The Laundry Saga--Part One

Y'all.  Seriously.  I've been away because I've been growing a business and gardening and getting my house in order, but I have met my waterloo.  Again.  Like, for the seventy-fifth time.  OMG, LAUNDRY, WHY ARE YOU SO HARD?

I don't get it, my friends.  I do not understand why laundry is this hydra of dirty socks and underwear that lurks in my closets.  I really don't.  I mean, I wash clothes.  I wash clothes a lot.  And I fold them.  And I put them up.  AND THEY STILL LURK IN MY FRICKING HOUSE.  Under chairs.  In cars.  Behind the refrigerator.

No.  I am not being hyperbolic.

Pretty much, I just grit my teeth and I make my laundry soap (more on that later) and I do my laundry and up until last weekend, I had fought the laundry hydra into a corner and it growled at me or occasionally threw a nasty sock in my direction, but otherwise, all was good until I got sheets out of the linen closet for my parents, who were visiting for Jeffrey's tenth birthday party.

*Pause to say TEN?  TEEEENNNN?  Oh em gee, y'all.  Ten.  I can't write about it.  I can barely even TALK about it.  Ten.*

Anyway, I got the sheets out and sniffed them, because that's what I do, okay?  I sniff sheets when I take them out of the linen closet to get a snootful of restful cotton goodness.

BUT...I did not GET a snootful of restful cotton goodness.  Instead, I got a snootful of what can only be described as yicky cotton awfulness.  Dank cotton greasiness.  Ughful cotton stankness.  The odor coming from these sheets and pillowcases was redolent of nothing so much as dirty hair.  And I'm not talking, "Whoopsers, I forgot about that meeting, better slap a hat on my head and run out, because I took a shower yesterday."  I'm talking, "Holy crap, this flu is kicking my ass.  The chills, the sweating...when did I last take a shower?  Was it after I loaded and unloaded that manure pile in the hot sun and then cleaned fish all day and then played a vigorous game of field hockey?"  That dirty hair.

I apologized profusely to my mother, got more sheets, and made her bed, throwing the awful sheets in the washing machine.  When I got them out Sunday, they still stank.  Um, what?  Well, I reasoned, I was almost out of laundry soap and maybe I had forgotten to add enough to the load, so I dumped the rest of the soap in and went about my merry way.  When I got them out of the washing machine Monday, they still stank.

In the words of women all over the South, "Aw, HELL nawh."

Tuesday I made another batch of laundry soap with the kids (River stirred while Jeffrey computed the amount of oxygen-based laundry additive we needed to be most effective.)  I feel that you need to start your children early on the path to hippiedom, otherwise they become adults who run around using chemicals willynilly.  (I kid.  Sort of.)  The children and I got our hippie cleaning supply-making on and they helped me load the washing machine.  

Tuesday night, the sheets still stank.

"Okay, fartknockers," I told the sheets on Wednesday. (What?  You're surprised I talk to my bedding?  Come ON.)  "You are GOING to get clean."  I upped the amount of laundry detergent I was using.

Stink.

I upped the amount and added vinegar.

Stank.

I upped the amount, added vinegar, and then added baking soda.

Stunk.

ARRRRGGGHHHHH.

By the time my beloved Mandi appeared on the scene yesterday, I had worked myself up into a lather over those damn sheets.  She suggested that I put the sheets in a bucket with Dawn, (the detergent) because Dawn cut grease and if it WAS greasy hair stank on my sheets (WHERE DID THE STANK COME FROM???), that might do the trick.  But, you know, I'm all green and mess, so I didn't have Dawn.  I did, however, have some Seventh Generation lemongrass and clementine detergent, which I poured liberally all over the sheets that I dumped into the hobbit tub.  (A bucket?  Honey, please.)  I added some peppermint shampoo, because, well, you know, hair grease and all that.  I might have upended the bottle of Spray and Wash in there, too.  I mean, it's a wonder I didn't start chanting and burning sage.

Although, frankly, maybe I should have because the damn sheets, after being washed adamngain in extra detergent, vinegar, and baking soda, STILL STANK.

Y'all.  Really.  WTF?

This morning, I finally broke down and added bleach to the load.  If the bleach doesn't work, I don't know what I'll do.

Burn the sheets in the firepit?

Mail them to my worst enemy?

Use them to repel the cats that keep pooping in my garden?

Pray for me. And the cats.  And my worst enemy, because I'm going to check on the sheets.

Are you waiting with bated breath?

Aaaaannnnnnddd....

THE STANK IS GONE.

I repeat:  the stank has left the building.

I'm sure the cats are pleased.

I know I am.

Failing at Chemical Warfare

As part of my on-going green up my life, lower my grocery bills, save the cheerleader, save the world process, I recently made my own laundry detergent.  It has been great.  Seriously.  The stuff works just as well as my old, chemical-laden stuff and it is Teh Cheap.  Huzzah!

Having conquered that, I decided to move on to laundry sheets.  I don't know how this happens, but my house produces more static electricity than any house ever in the history of houses.  Ever.  It's ridiculous.  We walk around all winter looking like we've had our hands on those big sparky electric globes from the 1980s.  (Does anybody know what I'm talking about?)  Frankly, it's not too much better in the summer, which makes me mad, because isn't mind-numbing humidity supposed to stop static electricity?  Science makes my brain hurt.

Anyway, I'd long since switched to theoretically compostable dryer sheets from Mrs. Meyers.  "Theoretically" because I never compost them.  Ever.  They do, however, wind up in balls all over my house for my husband to find and curse over.  He LOVES my housekeeping style.  It's the thing that glues our marriage together.  (Snort.)  I switched from Bounce sheets, which were great for the static cling, but which had all those nasty chemicals and the weird, polyester fibery leftover sheets that you can't compost, theoretically or otherwise.

Those theoretical sheets are really expensive, though, so I decided to move on to something else.  I scoured Crackterest until I found a few ideas and got started.

First, I tried vinegar and some drops of lemon essential oil, which I was promised would cut down static electricity and make my clothes smell fresh.  My clothes DID smell so fresh you could practically hear pre-Teh Crazy Axl Rose singing about them, but they also generated enough electricity to power my home.  (WHY can't we channel static electricity to power our homes?  See:  science, the hurting of my brain.)

Next, I tried a tip involving hair conditioner and rags.  Y'all.  This was about as gross a thing as I have ever done.  First, the cheap conditioners were laden with chemicals and scents that made me gag or question what ocean somebody was visiting to get a nose full of breeze like that.  Shudder.  The more expensive conditioners smelled better and had fewer chemicals, but they were, you know, more expensive.  I opted for the more expensive ones, anyway.  Once home, per the directions I found, I mixed the conditioner up with water in an old diaper wipe container I still have lying around.  The directions called for me to soak a rag in the solution, squeeze out some of the solution, pop it in the dryer and wait for the non-staticky glory to happen.

The static WAS defeated.  But don't get your huzzaher all warmed up, because there were several problems.  First, sticking my hand in a vat of cold, slimy, watered-down conditioner was nasty on a sensory level.  It also caused my fingers to break out in eczema sores and cracks, which isn't very comfy.  Also, I'm assuming because the more expensive conditioner contained plant-derived oils, our clothes (particularly Will's non-100% cotton dress shirts) got oil-stains on them.  At first, I blamed the spots on the children's and my poor eating habits--you can always tell what all of us had for every meal by what's on our shirts.  But then I realized that Will doesn't have a head that spins on gimbals (or gyres...whatever) and that he doesn't ever get grease spots on his clothes, much less on the back of his shirts.  DANG IT.  Out went the conditioner.

Then I found a suggestion to ball up an eighteen-inch piece of aluminum foil and put that sucker in the dryer. This was followed by a metric crapton (for the folks who've asked, this is roughly equivalent to a standard shitload, give or take a few grams) of comments that extolled the virtues of this technique.  Well, okay.  I accordingly balled up the aluminum foil and dried, despite my tocaya's dire warnings.  The result:  le static.  Okay, but, you know, my house is REALLY staticky.  So I balled up another piece.  The result:  le static.  What followed was pretty much a psychotic break during which I balled up an entire roll of aluminum foil and shoved it into my dryer piece by piece yelling, "DIE, STATIC, DIEEEEEEE!"

It didn't.

I don't know where Miss I Don't Know Why All Of You Aren't Using Aluminum Foil Balls To Stop Static Cling lives, but I suspect it is at the bottom of the ocean, because the aluminum foil did not work.  At all.  AT ALL.  (Not that I'm bitter.)

