Vacation!

I have taken more than a little vacation from regular posting, and since big life changes are on the way, it seems like a good idea to get a couple of posts out before I completely drop off the map. And it is an even better idea to write a little bit about our vacation while there still remains in my consciousness some of the relaxed, golden goodness it
bestowed upon me. So- on the first Saturday in June, we drove up to Anacortes to catch a ferry to a place I had neither
been to nor heard of before bidding on a week's stay there at a charity auction last fall, Orcas Island. This aution was
before I was pregnant, so a. I was a little tipsy and eager in the bidding, and b. didn't have any idea I would be eight
months plus pregnant on our trip. Turns out that neither factor was a factor- the place we won was a true prize, just the right size for our little family and our friends with their two little girls.

It was a guest house for what I can only imagine is a truly swanktastic
getaway home, just below. The house seemed to be newly redone, with slate tiles, a fantastic kitchen, a really oversized
tub surrounded by marble, a loft bedroom with twin beds (and intriguing little closets in the low walls, specially
designed to delight toddlers), a downstairs bedroom with a creaky queen, and even a laundry room. And, unlike other
getaway spots I have known, nary a taxidermic trophy to be seen. From the picture windows, and the big deck outside, we
spotted porpoises going by in the sound, as well as beautiful birds and hungry, ever-in-attendance black tailed deer.
Nevermind the staggeringly large slugs and snails (ah, the Northwest).

The first two days were sunny, and on the first day, we went to the Eastsound farmer's market, where carrying only locally
grown produce meant that there was, um, not very much produce to be had just yet.

Fortunately, the shaved ice crop had come in already! On the second day, Jim, Naomi, and I took a hike to several waterfalls in Moran State Park, then drove to the top of Mount Constitution for a really wonderful view of the San Juan Islands (of which Orcas is the largest, I believe). Through relentless conditioning, I managed to get Naomi to use a slow, booming, dramatic voice whenever she said "Mount Constitution".

It was pretty cool. After nap (which is something you say when you have tiny children along on your
vacation), the whole big gang of us went to Cascade Lake for some beach action. The water was too chilly for real swimming
(though I was ready, with my gigantic burgundy pregnancy swimsuit!), but the girls had a wonderful time digging in the
gravelly dirt that passed for beach sand.

We enticed them a little ways out into the water as well.

The next day marked the return of the clouds and showers that make Orcas Island the lush paradise where slugs the size of
your arm can flourish. We read books, played games, and ate a lot of overly large meals. The guys went out one afternoon
for a sea kayaking trip, of which I was intensely jealous, even as I saw the wisdom in sitting it out at this stage. The
girls hovered around the baby, played with all the pots and pans in the kitchen, and walked down to the rocky beach near
the house for some lessons in rock chucking from their dads. We took a short trip to the historical Moran mansion, where a
former mayor of Seattle and apparently huge Orcas Island fan recuperated from stress and just generally had a good time
(wonder if that huge bar on the main floor was open when he lived there?).

Our friends had to leave on Wednesday, but we decided to stay a little longer. We returned to Eastsound for lunch, some
groceries, and a visit to the free-wifi coffee shop (Jim's web surfing hobby having suffered considerably out at the uber
-relaxing, completely un-connected guest house).

On Thursday, we went in to town again, for pizza and gelato (can you
believe there is a local chain on the island- two coffee houses with tasty gelato?). That afternoon, we visited
Obstruction Pass state park, a place name not a little suggestive of gastro-intestinal difficulties. Oh well. The .5 mile
hike to the beach seemed a nice doable distance with a not-too-trail-hardy two year old, but it seemed much longer while
we hiked it. It was worth it, though, to find ourselves on the beautiful, sunny, rocky beach with a thick border of
driftwood.

As always, the hike back seemed shorter, though probably not for Jim, who was carrying the smallest member of
our party for most of the half mile. Unless you count the member of our party that I was carrying.

The return of the sun meant a beautiful ferry ride home on Friday.

Often a vacation can feel too short, or too rushed, or
too long, even, but this trip to Orcas Island, in so many ways, felt just right. We were sad it was over, but it felt like
it was over, not like we could go on staying in the "Tiny House in the Forest" (as Naomi called it) forever. Thank you,
Orcas Island, for a really wonderful week. Hope to see you again someday...

Made Up Self Interview

In the interest of making myself actually post something, I will now manufacture some categories to attempt to round up all the things I've been meaning to mention in this thing...

What's cheering me up: Work is really interesting right now as I have two projects that are finishing up before I leave for my three month "vacation." I really like to be busy at work.

What's bumming me out: I have pneumonia, or probably do, since there can be no x-ray to confirm it. I am getting better, though. I hate missing work when I am closing in on a big deadline.

Stupid thing that made me laugh: In the huge pile of dead computer equipment that had been cluttering up the hallway (and the feng shui, as my office neighbor pointed out) at work was a small printer whose explanatory post-it note declared, simply, "DIRTY PRINT JOBS" Heh.

Stupid thing that made me cry: Everything. No kidding. I'm up to fifteen times a day now.

Secret confession: I am a fan of the Gilmore Girls, and was genuinely sad when the show ended last week. Embarrassingly, see category above.

Bit of hilarity from Naomi: She named her baby doll (small, pink clad, with pink "binky") Clark. Where has she even ever heard this name before? Have I already mentioned her imaginary friend, "Dobo"?

