mamapants

I have to be honest: one of the main reasons I'm posting right now instead of snoring on the couch with my mouth open and half a can of Diet Coke dangling from my fingers is because I was sick of looking at myself walking through Springfield. Was it just my computer, or every time the page loads, was I briefly replaced by an all-white Homer Simpson? I am so not Homerish, thankewverymuch, ergo, new post! Booya!

So things have been nuts, as usual. The photos from all these weddings have been steadily getting better, or maybe it's me that steadily getting better - every single one has been, if nothing else, a learning experience. And I haven't had a really bad day yet - no bridezillas, no psychomoms, no major injuries.*

* Okay, that's a lie. I did a wedding here that involved me climbing a fire escape and shooting down from a penthouse roof. The shooting part went fine, and the pictures were fairly cool. Witness this, a lucky one of which I am undeservedly proud, since it was just a question of timing the downstairs lights:

My luck ran out on the way back down the fire escape, when my heel caught in the grate and I fell down the last few steps. Would have been fine, except that my precious little open-toed shoes (with reasonably low, sensible heels - I'm not stupid, just klutzy) sliced across the top of every single one of my toes. My feet looked like hamburger for two weeks.

But overall, seriously, every event has been great. I've got one more this weekend and then I'm off for a few weeks, so I'll have time to get those books done and breathe a little before the fall schedule starts. God, I love this job.

On the home front, last night Norah informed me that she would not be sleeping in her crib anymore. This isn't such a big deal logistically, as my childhood bed is already in her room and we had planned to move her into it eventually. However, every time we suggested even taking a short nap in the Big Girl Bed - even yesterday afternoon, for heaven's sake - the souls of dead weasels took over her body and we were beaten with our own limbs. So to hear her say, "Mama, I sleeping in that bed now please? Now I will do it?" and watch her climb up and flop down right in the middle, and then MIRACLE OF MIRACLES watch her teeny little eyes close like she was sedated... that was some kind of jawdropper. Today I took her to LnT and let her pick out her own sheets - after talking her out of the ones with the NC State Wolf on them ("he wearing a sweater! dog is wearing a sweater! that's so funny! I have it please PLEASE!") we ended up with pink polka dots. Oh well, she's happy, I'm happy.

I wanted to bitch a little bit today, because things haven't all been sunshine and daisies. A couple of weeks ago, I miscarried at about seven weeks pregnant. I didn't mention it, and I wasn't going to, because a) it sucked and I don't want to talk about it anymore, and b) I'm actually dealing with it fairly well, and c) I didn't want you, internet, to feel like you had to come up with something to say. It was a fairly horrific experience - aside from the physical issues, the complete loss of control was the worst, knowing that every second my body was expelling something or other that really ought to stay in, and there was nothing I could do to stop the process. The aftermath was more of an irritation than a grief process - haven't I been through enough, haven't I had enough to deal with, without adding in two weeks of this symptom or that one? It's over now, and I'm getting back to normal (okay, smarties, as normal as I ever was) so don't worry. I'm okay.

I'm finding it hard to bitch, though. After writing all that out up there - photos, jobs, Norah and her infinite ability to make me say "aww" - I felt like maybe it wasn't a bitching day after all. I'm better than I was two weeks ago, which is enough to brighten me up considerably. I'm lucky. And I'm happy.

Nonos is asleep right now, finally taking that nap completely of her own accord, so God knows I should be doing something... work, or laundry, or eating jellybeans, or something... hmm...

Posted in: babychatter, emotional, Me Me Me, Norah, work on 8/28/2007 at at 12:40 PM 3 comments  

I got another migraine today, the second one in a week. Usually I only get them once every few months - I start seeing these shimmery little rainbows in a circle that gets wider over about a half an hour, and then all of a sudden they're gone... and then I become conscious two hours later, curled into the fetal position on the living room rug, massaging my own temples, and moaning like a sorority girl with her head in the toilet. This isn't THAT bad when it's once every few months. Kind of like an appointment with the Lady Doctor, or Christmas shopping. You just have to go through it, so suck it up.

