to make sure you are doing your job correctly, and there are reports to run, files to pull, trees to kill by printing pages and pages of screen shots because they cannot see the information they need. Then you get to the point where they are done, and you get to hear about the mistakes you made. This year went pretty well, but the one thing they found was a process issue, and resolving it means closer coordination with the student accounts office, and after the week I had had, I sort of broke down. In front of the auditor. Which was AMAZING. She is a very nice person and not at all trying to make me miserable, and had it been JUST her or JUST the other evil thing, I probably would been OK. But I wasn't. There was crying. Whee.

So I got home, and ordered pizza because I was NOT going to be in charge of one more damn thing that day. The Bob was all "OK" and I was all "The Mama's armor has some fractures, do NOT ask me to make any decisions beyond pepperoni or black olives."

When it came to Tubby Time as we call Cooper's bath, Cooper did what he has begun doing at bath time, Naked Dancing to Music by Nightlight. I don't know exactly what this says about his future extracurricular activities in the teen years, but he likes to get naked, turn out all the lights, get some music going on the radio and dance before he gets in the tub. This particular evening we found some quieter music, and he sat in my lap with his hairbrush microphone, and he sang along with the music and it was MAGICAL. He didn't know the songs, but he has an ear for music, and was humming along pretty much in tune most of the time.

By the end of tubby time, I felt worlds better. I am still stressed, but eventually it will all be over. But in all seriousness, this has made me stop and wonder what OTHER career could I embark on at the age of almost 46 that would not involve going back to school, and I could support my family doing? I am coming up el blanko.

Reflecting on beauty...

2010-05-21T12:13:00.002-04:00

I don't know Chookooloonks but I have been checking out her blog, and she just announced she has a book coming out that intrigues me.

She is obviously a talented writer and photographer, and since I have begun embracing Twitter, I have been following her there.

This book focuses on how each person is different, and how that difference can actually make us beautiful. To quote from the website: "This book is designed to connect, inspire and encourage you to reconsider those attributes that make you unique, and reframe them as characteristics of distinction -- maybe even your superpowers."

Superpowers! Now we are talking. Because as I look age 46 in the eye (July 7th!) and am more and more aware of the impact of aging on my physical body (hello shoulder, you haven't bothered me lately, what's up?) what with the extra pounds and puffy eyes, I feel less and less beautiful physically. But through the eyes of others, like a three year old boy, I am crazy talented.

Let's review just a short list of my amazing, mad skillz: I can read, I can cut paper with sharp scissors and use glue. I am allowed to touch the remote and drive a car. My powers are ENDLESS.

Even with adults I can appear rather superfabulous. I produce tasty, even delicious meals using only leftovers and a can of diced tomatoes. I can find that missing thing that no one else can find, and is usually being demanded by the aforementioned three year old. That voice, that demand, makes his father almost blind to the point he can't find the door out of the house much less that third fire fighter that goes with that particular fire engine that Cooper has decided he MUST PLAY WITH NOW.

At work I am The Problem Solver. From helping a student figure out how to pay the bill to finding the jam in the copier, I am that go to person. Got a baby bird that fell out of a nest? Call me. Need some feminine hygiene products or a band aid? Come to my office. It isn't like I advertise these talents, but people seem to assume that I am a well supplied, prepared, and come armed with bird related wisdom. FYI...all I did about the bird was get an empty box, scoop the bird into it without touching it and plopped it under a bush nearby. After that it was on its own. The world has enough Sparrows.

My point is I don't think we give ourselves enough credit when it comes to the things we do everyday, but that we are really good at. That make us that person others seek out in times of happiness or sadness, or to help a bird in distress. We don't see those skills, those talents as beautiful, but we should.

I am looking forward to reading The Beauty of Different, and I am making it my personal mantra for the foreseeable future to consider my considerable talents, and to find the beauty in them. In me. Thank you in advance Chookooloonks for redirecting my mindset.

It was just one of those weeks...

2010-05-20T16:31:00.004-04:00

I feel like I have been going a mile a minute lately. Even right this minute I am keeping my eye on the clock because in 10 minutes I need to be over at Cooper's school to have his parent/teacher conference. Yes, even at 3 they have them. But that is cool, because they send you this evaluation that tells you all the great things you need to know, like he is on target with all these developmental milestones, and they say things like "We love having Cooper in class and we will miss him when he moves up to the next class". So it is a good visit.

I have done things like meet Bossy and a bunch of other fun bloggers like DaddyScratches and Meg of The Members Lounge to name a few. Meeting Ms. Bossy was great, and yes, she is THAT thin.

Things at work have been crazy, and then I cannot think about the oil spill in the gulf without wondering how do we become less dependent on oil and natural gas because if you think that is a clean fuel, you need to know my friend Pam whose life has been made hell by natural gas drilling.

This is why I cannot read books like The Omnivores Dilemma. I would probably stop eating if I knew more about where all my food comes from.