So today I'm betaking myself to the grocery store to buy a package of Bounce before my laundry finally succeeds in its plan to make me totally insane.  It might have won this battle, but it won't win the war. As GAWD as my witness, it WON'T BEAT ME.

To Color or Not To Color

I'm not particularly freaked out about getting older.  Call me morbid, but when you lose two friends before the age of twenty-five, the idea of growing older and living a full life is less freak-out inducing.  I've got a few fine lines on my face now and two deeper grooves (one between my eyebrows--I need sunglasses) and one beside my mouth (I need to sleep sitting up?), but they really don't bug me that much.  The zits that I keep assuming will disappear as I get older and then they don't, the little bastards, keep me feeling young in that respect.

However, in the last few months, grey hairs have begun popping up on my temples. I actually grinned at the first  one:  "Aw, look, my first wisdom badge."  Snort.  The second one was a bit less grin-inducing, but it still was barely a blip on my radar.  I've got about ten now.  And my radar's blipping.

I considered plucking them out, but honestly, my hair has never been that thick and the idea of losing a bunch of it (particularly hairs with body, as my greys seem to be) is not appealing.  I considered just letting them be.  They aren't bothering anybody.  They won't cause me to get sick.  They don't whisper to me while I'm dozing off about terroristic plots.

But.

They are sorta bothering me.  I think it's part of my whole, "Oh.  Huh.  I've been sitting around focusing on my kids and house for the last few years and I sort of let myself go.  Let's fix that." thing.  Like, I try to shave every other day now.  Or actually wash my face at night.  Or not eat an entire bag of candy in two days.  I wear makeup at least four days a week now.  It's all very exciting.  So maybe I should go ahead and color those suckers so they can keep up with the rest of the makeover.

The thing is, I'm not really into, you know, hair maintenance.  Truth be told, if I thought Will wouldn't fall over dead at the sight of it, I would cut off all my hair right this minute and revel in the ease of a pixie cut.  But I like my husband, and so instead, I wear my hair in a ponytail all the dang time.  It's fine, but it's hardly stylish.  And that's OKAY with me.  I'm hardly stylish, myself.

I dyed my hair exactly once in the past, when I got a little crazy with the Sun-In bottle.  I was about as blond as a person could get AND I was brown as a berry and my hair was in this crazy asymmetrical thing with a rat tail.  I...I don't like to talk about it.  I call it "The Summer of My Hair Insanity."  Shudder.

After that, I swore off hair dyeing.  Because it made me crazy.  I have always looked with wonder at those of my friends who get their hair colored.  These ladies, whom I love, are always getting highlighted and lowlighted and streaked and while their hair (generally) looks Teh Awesome, it's exhausting for me to consider.  Nevermind the wallop it would put on my budget.

That's the other thing holding me back:  coloring your hair is fricking expensive, yo.  For the price of a color and cut, I could buy a bajillion papers for card design.  Or a set of reflectors.  Or a few mini-defusers.  (These are all photography things.  Check out my term-dropping.)  Or, you know, a lot of bread and milk.  For a budget-conscious, eco-friendly, cultural-norm-eschewing gal, coloring my hair seems to be a glamorous deviation from Heatherness.

Like, on the days when I don't go to the hospital, I'm going to look really faaantastic with my colored hair as I weed the turnip rows.  People in Kroger will be all, "Who is that ravishing thing in the holey sweatpants cheering over a sixty-cent coupon for dishwashing soap?"  How are the pictures I'm editing going to fully appreciate my lustrous mane?

I don't know.  It just seems sort of silly to me to spend a lot of time on my hair.  Crazy.  Wasteful.  Un-fricking-natural.

And yet, those grey hairs.

Those ten grey hairs don't seem really natural to me either right now, particularly as I finally feel that I'm settling into the person I was meant to be professionally.  Is that person grey-headed?  She feels...not grey-headed.

I don't know...what do y'all think?  Should I color or not?  Do YOU color?  If so, why?  Do you use a salon or a bottle at home.  (I'm hopeless at this kind of girly mess.  Heeellllp me.)

Jacket Season

First, yes.  It's been a while since I posted, I frecked up NaBloWriMo, et cetera et cetera.  To be honest, the way the Fates came together and mixed NaBloWriMo up with the new job and my finally understanding clipping masks and the early football game and a million other things meant that something had to go and that something was additional writing every day.  In the spirit of NaBloWriMo, I'm letting that go.  I'll write every day from now on and release any residual guilt I might feel for not writing every day.  Mkay?  Mkay?

The weather has finally taken a turn for the chilly, which means that in addition to Visiting Season, it's also Jacket Season.  That sounds all nice and cozy, doesn't it?  Like, "Ooh, it's Jacket Season.  Time to snuggle up by the firepit with a hot toddy while modeling my jacket."

Don't get comfy, people.

Jacket Season really means, "Oh, crap, it's Jacket Season.  Time to catch up on the ironing, heaven knows we don't have any more room on any hook in this dang house on which the visitors during Visiting Season can hang their outerwear because Will's jackets have taken over the house."

Y'all.  My husband has roughly 76,000 jackets.  Jackets in every color but yellow, orange, and pink.  Plaid jackets.  Jackets with hoods.  Jackets with liners.  Jackets that are actually souped-up sweatshirts.  Jackets that serve as rain coats or wind breakers.  He has jackets that the school gives the staff, at least ten of them, all in shades of grey or black.  He has jackets he won by smoking a metric crapton of cigarettes.  He has a jacket given to him by his mother twenty years ago that is a virulent shade of dark teal.  He has jackets pocked by too many nights by the bonfire, with zippers that work only two percent of the time and with pocket liners that are in shreds.

And he won't get rid of a dang one of them.

Last year when the warm weather took hold, I piled up all of the jackets on the bed in the hopes that the sheer size of the mound would convince him that he should share the warmth wealth with ninety or so of our less fortunate citizens.  My bed looked like the world's largest lost and found pile.  I think he culled three out of the mix, not including the duplicate grey fleece school pullovers, one of which has a broken zipper.  (These two are two of about six grey fleece school pullovers.)

I wanted to bite my own face off.

Instead, I carefully laid all of our winter wear in a humongous tub (included was my stuff:  one winter coat, a lined flannel work shirt, and two fleece jackets for football games) that could be used as a rescue raft in case of flood and asked my dearest to find a place to put it.  I figured, since he has a bad back and honestly, we are slap out of storage space, that this would mean that he would get rid of some dang jackets.  Nope.  He wrestled that tub up into the attic and, sweating and groaning, commented on how that was one spring cleaning chore done.

ARRRRGH.

Now, the cool weather is back, so he wrestled the tub back down the steps with a look of sheer glee.  I am not kidding.  The boy was excited about getting his jackets out.  He has since festooned the makeshift rack he built specifically for his jackets in our bedroom (what woman doesn't want a one by ten resting on two plant hooks jutting out of her boudoir wall?), the pretty walnut disks I spent hours sanding and polishing in order to make interesting coat hooks for our foyer, and the back of every chair in our house with JACKETS.  It's as if he considers jackets to be a decorative accent.

I try not to complain, honestly, but I overheard him talking to his mother about a "light jacket" he'd seen in a catalog (I now go so far as to read any LL Bean or J Crew catalog in the bathroom where I can safely toss them away after I've gone through them so he won't see this season's crop of toasty outerwear) and I yelled, "NO MORE JACKETS."

It's sort of a family joke that people give him jackets, but I've lost my sense of humor about it.  Much as I love them, my family doesn't have to worry about wading their way through a sea of fleece and broadcloth should the jackets ever become too much for our hooks to handle.  Honestly, if you are reading this, family members, I won't, like, physically assault you if you gift my husband with more jackets this giving season, but I will do my best to make you miserable for five months.  Or seven, depending on the bulkiness of the jackets.

Jacket.

Jaaaaccckkkeeettt.

Even the word makes me cringe now.

Jacket.

Shudder.

Jacket.

Twitch.

I need some sort of Family Members of Jackets Anonymous meeting to go to.

Admitting there is a problem is the first step to recovery.

Jacket.

There is a problem.

Princess River and Her Mother, Queen Exhaustia

I'm snuggled up with the Squish on the couch.  For the next few minutes (at least until Wild Kratts) is over, she is happy with me, happy to be in my company.  This will not last.  You might remember a few years ago when I noted that River had a really strident cry and that I felt like this would be an issue in a few years.   Go ahead and consider it an issue, my friends.

