Now is the Winter of Our Discontent

I remember thinking to myself, just a few weeks ago, that it was so nice that Christmas was a season, rather than just being a day. When I was a kid, the day was everything, not just because of the presents (though I admit they were a factor), but also because it was possible then, in a way that it seems not to be so much now, to feel entirely immersed in the thrill of it being Christmas or your birthday or the day you go to Disney or start your vacation or whatever. The thrill is on you like a cloak, or in you, pulsing through your circulatory system. It's real, and it's really good. As a somewhat more grown up person, I don't have easy access to that feeling anymore, so I appreciate even more having the whole season, the preparation, the decoration, the cookie making, the parties, the candles, to experience. I like me some Christmas.

Why, then, a few weeks later, did I find myself feeling happy that there was a Day, and not just a season? Why did I put a lot more stock in how the day itself came out, whether Christmas Day was a success? Friends, I will tell you why. Because our Christmas season sucked, a little bit. I have already disclosed the wrong-week trip out of town, inviting and uninviting neighbors to an open house situation. The trip was great, of course, but getting the dates wrong like a big dope messed with my plans for shopping, preparing the house, getting gifts mailed, etc. No big deal- I had the following weekend to make up for it. Or did I? The great windstorm of 'Ought Six struck on Thursday night, knocking the roof off our garden shed and taking out the power for most of Bellevue (and lots of other Puget Sound areas). Judging by the swarm of people at the only open grocery store in the area, and the crazy half-mile line of cars at the only open gas station, I am pretty sure Bellevue collectively scores a D minus in disaster preparedness.

Jim thought I was insane for planning to go ahead with the open house in the frigid half-light of our powerless house, but after the previous week's head fake, I wasn't going to let my neighbors down. As if they cared. But five families did come over. We all left our coats on and drank punch and ate cookies and sang carols by candlelight. Except for the singing part. A relative success under the circumstances. We had just finished packing our things to spend the night in Seattle with friends who were less powerless than we when our own power surged back to life. Huzzah! Jim could return to his medieval war-making computer strategy game. And I could put Naomi to bed without going in to re-cover her every half an hour. Sweet modern conveniences!

So now, everything was back on track. The darkened stores would turn their lights on once more. The locked down post office would hum back to life. It was only a couple of days delay! I could overcome it! Sunday morning we tried take a Christmas card photo. I was a little embarrassed to learn that I couldn't tell that Naomi was under the weather until I saw her in the photos. In every one of them, she was staring glassy-eyed in the wrong direction, through pink drooping eyelids. I know cold does not cause colds, but two days of consistent fifty-degree interior temperatures surely didn't discourage whatever viruses were visiting at the time. We scrapped all the family shots and put another sweater on the bunny.

Naomi seemed OK on Monday, and went to school. Tuesday, she stayed home. Wednesday, we decided to take her to the doctor. Normally I am not an advocate for going to the doctor for a cold- I know that there is no treatment, and for kids under two even more so. It just seems like a waste. So although Naomi was clearly SICK, I went not expecting much. Not expecting, that is, for the doctor (one we didn't normally see) to listen to her lungs and start using words like hospital and pneumonia. Youch! She had me give Naomi a nebulizer treatment (which involved a LOT of crying and howling from Naomi, who told me half way through the epic struggle, with tears running down her face, "Mommy, I need a nap!"), listened to her lungs, and then had me give her one more. Hooray! Her lungs had improved. No pneumonia. By this time I had called Jim and made him join me at the doctor's office, since I hadn't predicted we would be there for three and a half hours. We were to give her the nebulizer every four hours for the next five days, or something ridiculous, in addition to another round of antibiotics for her forever infected ears. (We normally don't give her antibiotics for ear infections, since they don't bother her and eventually clear up, but we were feeling a little vulnerable on this visit.)

That afternoon was the worst, with Naomi half asleep and half awake, feverish, breathing fast and shallow. She got used to the nebulizer, thankfully, so we didn't have to wrestle every time. After she went to bed that night, Jim went to the airport to pick up his sister and her hsuband, who were coming for Christmas. We had been so excited about this visit, because we hadn't seen them since our Malaysia trip in early 2004, and they had never met Naomi. Now we were just worried that it was going to be the biggest letdown for them, as they sat around the house watching us blow our noses and give nebulizer treatments to their lethargic niece. Augh!
Naomi got a little better each day, and after one more day of fever, seemed to be over that part of it, thankfully. Because her cough was so terrible, though, she woke up every two hours or so during the night. We were reminded, and not happily, of the olden days, when little baby Naomi needed to eat every two hours or whatever. Zzzz. Needless to say, I got what she had, and as we got closer to Christmas, and I got sicker and sicker, and more exhausted, and I had a very strong feeling that I needed to leave my home and go to the hospital and just check myself in there and sleep for twelve or fourteen hours, and then come back. I skipped church on the morning of Christmas Eve and went back to bed. Because I could not get it together to make hot pot (our Christmas Eve plan), we just went out to Szechuan Chef, where they have hot pot (and everyone there had ordered it!). It was only so-so, but I loved it because... I didn't have to put it together!

Naomi betrayed her kid tribe by sleeping in very late on Christmas morning. When she got up, we opened our stockings and presents, ate some really wonderful banana bread that a neighbor had brought over to make up for missing our little cave party, listened to Christmas carols on Jim's fancy Mac Mini jukebox setup, cooked up a massive brunch, and did nothing for a few hours. There may have been napping- I can't remember. In the afternoon we went to our friends' house in Seattle, where they treated us to more presents, awesome tamales, and these little white chocolate pretzel clusters that are my coveted Christmas treat and that I was unable to find this year. Unfortunately I was not able to taste the food, however, I was assured that some of these little pretzel jobbies will be saved for the day when I can, again. Hooray!

So, Christmas turned out swell after all, despite all obstacles. The best and worst part of tribulations is the realization that you really don't have it so bad. We kept talking about the people in Iraq who get by on one hour of electricity per day (in addition to, you know, the even worse parts of living there!), and when Naomi was sick, I thought, geez, what if I had a really sick kid? One that really did have to go to the hospital regularly? Man oh man! Of course that detracts from the delightful experience of feeling sorry for ourselves and complaining, which believe me, we did. But our gifts are many, and we know it. As I was getting Naomi ready yesterday, I asked her who she was going to see that day at school. She said, "Baby Jesus!" Heh. I said what I always say when I am using my feeble don't-squelch-the creativity approach. "Yeah, maybe!"

NYC, The Rest of the Story

(I'm just cramming the rest of my NY trip into one long post. Set aside a minute for this. Or don't- your choice.) Friday...after an unexpected but lovely sleep in and some tasty oatmeal, we boarded the subway for another day in Manhattan. I should mention that although the first day was surprisingly warm, the second day was not just surprisingly cold in comparison, but surprisingly, health-threateningly cold, (my Minnesota-thickened blood has thinned down after just one winter away!), with a brutal wind. We braved the temperature (along with a huge mob of other teeth-chattering merry-makers) to admire the Christmas display windows outside of Macy's. Then it was off to H&M for a cold weather shopping spree. Liv got a winter coat for $50, I a terribly cute hat for $10 (we had one good day together, the hat and I, until I lost it somehow that night between the coat check at the Met and the subway ride home). Our wardrobe sufficiently bulked up, we headed toward Bryant Park, which not only had a cute ice skating rink and a little Christmas market (full of really, really devoted merchants, who probably each lost a toe or more to frostbite that day), but also is directly behind the gorgeously amazing New York Public Library. The lobby of the library was beautifully decorated for Christmas, as was, curiously, only about half of the grand light fixtures in the reading room.


After the library, we shivered our way to Grand Central Station for an admiring look around and lunch in the dining concourse. Afterwards, off to the gallery on Madison Avenue where Liv's friend D. works. The gallery is a single small room, covered floor to ceiling with frames. In each of the hundreds of frames is a photo or drawing of a famous person (famous enough where there was no one I didn't recognize), and framed in the same mat, some document that the person had written or signed. My favorite was a simple typed letter, presumably in response to some exuberant fan mail. "Dear Sir," it read, "Thank you for your enthusiasm. Sincerely, Katharine Hepburn." There was a letter written by Winston Churchill, a full page and a half, to a man who was procuring faucets of some kind of him. The last line says "I would not shrink from using (whatever variety) of faucets." Hee! If I had a great deal more money than I do, I would have brought home for Jim the original decree confirming certain land grants that had been made to the Knights Templar. And D. showed us a page of musical manuscript with a few notes on it, written by Mozart. Apparently when Mozart died, there was a scene similar to something out of the movie, a room with pages and pages of musical manuscript strewn about, and whenever another bill came due, Mozart's son or someone would sell a few pages to hungry collectors to settle the debt. This page, with its few little notes? $175,000.