Anyway, that is a bunch of random thoughts, just to say HEY I am still alive and well, and hope you are too. Later. Must go hear how great my kid is now.

It's Perfect...

2010-05-10T13:41:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was Mother's Day. The day started out with me waking up far too early for the time of night I went to bed the night before. I had gone with our neighbors (The Bob stayed home for a variety of reasons including but not limited to a lack of child care options) to a gathering for another set of neighbors who will soon be relocating to Maryland. We went into Boston to a place called Gaslight, which was loud but nice. I had been at a birthday party with Cooper for one of his friends from school just before going, so I had eaten pizza and ice cream and didn't need to order more than a glass of wine and enjoy my friends' company.

As the evening wore on, it became apparent that the neighbors I drove with were, well, drunk. So I said to the husband, "Am I the designated driver?" to which he responded by handing me the keys. The good news - his Accura is a nice ride. The bad news - I had to be the heavy and almost drag his lovely but seriously inebriated wife out of the restaurant at 11:15pm and try to keep her from flashing her tatas to the entire bar on the way out. That gal is a GOOD TIME for sure. She is quite hilarious actually, drunk or sober. What was supposed to be a quick evening out to celebrate with the neighbors became a repeat of many of my younger days, when I was the only sober person in a group of happy but silly and drunken people who all think that, after 5 cosmos it would be a GREAT idea to order shots, and then someone suggests going dancing and the sane and tragically sober person who is suggesting that if you are in charge of Mother's Day brunch tomorrow at your house, at 9am, for all 25 members of your immediate family who live in the area, you might want to leave now before you get MORE drunk, is such a an ol' stick in the mud no fun party pooper pants.

No one actually SAID that, but for anyone who has been that sober person, you KNOW THE LOOK.

Anyway, I am normally unconscious, in my bed, by 10pm most nights, so getting home and in bed at 11:30pm was LATE for me. We planned on going to brunch at Mel's, this great diner type place, first thing to beat all the other families with the same brilliant idea, so off we went at around 7:15am. We had a very nice breakfast, and not once did my child say "ALL DONE" and then insist on leaving. He was not interested in actually eating, but he was having a good time.

After that we went to Target, as I needed to pick up a gift card for my work study student who is graduating next weekend. Cooper LOVES Target, the place where all things Spiderman and Iron Man live. He immediately began asking for the Iron Man items he has been coveting since seeing them in a catalog. They involve a helmet that completely encompasses the head (a VERY important aspect to masks and helmets, according to Cooper), doohickeys you put on the hands that light up and an arc light that goes on the chest, that look like the repulsers that Iron Man has. Target sells all of these items, and after perusing them, I asked The Bob what, if anything, did he feel we should purchase for Cooper while we were there. The option of leaving without anything was real, but did we want to consider buying any of them?

We decided, since they were all on sale, to purchase the helmet. It was what Cooper wanted the most out of all of them. On the ride home I unpacked and assembled it, and he was thrilled. We arrived home and he ran in the house and was walking around the living room being Iron Man, when he turned, put the visor up on the mask and said to his father "It's perfect."

With that one little statement Cooper pretty much summed up my Mother's Day experience. Who doesn't want to provide, if at all possible, that item that fulfills your childs' aspirations, whether it is for a plastic helmet with eyes that light up and a British voice that makes statements like "Iron Man, return to Stark headquarters immediately" and then makes rocket noises, or something more lofty.

Motherhood. It is a lot of things, from frustrating to joyous and everything in between, and for at least a few hours yesterday, it was perfect.

I've Got the World on a String...

2010-04-30T12:01:00.002-04:00

Wednesday night our jazz group performed the one and only time we will perform this semester, as part of a larger symposium of student projects that is presented at the end each term. We have some students in our group, the rest of us are faculty or staff, except for our outstanding upright bass player who is the husband of a staff member, so we get to perform during this event. The evening included 5 groups, the chorus, the a Capella group, our jazz group, the student rhythm and blues band, and then a presentation by a music theory class that was 17 students performing Fantasy by Earth, Wind and Fire. It was hilarious.

The energy in the room was fabulous. All of the groups did a great job and I think everyone had a great night. This is the one creative outlet I have that is just for me, and I have such a good time doing it. Harvey, who leads our little band of merry minstrels is a professional musician, and as a result of working with him over the last two years, I feel I have improved in both my actual singing, but also in my stage presence. I won't lie, it is a rush AND terrifying to perform in front of people. Especially people I work with, students who see me in my professional capacity. Our group aside from Harvey is just a bunch of amateurs who like to perform and we only get to rehearse one hour a week together during the semester. So all things considered, I think we do a fair job of it.

The video is just of one song, I've Got the World on a String, which was hands down my favorite, and I got to sing a good portion of it. So be kind in your review of it. In case you can't figure it out, I am the singer in the middle, bluish shirt.