To say that River and I have a contentious relationship is like saying Lady Gaga is a bit extroverted.  (I don't know...it was the first thing that sprang to mind.)  She's stubborn and bossy all the time, but with me, it's as if she is purposefully also an ass a great deal of the time.  I know I'm not supposed to say that my four-year-old is an ass and it's hard to say it when she's laying her head on my lap and telling me that I'm the best mommy ever, but it's true.

I  can recognize that any child of mine is apt to have not only a stubborn streak, but also a bossy streak.  Combine that with my husband's genes and it would not surprise me if my children became despotic leaders of third world countries.  Or at least really pissy mayors of large towns.

*Interrupting to point out that Wild Kratts is over and River is hungry and, thus, the fangs are coming out.  Yay.*

I've heard it before that kidlets tend to clash with parents whose traits they share, which means that I probably need to go ahead and invest in full body armor and some Xanax, because River is a loooot like me.  She likes to dress up in sparkly dresses and shoes and then go dig around in the dirt.  She narrates every single moment she plays or works on a project, like she's a mini Martha Stewart.  She attaches a personality and meaning to almost every item that passes through her sticky little fingers; scraps of wrapping paper can be the most important items in her possession and woe betide the person who accidentally throws a scrap away.

Guess who is always throwing the scraps away?  Or demanding that the magpie nest behind the rocking chair in her room be shoveled out?  Or ending the princess' ant burial rites because it's supper time?  That...would be me.  I am the enforcer of schedules, the squasher of playtime, the ender of glimmering fairytale dreams in the face of teeth being brushed.  I don't relish this job, but it's the one I've got.

Lately, it's occurred to me that part of the problem (in addition to River's...strong personality) is that when it comes to leisure time, River and I don't gibe.  Jeffrey is perfectly content to wallow on the couch with me and read books.  Or play a computer game.  Or simply snuggle.  River can look at a book for maybe five minutes and then she wants to start doing flips on the couch.  Snuggling lasts for about five seconds and then she's giggling over her own poots or wanting to lick my neck.  She likes computer games, but the ones Will has turned her onto involve dressing princesses (barf) or designing ponies, which I could dig, but River doesn't take kindly to suggestions, nor does she approve of any color scheme not in the blue/pink/purple family.  So it's not real fun for me.

Will says that it's not about what I want to do, a philosophy which I have to be honest and say makes me want to barf.  I categorically discard the idea that our lives must revolve around our children. I'm going to pull a Herman Cain here and say that although I don't have the facts to prove this, I believe that the nation's obsession with kids and fulfilling their every whim is some sort of multi-step plan by large corporations (including banks) to take over the country while we're too busy making sure Shmoopy has the newest pants or phone or iPony app to notice that our republic has been replaced by an oligarchy.

Pantpantpant.

What?

Right, River acting the ass.

So, I just finished fixing her hair so she could go to the Fair with her Nana, and guess what she did the entire time?  She sang a song about how beautiful her mother was, and how nice and sweet, and how she missed me when I was gone and how sad it was for us to eeevvvvverrr bbeeeeee apaaaaaaaaaaarrrt.

Jeez.

Maybe she's like me because she's somehow cosmically a Gemini instead of an Aquarius.

I was going to write about how mean and defiant and cantankerous she was with me, how neither spanking nor timeouts nor time spent with her doing fun crafty stuff seems to put a dent in our combative relationship, but the sheer force of her preciousness has deflated me.

I'll be ordering that Xanax now.

Avoiding Quarterbacks Named Branson Via Crafting

I'm not THAT kind of mother.  You know, the one who makes crafts every day and spends quality time nurturing and exploring and blogging about it and THEN makes a healthy meal for the whole family and then everybody plays shadow puppets on the ceiling at bedtime before journaling? Um, no.  I don't do that.

I mean, I'm not KNOCKING that kind of mother.  Gah, I wish it was in me to BE that kind of mother.  But the truth is, Will is much more that kind of mother than I am.  He plays games and romps and schedules.

I get up early in the morning so I can scrape the last of the peanut butter onto my toast and not have to be unselfish and give it to my kids.  It's true.

This is not the kind of mother I want to be.  I love peanut butter and having time alone, but the reality is that my kidlets are going to school in just a few days and...I don't want them to.  I want them to be here, with me.
It's weird, I know, but I would far rather them be here, being loud and messing up my concentration when I'm trying to write a blog entry then being a mile away from me, having fun with the children and learning stuff.

Part of it is that I'm going to MISS having a kidlet around.  I haven't been actively alone for five years now.  And while I'm excited about having time to devote to getting the photography business really running and writing and gardening and sewing and crocheting and maybe even trying to find a job outside the house, I'm also terrified of being so lonely that I start wearing grey only and lurking in corners and crying.

More than I usually do, I mean.

The other part is that...okay, this is going to sound Crazy McCrazyface, but I worry about my kids turning into Everybody Else and not these kids:

Not Jeffrey, so much.  Goodness knows that Jeffrey is immune to most influences.  He's gonna be the weirdo that he is, medication and therapies and interventions be damned.  But River...whew.  That girl.

Here's a story:  the other day, Nana came over for a visit.  She brought with her the shirts and dresses she had gotten the kids (I have no idea how the woman isn't in the poorhouse yet with the five grandkids...)  River took one look at the (adorable) dresses Nana pulled out of the bag and yelled, "Oh, I didn't want thoooooose."

Oh, HELL to the NAW.

I rose up like a Fury (or maybe a Goddess of Not Ass-hatty Children) and yanked her into the bathroom and gave her a talking to the likes of which she had never seen which resulted in her sobbing hysterically and moaning that she wanted the pretty dresses that I told her she couldn't have.  In fact, I told her she couldn't have ANY of the dresses Nana brought her ever again until River learned how to be grateful for kindness and a Nana with good taste.  (And yes, I used those words.  I was...a little out of my head.)

River is smart and strong-willed and cute and winsome and clever with the words--have I said this before?  It has occurred to me lately that it is entirely possible that she might wind up being...forgive me...a popular girl.  A MEAN popular girl, who makes fun of kids like her brother.  Or who doesn't want to hang out with the family and watch Labyrinth for the 700th time.

I know, I know...this is ridiculous kind of thinking.  River will be who she is because of who WE are and we are awesomely NOT popular people, so surely she'll just be Queen of the Drama Club and that will be enough for her.

But I'm freaking out enough about the whole nightmare of having to hide all my trolls when River's prom date --Branson, the quarterback who will be groping her drunkenly all night, the little turd...where's my battle axe?-- shows up that I went a little crazy yesterday and DID A CRAFT with my kids.  Because that's the kind of people we are going to be, folks.

We are NOT going to be drunkenly groped by dudes named BRANSON, okay?

Over my dead body, Branson.  MY DEAD BODY.

Ahem.

So, the craft was one of those "find the hidden object in a jar full of other stuff." (Yes, I got this from Pinterest.  See that little red button over to your right?  It's the gateway to a world in which your daughter will never be groped by Branson, that little piss-ant.)

First,  I found an old, clear plastic peanut jar with a lid.  I set River to using Goo Gone to get the sticky stuff from the label off of it and Jeffrey to finding alphabet beads.  They were very intent on their work and didn't argue once.  Angels sang from the cobwebs in my kitchen.

Then we toodled around the house to find little bits of stuff we could put in the jar:  beads, safety pins, coins, a sequin Jeffrey called "The Boss Object."  Heh.  He plays a lot of video games.

We gathered the stuff

catalogued the stuff

and put the stuff in the jar with a bag of expired sushi rice.  (I cleaned out my pantry yesterday.  TWELVE cans of expired food, a bag of sushi rice, and a metric crapton of condiment packets went into the trash.  The waste made me fall over.)

River loved it.

Look at that FACE (and try to pretend that the focus didn't fall on her collar.  She was moving fast, okay?)   Taking the time to do a craft with the kidlets was totally worth it.

You do understand that if there's a kid named Branson in her class next Monday, I'm totally homeschooling them, right?

Or sending this guy after the little punk.

Parenting by the Skin of My Teeth

On Wednesday, River asked Will and I if people had bumps in their ears.

"Do what, honey?" I asked.

"Bumps.  Do people have bumps in veir ears?"

Thinking about Will's weird earlobes and the bumpiness of ears in general, we affirmed that people do, in fact, have bumps in their ears.  And then our family went tra-la-laing down the road.  (This would come back to haunt us.  Or me, specifically.)