This time, though, I was more than a little freaked out. For one thing, I was babysitting at the time, and I was more than a little reluctant to assume the position while I'm supervising other people's kids. Were it just me and my Nonos, of course, I'd hit the floor before you could say "child protective services." She's cool, she'd just play with her Teetos* or possibly her burfeeler* and occasionally that screwdriver she uses to clean her ears. It's all good.

* Teetos = potatoes = Mr. Potatohead and the Spud Buds, a Motownesque assortment of vegetables with rearrangeable parts. The carrot I can go for, but the corn, whose arms hold a cell phone and several dollar bills, is just too weird. Why does plastic corn need a phone and cash? Is he dealing butter and salt?

** burfeeler = bird feeder. We have two, and for some reason, Norah won't let me hang the smaller one back up. Rather, she drags it around the house and uses it as a purse, filling it with whatever flotsam she finds on her route. Yesterday that included my car keys, a plastic spork, and, in a moment of Nonos clarity, a fake bluejay from a centerpiece we used at an old office o' mine.

Anyway. So I had kids plural, and because I was all responsible and stuff, I gulped down several Motrin and hoped for the best. While I was waiting for the shimmers to go away, though, I had plenty of time to consider the other person who used to get a lot of migraines in quick succession: my grandmother. My grandmother who died of a brain hemorrhage.

It's funny how you can get the sniffles and they'll turn into ebola by the time you find the kleenex. I'm sure it was just another migraine, possibly brought on by the bright hot sun, or maybe because I was really tired from staying up to watch Lost last night (which, to digress slightly, was SO SAD OH MY GOODNESS that thing with Sun!). But I've been thinking about my grandmother a lot lately, and so my migraine blossomed into an ugly tumor of panic by the time the rainbows disappeared. And they did disappear, and the Motrin jumped in front of the pain and kept me from hitting the floor, and everyone was fine. Everyone but my inner voice, who cried because she thought she was done grieving, and instead had her heart pulled by a bad headache.

(i just tagged a bunch of old posts, and rereading a lot of them made me sad and all focused on the dreadful things I thought about earlier. Happy things tomorrow, I promise. Or maybe even in a little while - Rob's working and I'm waiting up, and so I've got far too much time on my hands. I'm on my third episode of SVU - and this one has the PRECIOUS Abigail Breslin! Who knew!?)

Posted in: babychatter, emotional, Me Me Me on 4/26/2007 at at 7:24 PM 1 comments  

There are a lot of angles to cover in the Virginia Tech story. There's the grief, the empathy, the fear for my kid in a world where this happens, the gun control issue. There's the horror of the cell phone videos floating around the internet, in which kids filmed people running and screaming for their lives. There's the fact that I couldn't sleep last night because I kept imagining how it might have been to sit in a classroom and wait to die while you watched the other students get shot.

What's really getting me, though, is the uproar about the "lack of communication and warning." Students and others are upset because they think that the university dropped the ball, and that they didn't warn people in time for evacuation.

I understand that grief is an ugly and irrational emotion, and that people feeling grief need someone to blame. In July, I blamed God; in October, I blamed doctors who didn't catch a blood clot they wouldn't have looked for anyway. You have to have a target for the finger-pointing, or the inability to point will kill you from the inside.

I'm watching web feeds of the Today Show (WHY? Why can't I just stop watching this show, because it makes me angry every single time I see it) and Matt Lauer is verbally smacking the president for that "communication breakdown," and questioning him mercilessly about the email that went out after the dorm shooting. The president is fighting to explain that they first thought it was a murder-suicide, that they needed time to investigate, that if they had immediately locked down the dorm, they might have locked the shooter inside with 800 other kids in their rooms. In his way, I'm sure Matt Lauer is looking for his own scapegoat (I'm going to skip the rant about the shit-stirring, muckraking media, even though in some way I'm sure it applies) and he hurts as much as the rest of us.

