Julia

Several Things

I. The new Maybelline Skyhigh waterproof mascara is rather good. A tendency towards clumpiness, yes, but if you are in the market for a cheap mascara that will keep you looking like Miss Pretty Sparkle Star Eyes during a photo shoot atop Mt. Washington I can recommend it. I picked some up when I decided to give my lashes a break from tinting and I am subsequently walking around a la Man Ray .

2. Dish soap will remove grease stains from clothing. Rub a grease-cutting dish detergent into the spot(s) and launder as per usual. I cannot swear that this will work with Mobil products but I can attest to its efficacy when dealing with the tastier oils: peanut olive sesame et cetera.

3. Your comments on giftedness (there, I said it): whoa. hey. wow. I have to admit that I am more up in the air than I was before I asked for your opinion. I read each comment and thought, hmmm, yes, well, THAT certainly makes sense, what a relief to know exactly what we should do with Patrick. The problem being that you all pretty much said something diametrically opposed to one another (a many-sided star of assistance) so I came to dozens of different, no doubt entirely correct conclusions. Individually you were helpful; collectively you are insane.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha.

Yeah.

The feeling right now is that we will just worry about this next year. Probably have him tested as we look at schools and try to figure out which one is best for him, although maybe not. I would like to put him somewhere that provides the widest variety of areas to study with the most flexible approach, if that makes sense. Tonight he looked at the grain of the dining room table and pointing to a rather nice bit of the cherry wood, said, "This looks like a stormy sea. And here are the clouds blowing in." I thought this was impressively lyrical and rather creative of him, seeing as how we don't experience many stormy seascapes here in Minnesota. Patrick the addition fiend I know, Patrick the poet is a new one. Anyway, it will all keep for a while. He's not going anywhere.

4. On a related note, I had a funny moment with Steve over this whole question of testing and schooling. I was relating a few of your comments to him and Steve said, "I skipped second grade, you know." I stared at him. Because, yes, I did know that but somehow one fails to internalize other people's trivia, even when you love them madly and devotedly and are twins souls and all that. And perhaps he could have re-volunteered this information sooner?

So I asked him, "Well, were you tested?"

"I think so."

"And were you deemed gifted?"

"I guess so."

"And.....? How was it? Did you mind being bumped up a class? Were you ostracized by your peers?"

"I don't actually remember."

"Did you struggle to make friends? Were you bored in first grade? Is that why they had you skip?"

"Uh...."

"Do you remember anything about your childhood whatsoever?"

"Ummmmmm, I liked hot dogs."

"Anything useful?"

"No."   

So there you have it. It is possible that Patrick will have no recollection of any of it, no matter what we do.

5. I received a FedEx from Peru this morning. The side of the package bears an official looking sticker that reads: "FedEx Express ACTUAL & DIM". Please explain this sticker to me.

6. I had my hair straightened last week. STRAIGHTENED like PERMED, only not. It is without question the coolest thing I have ever done to my head. My hair promptly waved back up a bit but I no longer have a thicket of curls below my ears pushing the straighter top hair out in a triangulating fashion. Six thumbs up.

7. Steve had ankle surgery on Tuesday and I am a complete mess. He hobbles around looking waxy and tripping me with those damned crutches. He is unable to make himself a sandwich, drive the car, refill the bird feeders, put Patrick to bed or have sex. Tonight he tried to get himself some milk and shattered the glass into six billion pieces all over the kitchen floor (note to the internet: 4 hands are needed to perform this task on crutches. duh.) I have always considered myself to be a divinely patient person (I can count on one foot the number of times I have raised my voice in annoyance with Patrick) but it turns out that I am not all that patient. Actually I am kind of a bitch. While I hauled out the broom and the vacuum cleaner, Steve stood there surrounded by oceans of broken glass and said that he still wanted some milk. I told him he should have thought of that before he broke the goddamned glass. And I said it all mean, too.

Hope you are well. My mother and brother are coming tomorrow for the weekend and I need to get some work done if I am going to be able to pretend that my bathrooms are always clean.   

