Signs of Spring

I feel like I’m always making excuses about why I’m not writing here more often even though I have so many things I want to write about. That’s actually part of the problem. I have so much going on in my head it’s hard to know where to start or what to say or how much to share. There’s a lot to sort out…much like cleaning up after a hoarder who’s been at it for 39 years. Piles upon piles of feelings and memories and treasures buried under old wrappers and useless trivia. Sometimes I think I need a dumpster on site constantly with daily scheduled pick ups. So, while I figure out what I want to say next, I thought I would share my favorite signs of spring around here.

When we get a good rain, the fields out back flood into wading pools (you can see pictures of the ducks who frequent the mini-ponds here). At that point two things happen. First, Monkey begins his treks out to splash around in the water, which he’ll do for over an hour easily.

The second sign happens after the April showers: the arrival of tiny flowers that, ironically, look like little patches of snow when seen from far away. When we’ve had a particularly wet Winter and early Spring, the whole back field is full of them, and if you didn’t know better would think they were, in fact super slow-melting snow.

Up close, they are bunches of delicate, little, flowers of the palest lavender with sunny yellow centers. I always have the urge to lay down amongst them and watch the clouds for hours on end. I might do just that if I weren’t such a complete stick-in-the-mud and could move beyond the idea of getting thoroughly soaked because they only bloom in the soggy marsh-like earth. I hate being wet though and my inherent lameness always seems to win out.

For now, I’m grateful for the longer, brighter, warmer days (even though it means less quiet alone time at night for me), Monkey’s joy at being outside every chance he gets, and the happy (and incredibly lazy) dogs basking in the sun on the driveway blacktop or lounging under the shade of the blossoming apple trees. This is one of my favorite times of year when nothing is extreme, (except for the amount of Zoe’s winter coat flying off her like bits of fluff coming out of a well-loved stuffed animal), but everything I can spy with my little eye grows more beautiful with each passing day.

Not too much longer and I’ll be back again on a regular basis. This kind of absence is fairly cyclical with me as you’ll figure out if you haven’t already. With the better weather comes more attention to the kids and the house and less time in front of my computer (no, really). Like the transition from Winter to Spring, my own transition is a bit tempestuous but will eventually settle into something better than what it was.

In the meantime, I leave you with my favorite naked tree in the early stages of becoming less naked (and in my opinion, somewhat less interesting).

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Pictures and less than a thousand words

It’s Monday and the start of a new week. But before we are all crazed about deadlines, meetings, chores, practices, and every other little thing, I thought I would take a moment to appreciate some of the better, and picture-worthy, moments of the past week.

About a week ago we had two of the neighbors over for a playdate. R & Big A are good friends from school, and Monkey and Little A are friends thanks to proximity and their older siblings. Monkey loooooves Little A and calls her his “best friend.” They are a riot when they play together running away from “monsters” and they are quite good at being formal when their big sisters dress them up for a ball (ah the vagaries of being the younger sibling!). You’ll notice Monkey is wearing a suit jacket and tie over his grungy weekend crew-neck t-shirt. Little A has been primped and powdered and made up within an inch of her life and is sporting a sash that says, “Princess” (in case you couldn’t get that from the bright pink foofy dress she is wearing). They were paraded down to the living room and danced to some Disney Princess song or other. Monkey is quite the charmer on the dance floor and as you can see from the second picture, he did twirl Little A about a bit with some grace. Is it too early to get them signed up for “So you think you can Dance?”

Like most of the east coast, we had a pretty good amount of rain within the last couple of weeks. That caused a pretty good amount of flooding in the field behind our house where it dips down. The kids have always loved when this happens–Monkey especially. He goes out back, rolls up his pants (and sometimes just removes them completely!) and splashes around in the mini ponds for over an hour. It is his favorite thing to do. He will sneak out there if I’m not paying attention, and I physically have to go remove him to get him to come in and eat dinner. He’s a little water bug.

So the other day, as I was assessing the clean up for the screen house attached to our barn, I’ve got half an eye on him as he’s standing out in the field. He yells to me something I hear as “Come look at the dust!” when, in fact, he was telling me to come look at the ducks. Curious why he’d want me to look at dust in the field, I trekked out there and sure enough, there is a pair of mallard ducks swimming along in the bigger and deeper of the puddles out back. They were a male and female who seemed completely undisturbed by the small boy yelling nearby and chattering at them as they dove for food and swam about. We talked about the ducks at length and I took some pictures for Monkey to take into school. Here are Mr. & Mrs. Mallard.