But goddamn, Matt, leave that poor man alone.

I worked at two very different universities, in various levels of their respective hierarchies, and I can tell you without a doubt that they had one thing in common: they geniunely gave a damn about their schools, and the students and faculty and staff inside them. Whatever students and alumni might think about their moneygrubbing, their sharklike drive to be first in fundraising, participation, whatever, their first and main goal was to enrich life for the students - the people in general - who walked through their gates. No president would have deliberately or otherwise allowed a breakdown like the one that people are alleging occurred at VT. If there had been a way to protect the VT community, IT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.

I don't believe that this is "another Columbine," like everyone is saying. Columbine was a high school, where two boys with two very horrific mentalities did something awful. This shooter was not another Dylan or Eric - yes, he was young, and yes, he was obviously mentally disturbed in some way, but there is a world of difference between 16 and 19 or 20. This, in my opinion, is another 9/11. The first plane hit the tower and everyone looked up and said, "What the hell was that?" No one knew to leave the second building because no one knew what happened to the first one. At VT, no one knew to evacuate or lockdown because no one knew what happened in the first place. And we didn't blame the management company of the Twin Towers when the second one fell - just as we shouldn't blame the administration at VT for not knowing, just as I shouldn't have blamed the doctors who didn't find the clot that killed my grandmother. Who would have looked for those things? Who would have known anything other than the rest of us?

To the Tech community, I say that my heart and my mind are with you today. I think about what happened and it gives me goosebumps, and I can't imagine being part of something as monumental as that. But place your blame on the guy with the gun, and believe in a president and a school that wanted the best for you. I'm sure the shooter had some issues, and I'm sure as time goes on that we'll discover an abused childhood or an inability to adapt to college life or whatever. But he held the gun and he did the shooting, and we all had to look around and say, "What the hell was that?" Blame him, and grieve with your school and its administration - whatever trouble you had with the registrar, however much the food sucks, however many annual fund solicitations you get in a year, grieve together. They're as broken as you are.

To Matt Lauer, I say only this: let the president grieve too. His school suffered a loss, and as such, so did he. Yes, he gets paid a huge salary, yes he gets to wear nice suits and drive a shiny car, but he could do that at Smith Barney or Disney or Dell, too. He chose that school and he loved it, and his heart broke yesterday, too.

Posted in: current events, emotional on 4/17/2007 at at 7:26 AM 3 comments  

I'm not a bad person, or at least I like to think I'm not. I try to be kind to everyone, even the jerks who cut in front of me (and my two wiggling kids, thankyouverymuch) at the post office. I give freely to charity, and buy books for the children's hospital drive at Barnes & Noble, and always ALWAYS hand a dollar to the panhandler who hangs out on exit 274.

I don't believe in organized religion, though. And this is the sticking point for my mother-in-law, who has up to now remained relatively silent about that. I've been involved with her son for eight-plus years now, and we've managed to dance neatly around the fact that she's a devout Roman Catholic and I'm... well, I like to sleep in on Sunday mornings, and I feel like God understands.

Yesterday a box arrived on our porch. It wasn't too big, which I understood - we're going to the in-laws' house in January, so we're just having a belated Christmas then. I brought it in, set it down, opened it up, and found several presents. WOOHOO! I thought, because I am an optimist and things wrapped in shiny paper make me instantly happier.

The top presents were labeled Norah, and they were tucked in with an envelope with my name on it, which I set aside for later. Norah and I gleefully had at the paper on her presents; the first one was an entire wardrobe of holiday apparel, which we will be sewing together into slightly larger apparel next year because there is NO WAY she'll be able to wear it all this year. The other one was a Veggie Tales CD with her name programmed into it - while I don't want to bash the Veggie Tales outright, because I'm sure their brand of music is well-loved by some people, I just have to admit right now that IF I HAVE TO LISTEN TO THAT AGAIN, I WILL DRILL HOLES IN MY FOREHEAD TO LET THE SOUND OF THOSE VOICES OUT.