A boy and some kittens...

2010-04-27T15:45:00.006-04:00

For your entertainment, the video from Cooper's visit to kittenland, otherwise known as my friend Jen's house, where she is fostering a mother and her 5 new kittens. The mommy cat and her little tortoise shell kitten remind me of my first cat, Griffin, who passed along after 16 years together about 5 years ago now. If it were not for those demented Schnauzers I would be bringing a cat home. Although I do NOT miss the smell of cat litter AT.ALL. I had embedded this from Facebook, but it seemed to block some people from viewing, so hopefully this time things are easier to view.

It's 2am...why am I awake?

2010-04-27T01:56:00.003-04:00

I rarely have trouble sleeping. Even more so since having had a child. I am usually half asleep on the couch by 10pm most nights and rarely see this side of midnight unless I am up with a sick kid or in the basement during the great flood of 2010.

But tonight, here I am. Awake. With almost nothing creative or useful to say. This blog has been pretty quiet because my life has not been. I am staring a book, Any Given Day, by Dennis Lehane, which I have been trying to read now for months. It seems like my free time comes in 20 minute spurts, and then should be put to use by doing things like washing some dishes or vacuuming instead of something frivolous like reading. For pleasure.

Work is still crazy. I go in with a list of 5 things I need to accomplish that day, and get sidetracked by 12 things I wasn't expecting. Or one BIG thing that I didn't want to spend 5 hours on, but there it went. Time is constantly sucked away by that Big Thing. I am hoping that Big Thing is going to be gone soon, but I am not holding my breath. My boss is hopeful it will go away soon too. We have all spent way too much time on it. I wish I could be more specific about it, but I can say that it has been one of the most frustrating, at time demoralizing and definitely disappointing exercises I have had to participate in. Ever. Hopefully by the end of the summer it will all be done, and maybe I can someday share my frustrations.

In the meantime, Cooper continues to keep us all entertained. We went to visit a friend who is fostering a mother cat and the kittens she just had three weeks ago. I asked Cooper if he likes cats or dogs better. CATS he said without hesitation. Hm. That is inconvenient. We are not getting any cats until most of our dogs are no longer in this life. The Schnauzers believe all cats are part of a major conspiracy and should be destroyed. That is not conducive to peaceful and harmonious home life. So no cats.

He has begun being a real grown up kid. We have watched Chicken Little, a cute animated film about Chicken Little who saves the world from an alien invasion, about 12000 times in the last two weeks. He has picked up from this movie the funny verbal distraction of saying "What were we talking about?" when he doesn't want to do whatever it is we want him to do, or answer the question we have just asked him. It is like he is 12 already. And because it is FUNNY, I laugh. And boy does this kid like to make a person laugh. You can see his eyes light up, and then he keeps trying to make me laugh. Since he loves a good prat fall as much as the next person, and loves to make people laugh, I can see a future as the next Chevy Chase of his generation. I am okay with that as long as we skip the part about addictions to various controlled substances. The Mama will need to be supported in some fashion in her dotage, why not through making people happy?

Princesses, they are not just for girls anymore...

2010-04-18T14:08:00.002-04:00

My son is obsessed with princesses. He has recently watched a variety of shows or movies that feature princesses, and he "luffs them" as he likes to say. The Princess and the Frog showed up in Cooper's Easter basket, and he has watched it many times now. Inside the DVD case was a pamphlet of Disney products, like other movies - Beauty and the Beast has definitely caught his attention - or the other merchandise that goes with the movies. Cooper has carefully kept this around, and looks through it frequently. He tells me every time he "luffs" the Princess and the Frog figurine. "Put it on my list" he will say. The list is the invention our our friend TR, who spends a lot of time with us, and told Cooper when he sees something he would like, he has to add it to his list for birthdays and Christmas. It is quite genius.

Today Cooper and I took a little trip to Whole Foods, to see if they sold the kind of yoga mat I have been considering getting, now that I am going to yoga more often. They don't by the way. On our way to the store, Cooper said that when we got to the store, he wanted to look at phones. "Phones?" I asked. "Phones. Princess phones. I want a princess phone" he responded. WHU? Where do they get these things? Must be TV. He has seen commercials for Barbie, with light up jewelry and shoes (obviously the street walking Bimbo Barbie) and he will say "I LUFF that!" Pretty much if it involves either pretty girls in fancy dresses, or dragons, he loves it. You cannot fault him for being well rounded.

This week we have also had some new adventures in culinary choices with Cooper. He ate a Sweet and Salty peanut butter granola bar - the first time he has eaten peanut butter or peanuts or a really chunky granola bar, and a plain bagel. Just sat down and began chomping on it like he does it every day. Which he does NOT. He has refused to eat bread of any kind since he was 10 months old. It was one of the first solid foods he would gnaw on, and then he just stopped and refused to look any bread in the eye.