How Do You Take A Cloud And Pin It Down

Patrick did a word problem today. He asked how many people would be at the birthday party and I said that all of the kids in his class would be there. He then asked if they would all bring their mommies and I said, yes, I thought they would. So he drank a little juice and looked at the ceiling and said, "So there will be twenty people at the party."

I made that little face I make when he says something particularly clever but I don't want to cover him in gush or anything and I said um-hmm, yes.

Which must not have been what he was looking for because he then explained his reasoning to me using a funny growly voice that I wish I could reproduce in some font but I cannot, "There are ten kids in my class and if they each brought a mommy that would be ten mommies and ten plus ten equals twenty."

I said, "Yes yes yes you are very smart and funny and nice. Now keep your spoon upright so both the Cheerios and the milk make it into your mouth together."

He said, "You can't add Cheerios to milk, Mommy. One Cheerios plus one milk does not equal anything."

"It equals breakfast," I said, all chirpy, like an ass.

"One plus one equals two so it would equal two breakfasts. If it did. Which it doesn't."   

OK then. I love being patronized by someone who is three feet four inches high and requires me to brush his teeth. Love it.

When I picked Patrick up from school on Tuesday they were all abuzz with the sensational news that Patrick is reading. Apparently he commandeered story time and read the book. His teacher asked me how long he had been reading at this level and described most of the things I have already told you about, like sounding out things he does not recognize and making mistakes based on skipping ahead in the sentence. She said that she has never had a child in a three year old class read with his apparent mastery and she reminded me that he is the youngest in the class. She suggested we get him tested. Tested for smartness. I cannot even write the word she used because it makes me feel all crawly and braggy and awful. But you get the idea.

Uh, huh.

I guess I wonder why we would do that. This is actually a legitimate question, because I really do not know. Suppose Patrick is smarter than your average bear. So what? Will school be a nightmare for him? Will it be a nightmare for us? Will quantifying this smartitude help him somehow?

Yesterday Patrick told me that he had created an octahedron out of a shape game my mother got him for Christmas (different than the last shape game I mentioned. two in total. Nana went shape crazy this holiday season. this is why Patrick loves his Nana ferociously) and I looked over and, sure enough, it WAS an octahedron. And I thought, fuck, maybe traditional kindergarten will be so boring for him that it will make him want to inhale paste until he passes out. I don't know. I know I make him seem like this miniature brilliant mind freaky freak when I write about him but he is not, really. If you could have seen him today at the party, getting down to the soul stylings of Aretha with all the other kids dancing and throwing balloons you could see how normal is. 

The only thing I am certain about is that we are putting him in this same preschool again next year. They go three mornings a week as four year olds and there is a field trip every month. This year the fours went bowling in November. Any school that will take a dozen four year olds bowling wins my life-long allegiance.

But after that I don't know. Should we get him tested? Does it matter?

I neglected to think this far ahead and now I feel like I am completely out of my parental league. 

In You Go

Karen (of the gorgeous blog Chookooloonks) has started an online magazine called Indigo Leaf which launched its premier issue today. Karen started Indigo Leaf to provide unpublished writers with opportunities to showcase their work, so if you lean that way I encourage you to think about submitting something. I also encourage you to check out the first issue, hot off the pixels, particularly if you want to see what I can do in fiction with roughly 3 hours and 1700 judiciously spaced words (note the adjectives "light" and "sweet" have already been used to describe this, my master work. all we need is "frothy" and I will have written a meringue.)

Yes! I pimp. I pimp for myself and I pimp for those whom I admire. It is what I do: pimp, front, mack, you name it. Do you know what just occurred to me? I think if you told anybody I went to high school with that I had ended up in prison they would all believe you. None of this, "Well, we were shocked, frankly. We would never have thought it of her." It would be all compressed lips and arched eyebrows and understanding nods. Although I would never have gone in for pimping, largely because I doubt my ability to convince anyone to go have sex with a stranger in exchange for money while I read Wharton in the car, and then come back give me most of the money. I am just not that convincing.