The other presents were for Rob, who was working. I gritted my teeth and didn't open them, even though I was itching to see what he'd scored... and then he called! And said I could open everything! And things got freaky. His first present was a double picture frame, with a photo of him and Norah on one side, and a poem on the other side. Fine. Okay. Maybe it wasn't our style, but whatever.

The other thing was a book called "Will You Bless Me?" and it's basically a manual on teaching your child about God and what blessing means, and raising your kid properly in God's image and stuff, I went numb after the first few pages. In case you don't know how to be good to your kid and you need a badly-drawn children's book to help you, jump on over to its website, where you too can feel inadequate, pathetic, and offended. Also, it's a book about a child and her daddy, with no appearances made by her mother.

Oh, and my envelope? It held a prayer card. Granted, it was something about having Christmas with Jesus, and I'm sure it was supposed to refer to my grandparents, but it was still a prayer card.

My dilemma is this, guys: am I wrong to feel hurt by this? I have two reasons: one, it's clearly a box designed for Her Son and His Daughter, and Oh Yeah Annie Too I Guess. Two, the whole religious thing... what is up with this? She knows, she has known for YEARS that we don't plan to raise the kid Catholic, or in any specific faith for that matter. Is this her ever-so-subtle way of telling us that it's no longer cute or funny, and we'd better get it together and come to Jesus? I'm confused, I'm hurt, and I'm irritated by her refusal to allow us to be non-sectarian, and I feel like this is a bad thing. Am I being a bad person?

My holiday spirit has excused itself to go throw up and hide in the linen closet.

Posted in: emotional, Me Me Me on 12/14/2006 at at 9:59 PM 5 comments  

And when it raineth, boys and girls, it poureth.

Astrid the hound has a torn cranial cruciate ligament, the dog version of the ACL. This little problem is only really fixable with surgery, and since she weighs more than 50 pounds, she's not eligible for the little fix, a $1300 band around her femur/tibia area that'll keep her bones from grinding into doggy-bone dust. Noo, MY dog, my elephantine dog, is only eligible for the super grande mother of all dog leg surgeries, the Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy. I feel like there should be a row of identically-dressed, tights-wearing midgets with bugles, bugling out a tibial leveling fanfare, because YA-DA-DA-DAAAAA! this particular surgery is going to cost more than $3000.

I talked to the vet at great length (after I finished sobbing uncontrollably) about what happens if we don't get the surgery, and whether or not I was a horrible person for not selling parts of my liver on the black market to pay for it. She said that several weeks of almost complete rest, combined with painkillers, should ease Astrid back to a semblance of herself; however, not doing the surgery will pretty much guarantee some vicious arthritis in a few years, which will lead to daily painkillers for the rest of her life. It's manageable, but her hiking days are over, so to speak.

I have never felt the guilt I felt when I heard that number and thought, "Weeping Jesus, we don't have that! No one I know has that! Surgery is out!" How could I sit there and put a price on what I'm willing to do for the one creature on the planet who has never asked me for anything? How can I say, "Oh, sorry, Toots, you're just going to have to be cripped up for life, and it's because I have nothing to sell, nothing to pawn, no way to get the money for you. You, who would jump in front of a team of rabid hyenas to save my baby."

I can't afford it, and we're just going to have to learn how to make her days as easy as possible. That's all there is to it. What a complete butthole of a day.

Posted in: emotional, wonder puppy on 11/10/2006 at at 9:48 PM 7 comments  

I made chili for dinner today (because maybe no one cares what I had for lunch, but EVERYONE wants to know what was on for dinner, you know you do). It felt like the right time: cold all day, slightly windy, dead leaves competely filling our slowly molding jack o'lantern. It's fall, baby, let the spicy soup-like foods commence.