Liv and I headed next to Central Park. Did I mention how cold it was? There was a handful of truly intrepid New Yorkers strolling briskly, and even a group of kids playing soccer. But I had my fill of Central Park, regrettably, after ten or fifteen minutes. Fortunately, our next target, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was in sight. We had cake and scalding hot tea in the American Wing Cafe, saw the Chinese art, including some calligraphy scrolls that were amazing not only in the obvious variety of styles, but also in the explanations for why these style variations were so significant. One big set of scrolls from the 1400s were a gift from the artist to his friend, and he jokes in the writing about how his friend's habit of heavy drinking can be considered a form of political protest. As is, ahem, mine. Somehow. We also saw the incredible Temple of Dendur, strikingly displayed in a specially built wing and carrying its own history of political intrigue. It's also covered with the graffiti of British and American tourists from the early 1800s. Quite the human drive, to leave one's mark, it seems.


Every Friday night at the Met, they place tables around the second floor balcony of the great hall and open a little wine bar, complete with a string trio. Here we met up with D. for cocktails and several small bowls of the free snack, olives, which, there in the heady surroundings of the Met, seemed to me for the first time ever to be a tasty and agreeable food. After drinks, it was back to the museum for a tour of the medieval faces exhibit and a quick breeze through some of the painting galleries. D. pointed out the Drue Heinz gallery, funded by the ex-husband of John Kerry's glamorous campaign-bankrolling wife. I particularly liked a Vermeer I had never seem before, of a woman dozing at her table. Liv particularly enjoyed showing off her knowledge of ancient buildings by pointing out which paintings of classical scenes were anachronistic in their inclusion of some arch or column that was actually constructed one or two hundred years after the event. D. told us which of the medieval heads she and her colleagues had picked as likely fakes. Sometimes you just need to know who to go to the museum with.

After some engrossing subway dish on a wealthy book collector D. had dealings with, we parted ways so Liv and I could get a train back to Brooklyn. We stopped off at a very nice little restaurant for Mediterranean food, where I continued my unbroken streak of eating moussaka that just isn't very hot (though it was certainly tasty). We finally returned to Liv's apartment, where I had a short but glorious fantasy that she was roommates with the Chinese foot rub guy. Oh well. Off to a sleep well-earned.


Saturday, we walked to a Brooklyn neighborhood called Cortellyou Road for brunch with Liv's lovely friends Luke and Willow. The restaurant was called "The Farm on Adderly," and according to the owner, this referenced a funny South African saying one uses when referring to a something that is a long shot, as in, if that works, I'll buy you a farm on Adderly. Ok? Ok. The brunch was tasty and everyone but me seemed to have a crush on the owner. Afterwards, Liv graciously agreed to let me lie around for a while, and I treated myself to a rare nap. When it was ended by a call from an old grad school friend I had been trying to see, who gave his regrets that it probably wasn't going to work out, as well as a little disappointment in my clumsy failure thus far to adopt "texting." Whatever.


We got our coats back on, headed back to the subway, and rejoined the fray in Manhattan once more. First we hit a flea market that sets up each weekend in a mercifully heated parking garage. There we saw many interesting things, but the most interesting by far was...the same kooky little old lady from the kitchen shop, using her same bargaining wiles, such as they were, on the flea market vendors. I don't need to tell you, there are a LOT of people in Manhattan. And there is a lot of Manhattan, for that matter. Nevertheless, we found her. It was a little piece of weird NY magic. After the flea market, we went to an architectural salvage place with amazing huge light fixtures and staircase bannisters and fire places that have been saved from demolition, as well as the usual assortment of ten zillion doorknobs and hinges and whatnot. Neat!


We needed to find some dinner, and after blocks and blocks of fruitless searching, we stopped at an "Irish Pub" and decided to just brave whatever was inside. If you find yourself in an Irish pub in NY that is brightly lit, crammed with tourists, decorated by the good people at Denny's, and staffed by a depressive Irish waitress whose Paxil prescription has run out and whose benefits have not kicked in yet, friends, you are not as hungry as you think you are. Take my advice, wander a few more blocks, and settle on something else. Learn from my mistake.
My next piece of advice: Stay out of Macy's at the holidays. Maybe even all year round? But for sure at the holidays. It's worth it to go to Macy's to see the fantastic window displays, but do not be tempted, even by the promise of the famous wooden escalators, to go inside. Because first of all, it is a crazy mob scene. And second of all, it's just a Macy's. You want it to be all historic and graceful and marvelous, but it's not. On the scale of Macy's' I have known, it ranks between ratty and decent, with both extra points and demerits for having so many floors (demerits because when one of those famous wooden escalators stops working, the ten thousand people who are trying to go down them at the same time start to pile up tremendously between floors six and seven).


After struggling through the sweaty masses at Macy's, it was time to hit the subway again for a trip to Harlem to attend a party at Liv's friend's apartment. She had a wonderful view of the city, but no elevator, so I found the good-sized Christmas tree in her apartment all the more impressive and festive when I learned that she had carried the thing up the six flights of stairs herself. I ate too much cheese and crackers, and too many cookies, as well as fulfilling my big party fear of saying something...stupid.
Girl I don't Know: I am so jealous of this big fridge!
Me: Oh? Do you have a small one?
Girl: I have this tiny studio in Chelsea, so my fridge is the kind that fits under the counter, with the tiny freezer that doesn't freeze anything.
Me: Where you, like, can't even fit a ben and jerry's in there?
Girl: Exactly.
Me: Huh. I live in Washington. State? And, uh, I have a pretty big refrigerator.
Girl: (Walks out of the kitchen).


Ah, parties. Back on subway, change to other subway, walk past OTB and storefront church, back to apartment, throw up party food, bad fish and chips, go to bed.

The next day, Liv had terrible news- her tutor, mentor, and friend from Oxford had passed away. We talked about it for a while; she had been planning a book and a conference in his honor, and fortunately had told him about it just a few months before. Isn't it great when you don't miss the chance to say something important to someone who is important to you? Anyway, then I had to get into the town car for the long ride back to La Guardia. The driver, in a barely intelligible (to my untrained ears) Carribbean accent, chided me two or three times for not being more talkative. Which seems like a weird thing to get in trouble for with a town car driver. I had time to get a ben and jerry's cone in the Minneapolis airport (though my preference would have been for someone to meet me at the airport with a Byerly's Killer Brownie). The highlight of my travel day was seeing Jim and Naomi waiting for me by the baggage claim, and seeing the crazy-ass outfit that Jim had put our innocent toddler in. I should have taken a picture of that!

That was my trip. What did I learn? I am not the tireless young traveller I once was, but it still felt great to be in an amazing new place, soaking up the sights and sounds and (subway) smells. Best of all, of course, was catching up with Liv, who appears to be rapidly aging in reverse, and despite recent stresses, has her life beautifully put together. Shout out to Liv! NY agrees with you, sister. Thanks for a wonderful visit.

Thursday in New York

Last Wednesday night, I took the red-eye to New York City to visit a dear friend (shout out to Liv!) and explore the big apple at Christmas time. After a night on two airplanes, the morning cab ride from La Guardia to Liv's apartment in Brooklyn seemed to last forever, but it was still exciting to be in the city, and passing countless weirdly named small businesses and churches (my favorite of course being the Christ Alive Flower Shop). The cabby looked at the map I had given him about every forty seconds. Hardly reassuring, but we found it.

It was strangely warm when I arrived, and as we planned our first outing, down to Brighton Beach, I debated leaving my coat. I was grateful that my hostess had convinced me to bring it, when, after purchasing our requisite Russian pastry from one of the many, many pastry-selling Russian ladies on the sidewalk and heading out to the strand to commune with the gulls, the sea breeze asserted itself with one endlessly vigorous gust. We walked down to Coney Island to admire all the seasonally abandoned rides and attractions (as well as one intrepid burger/hotdog/buttered corn/kebab/cold beer/pretzel etc. stand that was open, though it didn't appear to have any customers).

When we had our fill of Russian pastry, seagulls, and sandblasting, we took the long subway ride into Manhattan. In Soho, we wandered into bookstores, shoe stores, and a kitchen shop, where we encountered an unusual little woman, older, with a longish gray buzz cut and a nice looking coat, practicing an unorthodox method of bargaining with the staff of the store. Seems she wanted a $70 copper-bottomed saucepan for twenty dollars. She was relentless, and had this distinctive, nasally plaintive (and loud) voice. "You don't like old ladies? Why don't you give it to me? I want to buy it! I have the money! I have the $20! Why won't you let me buy it?" We left the store before we got to find out the resolution. From the way things were going, though, I'm pretty sure they didn't give her the discount.

For dinner, we settled on Lombardi's, which claims to be the oldest pizzeria in the city. Perhaps to emphasize their historical position, they accept no payments but cash. However long they have been at it, they seem to have the pizza part down. Yum. After pizza, it was off to the Chinese massage place for a ten minute back rub (Liv) and a ten minute foot rub (me). If you are looking for a good way to spend $10 in Manhattan, and there are many, you could do worse than a ten minute foot rub at the Chinese massage place. I'm just saying. Rejuvenated, we headed to a dessert place that combines the fat and sugar of ice cream with the carbohydrate punch of a plate of fried rice. "Rice to Riches" offers something like 30 flavors of...rice pudding. We had chocolate hazelnut topped with cherries. My Swedish Grandma would have been proud. And probably a little confused.

