Holding them close
Tonight the kids and I finished reading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door (the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time). In the final chapters, our protagonists are fighting Evil itself. The life of young Charles Wallace hangs in the balance, but so too does the future of all living things, all forces of good and rightness.
The kids snuggled up, one on either side of me, and Chickadee kept interrupting. “I don’t like this,” she would say, “this is scary and I’m afraid Charles Wallace is going to die.”
“Mama!” Monkey would add, “what if this story was REAL?”
I did not—could not—tell them that this morning as they romped around, thrilled that school was closed due to flooding, I had joked to a friend that this weather is surely a sign of the Apocalypse, and what’s next, locusts? Frogs? Pestilence? And then later came the news that had me hunched over my keyboard, trying not to cry, trying not to let on that anything was wrong.
What if it was real? What if evil truly exists and we are set forth to fight it even though we barely understand the tasks at hand? L’Engle just shapes it into a good story. I’m not convinced it’s fiction.
Nights like tonight, my children go to bed with nothing more on their minds than whether I might let them eat banana bread for breakfast and whether school will reopen tomorrow. And I am left to grapple with insomnia and weep for their safety, even though they’re sleeping just down the hall.
Portrait of the Mir as a young twerp
Well. It’s clear from that last post that you are all dying to see what a complete dork I was as a child. You’d think that the various and myriad demonstrations here of my dorkitude as an adult would be enough, but no. You people always want more.
And I always give it, because I care. And because it’s easier to sit down at the scanner and then resize pictures than it is to write an actual entry when all I have to report is “my house is still for sale and no one even came to look at it this weekend, possibly because it is snowing in the middle of April.”
I’d also like to point out that I have posted incriminating photos of myself before purely for your enjoyment. Just for the record. read more…
Still my father’s daughter
At dinner tonight the kids asked if I have any pictures of myself from when I was little. I was impressed by their maturity, you know, because there was a time not too long ago when both of them would’ve insisted I sprung from a pod as a full-grown mother, never having eaten marshmallow breakfast cereal or practiced kissing on my poster of Rick Springfield in a past life.
I assured them that I did, and when I was done eating but they were still flicking rice at each other, I went and grabbed my baby book. My mother gave it to me a little while ago, and I knew there were a bunch of school pictures piled in the box the book came in.
When I returned to the table with the book in hand, their jaws dropped. Thank goodness they hadn’t actually been eating any of the food in front of them, or that would’ve been gross. read more…
I’b a vzzzzzzzzzzzzz
I would tell you all about how I commenced FUH-REAKING OUT yesterday during the ice storm (ice storm. in April. buh-bye, New England… gonna miss you NOT AT ALL) when my internet went down, but I’m too sleepy to do it justice.
Short version: I spent all day working on the New Big Project and literally just as I was trying to turn in my work for the day, *POOF* no connection. Way to make a first impression. Thanks for hiring me! I done broke the internet!
Comcast’s solution to my fickle connection is to do nothing at all, but usually when they run their nightly maintenance things magically start working again. So I got up at 4:00 this morning to work.
Many thanks to Otto for filling in, last night. I totally picked him because of his pinch-blogging abilities.
Before I faceplant into the keyboard, I just want to point out that I am about to be trounced by Dooce in the Best Parenting Blog category of the Blogger’s Choice Awards, which, WOW, who could’ve predicted THAT? So I’ve decided to focus my narcissism in a way I can back up with conviction. There are lots of lots of great parenting blogs out there, so I certainly can’t tell you I’m the best with a straight face. (Hey, you want to vote, great, but I’m just telling you how I feel.) On the other hand, I’m just egomaniacal enough to say that yes, there are many great shopping blogs out there, but Want Not has the very best ratio of money saved to entertainment. There, I said it. So if you want to vote for Want Not for Best Shopping Blog, you would be very pretty indeed. (Dudes, I got up at 4:00 this morning to post about the Amazon Friday Sale so that you wouldn’t be left bereft and bargainless. FEEL THE LOVE.)
Drifter’s Wind
The Pretty One is off the grid. Again. Hopefully she’ll be back online again in the morning, but until then you get my musings. And if she’s not online in the morning, she’s headed to the wireless store. (Think our parents had any idea one of those was coming? Well, perhaps – they did invent the Radio Shack. Kind of the same thing.)
So our evening conversation wandered around as it always does. She hates the weather up there. She hates her cable provider. She hates icy roads that prevent her from getting to the grocery store. But the kidlets loved the made-from-scratch pancakes. Mmmmmm …. Pancakes …. Er, sorry about that.
Love is a wee bit oblivious
It’s T-minus one month, folks, before I put on the dress and the shoes and swear at my hair a little bit and go become Mrs. Otto. There are a million reasons (well, half a dozen, anyway) that we’ve settled on the day we did, and we’ve long since made peace with the fact that we’ll essentially be stealing a weekend for the wedding and a brief getaway before Otto goes back to Georgia and I finish up dealing with things here for another month and a half or so before The Big Move.
We are accustomed to the long distance thing; we don’t like it, but we’re used to it. And it’s temporary. Come late June, the days of a weekend here or there will be over for us. It’s just that sometimes the separation pretty much blows chunks. read more…
The happenings are. . . um. . . happening
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
—William Shakespeare
It seems like things have taken a decidedly Fortunately, Unfortunately turn around here this week. I want to complain! I want to celebrate! I want… some Advil, for my aching head.
Being ambivalent is hard work, you know. I think. Maybe not. read more…
Occupation: freelance smiter
I wrote my first unprompted creative masterpiece while in the fourth grade. It stood out from my previous writing in that it was long enough to have separate chapters, first of all. Secondly, it featured as a central plot point the fact that the house the main characters lived in had a large hole in the ceiling of the family room which they’d somehow never noticed before.
(See? Twenty-six years of practice and I’m no less verbose, but at least my stories tend to make a little more sense, now. This is why I like to stick to reality; my lies tend to have large plot holes.)
It took me a long time to decide that I really wanted to stop working crappy jobs for other people and instead be an independent. Now I can work crappy jobs for other people and have no vacation and no benefits! read more…
Christ is risen; let’s eat!
Just in case you’re wondering: If you wait until Easter Day to check the supermarket for chocolate bunnies in a moment of caving (because, after all, there will be Easter baskets at Daddy’s this year, and you were FULLY PLANNING to skip the whole deal, but then a certain child with big hopeful eyes and a quivering lower lip informed you that SANTA comes to both houses, so SURELY the Easter Bunny will do the same!), you will find row upon row of empty shelves where the bunnies used to be.
Also, if you were wondering: The only Easter candy left which is orthodontia-approved is then a 5-pound sack of assorted chocolate temptations (peanut butter eggs, KitKats, malted milk eggs). But! It’s on sale! So it’s okay! But you will load up those baskets and still have way, way too much candy left over and calling to you later. read more…
There’s no “pretty good” category
The very pretty Jackie nominated me for a whole slew of these Bloggers Choice awards, and I don’t really know what they are or if I should care, but here’s a handy link to go vote if you are so compelled. (I’m only linking the parenting category because, um, I’m lazy.)
I have a problem with trying to label things as “best” because my world is populated by endless shades of grey and I have a natural aversion to such absolutes, but in the absence of contests with easier-to-determine measures, I guess I’ll have to take what I can get.
There’s no “Most brutally honest about how much therapy her children require” category. Or “Most likely to blog about boob pus” category. Or even “Most verbose about things of no consequence at all” category. So this was the best I could do. (Get it? Best? Hello?)