this woman’s work

I wanted to take pics of some beautiful houses in the neighborhood across from the condo where we stayed in Florida. My mom and sister both love painted ladies. To keep Noah interested in our (long) walk, we made up a story as we went. Yesterday we uploaded the pictures and Noah helped “write” the story. The result is: Noah’s House Hunt.

All captions, right down to the punctuation, were dictated by Noah. I have other pics, too, but Noah picked which ones he wanted included.

Brett has the week off and we decided to celebrate by catching Noah’s cold. When Noah discovered this morning that both his parents are croaking instead of talking and staggering instead of walking he said indignantly, “Now how am I supposed to have any fun?”

Isn’t it always this way? Last year we both got sick on Brett’s scheduled vacation, too. And during school, I always got sick at break right after exams. I think it’s because your body has time to get sick. Brett is the sicker one though so I’m grouching my way through my chores. I refuse to give into true illness; I’m determined to get no more than a cold and armed myself with Cold-eze and Emergen-C, dammit.

We have the potential birthmom meeting on Wednesday and I hope we’re hale and hearty by then.

My husband, god love him, is a lunatic. He has a paranoid streak you could drive a humvee through and he visits much of that on our mail.

My mom bought him a shredder a couple of Christmases ago but he burned that out sometime last year. Instead of just ripping stuff up and tossing it, he was keeping everything with our name and/or address on it in a large trashcan with the plan to shred it eventually. He finally bought himself an industrial-strength shredder (the discounted floor model, natch) and is now slowly working through his trash can of documents.

All of that waiting paper is an awesome sight. Wanna see? Click here. This is in our basement playroom, by the way. In case you were wondering.

Take from Angela although what with my child being so enormously huge, these aren’t nearly as cute:

1. What is your favorite food?
Pizza, ummm, chicken. Ummm, french fries. Ummm, dog biscuits. [laughs hysterically] No, leave that! Umm, one more. Popcorn! That’s all.

2. How much does a hat cost?
I don’t know. Probably five dollars. Need to ask me anymore?

3. What is the moon made out of?
Cheese! No, wait, dust. Dust and rocks.

4. What is your favorite tv show?
Arthur.

5. Why is the sky blue?
Hmmm. Let me see. That’s how the sky was made.

6. How old is mommy?
27? [Mommy points out she just had a birthday so he should get this one right.] I don’t know! 26, am I right? [Mommy tells him 34 and he's unimpressed.]

7. What is your last name?
[He knows this one.]

8. Why do zebras have stripes?
Because they went to a cave and got a black and white coat! [Said in a funny voice.] Put an exclamation point on the end so I’m yelling it!

9. What does a plumber do?
Fixes your sink.

10. Where do you live?
On XXXXXXX Avenue. In a house without a garage. Anymore? Write down that I’m almost seven. [He asks for a 7 instead of seven.]

Here are the reasons why I didn’t sleep well last night:

1. Earache. Yup, another one. Someone wrote to me and said that she gets them when she’s clenching her teeth in her sleep and I’ve been doing that ever since we got matched (and unmatched), which was in November.

2. Neck still not entirely up to par.

3. Birthday party for which I have not bought a present on Saturday for Noah’s best friend.

4. Birthday party for Noah at the end of the month only we haven’t planned anything. Actually he’s not having a party proper because I was worried about planning it and then having to cancel because of a baby showing up, which is a great way to build sibling resentment. Instead we told him he could have his best friend over to this crazy swim club with currents and water-shooters and slides. Guess we should pull that together. Except that both weekends before and after his birthday (he turns 7 on a Wednesday) have large glaring obstacles that had previously escaped my attention.

5. Article due on Friday and I think I have everything lined up but then again maybe not. Trying to remember if the research is all in place was good for another twenty minutes of solid panic.

6. Interview later this morning and I do generally make myself crazy pre-interviews.

7. Article due next Friday and I have less ready there but surely it will all be fine. Won’t it?

8. Essay that’s giving me fits due next Friday. I came up with several brilliant lines while driving yesterday and forgot them as soon as I got to my desk.