Next time: Freaking Cold Friday...

Dear Diary,

A problem with waiting so long between posts is that you then hardly know where to begin with all the minutiae that has (have?) accumulated over the past month. The only November post was about Halloween, thus technically an October post. And now we are in December, and a fair way in at that. So there is nothing to do but throw in everything I can think of and hope the feeling of being somewhat caught up inspires me to a little more diligence. Or not.

So, the “morning after” exhilaration of the election has faded, but I will still cheerily submit that I hosted a “call for change” party the Saturday prior, wherein a handful of local lefties came to my house and used their cell phones to get out the local vote (when did air quotes become real quotes?). We lost the battle (sorry, Darcy), but I really didn’t mind too much considering the nation-wide results. The next day, very unshowered, I was chasing Naomi as she demonically pushed the teeny kiddy cart around the produce section of the Whole Foods when a man came up with a notebook and started asking me questions about the election. In a display of really shameful political self-aggrandizement, I told him that when I was calling voters just yesterday, it seemed that they WERE unclear on what Darcy stood for, though I also had just seen some of her newest tv ads that seemed to try to take that on, blah blah blah, stem cell research, blah blah blah. He took my name, and told me his- Bill Y., a reporter for… wait for it…the New York Times! Yea, baby! Of course, when I looked up his article a few days later, it was three short paragraphs and did not contain quotes from anyone, let alone a disheveled mother of one in the Whole Foods produce department. Still, neato!

On the work front, we are coming to the end of the moving walkway. The big project that we have been working mandatory 45 hour weeks to finish is…finished. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I really like to be busy, and having a frantic, coming up on a deadline kind of work experience is enjoyable to me, in some ways. Now, I’m back to the point where I do… I am not sure what. Think about the big picture and sign up for training, or something. Work is going very well for Jim- he is starting to work on creating schedules for his small team’s part of the project, and that means he is learning new skills and also showing his handsome, capable face in meetings with muckety mucks. He will probably censor this paragraph after he reads it (so humble is he), but in the meantime, I will confide that I am proud of him. Even more so this week, when, despite being famous (around our house) for taking a sick day when he so much as feels a cold coming on, he went to work so sick that even I conceded that he could have used a sick day, loaded himself up with dayquil, and stayed the whole day. Way to go, man.

Naomi has been hard at work herself. Just last night she came home from her sweatshop job with glue in her hair. When I dropped her off this morning I got to see why- she had been gluing toothpicks to a little construction paper hedgehog, of course. Last week things seemed a little off with her- she slept an extra one and a half to two hours a day, woke up grouchy, seemed out of sorts. After about three days of this, she seemed to be shining more brightly all of a sudden. She talks more articulately, in longer sentences. She can sing nearly entire songs that we haven’t heard her sing even parts of before. Everything is pretty and beautiful, too, including the “Chrisums tree”, the picture of Gramma, her tiny transparent plastic purse with a flower on it, and mommy and daddy. In the car on the way home from school, she said, “My miss Mommy. My love Mommy.” Aww. My miss you too, cute little Frankenstein talker.

And now I will close with an anecdote that illustrates just how big a dope I can be, like you didn’t know. The weekend of the 15th I had a trip planned to NYC to visit my friend the urbane professor, and bask in the joyful holiday goodness that abounds in that city. Hooray! So this weekend, on the 9th, I planned to throw a little holiday open house. There are still a few neighbors we don’t know, and a few we’d like to get to know, so on Monday morning I sneaked around in the pre-dawn darkness and delivered all the invitations (that is, stuck them on everyone’s front door). Two hours later, I got to work, checked my yahoo mail, and saw the note from Expedia with my itinerary for my December 7th trip to NYC. Wha, wha wha? That’s right, I had the dates wrong. And had already invited neighbors, most of whom I don’t know, to my house on the Saturday I’ll be watching the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center (is that where they ice skate?) Shit. So today I have to go around and un-invite everyone, hoping they can make it the following Saturday. Fun! And I had planned to have a four to five day word of mouth campaign to convince Naomi that it was going to be so neat to have Daddy take care of her for four days while Mommy visits aunty urbane professor, which must now be compacted into two days. Rats. But still, NYC at Christmas time! More on that in an upcoming post.

Happy Halloween!

A few weeks ago, Naomi’s daycare teacher informed us that they would be holding a Halloween party, at 3 pm on the ghoulish day, and that there was a sign up sheet for snacks. I signed up to provide cookies. In my vision of the party, all the parents of the tots would congregate in the room, sipping cider and eating cookies, trading tot stories and mingling while everyone admired the tots in their costumes. The teacher was non-committal about the whole thing, saying that there would be snack, the kids would dress in their costumes, and there would be a “pumpkin hunt.”

Because I know how prone I am to overdoing it, my original plan was to opt for the slice and bake cookies with the pumpkin or whatever in the middle. Americans have apparently gotten too lazy even to perform the slicing part and are now called on only to place the cookie disks onto the pan. The Halloween themed version of this “home-made” treat calls for applying white frosting and an “edible decoration.” Ew. I bought the kit anyway. And at the suggestion of a friend, some rice krispie treat fixings (food coloring included).

Monday night’s pumpkin carving went well- Naomi was fascinated by the pumpkin innards, and Jim’s jack-o-lantern art fell comfortably into the category of traditional/cheery. With Naomi in bed, the kitchen antics began. To make rice krispie treats is to participate in a peculiar alchemy of solids becoming liquids becoming solids again. It’s even more magical when you squirt drop after drop of yellow and red food coloring into the bubbling marshmallow goo… I used a pumpkin-shaped cookie cutter on the treats, so they were not only orange, but appropriately shaped and sporting a frosting gel expression. Spooky! I used the vanilla frosting in the sugar cookie kit to freehand some ghosts (according to a friend who graciously took home some remnants, they were really quite spectral).

Does it sound like I am boasting? Wait until I describe the costume! Naomi agreed that it would be fun to dress up like one of her favorite stuffed toys, the blue-footed booby bird. I bought fabric. I fumbled around with my sewing machine. I lucked into some little blue pants that prevented me from having to sew an actual item of clothing. I refuse to detail the frantic retail scavenger hunt that took place after the white hooded sweatshirt I ordered off the internet proved ridiculously large and made the innocent wearer look like a South Park character.

Halloween arrived. With my two large bags, one with cookies and orange crunchy marshmallow pumpkins (which, because of the decorations, have to be packaged in many separate containers), one with the unconvincing husk of a Galapagos squawker, I arrived at the daycare to see that all the other kids minus two were dressed in their costumes, all full body, one-piece pajama zip up affairs, a monkey, a lion, a giraffe, a Dalmation. I put the cookie bag down, and raced to get Naomi into her costume. Which she was totally not into at all. It was not until it was all the way on her that the difference between a homemade costume and a store-bought stood out so dramatically.

Wow. She looked goofy. Then one of the wings fell off. She started tugging at her beak/visor. About two minutes after putting her costume on, all that she was wearing was the hoodie, the pants, and the blue feet.

Snack was served- to the kids. I did not get it that the cookies I was bringing were only for the kids. They ate their melon and baby corn and pumpkin pie, supplied by less foolish parents than myself, and I sheepishly put a handful of rice krispie pumpkins on a plate and put them on a countertop. For the TWO other parents that showed up. Not two sets of parents. Two parents.

The kids had a great time- the teacher filled up a corner of the room with shredded paper; apparently this is some kind of invitation to fun for the toddler set. There was much gleeful shrieking. No one ate the cookies, of course. And I didn’t even open the rest of them up- just took them home, along with the little gray broken wings and blue fuzzy feet smeared with pumpkin pie.

So, the spookiest part of this year’s Halloween was the illumination of how my tendency to overdo things is magnified by the factor of my beloved child. In the evening, I pinned Naomi’s costume back together, wiped the pie off her feet, and took her to a couple of neighbors’ houses.

She was a champion trick-or-treater (although our practice of saying the phrase was for naught- she clams right up around strangers), held out her bag for candy (and, poor girl, has not gotten to eat any of the six pieces she scored),

and was appropriately frightened by some of the decorations. She also got to carry a flashlight supplied by her dear friend, Carmen’s mom.

(Carmen was an adorable pirate.) Until next year, Happy Halloween.

Lazy Postday

It is so, so lazy of me just to post another cute photo when there really is so much to write about. What about our visit to the pumpkin patch on Sunday? What about the fact that my company is bought up for real now and I find myself with 330,000 new coworkers? What about all the thoughts I'm having about Naomi's language skills and her cognitive skills and what kind of gap does or does not exist between the two? What about my concerns about not immediately going to the the little sleeper when she cries out in the night, and the ensuing muses on the metaphor of stern parenting for our own thoughtless refusal to meaningfully engage with the countries in the world that clearly demand some meaningful engagement? What about the fascinating research essay on the origins of Halloween that I just read today? What about the incredibly amateurish Halloween costume that I am attempting to sew for Naomi? What about the fact that Jim finally brought home the xbox he has been threatening to buy for the last few months? I could go on and on, but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm just going to post another photo.