Later in the day, I thought I was getting a migraine.  If you have migraines, you know that any change in vision, weird pain in your head, or general "off" feeling can trigger a flight or fight response in which you take massive amounts of caffeine and ibuprofen and cry softly while lying on the couch waiting for the doom to descend upon you.  Will took care of the kids:  fed and bathed Jeffrey and dealt with a damp and tired River when she came back from Vacation Bible School.  I lay on the couch, watching So You Think You Can Dance  and closing different eyes at intervals to check for any auras.

After River was in bed, I wandered into the kitchen to refill my tea mug and flipped on the patio light.  I was doing so because I had noticed a suspect spider web hanging over the patio door and wanted to check it out and OH.  MY.  FILING CABINET.  Y'ALL.  There, cold chilling in her web, was a huMONGous brown widow.

Mother humper.

After scooping myself off of the kitchen floor upon which I had fallen and swallowed my own tongue, I went in search of Will to deal with the dang thing because A:  she was hanging over an exit through which I was not exiting, which meant that B:  I'd have to go through the gate, which is attached to the fence, which was ALSO sporting some suspect webs.  I totally am fine with playing the damsel in distress when it comes to brown widows at night hanging over my patio door, y'all.  Mkay?  Mkay.

Will armed himself with the can of spider spray and manfully applied it to the door and surrounding areas, while I chattered and gesticulated and gagged and screamed on the other side of the glass.  I tell you, being married to me is one giant party.

After the spiders were dealt with, Will came inside and I told him that since no migraine was forthcoming, he ought to head over to Coach's house and play some video games.  I'd be fine and if I needed him I'd call.  I'm an awesome wife, right?  RIGHT. 

Okay, so he left and I looked out the window and shuddered a little more and then several things happened.

1. It started thundering.  Which was AWESOME, because we haven't had any good rain since February, really, and if the thunder meant rain, bring it fricking ON.
2. Jeffrey woke up and started zizzing around the room, alternating between making this gasping/laughing/tryingtokillmewithnoise sound and bellowing that he was starving.  
3. It started raining.  I yelled, "Woohoo!  Rain!"  Which of course meant that Jeffrey ratcheted up his noise a few notches and River boinged out of bed and they started racing around the library like cracked-out hyenas.  
4. It started HAILING, at which point in time, I said, "Oh.  Uh.  Well.  This is interesting."  And Jeffrey wigged the frick out AND started demanding food again.
5. I took a deep breath, sent River back to bed, looked out the window, sent Jeffrey back to bed with a cup of crackers, looked at the radar, noted no warnings of any kind, and collapsed onto the couch in a daze.
6. River came into the library.  The bump that was going to haunt me proceeded to do just that.

Her eyes the size of baseballs, her voice quavering, my poor little princess said, "Mommy, ve bump moved."  And she burst into tears.

Gathering her onto my lap, I tried to make sense of what she was telling me:  something about the bump hurting and her trying to touch it and then it moved.

I suddenly put two and two together and realized that Will and I were TOTALLY in the running for Parents of the Year because the "bump" was actually--wait for it--a tick that had nestled in my sweetling's ear for an entire day, depriving her of blood while Will and I blithely told her that, "Suuurrreee, everybody has bumps in their ears."

"Baby, I think you have a tick in your ear," I said, and she wrenched herself out of my lap, slapping her hands over her mouth, backing away and shaking her head.  It was like she was possessed by Marlena from Days of Our Lives.

"Let me see, sweetie," I said, reaching for her, and...y'all.  She went nuts.

She fell to the floor, screaming and writhing and shrieking about not HURTING her and not TOUCHING her and then Jeffrey of course got up and started bouncing off the library walls, scattering crumbs thither and yon while the dog, who thought this was all great fun, barked and tried to insinuate himself into the fray.

Hay seuss.

 I finally convinced her to let me look at her ear at which time I confirmed that she was a parasite host.  Shudder.  She lost her mind some more, and so did Jeffrey, until I told him to MAN UP and hold his sister's hand while I applied some hand sanitizing gel to the inside of her ear.

Hand sanitizer?  Look, people, I was freaking out.  Back in my day, parents would apply hot needles, matches, nail polish, oil...they did everything but chant and burn sage to get ticks out.  One remedy was alcohol, but I couldn't find ours, so the alcohol-containing hand sanitizer was the way to go.  I managed to get some squirts in and then I left her on the library floor so I could go haul Jeffrey back to his dang bed.  On the way, I picked up some tweezers.

When River saw the tweezers when I got back to the library, she flipped even more out and ran away from me, which was all it took to send me into that Mama Rage place because with the spiders and shrieking and hail and Jeffrey insanity, I just couldn't take it any more.  I chased her down into her room, flipped her onto her back, and pretty much sat on her in order to get her head immobilized so that I could get the tweezers into the delicate little curve of her tiny itty ear and wrench out the tick.  Every twist of her preternaturally strong body (honestly, she's a miniature person with the strength of Hercules) made me angrier and angrier until finally she managed to gasp out, "I'm AFRAID."

Damn, y'all.  Parenting is so HARD.  It always seems as if I'm accomplishing it by the skin of my teeth, barely making it through as I yell at my autistic son or swat my temperamental daughter or break somebody's toy or feed them ice cream for breakfast.  I know it's supposed to be hard (I'm making PEOPLE here), but sometimes it just seems an impossibility for me to get them to adulthood without scarring them for life.

I did not get off of my daughter, because I knew she'd just eel away from me and then I'd have another wrestling match, but I did take my hands off  her head and I leaned down.

"Baby, look at me," I said.

She did, wild-eyed and panting.

"I'm not going to hurt you.  I promise.  I need you to be still so I don't hurt you and so I can get off this tick.  I know you're afraid and you can tell me that all you want, but I am going to have to hold you down so I can get rid of the tick because when you're afraid you wiggle to much."

"But I can't breave.  I'm going to die now, I just know it."

Bless her heart.  This child is me made over.  "No, baby.  You aren't.  We're just going to get to get out this yucky tick now, okay?"

And so we did, while she wailed out her fear and I cried with her as the tick refused to let go until he took out some of her skin with him.  Then, sweat-covered, we snuggled a bit before depositing the tick in the toilet and having a rousing chorus of "Flushing Away the Nasty Tick" and doing the Tick Removal Dance of Supremacy. 

I put her in bed again, sang her a song, rubbed Jeffrey's head, and crawled back into the kitchen to look outside, at which time I saw this:

And for the first time, I actually felt a little sorry for one of these creatures, what with the absent father and the crazy kids and stuff.

Then I did this:

And I stopped feeling sorry for her.


I mean, I'm parenting by the skin of my teeth here, people.  I need all the dead creepy crawlies I can get.

I Got Them Mama Needs Five Minutes Without a Kid's Voice LAWSY It's the Summertime Blues

So...summer vacation.  I have DREAMT about this time for months now,  pretty much since after the CRCT, the standardized test by which some teachers apparently measure the school year, since once that puppy was over, so was Jeffrey's school year.  I couldn't wait for the long drives to end, for sleeping later to start, for the rabid otter nuttiness of the mornings to wind down!  And playing outside!  And biking to the park!  And swimming!  Wooohoooo!

Ahem.

1.  The long drives have ended!  Yay!
2. The sleeping late has started...but...um.  Yeah, that means that at eleven in the P.M., when Will and I are either passing out on the couch or looking at each other and waggling our eyebrows, Jeffrey is yelling and sprinting down the hallway because he can't sleep because he's hungry or he heard a weird noise or he saw a floating head in his room.  (I know, right?  I totally shouldn't have watched that My Ghost Stories show, because unlike that eejit with the punk hair who runs around in old mental hospitals getting spooked by moths flying past him, these people are taking pictures of invisible women with glowing eyes reflected in mirrors.  Hello?  NO, THANK YOU.)  Anyway, sleeping late means that Jeffrey also GOES to sleep late, which might be due to the fact that...
3. OMFC, y'all, it is so.  dang.  hot.  Like, we skipped June and jumped right into late July, which is when somebody opens the Hellmouth in Perrydise and vents the underworld a little.  It is preposterously hot, to the point where going out to water what I facetiously call a garden this year at eight o'clock in the morning means that I break a sweat.  (We haven't had any serious rain since...hang on...of COURSE I couldn't find it.  I mean, that would be too easy.  I estimate that we haven't had any good, extended rain since February.  A few showers here and there, but we haven't gotten a single thunderstorm, even.  You KNOW it's bad when I'm like, "Bring on the awful weather!!"  Sigh.)  I not only want to avoid going outside myself, I feel like a bad mom when I send my kids out.  Which means that they are stuck inside playing video games or reading or doing crafts and making messes which I have to clean up, which breaks my face.  Unfortunately, swimming is out ,because
4. My swimsuit pretty much looked at me when I tried to put it on a week ago and said, "Honey, please."  Because it is four years old and threadbare and sagging and incapable of doing anything but sitting around looking like I pasted a plastic bag over myself.  My mother-in-law is buying me a fancy one for my birthday.  Woohoo!  (Sad when you get excited over fancy bathing suits...or maybe it's good...yes. I'm totally claiming that it's good to get excited about fancy bathing suits, because it means that you are frugal in the meantime and wearing NOT fancy bathing suits, which--let's be honest--are just not as pretty as fancy bathing suits.)
5. Do I even have to tell you that the idea of biking to the park (omalawsy, and then biking BACK???) makes me fall down and try to strangle myself with all of Frodo's hair on the carpet?  (Beagles shed like it's their jobs.  Gah.)

