fair questions

Speaking of naps.. yesterday, after what looked like it was going to be the best discovery in recent history ( O almost fell asleep while listening to Goldilocks and the Three Bears on CD – thank god for i tunes), O and I discussed what went wrong. “Why do you think you kept kicking the wall and making loud sounds after I reminded you it was quiet time?”, I inquired. “Um..”, she began, pausing to wrinkle her forehead, purse her lips, look skyward as if deep in thought, and extend her hands as if beginning a presentation before she continued with, “that’s not really a fair question.”

Nola, meanwhile, had three firsts:

1. pulled herself up to standing for the first time
2. ate three o’s
3. drank voraciously from a sippy cup.

People are really growing up around here.

To nap or not to nap

Yesterday, I did the unthinkable. I declared an end to naps. Just for my 2.89 year-old who had been bucking the weary system for nearly 10 days. As the system administrator most days, I concluded that the resources expended  versus the product rendered created a ratio that was no longer worth pursuing…i.e. 20,30,40,50, even 90 minutes of trying to get O to sleep, versus total minutes slept = 0.  Not exactly rocket science.

For nearly 3 years, we’ve had a predictable break in the early afternoon. Our lives as parents have literally revolved around O’s naps. We plan errands, work schedules, personal hygiene, cooking, phone calls, employment, car trips, parties, and airline travel around the nap mandate. Naps have been like tides – something we can count on and something we must respect and plan for. Declaring the end to this institution has turned my world upside down. Mostly, I do a lot of semi-noisy deep breathing. The consequences are multi-fold…

1. First, I don’t get a “break” (defined here as having 1.5 hours of the day with just one child under the age of 3, as opposed to the usual 2 or occasional 3).
2. Second, O is disastrously tired without the nap and so we see incessant whining, irrationality, and sporadic melt downs.
3. Third, since she is falling apart by 5, bedtime now hovers around 6:15 pm – out of necessity. Though we always thought this would be boon for us.. you know, kids both asleep by 7, time for us to talk to each other, hang out, etc. To our surprise, it also means that we are basically homebound after 6 pm and a menace to anyone within our walls after that time. Doesn’t leave much in the way of night life (don’t laugh.. there is nightlife out here!)
4. Fourth, Nola’s afternoon nap is threatened by the loud sounds of an unsleeping but exhausted and cranky preschooler. We’ll leave it at four then.

The one thing that does sometimes work at naptime is to “drive her down”. This might create some guilty resonance with the other parents out there. Not exactly a carbon-neutral parenting practice…my guilt finally arm wrestled my nap dependence and won. So, without the option of driving her down against the backdrop of failed attempts at getting her to sleep via cuddling, singing, silence, shshshing, rocking, strollering, bribing, reading, books on taping, and ignoring, I surrendered.

Then, last night, I was enviously talking with another parent whose kid still naps at a much older age and started to feel that itch again…the one that compels to just try one more time or to try one more thing …just to do whatever necessary to get that nap back on our map. Then, someone else said, “you run on biodiesel so it’s not that bad”.

I am writing this post as O sleeps peacefully in our car outside my kitchen window. I can see her little cheeks drooping now with the relief of much needed rest. It only took 17 minutes to “drive her down.” I promise to stop… maybe when she turns 3. In the meantime, I will continue wrestling with my competing goals: reducing my carbon emissions and minimizing my grumpy mommy/grumpy toddler/grumpy baby emissions as well.

kuntrywife, live from the kitchen

It’s one of those mornings…Blase is performing tonight at the Community Center. He’s opening for a musician from Berlin. I am doing a little performance of my own which entails baking 8 loaves of rosemary-garlic bread  to be fed to event-goers this evening. My oven only has one rack which makes this a little bit funny. You bread bakers know that busy yeast waits for no oven space… so the timing of these promised loaves is tricky. I had it all planned out, including bringing rising loaves to high school with me today to bake in the kitchen trailer oven while I work.

My first glitch this morning was running out of flour. I had already started proofing the yeast so I needed to secure more flour ASAP. I called a couple of neighbors at a pretty ungodly hour for those without children (8 am) but yielded no answers and certainly no flour. I was able to launch four loaves and set the oven to preheat before loading up the girls to get Ossian to school. Oops… forgot to pump milk for Nola first. I hurled the pump onto the couch, hooked the apparatus up to one side while nursing Nola on the other. Though pumping was never fun with one kid, it has become nearly un-doable with two. Ossian and Nola love to play with the pump while I’m rushing to eek out a few ounces. They take turns pulling out the tubing, shaking the receptacle and trying to pull the suction funnel off of my breast. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so frustrating. I managed a few ounces despite the breast pump mutiny and buckled the girls into their snack crumb filled car seats.