The Bunny

Our Neighbors to the North

The fact that a few hours of driving puts us in a different country seems to be an irresistible lure for us; again last weekend we found ourselves in Canada. This time we eschewed the ferry ride for a road trip complete with a long, long wait at the border crossing. Our destination? Vancouver. This trip was inspired by my friend, who purchased a night’s stay and a horse-drawn trolley ride package at a charity auction we attended together. Honestly, she wasn’t bidding to win. But when she did win, I began plotting how we would all sneak away to Vancouver for a beautiful fall weekend.

The hotel location was a little hipper than we really required. Needle exchange? Gay book shop? Cecil’s Exotic Show Lounge? All within a one-minute walk. On the first night we walked across the street to the Two Parrots, which looked like a tiki-themed restaurant. In fact, it was a tiki-themed bar. When we asked for a high chair, the waitress looked at us for a long minute, as though to help us understand how absurd the request was, before answering in the negative. We thought it would be alright, ordered ourselves some pints and some dinner, and watched Naomi fling herself around on the grimy bar chairs with the singular sort of hyper energy that only a very tired small child who has just spent four hours in a carseat can really master. We got the food packed to go, pounded our pints (which is a good way to get your money’s worth, if you know what I mean), and went back to eat amidst the strange juxtaposition of a gigantic king-sized bed in a tiny closet-sized room.

On Friday we took a funny little boat (Aquabus!) to the Granville Island public market. It has all manner of tasty foodstuffs, including a famous sausage place and a doughnut place that, if it’s not famous, is at least famous with me. When naptime encroached, Naomi and I jumped the Aquabus back to the hotel side of “False Creek,” while Jim left the food building and explored some of the art galleries and shops. It was after naptime that things really picked up, with a trip to the Capilano suspension bridge, north of the city. When you see the bridge (if you are not Jim, who has a pathological fear of heights), you really don’t think it is going to be a nerve-wracking experience. It is marketed as an attraction, not a thrill. But when you get out to the middle, holding a squirmy toddler as tightly as you have ever held anything in your life, deciding it’s more important to keep both hands on the toddler than it is to use one of those hands to attempt to steady yourself with the swaying, creaking cables, keeping your eyes fixed on the far side even as sweat drips into them, well, that’s when you realize that your safety-loving, height-fearing husband might actually be on to something.

On the far side of the bridge, though, was a “treetop adventure”, where we walked around on even more elevated, swaying pathways, and admired monstrous trees and trout-filled ponds. Was it worth the trip? I think so. On the way back over the bridge, I put Naomi in the back pack carrier, held on to her leg amid great complaint, used my free hand for the cables, and did some deep breathing exercises. Then went to the gift shop for some fudge.

Saturday was another trip to Granville Island, with our newly arrived (and about to depart) friends (who ended up in a smoky room with no crib, and decided that one night of that was just about enough). And another doughnut. In the afternoon, we enjoyed our absent friends’ free carriage ride around the beautiful Stanley Park. Our driver and tour guide kept shushing us (Naomi), as part of the ride experience was her witty and informative monologue (the driver, not Naomi). If you’re ever out somewhere and a toddler is making a lot of noise, and you think to yourself, geez, can’t those parents keep that kid quiet? The answer is no. They really can’t. Which is why we mostly avoid situations where a short and inappropriately loud chatterbox will be considered déclassé. But once we got on that carriage, we couldn’t just hop off and attempt to find our way back through the miles of park road. So, she chatted. And flirted outrageously with the woman behind us, who was the sort who calls out witty answers to the tour guide’s questions, and who definitely appreciated the attention from the crazy baby in front of her. The driver tolerated us. Did I mention the weather was perfect? It was a good day to be at Stanley Park.

Saturday night, Jim and I ate a weird but admittedly delicious tower of cream puffs from “White Spot” restaurant (which is like a swanked-up Canadian Denny’s) and pay-per-viewed The Davinci Code. In an ironic twist on the possible liberation from gender roles and restrictions enticingly dangled by the sacred feminine, I was unable to stop obsessing about how perfect Audrey Tatou’s hair looked. If you haven’t seen the movie, it is one of those “real time” narratives that takes place over the course of just a few days, and the characters are always on the move and don’t have a chance to change or shower or freshen up, as far as I could tell. Nevertheless, Audrey’s hair is a masterpiece in every scene. Those French women have it made.

Sunday morning, woke up, ate breakfast, drove home. Another good visit to our neighbors to the north. Canada, you do right by us.

Chicken Walk Tea Party (Attire: Diaper Casual)

25th Percentile!

For parents who were taught as children to place a great deal of importance on their report cards, the periodic, regularly scheduled doctor’s checkup provides the analogous experience projected onto our teeny offspring. At every visit, the nurse measures the kid’s head circumference, length, and of course, weight. Yesterday was Naomi’s 18-month-old visit, and after struggling along since January in the 7th (seventh!) percentile for weight, we have finally succeeded in chunking the kid up to the 25th percentile. Hooray!

There was something about being in the bottom ten percent that made us feel like we were seriously failing at our parental jobs. The doctor, however, kindly chalked it up to the four bouts of horrible stomach flu the bunny endured in the late winter. Further good news- her chronic ear infection is cleared up, so no ear tubes for the bunny! Her height is holding steady at the 50th percentile, and her melon head is still riding high in the 95th percentile. My mom is quick to assume that is both cause- and effect-related to how smart her granddaughter is, ignoring the fact that her granddaughter’s father and mother both have big giant (though not particularly smart) heads of their own.

The nurse also ran through a list of things Naomi should be able to do, and I was a little flattered at the way she breezed through it- I took this to mean she was sure Naomi was doing fine. Can she stack blocks? Does she have at least 20 words? She asked whether Naomi can stand up and sit down when we tell her to, and we both looked at each other and wondered, can she do that? Because we haven’t really ever told her to stand up or sit down, that we could remember.

Anyway, here are the milestones of the past few months that the nurse didn’t ask us about. Some are charming. Some are not as charming.

• Naomi likes to put imaginary sunscreen on us. When we are cooking (me), playing the piano (the maestro), sitting around, whatever, she comes up and starts rubbing the stuff onto our legs.
• Naomi can count to…two. Which in a way is not much better than not being able to count at all, and in a way is kind of a huge difference, really. She also likes to march around the house shouting “1-2! 1-2! 1-2!” If she has two similar items in her hands, she will look at them both and say “Two cups!” Of course, she thinks five comes after two. So we have not applied for her mensa card yet.
• She knows yellow, red, blue, green, and purple, and I suspect also brown, white, and pink. Orange is a toughie, for some reason.
• If I am on the computer or Jim is playing the piano, she will take our fingers and tug us away from our chairs, saying “Daddy, all done. Mommy, all done.” Meaning, we are done doing what we were doing, and it’s time to stop it and start playing with her. Sheesh.
• Luna the dog is in constant attendance whenever Naomi eats (or does anything, pretty much), and for reasons I am not that clear on, Jim likes to loudly send her away or scold her. Every so often, we will hear a much smaller voice saying, in the same stern tone, “Loooonha, NO! No no!” Luna minds Jim about 40% of the time; she minds Naomi 0% of the time.
• Naomi has learned the second line of “Twinkle, Twinkle.” Instead of singing it, though, she recites it over and over, all mashed together, with a lot of emphasis on the last word. So it sounds like “UpabahwodsoHIGH! UpabahwodsoHIGH!”
• Occasionally, Naomi will sit down and open a book, and begin gabbling away, very earnestly, as though she were reading the book aloud. Her voice is weirdly monotone and none of the stuff that comes out of her is recognizable as words. It only lasts for twenty seconds or so, but it is pretty engrossing.
• After a trip to the zoo, where we saw an armadillo in the nocturnal exhibit, Naomi fell in love with the word. Armadillo! Armadillo!
• In addition to endlessly pretending to feed us, her animals, and herself, Naomi now pretends that she or her animals have owies that require the application of imaginary ice. This gives you some idea of what goes on in her hardscrabble daycare world…
• Sometimes when we put Naomi to bed, she says, “Bye, Honey!” Hee.

Whistle while you work...

In honor of Labor Day, I am going to hang on to the theme of the last post, my job. It seems I am not the only one who is taking a look at her workaday world this month. One friend has determined that her dream life of research in academia is perhaps a bit more selfish than she wants to be, and that shifting the focus to teaching is a good alternative path. Another friend is thinking of leaving her hectic, low-paying service-to-others job to get a higher paying, less hectic, service-to-paying-clients job. And I know I am not the only person who has asked him or her self this month, what job do I really want to be doing?