One of Monkey’s many favorite things to do on the fly is construct rock piles. I like to think of it as Cairn-building. Sounds way more cultured. So during the week he called me over to look at his latest creation.

I thought the pink polka-dotted rock was inspired…

This weekend, the kids, dogs, and I made a quick trip to my hometown for R to participate in another Greek Dance event. The weather was just amazing and I took advantage of the fact that there were multiple extra adults around and went for a walk early Sunday Morning along the water. I should have remembered my regular camera, but I was planning to do some running too, and the camera would have been to awkward to bring. So phone camera it was.

This is my favorite house on my walking route. It’s got the roof line I love in houses, wrap-around porch, nice decorative detail that is not over-done, and a widow’s walk. Someday…

I can’t wait to see what this is going to be when it’s finished. Might just have to keep visiting so I can take pictures of the progress!

Coming full-circle, we’ve got R in her Greek dance costume with her Irish blue eyes and freckles. She did a great job partaking in the Greek Independence Day celebration at church. Again, for a kid who doesn’t get the same opportunities to learn to dance that I had growing up, she did pretty well. I suspect the chance to wear a costume was a bonus for her, although for me I would have declined the pleasure if it meant dressing up more than the usual church skirt. She’s a beautiful girl no matter what she wears though!

Before I move on to putting kids on buses and getting my head collected for the week and clip on the pedometer to see just how much moving around I do in a day, I heard from K again today. He says they are still busy, the chow is good, and email is up and running. See? Somethings *are* the same there and here!

Hope you all have a picture-worthy week!

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I like to move it move it

February is like that one piece of clothing you have that on the hanger looks great and you can’t wait to wear it, but when you do put it on, it pulls funny in the armpit or is a little too short in the leg and makes you fidget all day, or the color doesn’t actually match anything else you have, or there’s a stain in a most embarrassing location that you forgot about and didn’t notice until you left the house. So you sigh wistfully as you put it back in your closet and hope that next year maybe it’ll magically be perfect. It never will be though and should be cut up and made into something crafty like a bow tie for your snowman or a remote control cozy instead. Apologies to all my friends and family born in February, but I can’t stand this month. It’s short, which should be a plus, but it feels longer than all of summer put together. I say we break it up and distribute those days to the months that need it. Like May, August, September and December. Who’s with me?!

Like clockwork, around the middle of February, my self-diagnosed seasonal affective disorder reaches it apex and everything catches up with me until I consider making sacrifices to whatever higher being will turn me into a real bear and let me hibernate. Where are those Disney Animators when you need them?! So between the distinct lack of division of labor in my house, the constant cold weather and still early dark, on top of a couple of freelance projects running simultaneously, I pretty much retreated to my room avoiding everything that could be avoided without tragic consequences and mentally scrambled to figure out where my priorities ran off to. For those of you who know me personally, you’ll understand what place I was in when you see my work area for the week.

I’m not a messy person at all. I’m pretty much the opposite bordering on OCD. Ask my kids. I don’t function well in messes and it makes me itch to have piles and stuff in the way. I know plenty of people who are pretty happy and do well in their jobs surrounded by chaos. I’m not one of them… although as a kid I loved a good mess and was quite content to wallow in my room where no one could see my floor (which given it was green and white linoleum with a maroonish carpet remnant over part of it, no one was missing out either). Not any more though. I might be related to the Anal Retentive Chef, in fact. So that picture up there of my “desk” is a clear indicator of just how scattered and out of balance I was the last week. The rest of the house (minus the kid’s rooms which mimic flea markets on crack) wasn’t that bad, thankfully—it was neat enough, but covered with a fine layer of dust, dog hair, Monkey’s favorite “crabby patty” cracker crumbs, and ice melt from the front walk. Normally, since Monkey is allergic to the universe, I clean the house top to bottom every week to keep him comfortable and me sane, but even that fell apart. The universe became an icky place.

Some light snow covered up the outside ick for a day or two, and given how unusually little snow we’ve had this season, the first thing I did was crawl out of my head and put some snowshoes on Monkey and me and escaped for a little while before he had to leave for the afternoon. Monkey required we go visit the two closest pine trees in the field behind us to give them a hug. I guess they looked cold and lonely.