My first paying shoot is tomorrow. I have model release forms, invoices, fake home-printed business cards because the fancy-schmancies haven't arrived yet... Prop flowers, a new tripod to replace the old crippledy one, a box of alligator clips... An umbrella. My equipment. The only thing I have to find, polish up, and store away is my nerve.

This is kind of silly, I guess, but I talked to my grandmother about it today. She was a brave old broad, and it made me feel better to sit and look at her picture on my wall, and tell her about tomorrow, and being a big girl (read: non-babysitter) with a big girl job (read: non-babysitting). We had a long conversation a few days before she died, actually, about how excited I was about just the possibility of doing this, and in her thick Norwegian accent she told me to "go for it, lovey, because you simply MUST be what you believe you should be."

Well, here I am... and here I go. Talk to the cosmos for me if you get a minute, all right? This is going to be one big day.

Posted in: emotional, work on 11/03/2006 at at 8:52 PM 2 comments  

... I'm coming to see you on Monday.

The lovely and talented Adrienne called me tonight, and in the course of our conversation I agreed to come up next week, ostensibly to see her and to bring the baby to see her, but let's not lie to ourselves. There is one reason and one reason alone why I'm coming up there, and you can say it with me now: Don Pablo's margaritas. All this behaving-in-public, sitting-nicely-in-one's-highchair stuff I've been teaching the baby? JUST SO I CAN GET LIT WITH MY OLD PAL.

Those of you who are in Baltimore, if you have time to hang out, please do email me or call me or something. I'll have some serious free time on Tuesday, as my hostess with the mostes' will have to go to work, in order to support me in the manner to which I shall become accustomed. And that means tequila in the morning and tequila at night. Talk about a healing experience.

The thing last weekend was as good as could be expected, but I don't especially want to talk about it right now. I miss her, every single second. That's all there is to it, really.

Posted in: emotional, out and about on 10/12/2006 at at 7:31 PM 2 comments  

This is just a short little stupid post to tell you that I won't be posting for a little bit. My grandmother (the one who was married to my grandfather who just JUST died) had a massive hemorrhagic stroke last week and she's dying. She asked us a long time ago to go ahead and pull the plug if she was going to be a vegetable, and it looks like my mother is going to have to sign a paper asking the hospital to do that tomorrow. My mother has to end her mother's life, and I feel like the whole world is flipping.

I love you guys, I do. I just can't be here right now. I don't even know if I can get out of bed tomorrow morning.

Posted in: emotional on 10/01/2006 at at 6:11 PM 2 comments  

What I Did On My Weekend Vacation, by Annie. I wish it were fun, kids, but it was just plain hard: I launched my dad and my uncle, in a canoe, into the middle of a lake in western NC. And when they got to the middle of the lake, where it was so deep and dark that you couldn't see the bottom, they lowered my grandfather's urn into it and watched him disappear.

The urn itself was a magical, biodegradable creation specifically designed for burials at sea. (It came in a box labeled "for burials at sea," so that's how you know I'm not making it up.) Choosing one was rough, as there are a number of options in the biodegradable urn market, ranging in attractiveness from "faux marble stereotypical urn shape" to "bulldog's ass." I'm serious, if you're ever looking into this sort of thing - and I so hope you don't have to anytime soon - you'll just hurl. Neon orange seashell shapes! Glitter and glitz! You can go completely nuts, har har har! Apparently, funeral supply companies have a wicked sense of humor... or death of a loved one makes some people completely blind. (By the way, you'll be sorry to hear that we went with the lame-o plain white one, instead of the one with embossed grapevines... for the wino in your life!)

We decided we would have breakfast at the lake, which in my family does not mean a box of Entenmann's and a gallon of OJ. Six AM, we were making quiches and baking bread. Eight AM, breakfast was loaded into the car and we went. Eight-thirty AM, mid-unloading, my sister and I discover the box - which we had never seen - behind the mushroom and spinach. Eight-forty-five, we're still staring at "for burials at sea," which is printed in an outlandishly cartoonish font (because that makes it more fun!), and my mom has to come get it because we can't seem to move.