When I had my big job epiphany last week, it wasn’t that I had arrived at the elusive answer to that question. When people ask how my job is, I equivocate. It’s OK. You know, it’s not the most interesting thing in the world. And so forth. Last week it occurred to me that my job really has so many good things going for it, and I need to start viewing it that way. The commute is short, and I am only about 12 minutes away from the bunny’s daycare. The boss is dreamy about flexible hours and working from home when necessary (I abuse the flexible hours a bit but have been very conservative on the working from home option). The building is across the street from a swanky shopping center where I have fifteen lunch options and a nail place where I can get my eyebrows waxed and be back at my desk within twenty minutes. (Even when some other part of my face also gets waxed, thanks to the plain talking aestheticians at “Finger Paints”: “You sure you don’t want that waxed? You got a lot of hair!”) I have an office with a door, free coffee and tea, and bagels every Friday. And with the afore-mentioned buyout on its way, who knows what other kind of swag! I am challenged, somewhat, by the work, and for the most part, I have almost no job-related stress. I needed to face up to the truth: my job rocks.

So, right. That’s where I was last Monday. On Tuesday, the person handling some high profile, time sensitive documentation task was out sick, and I was randomly selected to be her understudy. And my stupid email program kept telling me I couldn’t send more email because… I had too much email already. You’re using our program a little too well! No job-related stress, did I say? Because I had heard this document needed to be finished that day, and because no one was answering my questions about whether the further changes needed to be added, I was preparing, at the end of the day, to drive the twelve short minutes to the daycare, bring the bunny back to my office, buy her some animal crackers from the vending machine, and get back at it. (She has visited the office before, and thoroughly enjoys playing with my plastic plate and jar of peanut butter.) That scenario was averted, but the stress level continued through the end of the day Wednesday. More lively than usual? You bet. But threatening to my new outlook.

Also threatening to my job love was a bizarre bathroom encounter that occurred right in the middle of the stress patch. As I was walking into the Ladies’, someone was walking out of the Gents’. I said hi to the person, walked into the bathroom, and was suddenly aware that someone had walked in behind me. I turned around, and it was…the guy who had just walked out of the men’s restroom. Wha wha wha? Here’s where the story gets really embarrassing, because of what my brain offered to my mouth to say: “So, you’re just going to walk into the girls’ bathroom?” What? GIRLS’ bathroom? Anyway, the guy stopped, and said, “Must have eye trouble.” He then took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes, to really drive the point home that something was wrong with them, rather than just getting the hell out of the bathroom. The GIRLS’ bathroom. He repeated his line about eye trouble, but by this point I had walked back to the door and opened it, and gestured him out. He put his glasses back on. I think he said he was sorry on the way out, and I think I said something like, it’s alright, goodbye now.

But, ugh! It was not alright! I have walked into the men’s room on more than one occasion, usually at a bar or restaurant after I had a few, and two steps in I see the urinal, have the split second moment of realization, gasp, and flee. Not so this man, who seemed confused as to whether he was in the Ladies’ (Girls’) or at the optometrist. Plus? He had just gone to the bathroom, in his rightful place, with the urinals and all. He was done! So what was up next for him? Did he think they had moved his desk into the ladies’ room? Was he looking for the free coffee?
So yeah, happy Labor Day, fellow workers of the world. I’ll be celebrating my day off by using my luxurious in-home bathroom without the fear of anyone walking in on me. OK, anyone over the age of two.

The Corporate Life

Last week I learned that the company I have worked for since March (Company A) will be purchased in the coming months by gigantic Company B. Today, in addition to providing us with some really nice bagels and fruit for breakfast, Company B bussed us to the swanky Bellevue Westin for a little rah-rah and some free lunch. And a benefits discussion. The light fixtures in the Westin’s grand ballroom are at once amusing and extremely distracting- they are basically large circles of glass globs suspended on wires, like luminous water balloons dangling from the ceiling. For the first part of the day, we sat at long tables draped with black cloths, with notepads, pens, and water at each seat, and every so often a cosmo glass full of tiny, delicious foil-wrapped fruit candies. Which I totally meant to pour some of into my purse before we left, and forgot. Damn!

Of course, we opened with a video, showing headline after headline (after headline) of the acquisition, backed by rousing rock-n-roll. Newspapers and websites all around the world are covering this acquisition! And Company B has a really on-the-ball public information department! Then the video switched to scenes that I assumed were meant to represent the many industries that use our products, which included astronauts, oil wells, and people scurrying around the sidewalk, maybe in the financial district? Then, more astronauts.

When the CEO of Company A addressed us on the phone, his slides flashing on the big screen offered a perfect opportunity to play “a picture is worth a thousand words,” wherein you attempt to identify the real message of the slide by studying the seemingly random photo that always seems to go along with the bullets. “What drove the decision?” asks the slide. And the picture answers, “A view of the blue sky from within a small grove of tall trees.” “We wanted to be a billion dollar business,” says the slide. “I wanted to be a shiny, mirrored-glass skyscraper, seen from below at a sharp angle,” says the picture. “What does this mean for the company?” asks the slide. “Why, it means a beautiful suspension bridge, dramatically lit, in the rosy dusk,” says the picture. Or dawn. Whichever. “What does this mean for you?” asks the slide. “It’s a two-lane highway, stretching toward the horizon,” says the picture. The “Opportunities at Company B” slide declares, in the photo, that I could join the cast of yet another L&O spin off. And “Our Rewards” are that we get to sit around a glass table and smile for a camera that is directly over our heads. Cheese!

The free lunch was, I must say, delectable. They had some kind of marinated grilled veggie antipasto that could have been improved only if the people ahead of me in the buffet line hadn’t taken all the eggplant slices before I got up there. I am still a little jittery from my flourless chocolate something or other and cup of decaf. I confess a weakness for sitting in giant hotel ballrooms and eating some tasty trifle accompanied by coffee that has been carefully poured into my tiny hotel coffee cup by a uniformed banquet server. Dessert just tastes a little sweeter under these conditions.

After lunch was the benefits discussion, led by an HR manager from Company B, who was in general quite likable except for his unfortunate over-use of the phrase “at this point in time.” I had the guy next to me ask whether Company B covers maternity leave as short term disability (Company A does not). He said Company B gives you 100% pay for six weeks if you have a baby. Sweet! Not that this information is any more relevant to me (at this point in time) than it was to my seat neighbor, though he did get a laugh by asking the question.

Weirdly, none of the seven hundred questions we lobbed at the boogie woogie bugle boy concerned stock options. Back in the day, tech people considered stock options to be part of their entitlement in life. Free coffee! Subsidized soda machines! Stock options and lots of them. Now, there seems to be a don’t ask, don’t tell attitude emerging about stock options. Company A gave me exactly zero options when I started here (but I was loathe to say anything as they came miraculously close to matching my previous salary). What will you do for me, Company B? Make me love you. I’m just saying. Oh, and thanks for the lunch.

Once Bitten...

When I got home from work on Monday, Naomi and her dad were sitting on the front steps. Naomi always gets the cutest, biggest smile on her face when she sees me after a long time apart- it has evolved a bit from when I used to pick her up at daycare and she would signify her recognition (and happiness?) with a gaping, wide open mouth. I can only guess that I made a similar face at her? Like an open mouth of wonder and surprise? Something? Anyway, now she smiles a really beautiful and definitely genuine smile (which I stress only because lately she has become the biggest fake laugher ever). In contrast with this little sunbeam, though, was a particularly grim expression on Jim.

“You’ll never guess what happened today,” he said. “Look at her face.” Looked pretty cute to me. He turned her head so I could see her cheek. There was a round red welt- it looked like she had fallen asleep on something hard and painful, and this was the result. For a minute I didn’t know what I was looking at. It made me think of the old Phantom comic strip, with the guy who wore purple all the time and had a ring in the shape of a skull that left a nasty and unmistakable imprint on the jaw of whatever villain he socked. Was Naomi in a fistfight with a superhero? Or a gangster?

Jim must have sensed that I really would never guess. “It’s a bite,” he said. Augh! Apparently some kid at school was hugging and kissing Naomi (cute!), and then decided to get all Cape Fear on her (wait, not cute anymore!). She did not seem to be in the least bit traumatized by it, but for a few minutes, I really was. I didn’t feel angry at the kid, really, but I did feel upset. And weirdly helpless. When I talked to the teacher the next day, she said the biter was really into hugging the other kids, and just got carried away. Um, can I assume you’re planning to keep Toothy from getting huggy and kissy with the other kids from now on? She said they were going to try. So reassuring.

In the interest of full disclosure, about three weeks ago, Naomi bit… me. We were goofing around and laughing, and during one playful jostle, she just opened up her mouth and chomped down hard on my upper arm. It really hurt at the time, although she didn’t break the skin, and I had a little round bruise for a few days. I know that she didn’t bite me to hurt me, and I know that she wasn’t really aware of what she was doing. She was just worked up and excited, and that manifested itself as a chomp. I should probably have viewed it as the gift of a teaching moment; instead it was more of a yelling moment. But she hasn’t bitten since then. The point, I guess, is that I know kids bite. They are puppy-like in their scrappiness and in their manifestations of play and exuberance. But there is part of me that would have liked to have a similar teaching (yelling) moment with the tot who bit my kid’s face.