Pre-Empted

I am forced to cut this entry short (I know! and I haven't even started it yet) by an emergency Bribe Fulfillment Expedition.

Today we were talking about what was going to happen this week and I told Patrick that he was going to a birthday party on Saturday.

"And when it is MY birthday," he replied, "I can get one of those little painted striped letters that we saw in the store yesterday." "Yesterday", incidentally, is Patrick's word for anything that is before right. now. and in this case it means "last week". "The store" was Creative Kidstuff where we had gone to get a birthday present for the birthday party. "Those painted striped letters" were those little painted striped letters that I think are supposed to be wall decorations and I'll bet 99.999% of the children who get them use them to spell their names. Patrick coveted them mightily. Yea verily.

So he sat there looking wistful and appealing with his birthday a good six months away and I had one of those weird parental moments in which you forget to think first.

"Well, yes, you might get one for your birthday. Or I will tell you what, if you poop in the potty I will buy you on of those letters."

Huh? Why did I do that? Why? *I* don't care about his toilet habits. He can use diapers forever as far as I am concerned. And yet there I was, BRIBING him with his alphahabit. For shame.

Patrick instantly swung into negotiations. What if he did it twice? Would there be two letters forthcoming? Would they be the 'A' and the 'B'?

Um, I guess so, I said, wondering how I was going to explain this situation to Steve after I had chastised him the other day for offering Patrick a look through the binoculars in exchange for eating two more shrimp. The two things have NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER, I tsk'd. What sort of message are you sending the child about food, I tutted. And yet, here I was.

Patrick got me to sign a contact promising twenty-six letters in exchange for... well... you know... and then he stood up and said, "OK" and off he went.

So a note about bribery. Apparently it works, at least temporarily. Now I have to go before Patrick "gets up" from his "nap" (also known as mandatory-read-in-your-bed-for-a-while-so-Mommy-can-prep-cook-dinner time). Do you need anything from Target while I am out?

I am clearly cheating you on the sex scandal and the chicken recipe (pending, I promise) but here is a photo. This is my living room and with the exception of the lightish colored chair which is just a stand-in until the darkish colored chair's duplicate gets delivered on Thursday I think it is finished. BUT! It obviously needs to be painted. The question for you is, what color? Also, do we just paint up to the border (which hides the speakers) or do we paint above it too? The room is two stories and the wall to the right is one ginormous window (well technically it is several hunormous windows squooshed together to give the illusion of... right.) I think that is it. Carry on.   

A Very Bloggy Entry

Something has been bothering me. Type "Julia" into google (right, like you never google yourself. please.) Now click on the second page. OK, see in the middle there? Right below the Julia/Julie project and right above Julia Fordham? See that?

"Tales of a mother in Minnesota and her struggles to have another baby."

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT ABOUT? Who wrote that? Can I take legal action?

Could I sound like any more of an ass? Of a lame ass? Tales! Mother in Minnesota! Struggles! I am hiding my face in my hands. I don't know about you but I am picturing a doughy woman in a theme-sweater (huh. I wonder what a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day sweater would look like) thrashing around up to her neck in snow saying "Oh for disappointing! Oh for so not fair!"

My friend Julie claims that she writes the synopses for google but I am not sure I believe her. Hey! Speaking of Julie and google it just dawned on me that I discovered blogs through Julie and a google search almost two years ago today. Anyone who has ever tried to research depressing pregnancy statistics will inevitably land at a little pregnant. You come for the slow rising hcg or exploding ovary, you stay for the laughter. Me, I showed up at her blog, looked around, measured for drapes and then vowed that someday, somehow this woman and I would have our asses kicked by the city of Boston... together. I see (oh yes I do. I get around you know) that Julie is up for an infertility/adoption Best of Blog award. With all due respect to the other fine writers who are nominated (and there are many fine ones), Julie is the motherfucking genesis of infertility blogging and personally I think it would be nice for her to get shouted out with a BOB win. Seriously, I am willing to bet that every single nominee in that category starting writing a blog after finding Julie. In the beginning, Milton tells us, there was chaos. Before that there was a little pregnant.