I am now reading: Consumed (with some long important subtitle that I can't remember) by Benjamin Barber. It was my Mother's Day present from Jim after I got all pissy about the endless signs in the mall trying to make you feel like a loser if you don't spend some serious cash on your mom.

I have just finished reading: The Best Firefighters Ever, by Richard Scarry, in which Mr. Frumble, a little frazzled after having his pickle car flattened by a steamroller, pulls the fire alarm over a faint wisp of smoke in the next yard and summons Smokey, Sparky, Snozzle, and Squirty to blast the Greenbug family with water during their small-scale though still festive barbecue. At the end, all the named characters return to the firehouse, where the firefighters (who are all pigs) problematically grill sausages for their guests. Yikes.

OK, that's all the categories I can muster today. There is one (4-day!) week of work left before our Orcas Island Odyssey. You can bet there will be some photos from that! Happy Memorial Day!

Bunny Update

There is so much to say about Naomi these days that it is difficult to boil it down into a theme. So I am going the way of the technical writer (minus the succint quality, I am sure) and using bullets. –

• Naomi has a big(ger) girl bed now- she just completed her fourth cribless night. The bed is from IKEA (of course) and sports a nifty blue canopy kind of thing. She has fallen out twice already, but neither fall awakened her. Don't worry, we have created a landing pad around the gap, so when she falls out, it's into a pile of pillows. Miraculously (everyone knock on wood as you read this), she has not once removed herself from the bed on purpose.
• Does anyone else remember that Steinbeck story where the local developmentally disabled man plays back conversations he has overheard, in the saloon, for tips? Naomi could give this guy a run for his tip money, except that what she plays back are the things she hears at daycare. I am sorry to say they are almost all discipline-related. I am only going to say this once. Listen to my words. No hitting. We don't hit. Listen, are you listening? Do you understand? Do you understand my words? The comic twist is when her dad and I are subsumed into this dialogue of commands. Mommy, don't hit dancing bear (as though she has caught me in the act of assaulting one of her toys). Daddy, you take a bite of that sandwich RIGHT NOW. Whew.
• On the cuter, nicer side, she also plays back songs she has learned. There's something that sounds like "Goolee goolee goolee a-rum-sum-sum" or something like that, as well as some song that I assume has all the kids' names in it at some point, but Naomi only likes to sing it with "Colby." "Colby, Colby, Colby, let's take Colby!"
• I think I have already mentioned that Naomi is very skilled with context. By this I mean that she remembers words and phrases and grasps the context they are used in really well, so that she startles us sometimes by saying things that seem to imply a very complicated understanding of things and of language, but really, she just knows where to put certain words. It always keeps us guessing as to what she really understands. Probably more than we think. One example- I was cooking shrimp, and (against all child safety suggestions) picked her up so she could see what was in the pan. "It's shrimp," I said. "Shrim," she said. I said shrimp again, emphasizing the P. "Actually," she said, "actually, it's shrimmm." I stand corrected.
• Last night Naomi made a joke, and a decent one at that. For a while in December, when we were all sick all the time, she got her head around the fact that all of us have doctors, and each doctor has a different name. So if you had asked her what her mom's doctor's name is, she could have answered correctly. It happens that the doctor Jim sees is named Applebaum. Last night, during a brief revival of the what's your doctor's name game, she said, "Daddy, you should see Dr. Applebaum." Pause. "You should see Dr. Carrotbaum." Hee! Maybe you had to be there, but the fact that she laughed even before we did seemed to indicate that this girl was trying to be funny.
• I don't know how to explain this one, but she sometimes uses a slightly different voice, one that's a little lower in her throat. When she really gets going on a topic, she drops the second part of the sentence into this other voice. I have no idea where it comes from. This is completely different than the super squeaky, high-pitched voice that she uses when channeling the personalities of her stuffed toys, creatures she has created by chewing her bread or bagel, or her own fingers or feet. Mommy! Put a sock on me! I need a shoe!
• Whenever I arrive at school to get her, Naomi smiles a huge smile, announces to everyone that her mommy is here, and runs to me from wherever she is (lately, outside in the play yard). It is a joy I look forward to all afternoon long. No one else that I know is ever this happy to see me, let alone if they were to see me every day. Kind of sounds like I'm just in it for the love.

Girls' Imagination Gone Wild

(Apologies for the length of this post...) The morning after our guests left, I hopped a plane to Vegas, where my good friend from high school days lives with her husband and baby. When we finally found each other in the airport, my friend had her 10 month old son strapped to her front in a Baby Bjorn, and the spectacle of cuteness was almost too great to bear. In the interest of our "Girls' Weekend," though, we had to abandon the cutie with his grandma, head out for a sophisticated lunch (on a typical Vegasy artificial lake, where the appearance of a pair of Canada geese, which are like pigeons in Minnesota, caused our waiter to get all Audobon Society on us and tell us what a rare treat it was to see them there...), and drive to an off-strip casino to meet some 30-year old gazillionaire who was going to caravan with us up to the "compound" where our Girls' Weekend was to commence. My friend's dad is, I guess, connected around town, and one of the people he has connected with is this young developer guy who, among other things, has a part in this kind of cooperative getaway property that was put together by some famous Vegas real estate family (and a bunch of other well-off folks). Somehow word got out that I needed a place to spend my girls' weekend, and the rest is history.

