tuesday

A little of what we've been up to.

Practicing our "#$!!&* with me, #$!!&*with my daddy" faces:

Playing in the sun

Making ugly cakes

Being amazed by magnets

Being very, very weird


Finding treasured hand me downs



Sleeping at inappropriate moments of the day

Having our parades rained on

my afternoons

on the floor with birdie

on the other side of january

A while back Smootch did a painting on cardboard. It was strangely minimalist, not her typical style. I asked her to tell me about it and she said it was for her glamour dolls to get married with.

Oh-kay.

Today I watched Smootch in action with her painting: Ah, an aisle for the bride to walk down. Of course!Don't know why I didn't spot it.

Birdie's love of books and birds continues.His new love: vegetables!His curiosity is boundless. One last tale, this one a bit gruesome. Last saturday Smootch did the oddest thing. She accidently swallowed a nickel. The accident happened while doing mouth exercises with the coin in her mouth.

Oh-Kay.

Don't ask me, she's too old for this, and it's all a bit weird.

But, monday the nickel comes back and what a strange sight it is now:The coin on the right is a regular, uningested nickle, the one on the left is Smootch's snack nickel. It's black (and it is clean!) I don't know if it's just tarnished, or if the nickel plating was absorbed by Smootch's system. Anyway you look at it, I'm quite certain Smootch won't be swallowing another nickel. Still, we are now all curious about what would happen to a penny...

tell me again why i have this job?

Quick update:

my daughter is a beserker.
my home is crazyland.
my son is a biting, scratching lunatic.
i listen to whiny voices all. day. long.
i have no time.

aren't you glad you stopped by to see how we are doing?

fool me once...

So, there was this guy who worked at this independently owned Canadian manufacturing company. It had its issues, but the guy was proud of his work and felt good about working for said company. And then the company was sold to an American corporation, which subsequently made the manufacturing company public. A few years later, after systematically stripping the company of the original ideas and products that made the company worth buying in the first place, the corporation shut the manufacture's doors forever, laying off hundreds of workers.

The guy was a little sad and worried about his small family with their infant daughter. But, he went out and found himself another job with another independently owned Canadian manufacturing company. That was important: no shareholders, owned by some local dude.

But, within a couple of years, the second little company was sold to an American corporation. A year or two later, after all of the interesting ideas and products were systemically stripped from the company, the corporation shut down the little company.

The guy is a little worried about his not as little family, now with an infant boy added to the mix. He's smart, though, and his little woman is even smarter, so they'll be okay. But starting to feel a bit silly and slow on the uptake: what is the lesson of all this?

imagine

Hello again.

I'm sorry I've gone through the whole holiday season without a picture or even a generic pc 'happy holidays' or 'happy new year'. You should know that I actually blog all the time in my head. Particularly while I'm doing the dishes. And it seems I am always doing the dishes.

I would love to write more. No, rephrase that: I need to write more. Seriously, you think I'm talking to you, but really I'm working towards good mental health by blathering on here. But, life - don't talk to me about life - just keeps on getting in the way. Somedays I think I'd rather talk about life than actually live. Make that most days.

But, let's pretend, if I didn't have an infant and a preschooler to care for every busy day and through every weary night, would I blog more? If they didn't have places to go and people to see, and did not have to extend gross amouts of mental and physcial energy trying to get the 4 yr old to and from a school only 4 blocks away? How about if I didn't have the minimum of two additional kidlets during the week to fed, water, and do paperwork for. Or a whole other job making stuff. Let's pretend that there isn't a whole adult male who actually wants to spend time with me (enter requiste 'what's wrong with him anyway' comment here). Let's pretend I do not have two lonely cats that jump into my lap for ear scratches the 2 minutes a day it exists. Let's get rid of the living things - the plants to water, seeds to plant, the sprouts to water twice a day. Would I write more?

