Speak less than thou knowest

Nugget and I are in the midst of a crazy month of travel to see various family. We got back from San Francisco yesterday and are heading to Chicago on Thursday. Apparently it's a good thing we are traveling so much; I discovered yesterday that my Nugget, now a small-town boy, is in need of a little broadening. We were on a crowded parking shuttle, going from the Seattle airport to the lot where we left our car. It was one of those mini-buses, with seats facing each other around the perimeter. Nugget sat on my lap in a corner seat. Directly in front of us sat twin boys, probably around 8 years old. Their mom was next to me, and their dad and grandma were toward the front. They were black.
Nugget quietly contemplated the little boys for a minute, then said, "Mom?"
I was looking up the ferry schedule on my phone. "Yes?"
"Why those boys have funny hair?"
I froze, afraid to take my eyes off my phone. I could feel everyone on the bus waiting for my answer. I think we were all dying inside, except everyone else got to think, "thank god that question wasn't for me."
"I don't think they have funny hair," I said finally, "I think they have very nice hair. Maybe they think your hair is funny. Do you think so?" Nugget laughed and shook his head.
For being on the spot, I think I didn't do too badly. But the conversation wasn't over.
"Mom?"
"Yes?"
"Why they have those things on their ears?"
Oh yes. The boys had hearing aids. Because my preschooler wasn't satisfied with stomping his way through one highly sensitive and charged area like a bull in a china shop. We got the twofer.
"Honey, it's not really polite to comment on what other people look like or are wearing." Not a very good answer, but I was done with this conversation. In retrospect, I probably should have just explained what a hearing aid is. Fortunately, the boys' mom came to my rescue.
"They don't mind explaining what those are," she said. She prompted her sons for an explanation, but they apparently minded.
"They're going to have to explain them at school tomorrow," the kids' dad said. Guess my tactless son and I had given the family a practice run for the first day at a new school. Yay us.
Mom gave up on the boys and explained the hearing aids to Nugget. I struggled to come up with a warm and jolly comment to put the whole discussion to bed, but after considering and rejecting inanities like "Isn't that nice!" I just turned to the mom and said, with obvious relief, "Thank you."

O partial sleep!

Trent and I both read bedtime books to Nugget every night, but we trade off responsibility for the ordeal that follows. Getting Nugget to fall asleep generally requires an hour or two of sustained attention. Last night one of us jumped the gun on concluding that the battle had been won for the night, closed Nugget's door and headed downstairs, while the other one was surprised to see Nugget's head poking in the bathroom door while he or she was standing up in the bath to shave his or her bikini line. Without naming any names.

"It's hard to fall asleep, mom." Nugget frequently tells me. And it does look hard. He throws his body here and there and grunts and groans and screws up his face in a grimace of concentration. Nugget was did this even as an infant. He was like a mini WWE wrestler, rebounding from one side of his crib to another with inarticulately macho-sounding grumbling.

As someone who can sleep 12 hours and then immediately take a nap, I can't relate. Maybe this means he will be one of those people who needs only 4 hours of sleep and thus spends the other 20 running circles around the rest of us? I'm not sure whether I want that for him or not.

I am sure that I want him to sleep more easily now, while it's my responsibility. And you know, it feels like a particularly personal failure to be waging and losing a battle over sleep. Me, the queen of sleep. If there was nothing else I could be proud of, that was one talent I always thought I had. is there no end to the humbling of a parent by her child??

Perspiring from the effort

travellers must be content

Since we traded my sweet BigLaw income for a sweet SmallTown lifestyle, I've been dabbling a bit with couponing. Yes, couponing. It never made much sense to me--such a hassle to save 50 cents--and even now with my altered economic landscape that seems like a paltry payoff. But what I had not realized is that there are various strategies that have to be followed that will multiply those 50 cent coupons to a more meaningful amount of savings. So I'm trying it. I even walked around Costco yesterday with my little pricebook, scribbling down the prices of everything I regularly purchase.

But here's the frustrating thing. Couponing really does not lend itself to a nutritious, whole-food lifestyle. When's the last time you saw a coupon for produce? I can think of one. I got a free pound of baby carrots recently. And a free bag of cookies with the same purchase. Really effective coupon shopping requires buying a lot of processed foods, which is not how I like to feed my family. Further evidence that the obesity war is not being fought on a level battlefield.

Those free cookies would have wreaked havoc on my calorie-counting regime this week if I hadn't finally gotten with the program on my long-laid plans to exercise regularly "now that I have time." Yesterday I even went for a 90-minute, mostly uphill hike. Albeit by accident. I set out to do a half-mile loop that is the only trail in the Olympic National Park where dogs are allowed (Peabody Creek), and I somehow got a couple miles up the trail to Hurricane Ridge before I realized that something had gone awry. Perhaps it is a good thing that the dog ban has kept me from doing more hiking.