A postscript: in past idle surfing, I have come across some parenting bulletin boards that contain cheerful anecdotes from parents who claim to have cured their biters by… biting them back. I didn’t give this sort of crackpottery a second thought, but now that I have had a biter (and bitee), I am reminded of that advice, and all I can say is, Ewww! Is there really someone out there biting their baby? Stop that right now!

The Evening Good News

You know how sometimes it seems like you just get one piece of bad news after another? Well, not today! Because when I say this, I am actively omitting everything I hear on the actual news, and because the stars are lining up nicely for many of my friends and loved ones, I find myself in a situation where I keep getting one piece of good news after another. It’s great! So, ready yourselves for some unnecessary exclamation points, ladies and germs…here comes the good news!

Jim’s sister and her husband have adopted a baby girl. Just like that- Naomi has a new cousin, and we a new niece. We have seen her already through the magic of Skype. Naomi calls Jim’s mom “Ah-ma” and after we saw her on the computer with the new baby, Rachel, Naomi would periodically, throughout the day, say, “Ah-ma, Baby.” Hee. Rachel will be one month old in a few days. Teeny!

Jim’s other sister and her husband, who are living in Canada now, have bought a house! We don’t have many details yet and I am sure they are feeling a little overshadowed by teeny Baby Rachel, but it is still great news for a couple of M’sian transplants looking to put down roots in Canada. Oh, Canada!

My own personal sister had recently been diagnosed with skin cancer, and has since had all of it removed and is apparently none the worse for wear. Hooray!

My other sister and her husband and kids returned this month from a ten-day trip to Washington DC. The kids are just at the right age to get the most out of this trip (13 and 10), they got to stay with our wonderfully gracious aunt and uncle in Maryland, and they never, ever take vacations. Knowing all of this about the trip had me completely jazzed for them, and of course, the trip was a big success. Welcome home!

Another pair of good friends in Chicago have put a bid on a condo, and are waiting to hear whether all their fix-up demands are going to be met. I don’t think I am jumping the gun in considering this good news, as they have been mulling over becoming landed gentry for a while now, and it is so good that it is happening for them. From all descriptions, the condo rocks. Good job, C and B!

We got a piano!

Our friends in St. Paul had a lovely baby girl, Eleanore Marie, just before we got back to MN for a visit. And they had their house totally redone. Crazy! Congratulations, D and R! Incidentally, nearly everyone in MN seems to be expecting a child. Good for you all!

None of the great news is really ours (other than the piano), but having so much good news in just a few weeks makes it feel like things are going great for us, too. Naomi has started in her new class at “school.” She is a little early in moving up, and is smaller than everyone else, although one of her baby class compatriots who moved up at the same time has the same not-quite-there hair in a blonde shade, so Naomi is not the baldest looking toddler in her class. Heh. She seems to really like it, although every day when I ask her what she did in school, she says “Water.” I don’t know what that means, exactly.

OK, some of the good news is ours- Naomi’s friend Carmen brought over matching rainbow ponchos made by a friend of her mom. Thanks, Carmen’s mom’s friend! These ponchos are the bomb!

The Spirit Realm, or One Completely Random Post

Feel free to skip this long blathery post, which is unlikely to make much sense. Lately more thoughts of a philosophical or metaphysical bent than are usual have popped into my head. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. One is that I re-established contact a few months ago with a friend of mine from college, who told me about his faith (paganism) and also told me a lot of his thoughts on Christianity and the Christian God (nothing like a new perspective!). Another is our own search for a new church after we left behind one that we really liked as part of our big move. Another, of course, is just the unavoidable desperate headscratching that one is forced to engage in when paying any attention whatsoever to the big news stories of the day (war, another war, genocide, child soldiers, starvation, the missing Baby Suri). Lately, the news reports about psilocybin experiments, that left test subjects feeling as though they had gone through a profound mystical and religious experience, have caught my attention (and someone’s blog that mentioned this also caught my eye, but more on that later). Throughout all these things, I start to wonder if there is something in people, and specifically in me, since I have no way of knowing how these things feel to other people, that inhibits spirituality and connectedness. For the sake of this post, I am tying these concepts together, but it could be connectedness to God, if God is specifically your thing, or connectedness to the great life force, or to the universe, whatever. In my ramblings, here, spirituality is what enables the connectedness, and I am wondering what it is that either makes it more difficult to find the connectedness, or turns one away from it altogether. In a class a few years ago we read Brian Swimme’s book The Sacred Heart of the Cosmos. Swimme proposes that consumerism is the current cosmology, the thing that gives meaning and purpose to our lives, and that in place of that, we should be watching the sunset with our kids and explaining to them that we are rolling away from the sun, not that it’s setting, but we’ll see it again when we roll back around, and that we are fortunate little semi-sentient whiffs in a vast creation that is given by the great generosity at the heart of the universe. I loved reading this book, despite my clumsy summation. It does seem important to try to instill in the youngster the importance of following the credo of generosity inspired by creation, whoever we believe is responsible for it. But for me, there is definitely something in the way a lot, and if I were the same believer I was as a child, I would know it was the devil, or original sin, keeping me from God. I don’t know what it is, now- laziness? Inertia? Consumerism? Still original sin?

On a slightly different tack (but related in the sense that it is in this same misty realm of thought), my sad habit of clicking “next blog” over and over, after I catch up with the affairs of my blogging compatriots, led me to this blog, which had posted its first and only entry just that day. It caught my eye initially because the writer was talking about those psilocybin experiments, and it had only been a few days since I heard the NPR report about these tests (I couldn’t find that story on the NPR site, but here’s something similar on CNN. The experiment was so interesting to me, because it made me wonder if there is some part of the brain that is in charge of the spiritual and the mystical and the whole connectedness thing, and whether we have been slowly losing access to it. Anyway, the writer of this blog posed vaguely similar questions, which was cool, but also declared that his work was in investigating claims by children that they had had a previous life. Wha…? It sounds like some kooky stuff, except that he is not a “researcher,” he’s a real Researcher, at the University of Virginia. I know, being connected to a university isn’t any kind of guarantee that you’re not a complete kookoo pants, but it does offer a check on the work that you do, to some extent, and a legitimization (he admits in his blog that his work is “out there”). Anyway, why was this so intriguing to me? Because in all my recent musings, I felt like one manifestation of this spiritual “blockage” that may or may not be prevalent in society (rather than solely within myself) is that while lots of people may be out there thinking about these things, it seems like it’s unusual for people to be talking about them, and it’s difficult for me to write even a quarter of the way to the things that go on in my head. Yet here was a man whose JOB it was to investigate claims made by children that they had been someone else before. Thereby, you know, making the discussion of souls or life force or at any rate, human beings separate from the body they ride around in for a time, into a genuine study. Neat!

Silly blog reader that I am, I asked the guy whether he thought it was possible to try to wire up a kid right, so that they could connect more easily to that part of their brain, or whatever it was, that would give them a greater sense of connectedness and unity throughout life. This sounds like a crazy question now- it was spur of the moment. But he responded that it seemed like the thing to do was to raise the kid with an openness to spirituality. I put it on my list, but I sure wouldn’t mind more help with this one.

Lovely Victoria...

Can our vacation be over already? On TV right now, the local fireworks displays are snap, crackle, popping over the odd soundtrack of Beach Boys and Guns-n-Roses tunes, while all around, neighbors are conspiring to wake a certain sleeping baby by flouting the local firework ordinances. Work is tomorrow! Alas and alack. I could certainly get on board with a permanent four-day weekend mandate.

We got to see some other country's nationalism on display over the weekend, as we found ourselves in Victoria, British Columbia, just in time for "Canada Day." We both sheepishly agreed that it just didn't seem as obnoxious to have your car streaming the maple leaf as you drove about town (self-loathing liberal Americans!). Victoria is a beautiful city, at least it was when we were there- we overheard a lot of jokes to the effect that Victoria has two seasons- winter and July. We pick July! Sunny and gorgeous for us, thanks! (The fireworks display music has gone from Sousa to "Sing, Sing, Sing", to the current ballad, "R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me!" How about not firing missiles at us on our national holiday, North Korea! Sheesh. Oh, oh, and now it's Bohemian Rhapsody. Who was in charge of this playlist?) We had a beautiful ferry ride over to the Canuck side, and the ship's pilot was nice enough to point out the pod of orcas off the port bow. No one on the boat knew what that meant, of course, so we all rushed back and forth until someone actually spotted them. Sillies.