I neglected to delurk myself (I like that phrase. isn't it rather French: now, to delurk myself) last week which was particularly obnoxious since you were so kind. So, in the spirit and late as always, I offer a couple of blogs that I read often and think are terrific and/or funny (you decide which are which) and yet I seem to have never commented, most likely because I am afraid of looking stupid on their sites. But stupid on MY site I can handle, so here they are. Enjoy 'em.   

http://www.geeseaplenty.com/

http://queserasera.org/

Also, this new one http://thumbscre.ws/ but I might have to kill her before you read her because I have had Wham! Last Christmas stuck in my head ever since she mentioned it in a post. And that is just waaaaaaaaaaay too long to be giving it to someone special, ya'll.

Patrick has preschool tomorrow and I have nothing to do in the morning but update here. With, um, photos! and sex scandals! and my perfect dinner party chicken recipe! Look, please don't stop reading me. I'll be better. I'll write more. I swear it. Give me another chance. I KNOW we can work this out.

And The Sink For Good Measure

I have missed you terribly. Terribly, I tell you.

Since 90% of my social interaction occurs within my computer (the other 10% being distributed like this: 8% - multiple daily phone calls to my mom and brother, both of whom have "jobs" that keep them "busy" so my frequent calls to discuss whether I should cut off most of my hair or just slivers of it tomorrow are usually met with "bored impatience"; 1% - phone calls/messaging with my closest friends, all of whom, incidentally, I met through this blog; 1% - timid generally inept attempts on my part to make actual friends with an actual person who could actually keep, like, a key to my house or something and who would be willing and close enough to bring it over if I ever locked myself out) I have felt the absence of the internet keenly. I keened. But that is all behind us now in the this the Age of The New Computer, so let us move bravely forward, together once more, and grieve not for what remains behind. Hey speaking of friends, do you have them? Are they leftover friends from childhood or college or did you meet them as an adult? How? Where? I invited a woman I met at a baby shower out to lunch last summer and then she invited me to lunch this autumn and then she invited us to her New Year's Eve party and now I have invited them to dinner this weekend with another couple. All rather promising but at this rate we will be exchanging personal confidences by, oh, say, the year 3000. Is it me? Is it really really hard to make friends as an adult or do I just suck? Be frank, I need to know if I am just not trying hard enough.   

In other news it is January 10th and Patrick has finally stopped asking about his advent calendar. This was the first year Patrick kinda "got" Christmas and, while he enjoyed the presents and the tree, what really made his heart beat fast and furiously was the advent calendar I picked up in impulsive response to clever front-end merchandising at the grocery store. Five hundred times a day throughout the month of December Patrick would clasp his hands together, wriggling in anticipation like a little anticipating newt, and ask, "Is it the (x)th day of the month yet, Mommy?" Patrick is... rather fond of knowing what day it is and what time it is and how many minutes are going to elapse until something else happens (he spends a little chunk of each day going back and forth between digital and analog clocks in this house trying to figure out how the hell the minutes get calculated. because he is capital C Cool like that.) That the advent calendar brought all the joy of following an easily identifiable numerical pattern with the pleasure of quantifying periods of time PLUS nasty German chocolate dating from the year 2... well! Frabjous day, that's what Patrick thought.