Actually, I don't really know what went down, but after locating the fellow, we followed his SUV up a very rough dirt road into the foothills of Mt. Charleston, through a gate, and into this, um, compound, I guess. There was a spring fed pond, with a pretty fabulous "boat house," which my friend and I both assumed was the place to stay. But no, we drove further up the road, past the horse paddocks and the caretakers house to the "main lodge," which was palatial, and appeared to have been decorated by Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. Outside the main lodge were three mini-cabins, and up another winding road, a fourth cabin with a loft and a bathroom complete with a glass-walled shower (glass walled to the outside, I mean, so as to titillate the creatures of the brush). The ranch or farm or whatever it was originally is in the high desert, with scrubby trees and bushes, and beautiful views of Mt. Charleston and the valley below.

We decided to stay around the main lodge, and our host (who was actually leaving- he had just driven up with us to make sure we found it and so he could show us the fantastically stocked liquor cabinets- ouch! says the pregnant lady) showed us around the place, and told us that he liked to just sleep upstairs in the murphy bed. After he left, we continued our Girls' Weekend by engaging in the well-known female bonding ritual of photographing each of the many, many dead and stuffed creatures which lived (or, you know, didn't live) in the lodge. I risk sounding ungrateful to the people who, out of sheer generosity of spirit, let two strangers stay at their ridiculously lavish getaway destination free of charge, but I have to say, surely there is a limit to the number of taxidermy elements you should include inside one building. The place, admittedly, was huge (maybe three thousand square feet?), but still: one bearskin rug, one cow skin, one stuffed turkey, a buffalo head, a moose head, an elk head, a deer head, two pheasants, a wolf, and the piece de resistance, a snarling stuffed mountain lion (or bobcat or something) at the top of the stairs in the loft. And let us not forget the towering antler chandeliers, antler wall sconces, and, in the bathroom, antler magazine racks. Both lavish and super creepy.

(One of my new friends...)

We chose the mini cabin closest to the main lodge for convenience, and also because the other two had dead animal wall art (the bust of a snarling badger, for example). Before dinner, there was an extremely slapstick episode wherein we frantically paddleboated away from one of the caretaker's friendly and very mangy dogs, who swam obstinately behind us with the calm determination of that robot cop in the second Terminator movie. After we prepared our yummy dinner in the ginormous kitchen (Which refrigerator has the condiments? Oh, this one over here.), and scrolled through three hundred satellite channels on one of the staggeringly large TV, we decided to head to the little cabin for some magazine reading and chit chat before bed. This is when things began to go, though not horribly wrong, just, I guess, wrong. As I tried to turn on the little TV, an ominous high-pitched whine filled the cabin. OK, so we wouldn't watch the Chris Rock DVD that someone had thoughtfully left in the cabin for us. We climbed up onto the bed plateau, and the whining started again. After which, of course, the lights went out, and despite an army of decorative candles, the lighter was not functional. As good a time as any for sleep, we decided. But as we laid there in the complete darkness, a feeling of unease crept into my consciousness. This feeling was followed by two complementary reflections. One: Was this not a perfect horror movie setup? Two women completely alone in a big nice facility in the middle of nowhere? A "caretaker" who lives on the property with a pack of dogs, that the women haven't met? A door on the cabin with a lock that does not function convincingly? The power going out? Never mind the subtext of women deserving punishment for leaving their husbands and babies behind. Yikes. Two: The Gift of Fear. Which is some book that has been mentioned more than once in an online advice column I read, and the gist of which, I gather, is that you feel freaked out by people or situations for a reason, and you should be grateful and go with that to preserve your safety, since personal safety should trump your wish to be polite and gracious.

So convened the little terror conference in my head, and I asked my friend if she would be bothered (or think I was a freak) if I just moved the rustic chair in front of the door. She agreed that it was not at all a bad idea. Thus fortified, back to bed, pitch dark, and the whining noise started again. Augh! We decided to move back to the main lodge. Which appealed to pregnant me, since that's where the bathrooms were, but still meant walking a whole twenty or thirty yards through the extreme middle of nowhere darkness to a big inviting lodge with twelve unlocked glass doors all the way around. And lots of dead snarling animals. We made the move (and eventually even went back to the cabin for the comforter, together, with a tealight on a bread plate). We went around the inside perimeter, locking all the big glass doors. We convinced ourselves that it was surely a bunny when the motion detector light outside went on, then off, then on again. And we headed upstairs, past the snarling bobcat, to make up the murphy bed and have our pleasant dreams.

So generous was my Gift of Fear that I decided it would be a good idea to just lie quietly as my friend's sleep breathing became obvious, so that when the psychopath did creep up the stairs, I could at least have a moment of perceived agency before the inevitability of my doom solidified. Eventually, sleep prevailed. I have failed to mention in advance my friend's predeliction for terrifying sleeptalking when under stress. So when I was awakened, some time later, by my friend sitting up in bed, pointing to the corner of the room, and shouting, He's over there! He's over there!, it only took me the longest thirty seconds of my life to realize that's what was going on. The logic of the half-asleep convinced me that my friend was going to climb out of bed and go tumbling down the extremely steep stairway, so I patted her hand and asked her if she was OK until she laid back down. Then, another hour of shallow sleep until the sky outside began to lighten.