The dropping (lowering? what word does one use when describing this?) of the urn was surprisingly peaceful; it went below the surface and started to dissolve almost right away. For a horrible, chilling moment, I thought, "Hey, just like an Alka-Seltzer!" which made me cry. I was so tired, and so emotionally shot, and there I was cracking wise in my head about my grandfather's urn. It's obviously my defense mechanism, but oh, the guilt.

So we did the right thing, and it's over and done. Off you go, Bestefar.* Bon voyage.

* Norwegian for grandfather. Like you didn't know.

Moving on... I'm down to two kids, one of whom is my own and therefore way WAY more fun than the other. I've got the preschooler for a few hours a day, three days a week, but it doesn't really count since it's during naptime and they're all sleeping. Can you imagine? At least an hour wherein I get to diddle around on the internet, or read a book that doesn't involve singing what a sheep says, or just sit and stare at the wall imagining that it's actually a Tahitian sunset! "Stoked" does not do this justice.

And behold, the other wonder of my world: new, beautiful hardwood floors in my messy, cluttered kitchen. Thanks to a friend of a friend, we got free (!!!) wood and an extensive installation lesson. The miracle Rob hath wrought! Life, she's good after all.

(And if you look really closely, you can see Norah's hot hot HOT pink life jacket, which she wore when we went tubing down the Davidson River, on the steps. The river was about three inches deep, so don't panic - I think I can spit faster than it flowed. She thought it was some kind of wild ride, though, so it was super good all around.)

Posted in: emotional, out and about on 8/28/2006 at at 6:55 PM 1 comments  

Norah has a copy of the Jerry Garcia/David Grisman Not for Kids Only CD, and I can't get that darn "Arkansas Traveler" song out of my head. To all my pregnant friends out there: it's a cute CD, but be ready for obsession on a level with "It's a Small World" and "Tubthumping." Or maybe that last one's just me.

ANYWAY. Hello! Indiana was rosy, as only Indiana can be - I picked up a pile of my old kid stuff and was pleasantly transported down memory lane. Several old yearbooks and prom photos rose to the top of the flotsam, making me wonder how my hair stayed like that (god save our noble Aqua Net) and how I ever managed to find a date in high school. You should see the dating pool - shallow is just not the word. Yikes.

We're back, at least for the moment, until Norah runs (!!!yes runs my lord how that child can run!!!) off somewhere else. We'll actually be here for the next couple of weeks, until vacay in western NC, which will end with the spreading of my grandfather's ashes. The original plan was to take him to an island somewhere, but my grandma got a little skeeved about how much that would cost (understandably - it would have been like buying a new car to take us all down there) and so we're headed to their mountain house. He's going into the lake behind it, where we used to fish out golf balls and sell them to him for a nickel apiece. I still have one - I can't decide if I should keep it or send it with him, sort of an Egyptian pack-for-the-afterlife kind of thing.

Congratulations to a certain friend of mine who has found herself In the Family Way - welcome to the club, and prepare yourself... Norah ate 4000 grapes and a turkey sandwich today before screaming "Crickets! CREEEE-KITS!" (what that meant I have no idea, because there were no crickets to be found and as far as I know she's never been within 15 feet of one, but did we scream it oh yes we did!) and running off into the other room. She's also learned how to turn on the hose, activate the trash compactor, and take her clothes off, which she does with reckless abandon and no thought about where she is or what law enforcement officials might be nearby to remove this naked child from my possession. She's a lunatic, Anne, and you are destined to have your own little lunatic, because you lived with me and my lunatic child-vibe has almost certainly rubbed off onto you at some point.

And how you will love it! Enjoy, sunshine.

Posted in: emotional, Norah, secret messages on 8/10/2006 at at 8:45 PM 1 comments