Fortunately, my balcony offers views like this, no hiking boots (or compass) required:

Ay, kennel, puddle, sink

My dog is driving me crazy at the moment. She will not stop whining and scratching at the glass patio door no matter how many times I tell her that she cannot come in until she is dry. It makes me glad that Nugget is old enough to understand explanations. It hasn't been that long, but I'd already forgotten the daily frustration that goes hand in hand with the cuddly sweetness of babyhood.

The fact that Kiara--the dog (and no, I didn't name her, my Irish-name-obsessed sister did, but it's better than Lelu, which is what her previous family called her. She no longer answers to it. And who could blame her? They were the second family to abandon her before she was a year old. I'd want to forget everything about her life before me too.)--is soaking wet is completely her own fault, and I warned her it would happen, but "I told you so" is not that satisfactory when you say it to a dog. Who turns her head and cocks an ear and then barks again to be let in.

We went for a walk/run on the beach (most of the running was her, but I did run enough to get my heart rate up, which is something, for someone who abandoned her nascent soccer career after one day of practice freshman year of high school because there was too much running) and she insisted on going in the water. I managed to keep her from going in past her knees (which she wanted to do because there was kelp floating out there and she just had to know what it was), and she might have escaped without the full-body bath under a freezing cold hose when we got home if it weren't for this:

The standing water along the path to the beach was so thick with algae that it looked like solid ground. Appealing, right? I'm literally steps from the car and I look back to see where Kiara is, and she is actually going into that algae water. I could not believe it. What goes through that dog's head? I briefly considered making her run alongside the car rather than let her in the car with stinky algae-water dripping from her fur and stinky-algae-mud on her paws. And then I remembered that the back of my car is already covered in sand and dog hair and dried dog drool. Not to mention the toddler crumbs all over the middle seat. Plus the sunscreen that I was wearing on the way to the beach on Sunday, which got all over the front seat and, inexplicably, all over the outside of the car as well. So I loaded Kiara in and reflected that there is something to be said for a dirty car.

The other day when I took Kiara to the vet they told me that there are two boxers up for adoption at the humane society right now. "My husband would kill me," I replied. I went home and told him about it and he said, "No I wouldn't. You can adopt them if you want." My mouth hung open a little, and I wondered whether Trent had forgotten the regularity with which my separation-anxiety-riddled Kiara pees in the house when she's left alone. "You'd just have to move out," he continued. Oh. I guess I'll pass.

Yet, countrymen, O!

Sign outside the local hardware store: "Closed today for Jimmie Bob's funeral." That's a close second for "most obvious sign I'm not in Chicago anymore," right after this front-page headline in our local paper: "Duckling Shot with Blow Gun Recovering" (and the update a few days later, also on the front page: "Injured Duckling Returns Home to Mama"). I love living in a small town. It's especially comforting right now, knowing that if the morons* in Congress send us into default I'll be able to raise chickens in the backyard.

*We need to be fiscally responsible, let's start by not paying our bills ... GOD BLESS AMERICA.

Dogeared

From "Clever Girl" by Tessa Hadley, in the June 6, 2011 New Yorker (I detest this magazine but my husband subscribes, and clips the short stories for me. And I read them, as consolation for the fact that there are stacks of these f---ing magazines creating clutter all over my house. The New Yorker owes me a good f---ing story. Occasionally they deliver. Very occasionally. Pretentious motherf---ers.):

In a reasonable voice, he communicated his warnings about the meanness at the heart of things, which he understood and I, in my childishness, was refusing to acknowledge.

...

I didn't make the connection that Nor did, between the power of what I read in books in my own time and the outward husk of learning, perfectly functional but not involving, that went on in the classroom.

Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven!

Ah, 33. A very bulbous number, full of lumpy curves. Like a 33-year-old mom who doesn't get enough exercise.

I've been thinking about mortality lately, for reasons other than my birthday, though I suppose it contributed, and it really is most unpleasant. The abstract idea of an "age of innocence" takes on a sharper edge when you get old enough to realize how very innocent you were in the days of youthful immortality.

Funny thing about youthful immortality. It has the effect of making everything look like it's standing still. There you are with your youthful energy raging at the stodgy old world and its standing stillness, when all the while everything is incessantly, unrelentingly changing. And by the time you realize it you'll start to see it not as change but decay, and you'll fight for everything to be the same always and forever.

Today is perfect, in all its dying glory. So was yesterday, though it's now dead. If we're lucky, tomorrow will be perfect too before it goes. Happy Birthday, Anne.