I always considered myself a baby person. I thought I would grieve when Patrick left babyhood. I thought I would be inconsolable when the possibility of having another baby got smaller and smaller in the rear-view. In truth, I was so excited to see the emergence of Toddler Patrick, with his white-blond curls, letter obsession and incomprehensible speech, that I hardly gave Baby Patrick another thought. Now that Preschool Patrick is blooming all over the place I realize that the earlier models were sweet and all but this new kid is absolutely outstanding. I LOVE this age. He likes to cook with me. He likes to draw funny pictures and tell me stories about them (granted they all start with an enormous letter, drawn in alphabetical order, of course, he's no anarchist, but then he adds eyes and a mouth and shoes to the letter and he draws a train or some onions or some streetlights or whatever with it and there is always an adventure involved.) He makes up tuneless songs about numbers who cry because they threw garbage into the washing machine. He hides and he seeks. He reads and he almost realizes that he can read. I would never have understood this distinction without watching it in action with Patrick, but there has been a long period of time during which he could tell you what a word was on sight or sound it out or make decent assumptions about it based upon the words that preceded it. So he could pick up just about anything and "read" it. But only recently has he begun to understand that these words have meaning apart from just being articulated. So the reading thing is delightful and keeps him busy for, I kid you not, an hour and a half every morning when he wakes up. We can hear him on the baby monitor pulling books off his shelf and when we finally go into get him (after a refreshing sleep-in) he will be sitting in the rocking chair with Bear, reading himself a story with a pile of books next to him. Math is his real passion though. He can add and subtract to about 20. He is unbelievable with spatial relationships (my mom got him this box of shapes for Christmas that you use to build other shapes, like a couple of rhombuses (rhombii?) and a few triangles and poof you have a train) and Patrick sat down and did like thirty of them in a row. And this weekend he started coming up with series of numbers (like 1 3 5 7 and 4 8 12 16) all by his wee self. It would be ridiculous for me to pretend that Patrick is not a little ahead of the curve in some areas. Steve and I spend a lot of time doing our best impersonation of being warmly impressed but not TOO impressed (our instinct is that we should encourage him to be proud of himself but not get all freaky about it) while are both inwardly going Oh my god oh my god oh my god! We think he is amazing. I don't know what being precocious in math gets you out of life but I hope it is something nice because he is a very delightful person and I want good things for him.

That said, there are still lots of things from which he has barely progressed from infancy. He refuses to drink out of a regular cup and on the rare occasion when I try to press the issue he will unblinkingly pour the juice all over his head rather than drink it. He has only just learned to throw a ball (funny story, actually. we have been trying to get him interested in playing with balls for a while, I guess because it seems like something he would like once he got the hang of it. two days ago he threw a ball at me for the very first time all of his own initiative, trouble being that I was typing on my brand new computer at the time and he threw the ball hard enough to crack the monitor screen. so, um, damn it) and the only way he can catch is if the ball somehow gets stuck in his shirt. He has categorically refused to ever climb on or near anything resembling a pushcart, tricycle, ride-on or scooter. He also continues to refuse to do anything but pee in the potty. And he is not so consistently hot at that either, having wet his pants as recently as this weekend. 

So, as always and as with everybody, ahead and behind and just about average. 

Speaking of Patrick I thought I might as well proffer some hard-earned maternal wisdom in hopes that it may serve you. Patrick, although I have not really mentioned it much because I find the subject distasteful, has suffered from bowel irregularity for over two years. Badly. Once every four days, dreadful badly. We went to the pediatrician over and over about it and we have tried everything including a prescription laxative for months on end. The whole situation was very unpleasant and rather mystifying because Patrick seriously had a diet that was more fiber than food, washed down with oceans of fructose laden juices. Nothing seemed to help, though, and right before Thanksgiving we had an incident in which the poor kid strained so hard he actually vomited in the process. Not good. So! I had just decided that we would have to move on to the next step and schedule him with a pediatric gastoenterologist and work from there. Then I googled something that mentioned that a small number of children respond to milk allergies in this way. Although we had significantly reduced Patrick's dairy intake years ago we had never thought to remove it entirely. I switched him to soy milk three weeks ago and voila! it seems to have completely solved the problem. Completely. I offer this for what it is worth (here, I'll even throw in the google term "toddler constipation"). My public service for the day.         