Just when you think you understand what is going on, you don't. Cooper also wants to add to his list a princess costume. If a Spiderman costume got me a potty trained toddler, what can a princess costume get me, do think?

This is the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship...

2010-04-12T11:22:00.002-04:00

I didn't grab my camera, or my video camera, but I have in my minds eye this image forever. Cooper and "his Liam", the 3 year boy old next door who Cooper loves possibly more than his Spiderman costume, on Cooper's Red Flyer tricycle. Cooper was pedaling, and Liam is sitting on the top step behind him, hanging on to the seat, feet up in the air. There they went, up and down the street, tassels flying on the ends of the handlebars, two little blond headed boys, poised to launch into a life of shared adventures, joys and undoubtedly trouble.

At one point Liam wanted to ride the bike, but Cooper wasn't in the mood to share. Liam was crying, and his dad told him it was Cooper's bike, he had his own which he could ride any time and if he didn't stop crying, he could go inside. Liam trudged his way to the door, scuffing his feet and crying. Cooper was distressed that Liam was leaving, so I told him that Liam was sad because he wouldn't share his bike. If he wanted Liam to stay outside, he might want to tell Liam he could have a turn. "YES!" said Cooper, and he jumped off the bike, and ran as fast as he could to catch up with Liam as he got to his front door. Cooper stopped, put a hand on his side, slightly bent over, catching his breath, and gestured to the bike while saying "Liam, BIKE. Your turn." Just like that, the two were happy, coming back to play. Liam got on, and said in his little froggy, husky voice, "Cooper, get on the back."

And off they went again...now if all of their future negotiations could be solved this simply.

I had brain a minute ago...

2010-04-08T09:08:00.003-04:00

Nature is trying to kill me. Compliments of a month of rain of biblical proportions EVERYTHING is blooming right now. Trees, bushes, flowers, fungus of all manner. And they are all producing sneeze and mucus inducing spores. I am not even sure there is enough Claritin or Zyrtek to help. Do you know how hard it is to do yoga when your nose tickles like a rabid flea is up there? HARD.

I thought I had a cold, and it might have started out that way, but now it I am certain it is allergies. And along with all the sneezing and blowing of the nose comes the mental fog. Which is totally counterproductive to what I need to accomplish in my life. Work is off its rocker busy, and I have things on the home front that need attention.

Like swapping all my cold weather clothes for warm weather clothes, because yesterday it decided to be 90 degrees. Whee. Cooper refuses to consider wearing anything short sleeved or shorts instead of long pants. There was a meltdown worthy of John McEnroe in his heyday yesterday, when I attempted to put shorts on him. I hope he gets over that because it will be a long hot summer if he doesn't.

I also need to follow up with the City of Waltham as to why they are charging me another excise tax on my car. I think it is because I bought it in December. They just see it as I bought a new car, so I owe them more money. But it is the same car I had previously, which I leased. So I paid the excise tax on it already. SIGH.

And have I mentioned the dust or the dirt that is living on my floors? Three dogs and one toddler create a lot of gunk. And I need to do a thorough cleaning of the house.

But I begin something, and because I have this snot covered brain fog going on, I cannot remember for longer than 20 seconds what I was doing, or why I walked into a particular room, or why I opened the fridge. To make Cooper's lunch was the answer to the last question. Bob had to tell me.

Eventually the flowers and trees will all finish blooming, and if I live that long, my brain should clear. I am taking tomorrow off, so maybe I will be able to maintain focus long enough to accomplish two of the things on my list.

Things that don't make sense to me...

2010-04-02T13:51:00.002-04:00

Why people park their cars on the street directly across from another car parked on the street, so effectively creating a very narrow space between them that other vehicles have to navigate, and which is not wide enough for emergency vehicles, should there be a need.

Why our college softball games have to blast music outside. Seriously. The field is right next to the day care center, and games are alway during the peak napping time for 50 something kids under the age of 5 in that building. Including my kid.

Bullying. In recent local news a high school girl took her life because she had been subjected to relentless harrassment by her fellow students. 9 students have been charged in her death, two boys who were charged with statutory rape, and the other students are primarily girls. The girls in particular, reportedly, bullied the young woman verbally and online, through Facebook.

I am completely without comprehension as to how people do this to each other. I have seen from a distance this happening to a family member, who is high school aged. While I am not directly involved because this is not my child, and I know the child's parents are aware and on top of things, it is disturbing to me that high school students can be so cruel.

I know bullying has gone on since the first Neanderthal walked upright and the others pointed and laughed, but secretly wanted to do the same. But it has become somehow acceptable to do it in such a violent and heartless manner that children are committing suicide. On campus here, civility has been the primary topic and a driving force behind programming. But what is somewhat surprising to people who don't deal with people under the age of 24, is that it is the women who can be the cruelest, and primarily to other women. I think people most often think of bullies as being male, with the stereotype being like that kid from A Christmas Story, who stalked other kids in the alleys on the way to and from school. And that certainly still happens. But it has become more prevelant that it is the girls who are very willing to be physically, verbally and electronically cruel and unrelenting in the harrassment category.