Unless your horror movie involves highway driving, hitch-hiking, or the like, the sunrise always brings a welcome respite to the terror. And so it was on our Nevada ranch- the sky was blue, the breakfast delicious, the patio perfect, the hammock relaxing, and the fear of dismemberment entirely dissipated. It was easy to feel foolish about the whole thing, and I still do. It was a beautiful place to stay, taxidermy notwithstanding, and there really was no need to muddy up a relaxing getaway with fear for one's life.

(It really was a nice place.)

Oh well. We did laundry, unlocked all the locked doors, tidied up, bid adieu to the menagerie, and headed back to town. After an embarrassingly long nap at my friend's parents' house (where I felt very, very safe, apparently), we fancied up for a formal event that was in honor of my friend's dad, ate some dry salmon and those tiny whittled down carrots that still have the greens on them, and did a couple of songs worth of frightening pregnant lady dancing (in my case) before heading home. My flight was early the next morning. Vegas, Baby!

Family Fun

It has already been more than a week since I returned from my weekend trip to Vegas, a weekend preceeded by a full seven day visit from my sister and her two kids (a sister who adorably and with all sincerity informed me that next time they would visit during the summer, and stay for much longer!), yet I have been unable in that time to come up with a decent post. I keep vacillating between telling about the visit and my trip, and giving space to the many toddler (or wait, is she officially a pre-schooler now?) developments and intrigues that bubble up these days. And also, maybe, I'm feeling lazy or uninspired. Too bad for me. So here is the jumbled account from receding memory of our time with family, and my time in Vegas, baby.

My sister (the middle sister, though they're both my big sisters) has two kids, a fifteen-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy. Weirdly, they never thought to visit when I lived in Minnesota...but I was happy to hear they were planning a trip here to the emerald northwest. The visit was good- the kids were very helpful and polite, leaping up to clear the table every time we ate. Jim got my nephew attached to Medieval II, and watched Casino Royale with him; I took my sister and my niece for pedicures and a shopping trip at the cheesy but adequate Factoria Mall. We went to Pike's, and to the space needle (which Naomi calls the space noodle) and the science center, and on their own they went to the science fiction museum, back to the market, and on a search for the house our family lived in when my sister was born (she is native to Seattle, though this was her first time in the city since before she turned one).

On their last full day, I took a day off and Naomi and I went with them to the aquarium and on a boat cruise from Puget Sound, through the ship canal and the lock system, and into Lake Union. It was pretty great, and we actually had sunny, decent weather for part of the trip. I will not go into detail about the ridiculous abject fear I felt, gripping Naomi as we rode on the deck of the boat. Why did having a kid turn me into a person who can visualize the worst case scenario down to gruesome detail at any given moment? Ridiculous.

On board: safe, sound, wearing a cute hat.

The part of their visit I am least proud of has to do with my nephew and his tendency to be a bit of a sore loser. I have read and repeated many times that it is easiest to be most critical of others when they exhibit tendencies that we share (and dislike in) ourselves. I know myself to be a bad loser. I can recall with cringes of embarrassment the mini-golf matches (I know) where a few bad putts sank me into a foul temper, or even the occasional mah jong game with the in-laws, where I declared that I was no longer participating. Eeee. So I feel even worse that I gave a ten-year-old (and one that I should be giving lots of love and a general pass on things, both as an aunt and a hostess) a bit of a hard time for getting so grouchy when Pictionary and Risk didn't go his way. In any case, Naomi loooooooved having her cousins around, and I did too.

Effing Daylight Savings

Remember last week when I was rhapsodizing about the dawn's earlier light, and walking the crunchy nature trail, and spring, blah blah blah? Well, daylight savings has come, and with it, the cold pitch dark of my morning walk returns. On the return route today (all sidewalk), just past the cheery harbinger of seasonal change, the camelia bush, the world's slowest construction crew (seriously, Naomi, Jim, and I could work together and get their 15 week "intersection improvement" done in a couple of weekends. Naomi could be the flagger, flipping her sign from Slow to Stop and smoking four packs a day like the pros all seem to...) had erected some barriers around 7-10 feet of re-poured sidewalk. Instead of crossing the street, I walked in the road around the barriers, and in the daylight savings pitch darkness, stepped into a giant hole, which caused me to "spring forward" onto my face. Awesome.

After scrambling out of the way of an oncoming car (so much for the reflective vest) and walking another fifteen yards down the sidewalk, I realized that my right ankle and left knee were hurting really bad. That was also the length of time it took for me to realize that I had fallen
right onto my stomach on the curb. And that although in my logical mind I know that little Fetus Khooler is traveling, basically, encased in a waterbed, and probably didn't even wake up (after her long night of poking me), I was slipping into a crazy panic that I had just ruined her with my careless early morning dog walking.

I fell once during my first pregnancy too. I was walking out of work, down a snowy path that was
of course completely iced up. I didn't even realize what was happening until I hit the ground, full out on my back. I lay there a moment, got up carefully, evaluated myself as uninjured, continued walking to my car, got inside, and promptly lost my shit. I remember calling Jim, crying, saying, What if I ruined the baby? His calming response (and immediate phoning of the midwives, finding out where to take me for some soothing fetal monitoring) was the best thing, because it gave me a glimpse into the near future, where labor and delivery lurked, where I would be all out of my head and not in control of the situation, and where I now knew there would be someone with a level head who would take care of things. Not that I didn't trust that before, but the test run was nice.