We had some fish and chips, saw the woolly mammoth and the first nation art bonanza at the Royal Museum of British Columbia, sneaked through Fan Tan alley to have dim sum in Canada's oldest Chinatown, and drove out to Oak Bay to have a cheesy, dessert-packed "high tea" at a tea house called The Blethering Place. And of course, there was room service:

Our hotel was located just a block from the Parliament building, where Naomi got the idea to pick clover flowers and put them in our toes:

There was much shopping to be had on Government Street, which is why we had to declare this sweatshirt when we came through customs:

On the last day, we visited the justly famous Butchart Gardens, where Naomi charmed the other tourists with her cute dress and over-tired-toddler shenanigans. Although she appears calm in this picture, note that she was being restrained:

Oh, Canada! Thanks for having us.

Cheeky Little Monkey-Bunny

Since there has been a shortage of Khoo and a surplus of Ler in the Khooler report of late, it seems about time to focus on the shortest member of our family (if Luna stands on her hind legs…) a bit. The Bunny, as she has been known to her father and me since she was born, is slowly, inexorably declaring herself, through her actions and her speech and her understanding, to be less and less of a baby. Of course, she refers to herself as a baby when she sees pictures of herself, and calls all her classmates at school “the babies.” Actually, she is the second oldest in her class, so maybe she’s just being uppity?

Besides being terribly good at walking and running, showing us that she is able to climb up onto the coffee table and couch, saying all manner of interesting words (watermelon, egg, elbow, knee, animal), and dancing, our bunny is becoming, to quote her raised-in-a-former-British-colony father, quite cheeky. She is no longer just along for the ride. When I pick her up, she dissolves all the joints in her body so that she can slide back to the floor. When I tell her it’s time to get dressed for school, she laughs and runs away. She asks for things that have occurred to her entirely on her own, like a particular food, or even, this weekend, a bath. Who are you all of a sudden?

This morning, the bunny did something entirely new, and her dad and I are still talking about it. We were reading a weird but sweet little book we got from the library, called Little Fur Family (by Margaret Wise Brown, and illustrated by the excellent Garth Williams, whose drawings you may remember from the Little House books and the truly awesome The Cricket in Times Square). In the book, a little fur child gets up, goes out to play, gets home, and gets put to bed by his loving fur parents, who hold his paw and sing him a song. I improvised the tune of the song, and Naomi wanted me to sing it over and over. I sang it about three times before I noticed that her voice, saying “more, more” sounded a little strange. When I checked her face, her little lower lip was quivering, and her eyes were filling with tears. This picture, of the fur family putting their fur child to bed, holding his paw, and singing to him, had apparently moved her to tears. Because for sure it was not my singing.

Yes, this anecdote has a high sap factor. But it is killing me, not because it’s so cute, although, geez, it really is, but because it is a glaring bright reminder that every time this little girl wakes up with an additional major synapse all myelinated, she is going to be a different person than she was the day before. And we will have to be as well. We will have to go from being cheerful parents who willingly and easily meet the needs of a fairly predictable little emotional robot, to hopefully being cheerful parents who go on trying to meet those needs while facing the fact that their little robot is becoming a person with FEELINGS. Not just reactions, real feelings. It’s hard to articulate why this feels like my parental responsibilities have just quadrupled.

Beware...Dream Journal!

There is a distinct genre of nightmares based on the premise that one shows up for class without realizing that it is test day, and is forced to take the test without any preparation. This has not only been a recurring nightmare of mine, it actually happened to me FOR REAL once in college. In Astronomy 101. I showed up for the study session (after, um, a couple of missed classes), and I was given a seat number. I actually asked the TA what the number was for. Heh. Somehow I got a C on that test. Ah, multiple choice.

Anyway, it’s been a while since I had one of these dreams, and I was speculating that it might have something to do with the fact that I was getting farther and farther away from any school-like experience. Then last night, the dream returned and handed me a seat number. But it was different from a lot of the other versions of the dream. It was closer to a bad dream than a true nightmare. Instead of a regular college class, it was the class I took a couple of years ago at Hamline University, when I was pregnant- a graduate seminar on the concept of “home.” And in the dream, it wasn’t the last day, it was somehow three days before the last day, and someone was asking me whether I got the big paper finished, the one that was due in three days. So I immediately began to scheme and plan for how I would be able to pull off this ten-page paper, well thought out and well researched, in three days. And really, it didn’t panic me the way the immediate test dreams always did. Maybe because I always waited until the last one or two days to write my papers?

But in the quick calculations for how I was going to pull this off, I had to figure in time for going to work, cooking and cleaning (such as it is), and taking care of Naomi. And I realized that it was going to be really tiring and I wasn’t going to enjoy it. Whine. Now I am wondering if this dream is somehow a peek into my slowly maturing psyche. Panic isn’t great, but there’s something exhilarating about finding yourself face to face with an unexpected and extremely difficult problem that you have no choice but to attempt to solve immediately. These days the problems aren’t so difficult, and they are much less urgent. Finding a solution is more about…finding the time to make the solution happen. Boring! But also? Good.

Supporting the Troops

Today we had a reception at work for one of our own (one of our own coworkers, that is) who is being deployed. All the way deployed, to Iraq. All the way deployed, to join his combat engineer battalion in the unenviable task of clearing roadways of IEDs. His beautiful wife and their two elementary school age sons joined him at work for this little shindig (we all donated money to give them a weekend away somewhere, and weirdly, spending money for the kids). If I imagine Jim breaking the news to me that he’s going to be going away for a while, a long while, and I’ll have to stay home with the baby and attempt to keep it all together while he puts himself squarely in the way of lethal harm, my imagined response is something like “The hell you say.” (I got all single mother huffy yesterday when I had to cook dinner and care for Naomi, while he was out mowing the lawn and talking the rescue rooter guy through his exploration of our roof drains, for pete’s sake.)

I know it’s no picnic being an Iraqi these days. But I also thought being both anti-war and supportive of the troops wasn’t completely impossible. This send-off party got me thinking, though, that it would not be so easy to look a soldier and his wife and children in the eyes and say, This is a mad, massive boondoggle you’re off to. I wish you luck surviving in that crazy mess we made for you. When I thought about what I would say if I had to say something to this man (I didn’t, thankfully), it didn’t seem sufficient to say, honestly, that I wished him well, and the best of luck. I found myself thinking all those corny untruths that people inevitably bring out in support of the troops.

I guess what I am saying is that it’s pretty easy to understand the “defending the American way of life” nonsense that people are always saying on the news (and by people, I mean the loved ones of soldiers who are caught up in or taken away by this particular fight), because it would take a whole different, dark kind of courage to say to your loved one, “You are risking your life for something wrong. You are leaving me here to go off to a reckless, unjustified conflict. What you are doing doesn’t make any sense.”

The News Roundup

Yesterday I took the nipper and the dog to the little local park again, and there were no neighborhood bullies outside that one house to yell at us. Whew.

That lasagna turned out great. It didn’t look very good (because for some reason we had fat free mozzarella in the house, and I used that, and although it says it melts well, what that means is that each little individual shred of cheese melts by itself in its own little space, and does not join the others), but it tasted yummy. I will definitely make this no-boil air headed uneven layered last minute turkey recipe again.

I have met the elusive baby across the street! As I returned from a dog walk, I saw the whole family out on the porch of the steakhouse. The mother called to me and asked if I wanted to meet the baby. Yes I did! He is 6 weeks old now, and has his mother’s nose. His name is Jonathan. I have since purchased little Jonathan a cute cow-themed onesie and matching bib from one of the egregiously overpriced children’s stores at the mall (I had a gift card!), and I will wrap it up and give it to them this week. Done and done.

Jim and I and our sidekick ate at the Pal Do Korean Restaurant Sunday night. The nice owner lady was not present (my guess is she was at church or a church-related activity). While we were there, we heard both Elvis AND the new Korean pop music. So, they have expanded their selections, but only by one selection.

Last but not least, I am now also enjoying hoof and mouth disease. My version is just mouth-based, so I have a weirdly sore tongue (feels like I have scalded it with hot coffee every day this week). When Jim had it, it was mostly throat and whine based (just kidding, honey!). I hope it feels better by tomorrow, when we are celebrating Father's Day with all you can eat sushi. Oh yeah.

A Party at the Beach

Naomi’s best friend forever, Carmen, turns one year old today. Happy Birthday shout-out to Carmen! On Saturday her parents threw a pretty fantastic party at Saltwater State Park near Kent. The park is right on the Puget Sound, and below the picnic tables is an embankment of gigantic rocks that tumble down onto the rocky, tide-strewn beach. The park smells aptly of saltwater, and the view across the water to the forested hills on the other side is, while not breathtaking, simply and pleasantly beautiful. The weather alternated between warm, cold, dark, bright, threatening, cajoling, delightful, glary, calm, and gusty. And yet, it never rained. Hooray.

Carmen’s parents have a lot of friends, many with kids, some with a lot of kids. So there were easily twenty kids there, maybe more, all running around with the punching balloons and bubble solution my friend had packaged into beach pails (shovel attached). I learned some things about kids and parties. They are all going to want the cake with the pink frosting, no matter what the other choices are. When it comes to certain activities (blowing out the candle on behalf of the baby), they are total team players. I also learned a couple of good jokes. Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine! And what did the zero say to the eight? I like your belt!