I don't know what we do to change this. Where are they learning this behavior, and why are they learning it is acceptable? What is happening in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our school systems that dignity, respect and caring for our fellow human beings is NOT top of the list of how to behave? I watch a fair amount of TV, and I don't think it is completely to blame. Granted, I do not watch shows like The OC, Jersey Shores, Real Wives of any city and one could argue that what they show us, mirror back to us is bad behavior and we like it. But those shows would not be popular if the behavior they exhibit wasn't in some way already acceptable.

Where have we gone so wrong, and seriously what can we do about it?

Random bits of stuff and fluff...

2010-03-30T09:34:00.002-04:00

So, big news! Ricky Martin is GAY! GASP. The only thing that is shocking here is that it took around a decade for him to officially come out. Anyone, including my almost 90 year old grandmother, who saw him shake his fabulous latin bottom on the Grammys knew he was gay. Who knows why it took so long. He wanted his privacy, he didn't want his musical career, such as it has been here in America lately, to be centered on who he was in private? Whatever. Congrats to him for owning who he is.

I am so flabbergasted by the public response to the health care bill, I don't even know where to start. So I won't. What I will say is if anyone, ANYONE was paying attention, health care isn't the only thing the federal government decided it wanted to take a hand in with that bill.

Attached to the reconciliation bill was legislation that takes all federal Stafford and parent PLUS loans, loans most college students use to pay for some or all of their education, out of the hands of private lenders, and puts them into the hands of the William D. Ford Direct Student Loan program. Otherwise known as DL. All of these loans will now be processed and owned by you, the tax payers, and handled through the DL program. Just thought I would let you know. As of July 1st no private lenders will be involved in those programs. Lenders, guarantee agencies and servicers around the country will be laying off tens of thousands of employees as a result.

I am not a fan of this move, and I added my two cents to the discussion, but it didn't matter. They sold this as a huge savings plan. The BILLIONS of dollars that are supposed to be saved by making this switch are supposed to go into increasing the Pell grant program, which is a federal grant for very needy students. Since the beginning of the discussion 2 years ago, the amount of savings we should see has decreased, shocking, and now they are taking around 9 billion of those savings to help balance the whole health care deficit. So much for more grants.

And for the record, I am against creating or increasing a grant program that benefits the few (you have to be pretty needy to get a Pell grant) on the backs of the large quantity of students who borrow through the federal loan programs. I am fan of more grants, but not this way. Ironically, this is kind of the same thing many colleges got in trouble for doing a few years ago when it came to light that some colleges were getting money back from lenders in the form of a percentage of the interest charged on loans to their students, in exchange for a certain percentage of loan volume to that lender. The schools often put that money into scholarship funds. I didn't that was right either and we never did that at my college, and I don't think it is right at the federal level either.

And finally, it is raining, AGAIN, here in New England. So far our basement is dryish. We have deployed all sump pumps, so they are ready and waiting to be put into service should they be needed. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

And Spiderman is alive and well, living in my house. I can sing the theme song to the cartoon in my sleep. In fact, I do sing it in my sleep. Spectacular, spectacular Spiderman...daaadaadaaadaadaadaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Super Duper Spider Cooper

2010-03-27T20:46:00.002-04:00

Introducing the newly potty trained web slinger....

A month ago when we talked to Cooper about potty training, to which he was quite resistant, I said he could get a big prize once he was doing both poops and pee on the potty all the time.

"Spiderman costume, WITH mask?" he responded immediately. As if he had been planning this all along and was just waiting for ME to be ready.

Last Sunday we began the potty training. We had purchased a large quantity of super hero underpants, and by Wednesday, his teacher at school said she considered him potty trained. I think the good (or bad depending on your perspective) news is that he is as fussy about being dirty or wet as I was at his age. Once he was not in diapers, getting his underpants wet was not interesting to him at all.

So we have been living with Super Duper Spider Cooper since Friday afternoon. I am considering getting Buster a cape and a small mask, so he can be his trusty sidekick.

I'm here, here I am!!

2010-03-23T20:24:00.003-04:00

It's raining again, but it is a more reasonable rain, so far, and is not trying to flood my basement. So far. The sump pump people were out again, and I would like to know why every time someone looks at the work, they find something done wrong by the previous guys. This time the guy looked at the drain that should take water to the sump pump and said "They should have put holes in the bottom" because as it was, the water had to fill it more than half way before it started draining. No wonder it was overwhelmed. And the pipe that takes the water out of the house and to the end of my front yard, was installed a bit too shallow and with the seam facing in the wrong direction, so it has been leaking into the yard. At least it is not leaking in the house.