This morning, after the pain and panic set in, I found a little wall to sit on. I was still about a half mile from home, and of course had not brought my cell phone along. Even if I could successfully flag down a car with a driver who did have a phone, was I going to have Jim wake up Naomi and throw her in the car seat so they could drive half a mile to pick me up? That was what gave me renewed vigor, frankly, the thought of the display of cheerful fun I would feel compelled to enact when sleepy Naomi, in her jammies, encountered her mommy on the street corner, all teary and covered with construction dirt. So instead I limped along and indulged my right to a melodramatic homecoming. Jim was suitably concerned, though he tried to attach a little ice pack to my ankle with the raggedy t-shirt he uses to wipe up the floor after the dog slobbers water on it. When I demurred he told me I would never make it in battle or something like that. Note to self: bring some ace bandages into battle. Also, into our linen closet.

So, I got cleaned up, called the midwife's office for an early appointment, and took Naomi to school. In the flurry of concern from her teachers (brought on by my pathetic limp), I completely forgot to reassure them that her lunch contained NOT the strictly forbidden peanut butter and jelly, but rather, soy butter and jelly (now we need a soy substitute for peanut butter? Really, people, Mr. Peanut is not an animal. He is .... what? A legume? And kind of a dandy.) I headed to the midwife's office, where, after the requisite weigh in (sigh) and cup-peeing, a student helper located little Khooler's heartbeat on the first try. The midwife told me that although the baby was almost certainly totally OK, she was going to send me across the street to the hospital for another ultrasound. Whee. My third one. This baby is getting more in-utero camera time than Suri Cruise.

The ultrasound was fine, of course. The technician was nice, told me what it's like to have your
second kid when your first one is still a little tyke (summarized as "you get through it"). Then a doctor, I guess, came in, and started in on how it's super duper rare for them to see any kind of placental damage or abruption, which is what they're looking for, from a simple fall, and really you would only find that from a high speed car collision, but that with the medical environment being what it is, of course they are going to take a look anyway. You don't have any bleeding, right? Or Fluid leaking? he said. Huh? As though I had come to the ER straight from the street corner, in my reflective vest and dirt, demanding an ultrasound and hours of fetal monitoring, rather than being sent here by my duly diligent midwife. I am not hysterical with fear over here, Doctor Whoever You Are! But thanks for stopping by.

Anyway, wiped off all the ultrasound goo, limped off to work. Stupid Daylight Savings time, is all I'm saying.

Spring!

I have been intending for a long time to write a post about the little signs of spring that are emerging in the last few weeks. The first sign to catch my eye was an apparent bloom on a camelia bush along my pitch dark early morning walk route. I try to stick to the main drag close to our house because it is slightly better lit than the neighborhood streets. So every morning (OK, maybe three or four mornings a week), Luna in her leash and I in my fabulous reflective vest tromp up to the main intersection, turn around, and tromp back home. On the way we pass a lot of wood fencing, one excitedly barking dog (who inspires another), and a camelia bush, which started to bloom a few weeks ago. I wasn't sure I was really seeing blooms, because it really was dark on these walks. But now the bush next to our driveway, too, is covered with dramatic hot-pink flowers. Delightful!

The other, even more welcome sign of spring is that for the last week, when I leave on my walks, it is just barely light enough for me to abandon the sidewalk of the main drag and head into the nature trail. Our house is about a quarter of a mile from a long hiking trail that supposedly can take hardier walkers than myself all the way from Lake Sammamish to Lake Washington. One of the two legs of the trail that we can easily reach winds through a little patch of beautiful northwest woods and a kind of marshy grassland, past a few farm fields and a little stand that sells vegetables and gorgeous big bouquets of dahlias in the summer, and down to a medium-sized lake with houses all around and a healthy range of birds and occasional muskrats or otters or something to gawk at (I've seen a kingfisher, a pileated woodpecker, some kind of quail, lots of neat cormorants and duck varieties). The other leg leads through a blueberry farm, in the midst of which is a pretty pond, also with ducks and the occasional heron. We have been going the way of the blueberry the last few mornings, because it is much more open- a boon to the pre-dawn paranoiacs like myself. (What am I afraid of? Thugs, a little, but also...coyotes. Luna is probably too big for a coyote to try to eat, but why tempt a greedy one? There is also a sign that says to watch out for bears and panthers...heh.)

It's not a long walk- probably about a mile and a half from our house to the main road that borders the farm and back. But it is so much nicer than walking up the main road- so much more interesting for Luna to sniff, so many birds warming up their daytime voices. The trail is gravel, and my shoes make a satisfying crunch with every step. The moon is just past full now, and hangs low in the sky the last few mornings, behind light, misty clouds. The same clouds, on the opposite side of the sky, turn pink as the light grows. The most beautiful part this morning was the mist on the perfectly still pond. I could find a star, or a planet, more likely, reflected through the mist off the pond's smooth surface.

I always feel good when I take a walk in the morning, but the last week, the walks have brought me more joy than usual. I know when early Daylight Savings begins this weekend, my just barely light nature hikes are going to have to revert back to the pitch dark city street stroll. But I won't have to wait long for the light to return. Hooray! I love the transition to a new season. Spring here is long and damp and crazy with blooms and greenery, and leads to the warm, clear blue season of eating out on the patio and wandering around the botanical gardens. Also waiting for us, at the end of spring, is a new family member, who hopefully will enjoy eating outside and whatever else we come up with to do to celebrate summer. (Have I told you it's a girl? Poor Jim, now hopelessly outnumbered.) Spring is still a ways off for some of you, so I send you a big bunch of camelia blossoms and my best wishes for some sunny days in the meantime.