What else? Steve has a bone spur growing into a ligament in his ankle and it is making him walk funny. Funny gimpy, not funny Ha Ha, regrettably. Even more regrettable is the fact that Steve has taken this as a portent that he needs ankle surgery and has scheduled it for two weeks from now. At first I absentmindedly said, "Yes yes, whatever makes you happy" but the more I hear about his recovery time the more my brow furrows. THREE WEEKS without being able to go upstairs or downstairs. That means THREE WEEKS in which I have to get Patrick in the morning and put him to bed at night and do the whole day in between. As I explained above, I love the child, I adore him, I dote upon each and every eyelash, but taking care of him unassisted from his first peep to his last bedtime story? Ugh.

I told Steve that I have thought about it and after a careful cost-benefit analysis I have decided it would be best for him to just skip the surgery. The cost of my having to do everything by myself for three whole weeks (maybe four!) is simply not outweighed by the benefit of his being able to walk pain-free. As I pointed out, his ankle hasn't been bothering me at all, and that must count for something. He said he would consider it, but I don't know... I am not sanguine. He can be so selfish sometimes.

I am now five days post ovulation in our attempt to achieve an eleventh pregnancy, seven years after beginning to try to conceive in the first place. What I find amusing is that I am still all a-twittered by it. I like trying to have a baby. I love the suspense of the wait. And I am completely cool with it not working. I can handle it if I never get pregnant again. I am also fine with the idea of getting pregnant but having another miscarriage (um, another first trimester miscarriage. I think another later loss would cause me to hang up the ol' bed and call it a day.) It has taken a long time but I am also  finally comfortable with the idea of Patrick being an only child. In fact, I should be so lucky as to have that be the worst thing to happen to me in life, you know?

So I think I am covered. No pregnancy? Check. Pregnant but miscarriage? Check. Worst case scenario Only One Child? Check. Long-shot success culminating in second baby? WOW.      

I hope you are all well. I really have missed you. Let me know about forming adult friendships, I am curious to hear your thoughts. Oh, and Patrick has been invited to a classmate's birthday party. What is a good present for an about-to-be-four-year-old girl? I am guessing she probably is not interested in an abacus or trucks, so I'm fresh out of ideas.

PS I see from comment two (Hi SarahA) that it is delurking week. So delurk, damn it. I am feeling lonely.

The Dark Age

We returned home from a predominantly uneventful Christmas to discover our stockings still hung by the chimney with care and demons had infested my computer.

Remember when the little mermaid trades her voice to the witch in exchange for legs in order to serve as some sort of pet for that princeling who winds up marrying another girl anyway before the little mermaid commits suicide and turns into sea foam? Well, each step she took on those ill-conceived legs felt like thousands of knives were being thrust into her and that is exactly how I feel. Only typing rather than walking. And not so much with a stabbing sensation as one of supreme bile-inducing irritation. Because every three seconds that I spend using Outlook or Explorer or Messaging or just pick one... Windows freezes all function by popping up an error message that can only be cleared by hitting OK. And, you see, it is most definitely NOT OK. It is FUCKING AWFUL but there is no button for that.

I attempted to fix this disaster but, as usual, only made things worse and then our satellite signal got blocked by a huge avalanche of rooftop snow and for five longs days we have been without access to the internet. Which was sort of immaterial to me in light of my computer problems but it made Steve noticeably edgy. I suppose this return to a simpler way of life should have been cleansing and just the nudge we needed to start making wooden furniture with hand-turned spindles and dove-tailed joints but instead it has made us feel all screechy and fragile.

Steve finally climbed on a ladder this morning and managed to melt the snow with his ire. This is a step in the right direction but my computer is still behaving irrationally in Explorer and refuses to have anything to do with email whatsoever. I hope you appreciate what a labor of love this post has been (what with all the stopping to click OK) and if you have tried to email me forget about it. Just... forget about it. Email is dead to me.

I have ordered a new computer (oh shut up. you would have done the same) and expect it to arrive momentarily. In the meantime a very happy new year to you and don't forget to tip your waitresses. I'll be baaaaaaaack....... (click OK).