The food was plentiful and delicious. The gifts were reasonable and appropriate (we brought this awesome moose, and had our irrational gift-choice pride rewarded by the loving attention of the birthday girl).
The kids were jovial and appreciative. At one point, a certain little Julio saw Naomi walking toward him with her arms out, and he thought about it for a moment, then gave her a hug. Hee! Besides the unexpected hugging, Naomi’s sleep-nazi parents lightened up and let her stay at the party a full five hours without a nap (completely unprecedented!). She also got to eat her first small bite of hot dog, some potato salad, guacamole, cake, of course, and some grilled corn on the cob.

Carmen’s parents have said this is the last of the big giant birthday parties. But I hope they relent. I would go to a party like that every weekend if I could.

Animals and Disease

Is it one of the marks of a humane(r) zoo that visitors find it difficult to see the animals, busy and fairly hidden as they are in their simulated natural environment? If so, we can feel good about the zoo (Woodland Park) we visited for the first time last weekend. Naomi thoroughly enjoyed seeing the foreground animals (mallard ducks!) at the expense of the distant main attractions (real live giraffes!). She did get to see some goats and sheep up close, as well as some teeny, tiny ponies. (On the fence of the teeny, tiny pony pen leaned a grumpy veterinarian, waiting for the elderly pony to pee so she could collect a bit for a UTI test. Sounds like intern work to me, ma’am. )

Overall, it was a really good time. Naomi tromped along the zoo trails, shared my ice cream sandwich, poked around the butterfly enclosure, and patted a sheep. I know it is only a coincidence that three days after the zoo visit, the daycare called and said I had to come and get Naomi, since she had symptoms of hoof and mouth disease. Ok, not really, but hand, foot, and mouth disease sounds awfully evocative of the original. The promptly consulted doctor said it wasn’t from the zoo, that it was very contagious, and that there was absolutely no reason not to take her back to school, since all the kids were going to get it anyway.

Today for Show and Tell, Naomi would like to share a virus of hers that will give you blisters on your hands and feet, and little sores in your mouth. If you’re lucky, you will also get a fever. Enjoy!

Target Market

On my Raisin Bran box, I discovered a movie trivia question. The movie? Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I am guessing that I am about forty years and maybe a chromosome off from the consumer Kellogg's is trying to impress with this cereal box fun.

Elvis has left the building

In celebration of Friday, I headed to Papa Murphy's to pick up a take and bake and a salad. Yep, that's what it's come to. If I have not already endorsed this particular product, let me do so now. Papa Murphy's pizza is delectable. No, it does not compete with the deep dish Chicago pies, or Z's pizza (RIP) on 6th Street south of the University of Arizona. But for chain pizza, Papa Murphy's is definitely superior. Yes, you have to pick it up yourself. Yes, for god's sake, you have to bake it yourself. Nevertheless. Also? It is three blocks from our house.

While the enthusiastic teens assembled my pizza, I trotted over to Pal Do World Korean Market to pick up some beer. Although in some ways it would be nice to have a boring old supermarket around the corner from our house, I am mostly glad that instead we have Pal Do. Because I have done the Murphy's and beer run before, I know that the good people at Pal Do politely request that I spend more than ten dollars if I am going to use my credit card. So I had to play a quick game of Supermarket Sweep in an attempt to boost my Tsing Tao purchase over the ten spot limit.

At Pal Do World, there is, naturally, a vast assortment of Korean and Japanese food. But there is also quite an extensive assortment of "European" food. There are some very tasty baked goods in the front, from some place called the Euro Bakery. There is in fact an entire aisle labeled "European" food. (Really, the only kind of food that Pal Do expressly doesn't carry is...American. So we do not shop there for bread, cheerios, canned peaches, milk...you get the idea). I headed down the European aisle for something else to buy (ridiculous why I did not just find an ATM...), and found a great number of jars of food that were labeled not just in another language, but in many cases, in another script. And the food wasn't identifiable, even when seen through the glass. It's one thing to try something new when you at least know the name of it. It's another when you don't even know what it's for. One jar tried to be helpful- along with the Russian words, there was an English name: "A chunky relish." Mmm. Even knowing the English name? Does not help me understand what I would be taking on buying this jar. So I settled for some wafer cookies with cocoa hazelnut filling. For some reason they were called Neopolitans.

I forgot to mention that Pal Do World has two restaurants, one Korean, one Japanese. When a certain contingent of Malaysian in-laws were here for two months, we spent many a dinner eating Korean food at the Pal Do restaurant. The woman who runs the place was wild for my in-laws, for my husband, and for my baby. Sadly, she has some eye condition which makes it difficult for her to see me. But the food is good. It is these once frequent dinners at the Pal Do on which I base the following bold assertion: the background music at Pal Do is always, always Elvis Presley. And not, as you might expect, an entire range of early Elvis, Vegas Elvis, gospel Elvis. No, it was the same dozen or so songs, over and over. You ain't nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time. Don't be cruel to a heart that's true. Everybody in the old cell block, dancing to the jailhouse rock.

Once, during the beer run where I learned of the ten dollar credit card rule (and the cashier let me off with a polite mention), I made a comment about how he must be a little tired of Elvis. He just looked at me. Today, I went up to the counter with my Tsing Tao and my Neopolitans and my bunch of bananas, and noticed that the cashier was singing along with the storetrack, and that it was very definitely Not Elvis. It was peppy Korean pop music, and the singer jovially shouted the chorus, like a Korean Chumba Wumba (as did the cashier). My total was $13.92. I have eaten about that many Neopolitans, two slices of Papa Murphy's, and one bottle of Tsing Tao. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my Friday night.

The Baby Across the Street, or, Serious Overthinking

This is more like a letter I should submit to Miss Manners or Dear Abby (love your work, Miss and Dear!) than an actual event worth ruminating on. Even so, I have given some thought to it already, so I may as well go all the way and give some thought to it out loud (so to speak). The issue in a nutshell is: our neighbors have had a baby- what should my response be? Keep in mind that the longer I ruminate, the more I have made a default decision for myself. The history is thus…

The house across from ours is a piece of new construction on a street of 1956 split levels. It’s big and red and has gables, a funny brick-walled front yard (with impeccable groundskeeping) and a wide front porch at ground level. And it seems it is not just a house, it’s a home. An assisted living home, to be exact. Mobility buses coming by many times a day to schlep the assisted livers here and there, and when we first moved here and I wasn’t yet working, I got a little jealous that these assisted livers seemed to have so much more of a life than I.

Also living in the “Steakhouse,” as my local friend has dubbed it (because of how it looks, not any darkly comic sense), is a family of four- husband, wife, and two small children. They are from some eastern European country. I assume that the woman looks after the residents, and the man looks after the building (though it could be the other way around. He certainly mows the lawn, more, though...). Our association with them has been limited to occasional waving (especially waving at the man and his children, who sometimes go out for little walks in the neighborhood).

At Christmas time, as is the tradition in my family, I loaded up a few plates with Christmas cookies and candies, and carried them to each of our neighbors’ houses. The only one who was around to receive their goodies was Sheila, who celebrates Hanukah instead, but was still very gracious about accepting the cookies. When I brought a plate to the Steakhouse, a young woman who works there took them from me, saying, I’m not the owner, but I’ll give them to her. Fast forward to Easter, a few weeks ago. The doorbell rang (an excitingly rare event), and when I opened it, there stood the woman from across the street. Whom I have never met or spoken with or even really waved at, since it’s her husband who is outside much more often. Unsmiling, she handed me a plate of pastries she had made for Easter. I thanked her, hugely smiling, and asked her (recklessly!) if she was expecting (because she looked about six months pregnant). She said she was due in two weeks (Wha?). She told me her name, Adina (I am spelling it on a whim here). I told her if they needed anything, to call on us. She said they would be just fine. Kind of meanly, it felt like.

And of course, she had the baby. We have seen him from our windows, tucked into his baby bucket and covered with a blanket, being carried in and out of the car. Catching him outside once, I asked the father if the baby had come, he said yes. I asked the little boy if he liked his little brother, and he gave me a very sour scowl. We know the baby is here. We don’t know the family very well. But they have made a kind gesture to us (the Easter pastries were pretty tasty), they are a young family with a new baby, and they are our neighbors. I want to do something nice for them, on the other hand, I fear (a little irrationally, I’ll admit) that doing something for them will be perceived as something like meddling, which I genuinely don’t want.

Am I mired in a simple cultural difference? I know Americans are more grinny and boisterous in their attempts to be “friendly” with others (especially me! I blush a little at my uber-friendly try at conversation with the borderline sullen Adina as she handed over the Easter sweets). Or is she genuinely just not a warm, friendly person, perhaps one who would neither notice nor care about an extra pack of onesies and a Hallmark card? This is one situation where the golden rule might not apply. I would want my awkwardly smiley, new-to-the-street neighbor to come over with a small, cute baby present if I had a new baby. To me, that would be just great. But also? I think it’s easy to see how not everyone might feel that way.