Yeah, so all of these total up to me hanging out with the kids all day every day and getting a wee bit sick of it.  And sick of them.  And, you know, sick of myself because I'm sick of them.  And myself.  SICKNESS ABOUNDS.

What I reaaaaalllly need is a day when I get alone-time, or a time of day when I feel unguilty for being on the computer (which isn't right now, because River is het UP about having to nap and my kitchen is deplorable) and writing blogs or playing a game.  This is the lament of all WAHM or SAHM's every summer time, so nothing I'm saying here is new at all.  I'm just adding my voice to the millions of other mommy voices which are crying, "Calgon take me away!"

Ugh, except please not Calgon, because that would mean taking a bath and the thought of taking a bath actually makes me gag a little.

What about, "Apple Cider, take me away?"

No, then you'd think I'm a lush.  And honestly, it's one thing to lock yourself in the bathroom with some bubbles while your kids plaster themselves to the Wii.  Getting plastered yourself and pointing out that you have a crush on Lego Harry Potter is another.

Not that I DO have a crush on Lego Harry Potter.

The REAL Harry Potter, maybe.

What?

You know he's precious, what with his milk-white skin and red lips.

Like Snow White, only a dude.

And with a nasty scar.

And no singing animals.

You know, I think I'm going to end this while I'm ahead and go soak my head in the sink.

Y'all stay cool.

ANOTHER Standard NotHannah Catchup List

Honestly, it's starting to feel like maybe I should just post only lists every two or three weeks, because that's how I'm rocking the blog lately.  I'm awesome. What can I say?

What I SHOULD say is that I'm sorry I've been out of commission for so long.  NOT that you're hanging on by your fingernails, clinging to a shred of hope that some day, some how, I will once again grace you with my bloggeriffic fantasticness.  But I have totally ignored my interweb friends for a few weeks now.  I haven't visited blogs, I haven't responded to emails, I haven't done anything but peeped up on a few FB posts and that, my friends, is not cool.  (If it makes anybody feel better, I've ignored many of my "hey, I can actually give you a hug without flying across the country and/or world" friends, too.  Have I mentioned I'm awesome?)  Anywho, to all of you whom I've neglected lately, I'm sorry.  Things are straightened out now and I am slowly crawling out of my cave of self-interest.  DANG.  It sure is bright out here.

Let the list commence:

1. I done made me a photography website.  In the professional photographer world, this is theoretically how one drums up business, while also offering clients a place where they can view a gallery of their session.  From a NotHannah standpoint, it's a responsibility that takes away from this blog, in that every time I sit down at the computer, I'm editing pictures, tweaking the site, or pining over new equipment.  (Okay, I will admit to also being sucked into a new FB game.  Gah.  Gardens of Time is a wicked, awful, beautiful time-vacuum.)  If you are so inclined, head on over to the site.  http://www.hrayphotography.com/  
2. I have been alternating between my feelings about the death of Osama bin Laden.  In a departure from many progressive friends, who are in a place of "we should all love one another and not be violent," I am genuinely happy that the man is dead.  HOWEVER, I do not feel it germane to be bouncing around the streets with glee about it.  HOWEVER, I understand the (mostly) young people who are doing it, if only because their entire lives have been spent in the shadow of a bogeyman who has been removed from the collective consciousness, so yay.  HOWEVER, I'm not all down with demands to see the body, which seems to be coming primarily from a group of folks I now call deathers.  (I'm pretty sure that at some point in time our president is going to have to prove that he is, in fact, alive.  Or human.)  I'm not down with that mainly because it strikes me as further proof that reality television is rotting our brains.
3. I received a notice that I could now pull the money from my Teacher Retirement System account.  It's a nice chunk of change, and I'll put it to good use, but it's rather weird to be closing that door officially.  Part of it is a sense of, "Oh, shozzbot, I have NO retirement."  Part of it is a sense of, "I really enjoyed the kid part of teaching."  On teacher appreciation day, two of my sweet babies thanked me.  It really meant a lot to me and made me thankful for the technology that allows me to keep up with former students.
4. This weekend, while walking with the family out on The Land, my brother Heath found a muddy, crumpled piece of what appeared to be a hymnal.  One of the hymns was "Were You There?"  It dawned on us that it was refuse left behind by the killing winds that swept through the South the week before.  We found bits of roofing paper, a shredded California map.  At a friend's house, I found the top of a doll's head.  My friend's contractor found a high school yearbook page.  Finding these pieces of life, snatched up and flung far away, is sobering and awful and freaky...and, of course, maddeningly interesting to a writer.  There's a story racing around my head that I think will have to be let out soon.  
5. I took up running again, which has apparently tickled the humidity gods PINK, because it has gotten hotter and more humid than May has a right to be.  It's hard to do ANYTHING, much less run for forty-five minutes every day, but I'm trying to force myself to do it, because while I've lost five pounds, I need to lose more and I don't feel very healthy lately.
6. It could be all the chocolate chip cookies I've eaten today.  Possibly.
7. I finished the bathroom!  (Actually, I finished it months ago, but I don't think I've shown you yet.) Ther are still touch ups I want to do, but it looks MUCH better.  

1. 
   
   
2. Yes, I know this should be "8."  But honestly, Blogger is on such crack that I can't figure out what the hell it wants me to do in order to insert a picture.  It makes me insane.
3. My garden is shot all the way to hell and back.  I have planted very, very little and what I DO have is fairly crispy.  I'm hoping to get some stuff in this week, though.  Really. 
4. On top of...
5. Y'all, this disjointed list is breaking my face.
6. We had our IEP meeting for next year.  Jeffrey's IQ was 143.  1.4.3.  Good heavens.  And while that's all great and everything, the boy still can't write legibly.  Last week was field day, during which I talked to another mother who had had virtually the same experience with her little boy this year.  Neither of us were very excited to find this connection.  Whheeee!  (When is school over, please?  Seriously.  I want it over NOW.)
7. I have replaced the sad, worn out office chair with my big exercise ball.  I don't know where I got this idea, but can I just say "Yay!??"  It is forcing me to have good posture, my legs and back aren't as sore from all the editing and writing, and I can even get a little exercise in.  RIGHT NOW I'm bouncing on the ball.  Exercising.  AND typing.  Yahooooooo!
8. Ahem.
9. I made cookies today.  Lime and white chocolate chip and regular chocolate chip.  I realize these are not healthy, per se.  Or any se, really.  Especially when you forgo lunch and eat cookies instead.  Cooookkkiiiieees.

Hope all of you are well.  Miss you.  Mean it.

Springtime in the House of Aspie

Just for giggles, y'all, I took a little trip down memory lane in the "Asperger's" category to see if I was somehow deluding myself.  (I delude myself on a fairly regular basis.)  But, no, I found it there in black and white:  Springtime makes my boy crazy.  Cra.  Zy.  I think it's a few things:

1. His allergies make him want to claw his own nose off.  He walks around in a sort of daze of itching and you can tell he's miserable and distracted all the time.
2. His winter haircut has grown out and the little hairs are tickling his ears and making him want to claw his own ears off.
3. Not only has the angle of light changed, but the hours of sunlight have, too.  I think they should give Aspie families a Daylight Savings Time exemption.  Or an island.  OMFC, an Aspie Island.  With, like, lots of bounce houses and bubble wrap and books about insects.  I totally need to buy an island.
4. He is so sick of school that he wants to barf on it.  (And, with the exception of last year, I am totally right there with him.)
5. His birthday comes with cool presents and candy.  And CAKE!!  And BALLOONS!!  And...MORE PRESENTS!!!