9. Suddenly remembered that I need to learn to work digital camera properly because I promised pics with both articles. Oops. That’ll teach me to be proactive with an editor. Another 45 minutes spent tossing and turning over that.

10. In order to calm myself down, started thinking about my long lost book proposal and had half the first chapter written but was unable to get out of bed, boot up the computer and write it down because it was then 3am. Sadly, like the brilliant lost lines for the essay, it all seems to have disappeared. Perhaps coffee will help.

11. General concerns about neglect of my child while I try to meet deadlines.

12. Overarching frustration with continued adoption wait as it impacts every single small aspect of our lives from Noah’s birthday to an upcoming trip to these deadlines. At any moment, a baby could come crashing through the roof and while this would be a happy event, no question, it would be nice to have a rough idea when that event might be. Frankly, everything else would be a minor nuisance but not knowing about the baby makes it all so much harder.

So yesterday I still couldn’t turn my head and it was making me extremely grouchy. My sister wanted me to come over and I had to have Noah help me look for traffic when I was backing out of the drive (don’t worry, our street gets maybe 5 cars going down it a day, counting ours). I showed up in worse pain because even driving aggravated it.

This is what my nice big sister did for me: She gave me a slice of cheesecake and a hot cup of coffee, she sat me in her comfy chair and gave me this big, vibrating pillow thing that you wrap around your neck — it heats up, too; she gave me a stack of Hollywood gossip magazines, and she turned on four episodes of The Simple Life. The boys ate macaroni and cheese and then retired to Frankie’s room where they happily played while I got groggy from too much sugar and trash media influx. It was lovely. And my neck feels 98% better — good enough that I was even able to work out this morning.

While I was there, I checked out the stuff that she’s ebaying this week and her big haired ladies are back! She’s got stacking dolls and another set of salt and pepper shakers. Aren’t they hilarious???

OK, so it was a small brush, a toothbrush-sized brush but it was a real life true story and I must tell it.

Brett has been working on the bathroom every spare moment so he was very happy to have a long weekend to get in there and make some serious progress.

(Some of you may recall that he pulled out the tub to replace and in the process also ripped up all the drywall, had some guys over to put glassblock where the window used to be, and basically made a big mess of our one bathroom for what he thought would be a minor job. I hear this is how these things usually go. In any case, we hope we get to shower by spring. Meanwhile the bathtub is available although lined with plastic so we don’t splash the exposed drywall. It floats around and is awfully uncomfortable. This is how things have been for over a month.)

Anyway, he was putting backboard up last night because he’s going to start tiling this weekend. He used glue on parts of it and so he turned on the attic fan to try to clear out some of the fumes. Meanwhile, Noah and I were decorating the tree and then admiring said tree and listening to the Chipmunks, who make Noah laugh everytime.

Later in the evening we all sat down and had some grilled cheese sandwiches while Noah set up a board game and then commenced to play Sorry over mugs of hot chocoalte and decaf cut with soy nog, (which tastes better than it sounds). I began to get royally grouchy. My sinuses were hurting and my neck was aching and I figured I was heading for a cold. Brett kept missing his turn then going, “What? Huh? Whose turn is it?” That was annoying me to no end and I thought about just going to bed early and avoiding him entirely. Noah begged to watch a movie so we all trundled downstairs to snuggle up with a video. The opening credits were rolling when I heard this high-pitched, prolonged beep upstairs.

“What is that?” I whined. “It’s so annoying! Brett, go make it stop!”

Well, it was the carbon monoxide detector. The reason I was achey and bitchy and the reason Brett was too spaced to remember whose turn it was during Sorry was that we were all slowly being poisoned. Interestingly, both Noah and the dog were hyper and in good spirits. Go figure. Anyway, it turns out that the attic fan is just a few feet from the heater’s intake vent and was sucking all that nice fresh clean oxygen right out.

We aired out the house, turned down the heater for the night and tucked into bed next to a cracked window. Fortunately, we all awoke this morning and the carbon monoxide alarm is reading normal in all of the rooms.

Every day is an adventure, eh?