So he fixed the holes in the bottom of the drain thing, and someone will come out and fix the pipe thing eventually.

In other news, we began potty training again, and this time it is working! I am so grateful he goes to school. He has really responded to the potty training at school with other friends who are already using the potty regularly as a living example. And even though you probably don't care to know this - he has even POOPED on the potty at school. That is HUGE. Some kids take weeks to work that out.

Things have been changing for Cooper so fast lately, and he is becoming such a little boy. He is not a baby. He is barely a toddler anymore. We switched his room a few weeks ago, and now he is in a full sized bed, not his toddler bed. The toddler bed is still in the other room, and he stopped and looked at the other day and said "What's that?" I told him it was his baby bed. "Yeah, my baby bed. I'm in a big bed now." And I was all verklempt. He is just growing by leaps and bounds and now he is potty training and telling us when he needs to pee and WHERE DID MY BABY GO?

He is also totally into super heroes. We went to Target last weekend and bought 450 pairs of super hero underpants. He LOVES Spiderman and now he is into Iron Man too. We have watched the newer cartoon versions of these two guys quite a bit lately, and he wants to act out everything. It is hilarious. I hope his Uncle Chip appreciates that there might be another comic book collector in the family. I can get behind loving Iron Man. I mean, helloooo, Robert Downey Jr.

So we have been busy, and I feel like tomorrow I will be writing to tell you I have a teenager, because life is flying by. I am hoping I get the chance to really embrace the moment and savor it.

I needed to use up vacation days anyway...

2010-03-17T15:11:00.003-04:00

Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon...

If you don't listen to A Prairie Home Companion that will be meaningless to you. And it has NOT been a quiet week for me. Not at all. No. The opposite of quiet, calm, still.

Last week began with the thing at work that I can't talk about taking a whole new and annoying turn, to which I state again DO WE REALLY NEED ALL THE LAWYERS?? And it has been really super sonic busy at work, since it is that time of the year where we begin awarding all the prospective new students for fall, and remind all the currently enrolled students they have to apply for aid again, and plan for the graduating students to graduate, and then the auditors surfaced saying they would love to come a full month and a half earlier for the yearly audit. So when the weekend came, I was ALL SET for some relaxation and a complete lack of thinking about stuff I didn't want to think about.

The universe decided to see my desire to not think about work related crap, and raise me with a monsoon of biblical proportions that threatened to flood my house with many feet of water for three days straight.

In case you think I am exaggerating:

This is the water spout that appeared out of my foundation on Sunday. This is the result of a rising water table, that was probably a solid foot above the floor of my basement. Fortunately it spurted OUT.

This would be me, sitting in the backyard on Sunday, seeing if we could use a sump pump to drain the yard so it would STOP GUSHING INTO MY BASEMENT.

And this is a picture of the left half of my yard from our deck. Can you see the floating dog poo? Mmmmm.

I have blogged about my basement flooding before. We have a lovely and expensive sump pump system, that can pump 2500 gallons of water a minute out. If the water can get INTO it to begin with. And thus the reason we sat in our basement for over 12 hours straight, pumping water with a smaller sump pump from the pit of despair. That is the pit you can see the water spurting into. And in that picture you can see the grate over the drain that should take water to the expensive sump pump BEFORE it floods my basement. The water came in at such a high volume it overran the drain and didn't get to the pump. So we had to pump it out of the pit BEFORE it entered the basement. Which meant turning on the pump every 5 minutes and then off again because the pit is not deep enough to cover the pump and allow for it to run on its own.

Do you know how cold my basement is at 3am in March? COLD.

By Monday sometime it slowed down enough that we didn't have to pump every 5 minutes, but every 20 minutes. We finally made a dent in the amount of water in the yard by pumping the water out of the pool, so as the yard would drain into the pool, we would pump it out into the street. It stopped raining on Monday night, and by Tuesday the water was actually draining into the drain at a speed that it could handle, so we didn't have to babysit it. We then could use the wet/dry vac to get at the small amount of water that came up through the floor and the walls at the other end of the basement. That is still happening.

We will eventually have to remove some drywall that is down there, because it has been wet for 4 days now. But we did NOT lose the treadmill, the freezer or the furnace. That was the goal of the military campaign we waged for 3 days. It only cost us the price of another sump pump, which I bought Sunday morning when it became apparent that things were not going to go well as the weather reports all showed this massive swath of green over all of eastern Massachusetts, pulling moisture off the ocean and dumping it in my yard. I was lucky to get my paws on that pump too. The road to Home Depot was flooded and eventually closed not too long after I went through there. And I might have had to arm wrestle some guys to get the pump if it weren't for Cooper being there. I might have gotten the "mom at Home Depot with small cute child" dispensation.