Then we wandered out a little farther toward the wood line where Monkey picked out a different tree for cutting down (lest you think he is an actual tree hugger).

He, at least, has some balance to him. He made snow angels and I made a little snowman and then it was time to head back into the House of Yuck.

Being out in the clean, pristine, blank paper-like snow gave my brain the kick-start it needed to move out of my mental rut.

When things get off-kilter for me like that, I tend to mentally stand still like the proverbial deer in the headlights trying to figure out what to do next. But instead of fright or flight, I eventually experience purge or rearrange. Takes me a couple of days to get there, but inevitably a mock spring cleaning is what breaks me out of this. Normally K is around to humor me and help me lift heavy objects, but, this time, I not only don’t have the manual labor at my disposal, but I’m debating how much I should do. It’s still early in the deployment and I get this way pretty regularly. I had told K that I wouldn’t do too much changing of things around the house (even though he and I are both notorious for moving the furniture around quarterly) because I always felt sort of bad for the soldiers who would come home with a certain picture in their minds of home and walk into something significantly different. I can warn him and send pictures, but it’s different than being part of the process. So, what and how much to do and where to start?

R’s room is safest because K doesn’t go in there much anyway, so it won’t be so shocking to redo, and is probably most in need of change because her furniture is really for younger kids and not helping her keep things mostly in order (as required by her evil mother overlord). I know she’s young and her genes are fulfilling their sloppy kid destiny, but I don’t see how giving her the right tools to self-organize can be a bad thing. She needs a new desk, a bookcase, mirror, and either under bed or some other storage. I’ve already hit a couple of thrift stores in the area with no success, but will have to go back again and visit a couple more as well as a local antique store I’ve been wanting to poke around in. I want to keep the cost down of course, but I’d like her to have some interesting pieces that reflect what an interesting kid she is. She has some wacky taste far afield from my own, but I figure if we start with conservative pieces and the potential for embellishments, that should work for both of us.

Of course, it is almost impossible to change one room without starting a chain reaction or three. I could simply and cheaply repurpose furniture we already have throughout the house into hers and the furniture she’s not using can go elsewhere. I can start with my desk that is currently in our living room and give her that. I’m not using it much these days and it’s a good size that can hold storage drawers under it. Plus, I can repaint it whatever crazy-ass colors she wants. Moving that desk would leave a gaping hole at one end of our living room though. Unfortunately, that particular part of the room is sort of odd. It’s like the one kid who is always at the party but not really participating but watching what everyone else is doing. We’ve tried to give it various uses–reading area, work/arts area, books only area–nothing really seems to mesh with the rest of the room. I just can’t come up with the right combination. Our living room is huge but the bulk of the furniture centers around the fireplace. This extra area is kind of dead space with a couple of bookcases, my desk, and two doorways that break it up effectively into a corner, but where it is part of the living area, I want it to fit in better. I just don’t know what to do with it. I do know that I can’t work well there because it’s too close to the kitchen and I tend to snack when I get stuck or bored.

If I give R my desk, that means I have to move my work and art supplies somewhere—more than likely that means the Harry Potter-sized closet under the stairs where we keep the cleaning things and miscellaneous Other Stuff (like the Nerf machine guns). I’ve thought about converting that walk-in closet into an office, actually, but I’m not there quite yet (I mean, if a small, fictional boy can sleep in a closet, I can certainly work in one). Either way, if I ditch my living room work space, I’m going to have to reorganize the closet to fit all my office paraphernalia which means more shuffling and/or money spending. Where I prefer to work is in my bedroom. There’s a little alcove in it that you can’t see when you walk into the room and it’s the perfect place to hide out and not be in the middle of crazy kids. My room is sunny, warm, has a beautiful view of the back yard, and is down a hall from the other rooms upstairs. It’s my favorite place in the house. Problem is that it is small (smallest bedroom in the house). It’s got a queen bed, long bureau, two night stands, two dog beds (which I refuse to relocate, so don’t even bother suggesting that as an option), an arm chair and a small two-shelf book case. No room at the inn for a desk or anything else. At this point, I’ve gone from having a home office to actively looking into downsizing to a lap desk. It beats the card table and cookie cooling rack I’ve been using recently. Ah…so many decisions, so much online purchasing research!