J. Crier

The first time I was pregnant, I was tired all the time. It got better after the first trimester was over, and got worse again as the due date got nearer. This time around, I didn't have that first trimester wipe-out, and have been feeling fairly normal even up to now (week 20!). But there are other things about this pregnancy that are different too, and one of the most notable is the fact that I cry at the slightest provocation. I have always been an easy crier, but since this fetus came along, it has become an absolute pathology. So if the first time around was the sleepy pregnancy, this one, it seems, is the weepy pregnancy.

What makes me cry, you ask? First, just about any item on the news. Soldiers who thought they were coming home this month are redeployed until July. Wah! And again, any time they give the slightest personal detail about a soldier killed in Iraq. Wah! He had a mother and two sisters! He had a ten year old son! But of course it is not just bad news. When the two guys in New Jersey or whatever caught the toddler that fell out of of his fourth story window? Wah! Last week DURING THE TRAFFIC REPORT, they guy explained that the slow-down on I-5 was because someone had to pull over and give birth to a baby. Nice! I cried the rest of the way to work. Just now I was watching some of the video contest entries on the intranet here at work (don't ask), and one of the videos from some guy in India showed a young techie go-getter mountain biking through a rural village, where a mother was holding a very sick child. WAH! Of course the techie uses his technology to get help, and at the end of the video, the kid is frolicking. More tears from me!

There is a song on the mix CD I got from a way-too-nice classmate once (she gave one to everyone in the seminar!) called "Last Fare of the Day," and I can't remember the name of the artist, though if you're reading this, CW, feel free to remind me with a comment. The song is about a cab driver who picks up this couple who are in a really bad place (you know, emotionally, or whatever, not a bad neighborhood), and then later in the song he picks up the same couple (at least in my mind, it's the same couple), and they are just leaving the hospital with a new baby, and flowers and balloons. And things are a lot better with them, as you may imagine. (Here's the line, so corny, which sends me over the edge: "I asked about her name, and we all laughed when he said 'Hope' and she said 'Grace.'") Even when I wasn't pregnant, I teared up for this song, but now that I am? Forget it. I think it actually frightened Jim once, how hard I cried when this song came on. He claims he can't understand the words, so obviously he is somewhat less affected by it. One morning when it came up in rotation on the drive to work, I thought, oh, I can handle it. Then I heard the first few strums of the guitar and had to immediately turn it off. That's how bad it is with me and this song. And these hormones.

I am reminded of my hyperextended lachrymosity today because of a little breakfast tableaux that has had me dabbing at my eyes two or three times now, at random points during the day. Naomi has been talking now and then about babies being born, how they are in their mommies' tummies, then they come out and that means they are born! And they're on the outside! My friend's baby is due any day, which we talk about a lot, and Naomi is also starting to get it that I have a baby in my tummy, too, so it's all good with me if she wants to talk about the miracle of birth. This morning while she was eating her mini-bagel, she said, I was born! I was in your tummy, then I came out! And I was born! We talked about what it was like when she came out, how it was light and Daddy was there and I held her on my chest and we named her.
Then I told her that I was born too- that I used to be inside of Gramma's tummy (which I'm sure was a stretch for her, but she seemed to go along with it), and then I came out and was a little baby. I said, you know, because Gramma is MY mommy. She thought for a second, then she said, where is Gramma's mommy? Oh, man...really? I said, right, Gramma had a mommy too. Gramma was a little baby once too. And she said again, where is Gramma's mommy? What I did not say is that Gramma's mommy was a beautiful person and an excellent Gramma herself, with a cute Swedish accent, who passed away in 1997 at the age of 92. And what I did not do was try to figure out whether Naomi had any sense of what she was actually asking me about. I just said, Gramma's mommy is not here anymore. At which point, naturally, I had a huge surge of crydrenaline and had to whisk my cereal bowl off to the sink to avoid weeping all over my unsuspecting kid (who of course has seen me cry before, an embarrassing number of times- no strong as steel mommy in this family).

Fortunately, she moved right on to something else. Like gleefully pointing out for the fifteenth time that she had both a milk cup and a water cup. Luxury! I went through a hundred quick thoughts at once, that I missed my Gramma, and that I wish Naomi could have known her, and that she could have known Naomi, and that yeah, my mom was once a little baby, just as I was, and that was almost as hard for me to imagine as it probably was for Naomi to imagine her big, giant mommy in Gramma's tummy. None of these instantaneous musings were much good for stopping the crying. I got my act together, we finished up breakfast and got on with our day. When I think of the things I get to enjoy when this pregnancy is done, I hope a slight cessation in the weeping is one of them. Otherwise you will find me, greedily eating cold cuts and soft cheeses and sushi with a glass of beer, crying over whoever got eliminated from American Idol.

The Khoolest

A post about our trip to AZ is forthcoming. In the meantime, is there a cooler baby than this one? Hard to imagine.

Again with the Daycare-Related Post

Thanks to all who gave me their thoughts on the situation described in the previous post. I have thought about things a lot, and I think I am overreacting. The teachers really have been nothing but nice when I'm around, despite having a crazy bunch of little guys to ride herd on. So what if the voice volume is a little higher?