We count ourselves lucky though. We didn't lose power, which would have doomed us, we didn't have to be evacuated in the bucket of a bulldozer as some people in town did, and we didn't lose anything expensive. The company that installed the expensive sump system will be out on Friday to assess if they can make the drain BIGGER. I want a giant sewer grate in my floor if that is what it takes. And it couldn't hurt to create another sump pump hole in the pit of despair, where we could put one temporarily if this particular set of circumstances were to converge upon us again.

I also want to give a shout out to The Bob, who personified grace under fire through this ordeal and battled the elements with style, using his computer and our wifi down in the basement while monitoring the sump pump activity. You rock.

Channeling my inner Ella

2010-03-07T13:55:00.002-05:00

Today I went to do a one on one rehearsal with Harvey, the guy who leads our jazz group. I like to do this every so often to sharpen up what we are singing as a group, but to also work on other pieces that I want to do as a solo, in the event I sing with him at Ryles again.

I think I have mentioned previously that I am not necessarily the visionary type. My comfort zone is in taking someone else's vision and implementing that. This is true in work, or when I was into sewing and I would make great clothes based on a pattern, but wasn't able to create my own pattern. It is also true in my singing. I hear a version of a song, and I can reproduce that pretty well. Whether it is Ella Fitzgerald's version of The Nearness of You or Nora Jones', I can pretty accurately sing that back to you.

What I am not as comfortable doing, and what Harvey was challenging me to do today, was to improvise, find new phrasing, melodies and generally sing around the song.

I suspect this is a skill that like most, the more you practice it the better you get at it, but even though it was just Harvey and myself in his living room, with no one else listening, it made me anxious, nervous, and tapped into a few feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. But since I want to grow and challenge myself in areas that don't involve work, but are more extracurricular, I tried to just be in the moment, let the inhibitions go and listen to that still small voice of my musical instincts.

I had a similar problem when I was playing the viola. I remember my teacher trying to get me to tap into the emotion of what I was playing. One day I played something differently than I had been previously, and he was ecstatic. "That was fabulous! There was emotion and feeling! What did you do differently?" he asked me. I had no idea. But in my defense, I was probably 13 or 14 years old. My experience with life was a bit limited, and the extent of my emotional bond to music extended to being in love with George Michael, who as we all know is gay. So you might say I was not exactly in tune with a lot.

40 years, two marriages and a boatload of other life experience later I at least have a deep and colorful to tap into to help inform what I am trying to sing. It is still HARD to improvise with melody, especially one that is well known. I hear the standard version in my head and that is the way I want to sing it.

But it is a good challenge, a healthy one, and as long as I experience a bit of success doing it, where I hear Harvey say "YES! There you go, that was great phrasing!" then I will keep trying. I just need to channel my inner Ella and I will be just fine.

Please stop eating that book...

2010-03-05T09:12:00.003-05:00

That is just one of the many fun things I overhear as I walk in and out of Cooper's day care. Usually I only hear the infant and toddler rooms, and that was uttered in the infant room today. Obviously SOMEONE is teething.

I don't know if this week has been so difficult with Cooper because he has not been feeling 100% (took him to the urgent care place Wed. night because he said his ear hurt, and lo and behold, ear infection), or if it is just because he is three, but WOW has this week been hard. He has been contrary about everything. What he wants to eat, whether or not I am going to wash his hair, taking a bath, where to sleep, when to sleep, with whom to sleep, putting on clothes, taking off clothes. GAH. I had to plop him in his room last night for 10 minutes to let him defuse a bit, because he was getting so angry about nothing that he could not even be remotely nice.

I might have stumbled onto another reason he has been a bit more cranky than usual - we brought up potty training again. He announces without fail that he has gone pee or pooped in his diaper and YES he needs a new one right NOW. He will go get one for you, and lay down on the floor ready for a change. Very accommodating. So we thought maybe he was ready to try again. So the other night I introduced the idea, suggesting that once he has successfully achieved a no diaper during the day status, doing all his business on the potty, he could get a prize. To which he immediately said "Spiderman costume, WITH MASK?" Okaaaay, if that is what you want, we can make that happen. For the last two days he has been insisting I "order one on 'puter." Which I have. Do you know how hard it is to find a Spiderman costume, WITH mask, in March? Anyway, I did it, and every time he has mentioned it, I have reminded him that in order to get the mask, he has to go pee and poop on the potty all the time. Not too long after this is mentioned, he starts acting out. He will start knocking things over, demanding to watch something else on TV, but is not able to say WHAT he would like to watch, just that he does NOT want what is on now, nor is turning it off an option as his immediately protestations establish.

I know a lot of life for a three year old is out their control, and potty training, or NOT potty training is probably the one thing they have any sort of control over for real. And I don't know why he doesn't like the idea, but he is resistant, as a friend of mine is wont to say regarding concepts about which he is not crazy.

So until the costume arrives, I think we will avoid talking about the P.T. and will see how his mood goes. If it doesn't improve, he will be on a plane to see his grandparents in Oregon SOON. For an extended stay. Til he is 20.