OK, I’ll admit that these aren’t quite my style but if I still worked at a daycare, I’d wear ‘em because they make small children happy. My mom made these beaded earrings for the holidays.
Santa Earrings
Snowman Earrings

My sister has them available on her ebay page. Start your holiday shopping now! You could get this beautiful phone or maybe this one suits you better. She’s got one-of-a-kind items out there and when you buy from her, not only do you get a great piece of art for your home, but you’re also supporting my wonderful big sister — stay-at-home mom, artist extraordinaire and pretty fab person to be related to.

I’m reading a review book I got in the mail last week titled Mothering Without a Map. It’s about attachment and parenting and love.

Of course reading this book makes me think about my own mom. Our relationship is not perfect but I know that my centered self-confidence is something that I owe to her and that’s a tremendously huge thing she gave me. It’s especially amazing because my mother had a childhood straight out of an Oprah book. She’s my hero. Whenever I think of our petty arguments or our frustrating value differences, I think also of her ability to mother despite having no mothering role models. Unlike most resilient children, she also had no loving adult who anchored her despite her horrific homelife. She says that books are what saved her. When she read, she says, she knew that other people didn’t live the way that she was living and she decided she wanted something different from her life.

She has always believed in me. She has always listened to me. I can remember a zillion times sitting at the kitchen table chattering on and on about my hopes and plans and dreams and her listening. She even listens now and frankly, now I know how boring I can be. I know that she thinks that I’m wonderful.

When I was 17 and getting ready to start my first year of college, we were really broke. My mom was about to sell our house (finally) and downsize. She’d clung to the house for most of our teen years because she felt that the divorce was disruptive enough. So we lived in this fairly big house in a snotty, affluent neighborhood but we had the sunken living room closed off with plastic so we didn’t have to heat it and we hung our laundry outside to dry although that went against code. (The neighbors didn’t like us.) We certainly weren’t poor and we never went hungry but buying groceries made for tense days and there wasn’t room for extras. I remember worrying about money a lot when I was a teen.

Anyway, I was using my mom’s old typewriter and had been for a long time. (My mother always took my writing very seriously. She bought me a manual typewriter when I was 8 or 9 and then gave me her electric typewriter when I was a bit older.) It would be perfectly serviceable for school. Then one day I came home from work and there was one of those early Brother word processers on the kitchen table. You know, the kind with a tiny screen where you can see what you’re typing a few words at a time. I think they cost around $500 then. I stood in the doorway and just stared at it. There was no one around and I wondered where it had come from. I had typed on one of them when I was babysitting and I loved it; I loved the clear font and the way you could call a whole story back up and let the machine type it again and again, copy after copy.

Then my mom came out from the other doorway with this big grin on her face and I knew it was for me. I couldn’t even talk. I knew how expensive those things were and I didn’t understand how she could have done it.

“You’ll need this for school,” she said brightly. “I just couldn’t resist.”

Much hugging ensued.

She didn’t just do this for me; she did this for my brother and sister, too. And she did it again and again. I have a lot of stories just like that one.

As I said, my mom could be (can be) difficult. She yelled and sometimes she smacked and sometimes she was too tired to be as loving as I wanted her to be. But she did love me and I never ever doubted that. She loved me at my most unlovable. She loved me when I hated her and told her so. And when I was a miserable, depressed teenager and I was afraid that my life would always be that bad, she held me and promised me it would be different someday, that my better life was waiting for me and all I had to do was grab it.

Is it any wonder that I like myself so much? The good mother that I am today is because of the good mothering that I had. And she did this out of nothing but her own grit and determination. I think that that is so amazing, her ability to create love the way that she has, a wondrous alchemy to make so much love out of a childhood that was so barren.

I have my work all lined up in neatly labeled virtual folders and I’m feeling easy in my routine. I think about how stressed I was when I first got this job and am grateful that it has all come together like this. I used to be worried that I couldn’t do this and take care of a new baby and now I’m sure that I can although my blog may not get updated as much and my email response time may lag severely.

I was on the phone with a manufacturer the other day to get some info on their company for a write-up I was assigned and she started asking me about my family. I told her we were adopting and she was very lovely, excited and congratulatory. She is sending me a sample of one of her things for the baby. Now isn’t that nice? Certainly made my day.

I wish I had something more interesting to say but maybe I will tonight. We’ll just have to see.