Anyway, suffice to say that I am gritting my teeth and groping my way through tantrum-choked mornings and loud car rides and a child so vague and spacey that the other day he honestly forgotten that I had put his medicine in his mouth THIRTY SECONDS beforehand.  Whew.

Also, can I just say that this school year is just over?  Honestly, just stick a fork in the NotHannah family, because we are done.  Doooone.  I fantasize every day about pulling Jeffrey out of school early and all of us spending our mornings peacefully toodling around in the yard or going on errands and NOT going back to the place where the legally binding interventions keep getting pushed aside, ignored, or modified without rhyme or reason.  I could go on and on about it, just fill up blogs with the asinine, careless, illegal mess that keeps happening, but I just...don't want to.

Like...when a teacher emails me and tells me that Jeffrey said something inappropriate in class and I ask him what it was and he says they were doing a Word Scramble (in Math/Science/Social Studies...but it's testing week, so whatever) of "April Showers" and there was a clue to "find the dirty word" (I'm assuming "showers," but seriously, isn't that inane?) and he found "ass" and said it out loud--I mean, I know it's WRONG to laugh my "ass" off over it, but that didn't stop me.  Are you seriously going to spend however long it takes you to type up this relation of evilness in my child and on the same day, NOT give him a schedule by which to organize his day?  Seriously?

I say this every year this time of year, and it finally occurs to me that I just need to suck it up and bite the bullet and do whatever else I need to do to get it through my skull, but public schools just don't seem to get Aspergers.  It's as if they look at my boy (and boys like him) and say, "Well, they SAY he has autism, but he's really smart and he can talk, so let's fling him to the wolves and hope for the best."  And then "best" is not really so much "best."  It's more like "pitifully not enough."  I get that the public schools have in their minds that we want to mainstream these kids and make them like everybody else, but I am finally at the point where I want to say, "WHY?"  Why do I want to mainstream my kid?  He isn't mainstream.  He is beautifully, weirdly, rainbowifically NOT swimming in the mainstream.  He did so well last year in his contained classroom, venturing out to do fun stuff with the mainstream kids.  He felt secure.  In place.

This year?  He has no friends.  He is constantly confused about what it is he's doing wrong.  (He shot a bird the other day at a girl.  He had no idea what he was doing.  The other kids made a big deal out of it and embarrassed and pleased him at the same time.  Where were the teachers?  Goodness knows.  Perhaps coming up with more phrases for Word Scrambles.)  The teachers and parapros and administration seem absolutely clueless as to how to handle him.  Shall I tell you about the AP who told Jeffrey he was breaking the law the other day by touching another child?

I'm just sick of it.  Sick.  Barfingly, tiredly, dragging my feetedly sick of it.  (Adverbs are my friends today.  Better than chugging vodka straight from the bottle, yes?)

I just did a quick read through again.  Every.  Year.  Every year I've felt this way except for the one year that Jeffrey was in an environment designed to bring out the best in him.  Why in the world the system chose to change that for him is beyond me.  But...

I almost can't even write this.  We're changing schools again.  We're pulling the plug on the disorganized, chaotic mess that Jeffrey's school was this year.  We're hoping that the school he's zoned for will work.  They have new procedures in place, better than when he was there.  He and River will be able to go to the same school. 

Can I say, "Blahblahblah?"  Because I am not only not hopeful anymore, I'm back to the "Keep on messing with my kid" place.  The place where I want to homeschool him.  Where I want to keep him away from the grudging guidance he gets in the public sector.

And I HATE being here on a beautiful Spring day when the bees are buzzing and the greening is happening and we should be skipping around being hopeful.  I'm tired of being here.  I want to be happy in the Spring.

And I'm not.  Springtime in the House of Aspie is blechy again and it pisses me off.

Standard NotHannah Catch-Up List: Volume Nine Bajillion and One

Helloooo!  I'm totally not apologizing for not posting in so long, because I was busy getting my Spring Break planning and then my Spring Break having ON, people.  The fams and I went all the way from the foothills to the mountains to the flatlands to the beach and I am rested and restored and inspired and sated with crab until June.

Seriously, we had a fanTAStic time and I had just enough time with the kidlets and just enough time with the hubs and just enough time with MYSELF that I feel like all of the bits and pieces of me that were pulled too tight or worn thin or fitting oddly around the edges are all smoothed and polished and clean again.  Yay!

Along the way, I listened to and watched and discovered and read some really cool and amazing and inspiring things and...I wanna tell you about them, mkay?  Mkay.

1. R.E.M.'s new album, Collapse Into Now ~  I've been an R.E.M. fan for going on twenty years now.  I've danced like a crazy person to their songs, and written short stories with them playing in the background, and cried at the first notes of them when my heart was broken.  This album sounds, to my ears, like all of their albums fed into a blender, whizzed together, and poured out as something new and golden.  The jangling guitar-driven beats are straight from Life's Rich Pageant and the mandolins remind me of Out of Time. The song "Oh My Heart" slays me, especially when Stipe's voice soars plaintively like in days of old.  Er...you know, like, fifteen years ago.  It's definitely an album made by men who have been doing this rock star thing for a long time, and who are contemplating legacy and purpose.  I love it.  Luff it.  Looooveee it.
2. The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv ~ If there was a theme to our Spring Break, it was the reinforcement of the idea that we needed to spend more time together outside as a family.  I'd heard about this book in the past and when Will and I spotted it at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center on Jekyll Island, we snapped it up.  I've only read a few chapters into it, but already I'm feeling more and more supported in my idea that being inside all the time is HURTING my kidlets.  I'm looking forward to the sections that discuss the concept of being in nature as a means of treating ADHD.  Not necessarily a cheery, upbeat tome, but an important one, I think.
3. Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee ~ It must be said that when Will announced that we would be going here for two days during our vacation, I was less than thrilled, particularly when he nixed the idea of going to the Smoky Mountains National Park for a hike--or even Cades Cove.  I did not want to spend two whole days hanging out in theme parks getting slimed by strange kids.  There.  I said it.  However, with the help of some sweet cousins, we were able to rent a cabin and score tickets to area attractions at VERY reasonable (read:  cheapola) rates and so we were set.  First, we went to Magiquest, which...y'all.  I think I have told you of my love of Dungeons and Dragons as a tween and the fact that, even now, I am drawn to fantasy literature, right?  Right.  So let me tell you that when we peedoodled up to the faux-castle facade of this place and picked out our own interactive wands...well, the fantasy geek in me might have squealed a little.  We had a great time running around solving puzzles and tapping things with our wands.  Jeffrey was in hawg heaven and perfected his wand-flourish lunge.  Here's a picture of him solving something or other:

I know it's blurry and vague, but I promise you that this was the only time he stopped long enough for me to snap a picture.   We also went to Wonderworks, which I'll spare you the details of.  Jeffrey loved it with a passion that burns, but there wasn't a lot for River to do, besides lie on a bed of nails.  Which was cool, but, you know...weird at best and, at worst, maybe a little sordid.  The highlight of the festivities (besides visiting with my sweet cousins, who are some of the best people I know) was our trip into Gatlinburg to visit the Ripley's aquarium.  We love a good aquarium and this one was GREAT.  Also, it wasn't very crowded, which made us happy.  There are so many pictures I could share, but I'll give you these because otherwise, this will be the longest blog post in history:

The last morning of our short stay, we went into G'burg for some doughnuts at The Donut Friar.  I lived in the area for a year when I was a child and although one of the houses I lived in has actually been torn down and the whole city is completely different, this shop remains and the doughnuts are still as good as I remember.  What a great time we had...

4.  Garden and Gun magazine ~ Have I mentioned my love for this magazine?  I adore it, and for the past few months I've lived without it because it was one of the things that we had to trim from the budget.  It's like the New Yorker for Southerners:  you can read about hunting, cooking, artists in the South, regional travel destinations.  It's printed on lovely, thick paper and almost always features something that I love.  I missed out a couple of months ago on The Avett Brothers, but I picked up this month's copy before Will and I headed to St. Simon's Island for our get away and was treated to a story about Gregg Allman, one about a potter in Mississippi whose works grace my library and kitchen, and a recipe for something called bacon crackers, which is a piece of bacon wrapped around a club cracker, can I get an AMEN?  Oh, and there was an article about Shelby Foote!  Love.  (Also?  Will totally just subscribed to two years of it--yay for tax refunds!)