A doggie dilemma

2010-03-03T09:10:00.000-05:00

We have three dogs. I have introduced them before I am sure.

These are the Schnauzers. Gus is gray, he is 6 years old, and Poncho is the black one and he is 4.

Then there is Buster.

Buster turns 13 on Sunday. And we have just found out he is suffering from hyperparathyroidism. Generally this is caused by a benign tumor on the thyroid. The problem is that it is causing Buster to have elevated calcium levels in his blood, and that can eventually lead to things like kidney or bladder stones, crystals in his urine and urinary tract infections. Right now he is relatively healthy, for being 13, and they would like to take the tumor out to stop things from escalating.

And that will cost us $2000. Minimum. We don't have $2000 to spend on Buster. So we are not doing it. But that means risking that he will develop bladder stones and UTI's and any number of other related problems because this is not being fixed.

We would be hard pressed to be able to cough up $2000 for this even if Bob was fully employed, but with the current situation, it just isn't happening. And that makes me a little angry and very frustrated. But there isn't much we can do about it. As it is we have to call a plumber today because the upstairs toilet won't unclog. How is it that a toilet is fine and then one day things just won't go down? No, Cooper did not put something down it. He is not unaccompanied 99% of the time he is upstairs and awake. So I am confident he didn't stick anything in there. But it is clogged and no amount of plunging or toilet opening enzyme product is making much a difference.

Speaking of awake, the sleep gods have forsaken us. Hopefully temporarily. Cooper would not go to sleep last night. He never fights going to bed. But he was wound up. I don't know what happened, but at 10pm he was still AWAKE and Bob finally decided to lay down in the guest room with him, and that is how they fell asleep. This had better pass.

Is Mercury in retrograde or something? Dogs, toilets, kids not sleeping. GAH.

And then she blew my mind

2010-02-27T16:26:00.002-05:00

I am sure we all know someone who is really good at visualizing something. Some people can write music like they breathe, some people can decorate a room perfectly, some people, like my boss, can visualize a spreadsheet like no one's business.

She can't actually CREATE the spreadsheet. She is the first to admit that she is much better at using a pencil and paper. But the other day we needed to pull together a huge amount of information in a very specific way. My brain was seizing up just at the thought of having to sort all of this information into the right format, and she sat down with myself and our Institutional Research guy, who IS a whiz at creating spreadsheets and reports, and outlined what she wanted just by visualizing it.

She could describe exactly what she wanted each part of the spreadsheet to include, how it should be sorted, what the cover sheets for each part should look like. I just sat there thinking "THANK GOD Richard is sitting there taking notes and knows what she is talking about" because if I had to do that on my own we would have been there a looooooong time.

I am quite sure I am good at certain things. But I sit in awe of my boss most of the time. She is one of those people with such a clear vision of things at times that it just blows my mind. And makes me wonder if even with another 10 years of experience if I would be able to ever do what she does even half as successfully as she does. Which is inspirational and depressing all at the same time. I learn so much by working with her, but often go back to my office thinking "I am sooooo inadequate."

Mostly I find it inspiring. I don't know if I ever want to have a job like hers, it is a huge responsibility and I know she loses sleep at night over having the fate of a college in her hands regularly, but I am grateful for the opportunity to work for someone like her. Maybe some of her visionary ability will rub off on me.

Mindfulness

2010-02-19T12:31:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time I was a very active, churchgoing individual. Over the years, as life has happened, as my world broadened and expanded, I stopped attending church. I didn't stop believing, I didn't abandon my faith at all, but I did stop going to church.

I have found it difficult to put myself in a place that is so limiting. I don't appreciate the exclusionary attitude many churches approach life with. That is not to say all churches are like that, but many are. I began to feel that there were other ways for me to worship that didn't involve being in church.

And then life happened. Again. Much like it is easier to be good at yoga if you go to yoga class, it is easier to be mindful of your spiritual life if you go to a spiritual place. With the arrival of Cooper in my life, my life took on a life of its own, if you know what I mean. It is that much harder to find a space in it, physically as well as mentally, that allows for me to get to that spiritual center. And I miss it.

I recently discovered a website that can be at times sort of sappy, but it suggests one thing a day that you can do to be mindful in your life. Today's suggestion was to "Take a deep breath and relax; it is all unfolding as it should."

Which is something that I KNOW, but keep forgetting. It is easy to get bogged down in the minutia, the franticness, the freak outs about fire fighters, the crap at work that you want to ignore but can't, pretty much EVERYTHING that takes your brain and soul away from experiencing life as a wonderful and blessed thing.

And it is wonderful and blessed. And things tend to work out the way they are supposed to. I mean, you have to participate, you have to do your due diligence and meet your obligations, but assuming you are out there doing what you need to, things work out the way they should.

So I am breathing, I am taking a moment and I am trying to give up the anxieties of the moment to the universe.