I still have some concerns, though. The main one is that Naomi, normally a fan of school, has said every day either that she wants to be in the other class, or that she doesn't want to go to school at all. This is probably normal considering that she's getting to the age where she has figured out that she doesn't always want the same things for herself as the things that are frequently thrust upon her. School is thrust upon her every day, so it's not surprising that she has started to have something to say about it. On the other hand, wah!

It's hard to hear that she is not as happy now as she has been in the past.Her first transition, from the baby class to the teeny toddler class, was hardest on me. I actually cried on her last day, and made ridiculous personalized presents for the teachers so they would never forget my kid. Ha. For her part, Naomi talked about her old teachers a lot, but she seemed to really like being in the new class, and playing on all the great new playground equipment, and doing the songs and activities that went along with being a slightly bigger kid. For some reason this second transition, to the two-year-old class, is harder on her. She is the littlest in the class, one of very few girls. And I know she misses her teachers from the teeny toddler class, who were very sweet to her. Even so, it was clear for the last few weeks she was in that class that it was time to move up. There was a new influx of tinies from the baby class, and seeing all of them together made me realize that it was going to get frustrating and boring for her (am I really saying this?).

My other concern, which may or may not be related to the main concern, is that I've heard Naomi say a few things to her animals, usually when she is putting them down for a nap (a favorite past time), that were a little surprising. "Get that head down!" "Look in my eyes, you hear me?!" Yipes. This makes me think that naptime in the new class is not as relaxing as it should be.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will relate that I spent a year as a preschool teacher. My class was the "young 4's." Man, were they cute. The place that I worked had a very yelly head teacher, and she set the tone for how we interacted with the kids. This was particularly bad for me, as I can be a wimpy chameleon in work and social situations, so there were times when I got yelly too. Frequently, at naptime, I was determined that all my charges would sleep if I had to give myself a stroke making it happen. I am sure I said "Get that head down!" or worse tothese little ones. The result was that a bunch of kids that were probably developmentally ready to stop napping developed the ability to lie still and quiet for an hour or more in the middle of the day. Not necessarily the most useful skill outside of a monastery, but there you are.

Right. So getting all worked up over hearing Naomi bring home nap-coercion techniques that are (I promise) not learned from her parents feels on the one hand like my job as a mom, and on the other hand like a certain pot casting aspersions on a certain kettle. It is not going to be the first time that Naomi picks up something we're not crazy about. And the next time she does, rather than looking at Jim with horror and saying, did I just hear her right?! I will talk to her about using kind words with her animals, and with people. In the meantime I will ruminate endlessly about this very long test that is constantly being administered to me, wherein I have to decide whether to continue doing everything in my power to protect and shield my child within a world that is endlessly safe and kind and loving, or whether (and how quickly) I have to accept that she is part of the actual world, and everything that goes along with that. How lucky for her and for me that our version of the actual world is still so safe and kind and loving. Not so, in so many other places.

Old Yeller

Naomi is in a daycare that I really like. The facility is not too big, not corporate, nice setting, secular, calm, kind, good teacher to kid ratio, etc. Recently she moved up into the slightly bigger tiny kid class (she's almost two!), and now has two new teachers. They also seem kind and caring. Here's the sticking point: one of them is a yeller. She speaks in a normal-to-loud voice to me, but when she addresses the kids, it is all yelling all the time. I don't mean to say that she is mean (when I am there), I just mean to say that she is LOUD. Given that the classroom is propotionately small, even with a busy play buzz going on, you would only have to raise your voice just a bit to be heard at the other end. But when she is right in front of us, when we arrive in the morning, she says hello to me, and then she shouts HELLO to Naomi (who occasionally cowers back into my leg).

Naomi is at an age where she is just starting to understand the concept of rules. She says them back to us all the time, even things we said three weeks ago, sort of off the cuff, that normally we wouldn't think we would need to make an actual rule around ("We don't lick the couch. The couch is not for licking."). This is exciting in a way, because it feels like she recognizes the need to think about her behavior and what effect it will have. It's a little bit discomfiting as well, though, because it shows us how often we are decreeing, and about what ludicrous household minutiae. Yikes. Because it seems like she is starting to sort out her response to authority and internalizing some of it, and also simply because my gut tells me that a loud and shouty environment is perhaps not the ideal one for any kid to spend long hours in, I am uncomfortable with the fact that her authority figure and primary caregiver in the daytime hours displays the "American talking to a foreigner" behavior each and every day.

Which leads me to a fork in the road. Do I accept it's not that big of a deal, and just concentrate on teaching Naomi the difference between an inside voice and an outside voice on my own time, hoping for no hearing damage while she's in this class for the next six months? Or do I say something? If I say something, whom do I say it to? It would take a lot of courage to say something directly to the teacher herself. The alternative is to say something to the administrator (although I believe the owner is off having a baby this week). But unless I convince the person I talk to about this not to mention my name in connection with the feedback, that would mean the teacher knows who the feedback is coming from. My fear, of course, is that she might then see Naomi differently from the rest of the kids, or treat her differently than she did before she found out my opinion of her pipes.

I have read other daycare dilemmas on message boards, and I remember some angry retorts from caregivers who claim that they would never, ever treat a child any differently because of something a parent said or did. I want to believe that. But I know how people are. If you feel resentment, which a person might if they were told that they have a big giant mouth, you tend to let it out somehow.