What would be ideal is if K were here to either talk me down and point out that what I really need to be doing is working and not mentally playing move the space with our furnishings, or grab an end of the desk and help me move some shit around. Either would be fine. No one else is vested in my decorative maneuverings and I cannot trust the opinion of a 9-year-old girl with visions of shiny new(ish) items to call her own(ish). Today, though, life is not ideal, and like other women in my situation, the decision is ultimately mine to make and execute and hope that my changes will work for K too when he comes home. I could use less February, some more snow for my snow shoes, a babysitter, and a notebook, but I’ll take a good night’s sleep, a shower, some completed freelance work, and an afternoon field trip to see movie props from my favorite former closet-dweller and wizard extraordinaire, Harry Potter. Some distance and a little magic should ultimately do the trick.

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Ode to a Monkey

Six years ago tonight I sat in a maternity ward hospital room by myself. I could hear the cries of newborns but none of them were mine…not that I would have known what my baby sounded like. It was a tough day and a lonesome night. I had been 7 months pregnant and everything was going well until earlier in the week when I started pre-term labor that not even the anti-contraction drugs could stop. Monkey was born at two in the afternoon after a ridiculously quick labor and emergency C-section. After he was born—coming in at a whopping 4.4 oz. and 16 inches long—I only saw Monkey for about a minute right before they loaded him onto the ambulance, and that was it until the next afternoon when I was moved to the same hospital as him. I spent that first night contemplating the picture the nurses had given me of my baby boy. I couldn’t say who he looked like, nor how heavy he felt, or how well he was eating, or how strong his grip was. I just didn’t know and it broke my heart.

The next day started 5 weeks of hospital stay at two different NICUs. Within 24 hours of his birth he had surgery for testicular torsion. Within a couple days a nurse realized one of his arms was broken (it wasn’t broken during the birthing process–someone broke it and no one ever took responsibility). Thanks to all the crying from the pain of the broken arm (as we later found out) Monkey ended up with air in his intestines that he couldn’t get rid of easily so they thought he had and biopsied him for Hirschprung’s disease. Luckily it was not that or any other thing. Within a couple of weeks he was breathing well on his own which was our first hurdle in bringing him home. All that was left was for him to gain enough weight so he was over 5 lbs. He was so skinny he looked like a spider monkey and that’s how he first got his nickname “Monkey.” Now he just is a monkey. He spent his first Halloween in a NICU looking like an old man who was only as big as a stuffed animal. See?

We were able to bring our boy home in the first part of November. He was just over 5 lbs. and was a really good-natured boy who didn’t cry more than he should and was already starting to be the sunny kid he is now. We just started getting into a routine with him when the rumblings of K’s first deployment started to become serious. There wasn’t much time to really enjoy our new baby before the craziness of the deployment preparations came along. I can honestly say I don’t remember a whole lot about my maternity leave that doesn’t seem like watching a movie in fast forward. Soon, K. left and I was on my own with the kids.

Monkey’s first year was tough on all of us. I don’t know that Monkey noticed though which was really a boon for me and probably him too. He seemed to know when I was feeling my absolute shittiest or when his big sister was going to push me right over the edge with her “I miss Daddy” tantrums, because he would just look at me and smile a big old toothless grin and deflate my anger and frustration in a second. He was a little squirmy Prozac. Monkey developed eczema when he was a few months old and we’ve been fighting and managing it ever since, and that really only made him tougher, but he was still a happy kid in spite of it all. It was hard to feel sorry for myself when I had this sweet face in front of me who had been through more in his short life than I had been through in over 30 years. I had no room to complain.

K. came home when Monkey was about 16 months old and Monkey was wary of him for a couple of weeks before he decided that K. was ok. After that, we tried to carry on like a regular family, although like most families find out post-deployment, it’s neither a quick nor easy adjustment. Again, I don’t think Monkey noticed and his growing sense of humor and comic timing certainly helped me over the bumps and balanced out all the trouble we were having with his eczema that kept him, K. and I up most nights trying to ease his discomfort. He was part of an Early Intervention program keeping track of his developmental progress and before he was released from the program, the OT (who loved him) commented on how his sense of humor was far better developed than most kids his age.

Potty training might take a while at this rate…

asleep at the meal!

Coffee, tea, or Monkey?