5.  O Magazine's April issue ~  Listen, a lot can be said about the ridiculousness of Oprah Winfrey's magazine and even, in some cases, Oprah herself.  I mean, I have snorted LOUDLY at the pricey jewelry and shoes and makeup applicators I've seen grace those pages.  However, this month's issue features POETRY in a large way and that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.  There is an interview with Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer prize-winning, fiercely joyfully-living and writing woman whose words I'd only given a passing glance to before. There are snippets from Maya Angelou and W.S. Merwin and thoughts on what poetry is from Margaret Atwood and Bono and Ashton Kutcher.  There is also a list of important works of poetry and I am tickled to say that not ONLY do I own many of them, the Rumi translation by one of my creative writing professors from UGA (that would be Coleman Barks) is on the list.  Hee. Given that this is National Poetry Month, I say "Huzzah."  HUZZAH, I say.  You can poopoo Oprah all you want for her lavish giving and huge personality and Tom Cruise bouncing like a mongoose on speed all over her couch, but the Truth is that the woman has brought the written word to housewives and couch potatoes all over this country and I'd like to give her a big fat hug for that.  (Do I need to tell you that Mary Oliver mentions in the interview how humans are losing touch with Nature and what an awful thing this is?  Note to self:  write a letter to Mother Nature thanking her for the gigantic nudge.)

6.  The Driftwood Beach on Jekyll Island ~  Listen, y'all.  Jekyll Island ain't got much.  It's got some big fancy houses that a bunch of rich folks in the early 1900s built and called cottages, and that's pretty much it.  No glistening white beaches; the beaches here are brown and flat and unstirred by the waves that churn up shells and sharks teeth farther south.  There aren't many restaurants and there's a convention center and...um...yeah.  Jekyll has always felt stale to me.  Sort of...."Hunh...well, THAT was a horrifying suspension bridge to cross for a lot of nothing."  But a few weeks ago, I came across some pictures taken by somebody at a driftwood beach on Jekyll, and they were gorgeous and I thought, you know, maybe it was something we could check out while we were there.

Y'all.  I can't really describe the power of this place.  Basically, the water and wind and time have ripped up and tossed around huge old live oak trees, driving them into the sand and turning them into sculptures that are feminine and stark and...wow.  Just that.

This one was my favorite:

Seriously, I couldn't get enough of her. I couldn't stop myself from whispering to her, leaning against her. I could have spent HOURS trying to find new angles from which to film her. Sighhhhh. I luff her.

7.  Also, I love this guy:

Seriously, how can you NOT love a pirate, looking at forty?

8.  SPRING!!  ~  As long as I focus on overlooking the fact that awful storms are approaching from the west, I can be giddy with the feeling of sinking my fingers into the dirt, watching River hug an azalea bush, listening to Jeffrey laugh as he flies a kite in the pasture behind our house.  A few weeks ago, I was going to take down the Winter wreath of roses and rosemary that had hung on our front door since December.  I was planning a Spring lavender and egg extravaganza, but when I opened the door, a flash of red swooped away from me.  Turns out, a pair of house finches decided that my wreath would make a perfect house site.

A few days later, I found that Mama and Daddy House Finch had been busy:

And when we got home today, we discovered this:

Oh,  sweet little fuzzyheads.  You remind me that there is so much hope and newness and fragility in our world, and so much safety and warmth to be found in a cozy house filled with love.

It's a Love Fest, y'all. 

Consider yourself hugged.

I'm Becoming a Wereferret

When I was a teacher, I used to hate to find a special ed kid on my roster.  It wasn't the kid, though, that made me groan.  I could handle the preferential seating needs, the talking out in class, the tics, the meds, the struggles through vocabulary words.

What drove me nuts were the parents.

GAWD at the special ed parents of my tenth and twelfth graders.  They were pushy.  They were never satisfied.  They acted like I didn't know what I was doing.  They expected me to fail and were on top of every single mistake I made.  I wanted to eat my own face so many times dealing with these parents...they were like rabid little ferrets biting at my ankles every time I turned around.

And now?

Now I'm a rabid ferret. A wereferret, if you will.

Or at least, I understand how one becomes a wereferret.  It has finally started to dawn on me that by the time a special ed student makes it to high school, the parents have become old hat at what's going to happen:

There's going to be a meeting.  The parents will say, "My kid needs X, Y, and Z.  He needs X, Y, and Z because of 1, 2, and 3.  Our experience--you know, the experience that comes with living with a child for, say, fourteen years--has been that if the kid doesn't get X, then 1 will come into play, which will make it impossible for Y to happen because of 2.  Don't get us started on what heinous, awful 3-type behavior will occur if you don't do Z.  DO Z!!  For the love of all that is holy, DOOOOOO ZZZZZZ."

The parents will produce the documentation, the recommendations, the helpful website links, the therapists' phone numbers.  They will smile and shake hands and talk about how they just know this school year is going to be a success.

And so, the teachers do Z.  At least, MOST of them do Z.  The PE teacher won't, because she can't figure out how to make it work in her class, but that's okay, because it's the last period of the day and if 3-type behavior happens, the kid can just go home early, right?

Most of the time Y gets done.  I mean, if it doesn't get done, of course the kid falls into the habits that are caused by 2, but the teachers can work around those.  And the other kids aren't really worried by them.  They just ignore the kid when he does weird stuff, but that's okay, because kids affected by 2 don't really always get along with other kids, anyway, so he's used to being ignored.

X is just so tedious, really.  Doing it every day is just so hard and if it gets forgotten every once in a while, it isn't really a big deal, because the kid is making good grades.  He passed his latest standardized test, didn't he?  Oh, and by the way, the school is going to use 1 as a way to get more funding.

Meanwhile, the parents are at home, listening to their kid talk about how he can't make friends or find his homework list or understand a concept in math or concentrate on what his teachers are saying.  He comes home with wrinkled papers (if he comes home with papers at all.)  He THINKS he has a test on Wednesday, but he isn't sure.  And so the parents email the teacher and they ask about the isolation and the list and math class and his organizational strategies and THE TEACHERS DON'T WRITE BACK.  They don't write back because they are exhausted by teaching the other kids who don't have 1, 2, or 3 and who don't need X, Y, and Z.  They are worn out from dealing with the kids who have 6, 8, and 32 and who need a strange combination of P and lower case J.  They have children at home or a party to go to or a class to take after work and, frankly, they don't really care that for the last ten years, the kid's parents have been writing unanswered emails because teachers have not done X, Y, and Z.  

I know that they don't care, because there were plenty of times that I didn't respond to the emails.  Or I responded to them a day or two later.  Or I responded to them with a lofty, icy tone.  After all, I had been teaching for FOUR years, so surely to every god in the pantheon I knew what I was doing better than a kid's parent.  I would go over those emails with a heavy dose of snark with my friends, outlining the several ways that the kid in question was an ass or an idiot or just so dang difficult.  And the mothers?   They were simply RUINING their children with their over-parenting.  Those kids would be so lucky to graduate and get away from them.  What, did they have nothing better to do with their days than write lengthy emails about how their little shmoopy just couldn't find his English paper?

This dang petard I just got hoisted up by chaffs, y'all.

To the parents of the special ed kids I taught:  I'm sorry I was an ass.  You were asses, too, but I understand  why now.  There was no reason for you to expect that I would do the job you paid me to do, and all too often, I didn't do it.  You were right to call me on it, and I hope your kid did well despite me being an ass. 

To the teachers of the special ed kids who work so hard to do it right:  bless you.  I know how hard it is and the fact that you do it right despite being emailed and called and hounded by frightened wereferrets is a testament to your awesomeness.

To all my fellow wereferrets:  keep up the good fight.  Write those emails, make those phone calls, bite every damn ankle you have to for your kids.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go write an email and find some ointment for my petard rash.

Here's who I'll be writing emails for:

Lest you think he's too angelic:

Adventure Parenting

The other day, I was hiding from my children using the restroom and I picked up the Michael Chabon book Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son.  I got the book for Will for Christmas, mainly because I wasn't able to find the Terry Kay book I had coveted, andWill had put it in the bathroom because he's trying to read Tropic of Cancer in the library (his comment:  "I'm looking forward to getting back to The Dark Tower--by Stephen King--really soon."  Apparently, he's sick of reading jarring descriptions of vaginas that go on for three pages.  The descriptions, not the vaginas.  Although given that it's Henry Miller, the vaginas probably DO go on for three pages.  Why is Blogger's spell check telling me "vaginas" is spelled incorrectly?  Ohhh.  I'm supposed to put "vaginae." Weird.  ) ANYWAY, he wanted to read the Chabon book and so he put it in the bathroom and I picked it up.  The latter chapters are about relationships and such, but the first chapters are about parenting; how scary it is and hard and challenging, et cetera.  It's funny stuff, but it's also painfully honest (this is one of those Truth books I'm so fond of) and Chabon is brilliant in his observations.