Now I am flashing back to Crucial Conversations, a book I had to read back when I was in the lowest rungs of management (rungs I let go of, dropping gracefully back where I started). The authors talked about a common mistake people make, which is assuming what I seem to remember them calling "the sucker's choice." This makes it hard for people to deal with a situation because they think there are only two choices- in my case, say nothing, or say something and risk alienating the person who takes care of my kid. But maybe there is a third way? Maybe I can tell the teacher that Naomi has been shouting more at home (which she has a bit), and that we don't shout at home (we really don't, barring the occasional call to another room), and that I was thinking perhaps it was due to the fact that there are so many boys in her class (in Naomi's new class, girls are outnumbered five to one. This is a good ratio to get used to if she ever decides to follow in her mom's footsteps and get a job at a software company...). See how I assume the mantle of sexism and take the teacher out of it completely? I could ask if she would mind just practicing quiet, inside voices with them a few times a day, and see if Naomi adds this to her list of a thousand rules. Could this work?

I can't resist adding here that Naomi has made a verb of the word "loud" and has created a rule out of it, a simple one - "No louding." Ha! Maybe if that rule has already taken hold, we really don't have anything to worry about. No amount of shrilling and louding from Ms. Yelly will shake it loose!

Your Personal Penguin

Although Naomi very much likes both the book and the song (shout-out to gift bestowers C & B!), and although I admit to being surprised by how much better the song is than I suspected it was going to be, and although I am glad to know that Davey Jones is still getting work, still I
can't help wondering if it was a mistake to download "Your Personal Penguin." All day long I have been singing it to myself in my office (with my door closed, yes). I am about at the end of my rope. "Lots of other penguins seem to do fine in a universe of nothing by ice. But if I could
be yours and you could be mine, our cozy little world could be twice as nice."

We are finally emerging from our universe of nothing but ice. For the past week, the weather in Bellevue rather resembled...the weather in Minnesota. At least the weather we remember- who knows what it's doing this year. Last Wednesday afternoon, the work hallway buzz was that it was starting to snow, and that people were having trouble getting up the ramp out of our subterranean parking garage. I decided to join the herd and get on the road. I left at 4:30 to a traffic jam in our own little parking lot (and a beautiful, fluffy snowfall). I had to wait ten
minutes to get out of my parking space. Traffic is a strangely big deal here, and is rabidly tracked and reported on. But normal traffic is meaningless as compared to what happens when any sort of precipitation other than our normal warm rain enters the picture. People here simply do not do winter driving. Collectively, we lose our nerve. In our defense, of course, we can cite the hilly terrain. When I finally got out of the parking lot and around the corner onto the main road, going up the long, steep, impressively iced-up hill to the freeway at a slow crawl was a little nerve wracking, especially as we had to snake around cars with tires making that futile RRRRRrrreeeeeeeee sound, and other cars that had been outright abandoned. (Abandoning one's car is a common response to winter driving conditions here.)

The freeway was easier to navigate, but when I got back off, things were similarly nuts. On a stretch of road that normally takes me four minutes to drive through, I sat behind a burgundy Ford Explorer, stopped sometimes as long as five minutes before we would creep forward another ten feet. The Explorer had a DVD playing, and at first I thought it was "Air Bud," because I don't know of any other movie that has a cute yellow lab as the main character. Then of course there was scene after scene of lots of cutie cute yellow lab puppies running around. I have never seen "Air Bud," but I know it has something to do with basketball, and there didn't seem to be any sports in this puppy-centered film. Was it the yellow lab version of 101 Dalmations? You can have that one for nothing, Disney. I could tell who the bad guys were, because, just like in the dalmation movie, they were always sitting in some kind of van. The puppies somehow found the last functioning drive-in movie theater in the country and for reasons unclear to me, invaded the snack bar. A woman ordered a large popcorn and a moment later a cutie cute yellow lab puppy burst out of it. What a mess! But, cute! All the while, George Bush addressed those of us with the radio on about his brilliant plan to fix a much messier and much less adorable popcorn spill far, far away. That's when I started to regret that I couldn't actually hear the 101 Yellow Labs movie.

Normally, if I leave work at 4:30, I can pick up Naomi at her daycare and still be home shortly after 5:00. On Wednesday I didn't get to her daycare until 6:15. There were only a few kids left, and two teachers, and Naomi's biggest concern was that she had just received some snack food, and surely I wasn't going to make her leave it there! I stopped for gas, milk, string cheese, and cheezits (the selection of nourishing food at this quikstop was about what you would expect). We sat in traffic, munching our snack food and drinking our milk, singing songs, and talking about snow. There is a strip mall near our house with a big empty K-Mart (classy, I know), and as we drove past the vast snowy parking lot, a Subaru wagon with the windows rolled down was doing harcore doughnuts. It looked like fun, but I felt like Naomi and I had about reached our winter excitement peak. Parenthood can really wreck some of your thrill seeking instinct. We got home at 7:30.

Nothing can make this already long story short, but to bring it to a close, I will report that both Thursday and Friday were "snow days," meaning that Naomi's daycare was closed. Jim and I both went to work for a half day on Friday, passing the all-wheel drive Audi baton. The snow
stayed all weekend, bolstered by a troop surge on Tuesday, resulting in another snow day. Now, finally, the temperatures are rising out of the low thirties, the snow is disappearing in the way that it normally does in the first four hours after it falls in these parts, and we are weirdly looking forward to an actual 5-day work week... barring unforeseen circumstances, of course. To the other parts of the country (and now Europe) who are having similar run-ins with this big bad winter, we stand with you. That's the real reason we abandoned our cars.

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.