Monkey’s eczema has influenced our lives—and mine in particular—in ways I never thought possible. The lack of sleep we all experienced for a good solid 5 years certainly did not help anyone. The allergy meds were turning him into a zombie and impeded his academic development as well as his speech. Plus, they just weren’t working. We changed his diet and even that wasn’t helping enough to ease his itching. He built a habit of scratching when he was stressed that has been incredibly hard to break. And he missed out on those bursts of learning that young kids have. His speech is still way behind. He sounds more like a 3-year old than a 6-year old but he has a wonderful imagination, he’s incredibly polite and affectionate, and thanks to being an extreme visual learner he can pretty much recite back almost every movie he’s watched. It’s both funny as hell when he uses the lines he knows at the odd yet strangely appropriate moment, and irritating as can be when he’s just rambling on to himself. Through all his problems he is still a happy, mischievious kid. He has his tantrums like every other little kid, but they don’t last long and he’s not one to hold a grudge.

In moving to our new town and home, I made the decision to stay home with Monkey. It was not in my plans ever to be a stay-at-home Mom, but he was not a day care kid like his sister. Other people could not seem to handle the eczema management, and Monkey could not manage the over-stimulation that large groups of kids managed to create. We looked at a few potential day cares when we came up here, but with every visit I could see Monkey get stressed and I could see the other kids staring at him and making him feel bad for looking different. I couldn’t do it to him just so I could pretend that I was still a cubicle jockey and feel “normal” myself. He had already lost a lot of academic ground and catching him up was becoming more important by the day. He was so far behind. He was and is by no means a stupid kid, he is just laden with speed bumps like a condo complex. We’ve been lucky to have such a great team up here helping him—teachers, therapists, specialists, and his dermatologist. They have all guided me to have a better grasp on his learning style, what he needs to manage his itching both emotionally and physically, and how to prepare him to deal with transitions. Working with Monkey has been a huge learning experience for me and by that, I mean I’ve learned about about myself.

I love my kids, but I’m not generally a kid person. I sometimes think I’ve lost the ability to just play, but Monkey is showing me the ropes again and I feel a lot less silly being silly. Laughing with him is just too addictive. I’ll even sing in front of other people now where before the dashboard of my car was my only audience because he loves to sing too and I like to encourage him. I had felt like my creativity was buried so far down that it would take one of those ocean oil rig drills to find it. But since he responds so well to visual cues, I ended up kick starting my whole artistic flow again by drawing him little pictures of events to help him get through his day. I’m also not the most affectionate creature in the world, but Monkey is a hugging and kissing bandit, so I’ve learned to shrink my personal space boundaries a bit more. As much as he has changed for the better by being with me, I’d say it’s a two-way street. I can’t imagine who I would be if Monkey had never made it that day six years ago.

I’m not sure how other mothers of preemies feel, but I know I carry around a fair amount of guilt that my body failed to keep Monkey where he belonged for his own benefit. We don’t know why he showed up so soon, but he was in me and not someone else, so I feel a bit responsible for his early appearance even though I like to tease R. that it was her fault for asking if the baby could come out and play so damned often while I was pregnant. (The boy loves his big sister!) Feeling that guilt lends a different dimension to my relationship with Monkey than I am used to from my relationship with R. who was a normal pregnancy and easy as pie when she was an infant (really, if she hadn’t been so awesome as a baby we might not have had another). My connection with Monkey is different right now than my connection with R. I don’t love him more, but I’m more aware of how much I love him because I am just so thankful every day that we didn’t lose him when it was all too easy for that to have happened. And having felt helpless so often those first weeks of his life, I tend to take the initiative in getting the right help for his issues more (although that’s spilled over to R. too—I’m much more hands on with her than I used to be when she was a little kid at daycare and school) and speak up for things I normally might not have before. Because he is behind, I am over the moon for even the smallest jumps in progress. Going through everything we have together with Monkey has made me a better and stronger person.

I joke that because I spend so much time with Monkey he’s my best friend, but I could do a whole lot worse. There are many days I wish I could be more like him—more carefree, appreciative of others, and able to let the bad stuff roll off. He teaches me these things every day, and in exchange I hope to teach him to not lose those gifts that make him such a pleasure to be around.

I love you, Monkey-man and I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for saving me.  Happy Birthday!

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