Among them:  we are raising a generation of wussy, unimaginative kids.

He doesn't put it that way, of course.  Mahgawd, the man won a Pulitzer.  But he makes the point that our children don't play in the streets (or even the yard) anymore and with the loss of that freedom, they are losing their imaginations, their waistlines, and their innovation.

This gave me pause.  As a child, I didn't play in the street.  We lived on a (barely) paved road frequented by combines and rednecks driving 9,000 miles an hour, so the thought of us playing in the street made my mother pass out cold.  My brothers and I did, however, play outside.  Every day after school until dark, all day long in the summer time, we were outside.  We ran through the pastures, we built forts in the strip of trees behind Daddy's garden, we imagined ourselves a veritable fleet of ships, rockets, race cars, and motorcycles that were actually clumps of crepe myrtles, bicycles, swing sets and random barrels brought home by my father.  We jumped hay bales.  We made mud pies.  We waded in creeks and played basketball or soccer in the yard. 

We got dirty.  We got hot or cold.  My mother provided us with wet paper towels, drinks, extra toboggans, and the firm abjuration not to come inside unless we were bleeding.  Sometimes, we brought books or coloring stuff outside and read or colored under the trees in the front yard.  We played with our cousins or each other when we were at home.

When we visited friends who lived in town, we rode bikes or skated down the sidewalks.  We played football or had pine cones wars, running through drainage ditches and other people's yards heedlessly. 

We LIVED.  I mean, not only did we not keel over from the outsideness of it all, we actually had lives outside of the confines of our home.  We had personalities not shaped solely by the extracurricular activities watched over so carefully by our parents or teachers.  We read stuff and then we acted it out.  We were not afraid of everything.  We weren't nervous.  We were fearless, laughing, dirty, scratched up, imaginative little people.

And on the days when it rained?  We were STILL fearless, laughing, dirty imaginative little people.  We read to each other.  We made shadow puppets on the wall.  We built insanely complicated clubhouses out of sheets and pillows and chairs.  We baked cookies, wrote and starred in plays, colored in a vast array of coloring books.  Sure, we watched some TV.  We played some video games.  But they were rarely the center of our day.  We made our own fun and if our parents gave us parameters, they were loose and designed to prevent serious bodily harm. 

We lived.  We lived hard, my friends.

My kids?  Not so much. 

Oh, it pains me to say that.  It pains me to reveal that my kids have spent their lives inside, mindlessly watching television or playing games completely laid out for them by the careful marketing strategies of toy companies and fast food restaurants.  The earth mama in me shudders at the fact that my kids don't know the changing of the seasons in their blood because they don't know the seasons change except for the increase in allergy medicines or the special programming around holidays.  It saddens me that the back yard is the only yard my children know, that their entire universe is a half acre that is hidden from the street by a fence. 

Y'all, that is just wrong.

We live in one of the safest neighborhoods in Perrydise and I won't let my kids go out by themselves in the front yard.  Because, gods forbid, they might get kidnapped or bitten by a brown widow or stung by a wasp.  I'm not making light of those things.  What if my children DID get kidnapped or bitten or stung?  What if I lived the rest of my own life mourning the loss of my child because I didn't protect him or her?  This is an awful, terrible, soul-crushing thing to think about.  But...

What if they don't get kidnapped?  What if they don't get bitten or stung?  What if they spend their entire lives with me on one half acre (or on very carefully controlled jaunts into "wildernesses") and grow up to be frightened, unimaginative, fat adults with no capability of entertaining themselves or imagining a better world for themselves?

I'm totally serious.

I look at the world we live in, with all of the technological advances and advancing waistlines, with role-playing games that let us be muscle-bound and fight dragons while we munch corn chips on the couch, and wonder if we aren't being set up.  Or turning into a certain Pixar movie featuring a musical-loving robot.  I'm worried.

And I'm doing something about it.  I'm starting to practice Adventure Parenting. 

It's awful.  It's scary.  It makes me feel, sometimes, like a bad parent, which I understand is insane.  But in the freetime my kids have, I am setting my jaw and shoving them out the door. 

"Go play," I say. 

The whining starts.  "It's hot."  "It's cold."  "I'm tired."  "I'm bored." 

"Go play," I say, handing out drinks and sweaters. 

And they do.  They jump on the trampoline (my GAWD, they're going to break their necks), they crawl on the play fort (there are BROWN WIDOWS in the corners), they fight their way into the azalea patch that they call a cave (COPPERHEADS!!!.)  They argue and fall down and they run with sticks and the dog jumps on them and they wig out because something buzzes by their heads.  They play.

I stand inside looking out the window, freaking out a little less every day.

In the grocery store, I let River walk beside me.  I let her run to go look at a toy display.  She carries soda bottles for me.  She drops soda bottles on me.  I cringe and tell her to try again, which often leads to her collapsing on the linoleum and wailing that she caaaaannnnn'''''ttttt doooooo ittttt.  In fact, right now, she's complaining because she can't reach the box of drinks on the table.  I could get up.  I could get the drink for her or tell her to climb on a chair, but I'm not going to. 

Because here's the other thing:  my kids can't problem-solve.  They can't figure things out on their own.  If they are thirsty, they can't look for the drinks themselves or pour themselves glasses of milk.  They can't open up bags of chips.  They can't clean up spills, because we do every fricking thing for them.  We schedule their days to the minute and make sure that they are occupied every single minute.  We open bags, tie shoes, mop spills, wear ourselves out making sure they are safe and comfortable and taken care of.

Part of this is understandable, I guess.  My boy is an Aspie and for the past four years, we've learned that he needs to be occupied, scheduled, informed.  But we've allowed this to mean that he has no free time, no time to figure stuff out for himself, no need to think outside of the electronic boxes he loves.  And, unfortunately, we've allowed this to mean that his sister, who is as neurotypical as they come, is also occupied, scheduled, and informed.  We've allowed it to mean that instead of risking a meltdown, we clean up messes ourselves.  Or give in to demands for TV or video games--even from the kid without scientific reasons for meltdowns.

My kids could change the world with their brains and their personalities, but we have parented them right into a situation in which they might not change anything. 

Hence the Adventure Parenting.  Hence the fact that I just told River to go into her closet and get her clothes for the day.  Hence the fact that after Jeffrey comes home from school and after his homework, he'll go outside for a while before retreating to the digital world that we allow him to escape to.  His sister will go with him and they'll play together.

Here's a side-effect of Adventure Parenting:  my children are interacting.  Now, listen.  They love each other because they're siblings.  But there's an almost-five year age difference between them, never mind the developmental quirks that Jeffrey has.  We haven't really encouraged them to play together, because it seemed ridiculous to do so.  They like snuggling in front of the TV together, or sitting and painting together, but they have never really played together.  Now they do.  Sure, River leads the games with an iron fist:  her naturally more fertile imagination casts her as the boss a little too much for Jeffrey's taste.  And, sure, sometimes Jeffrey gets heartily sick of all of the outsidedness and acts like an ass.  But, for the most part, my kids (and their relationship) are thriving on being forced to play together.

The other night, Will came up to me as I was washing dishes while the kids jumped on the trampoline.  Hands stuffed in his pockets, he said, "I don't know what to do with myself.  They don't really need me out there." 

I looked at him.  "Well, we could always, you know...talk." 

What a revelation:  the idea that we could have a conversation not squeezed in between taekwondo and bedtime and breakfast.  The concept that we didn't have to worry and manage and fix and placate every waking minute of every single day.  The thought that our kids might be able to occupy themselves and wind up OKAY--and so might we.  CRAZINESS.

River is brushing her teeth right now.  Well, actually, she is dragging a chair into the bathroom to brush her teeth.  She has to use the chair because the other day, I forced her to realize that she could use the stepstool to get up on the trampoline all by herself.  The smile on her face as she jumped all by herself, flinging herself away from the earth and my grasping hands...it was like sunshine.  She was transcendent.  I stood in the doorway and kicked myself for denying her that for so long. 

When she's finished brushing her teeth, we'll go outside, where I'll straighten the yard and garden up and she'll help me until she gets bored and goes off to dig a hole or climb a tree or some other adventurous thing that will make me cringe and waver. 

Understand, I'll be cringing because my daughter chose to dress herself in this today: 

Ahem. 

Anybody else wanna have an adventure?