There is the never ending housework also that needs to be gotten rid of. I can't believe how much time this place sucks up each day. The dishes, the laundry, the constant picking up from the 3 foot high human tornado. The meals to make. The taking out of the compost. And the yard, with the snowing and icing up, and the car, with parking and unlocking the human door and the lifting garage door and driving and closing garage door and opening human-door, and closing and locking human-door. More time for blogging?

While we're at it, definitely need to toss the educating of self, the courses and assignments, and the reading to keep up on what's happening in the world. And all the maintainance required to just exist in our culture, particularly the stuff one has to acquire, buy, maintain, return, exchange, recycyle and throw away.

And let's say that perhaps I am not exhausted from my 5 hours of sporatic sleep a night, and the crazy making holidays, and my nearly crippling guilt from not having the time to keep up with my dear friends. And let's pretend that January isn't basically a mental and emotional shit storm for me as the world once again cracks open with grief.

Then perhaps I would have some sort of time to blog? Well, after I watched the 3 seasons of Dog the Bounty Hunter I have on dvd here. But then, yes, time to write.

But what would I write about?

Bring back the wee ones. I would be missing them anyway. And The Man, he's sort of fun to have around. And the kitties. They are as much a part of this family now as I am. But the stuff to do, the house to keep, the crap to buy - that can stay disappeared forever.

hmmmmm...

And after I write a little about how insanely wonderful the people I live with are, maybe I could sew a little something too.

bitterness before breakfast

I think I'm starting to become suspicious and weary of people without children. I remember pre-offspring I would be sitting, for example, in the college pub after class with a classmate and they'd have to leave after only one beer to go pick up their toddler from daycare and I'd feel sorry for them. 'Awww, poor person,' I'd think, 'having kids is such a drag, man.' And the other person would rather charitably let me believe that they would actually rather be sitting around discussing obscure social theorists and their convoluted ideas about consumsuption and the modern individual with me rather than snuggling with their sweet smelling, cuddly babe while reading 'pajama time' for the 200th time.

Now I know better.

Bam, what a difference a few years can make. Now I think of adults without children as not really fully grown yet. They have an innocence about them. They carry life lightly on their shoulders, amusing unaware of the superficiality of their problems, of how irrelevant all of life is compared the bottomless responsibility and sense of forboding that having a few bambinos running around brings. Love is gruesome. It is a heavy, heavy thing.

Remember those 1970s or so little cartoons of naked people with sickly sweet little "Love is..." sayings. I've never quite gotten them, perhaps I was too young to really get it, and the fact that they never wore clothes kind of distracted me (don't they get cold? They don't live around here, I know that.) But now, here I am older and more tired, I know for certain that those nudies were totally out to lunch. The one I remember best is the the 'Love means never having to say sorry.' What the? In my experience, love means having to say sorry all the time. Over things that couldn't possibility be my fault, like the weather and socks that don't match (okay, maybe my fault, but, dude, I got better things to feel sorry about).

Love is spending years nursing, cuddling, feeding, dressing, sacrificing in a thousand ways to please, sooth, and nourish a child and then have that child pass you over for someone who keeps whacking them with a plastic light saber and pushes them down the stairs.

Love is carrying a collective 60 pounds of screaming raging children through the darkened house after a very long day, stepping in cat upchuck along the way, and still reading one child her chapter before bedtime, nursing and singing the other to sleep and making sure the cat gets a good scratch behind the ears before dragging your own exhausted body off to bed.

Love is not having enough time to trim your toe nails for five months.

Love is taking years off your life by only sleeping in 15 minute stints for years at a time.

Love is poop, pee, vomit and applying salve to strange rashes in places only highly paid doctors or prostitutes will venture.

Love is not hauling off and smacking the brat who wakes you up an hour and half before you need to and then going back to sleep half an hour later, leaving you to deal with the now completely awake baby, who then falls asleep 30 minutes before you must start work, leaving you just enough time to finally trim your toe nails and blog out a whine about the whole love and children thing.

For so many years there has been no such thing as calling in sick, of walking while swinging my arms, of using the bathroom alone. Love is the only thing that would motivate someone to tolerate these barbarous conditions, and to make a person insane enough to actually enjoy it along the way.