I was a bit behind schedule but nothing I couldn’t make up with some speed-vacuuming and clutter hiding later…. I am also trying to excavate our mess to prepare for guests arriving tonight. Childless guests always muster up a different standard in me – one that requires toys to be put away, dirty diapers to be hidden, and surfaces to be visible. Ossian began a cool new project this morning. She was “making a fire” which she felt required her to wash a lot of our firewood in the bathroom sink before stacking it in the middle of the living room. These kind of natural events make cleaning an elusive goal. How do you clean when things are always moving around and infinite messes are continuously created in the name of child development?

Ok.. so we made it into the car and nearly to the bridge when the car stalled out. I knew it was either bad biodiesel or thick biodiesel that hadn’t gotten to warm up enough from last night’s frost. That could be another post. Miraculously, at that moment, Blase drove by. We flagged him down and he pushed the car over the crest of the hill onto Mattole Road so I could coast downhill, across the river and into Rick and Tamar’s driveway where, I hoped, the morning sun would warm my chunky fuel and release me to continue scurrying through my overloaded schedule before heading to work at 11:30. The oven was on at home, Ossian was an hour late for school, I was out of flour, the mess was likely breeding at the house without my intervention, I had to be at work in 2 hours, and my car would not start. The clock was definitely ticking.

I won’t bore you with the logistical details except to inform that I am now at home, 1.25 hours later. Ossian is at school, 2 loaves of golden bread are cooling on the counter, two are maturing in the oven, and two more are on the runway. My car still lies dormant a couple of miles away. Nola is asleep on my back. The mess is still here in all its glory. And I am blogging as though I have not a care in the world. That ends now. Time to collect orphan socks, abandoned jammies, scattered puppets, unstacked blocks, cascading books, misguided shoes covered with mud, belligerent laundry piles (STILL NO SEARS GUY), discarded snack bars, stray dishes, and dust bunnies and get this show on the road. I’ve got 15 minutes before I leave for work and our guest arrive in 8 hours. Just another day in the mundane and unpredictable life of the Kuntrywife.

7 cow day

Seven cows rambling down the road today. Had to weave between them to rush my outgoing mail to our postmistress. Perhaps one measure of one’s quality of life is in the frequency of vehicular cow-dodging one has the compulsory opportunity to engage in. If so, I am living an exceptional life.

Given that I live along the longest stretch of undeveloped coastline in the country with my two daughters – both of whom inhabit the most fertile and comedic stages of development right now ( I know I say that at every stage but it feels definitively true), my love-giving husband, and our widowed, dominatrix cat, I think my life would rate ridiculously high on the quality scale even without the meandering cows.

I have a little crush on most cows. I thought of starting a cow blog.. I would call it “The Daily Cow”. It would feature a new cow every day or so and lots of tasty cow trivia. Would anyone read it? Really, I need a venue for my plethora of cow photos. They number in the high hundreds and reflect my bovine obsession.  Apparently, I am not completely alone in this.  Thankfully, there are those who are bovine-obsessed for the greater good. 

all hail P G and E

Alas, the lights are back on.  I didn’t think I cared until I found myself feeling giddy upon hearing the long lost hum of our leaking refrigerator.  All hail P G and E.  Now that it’s back on, I can’t believe how bizarre and miraculous it is that there is a functioning system of wires carrying voltage through all kinds of terrain so that when I flip a switch out here in the middle of nowhere, a bulb lights up.

here are some bland but vital statistics from our 5 days without the miracle of electricity:

• number of puppy teeth found ( and removed from ) in baby Nola’s mouth:  1
• number of people in attendance at my highland games birthday party – in the dark: 51
• number of guests who believed the darkness was an intentional way of creating an “old world scotland” feel for the party: at least 1 
• number of cabers tossed in a rainstorm at the aforementioned lightless highland games: 12
• pounds of  haggis eaten: 3.5
• days since anyone in our household has had a reasonable nap:  3
• length of time for power to be restored according to the official Petrolia rumor mill: 8 hours to 13 days
• number of times precious headlamps were all lost (4 in total) and then found:  13
• number of blizzards preventing the visiting aunt janelle from getting to the airport for scheduled flight home to seattle: 1
• number of clean pairs of pants remaining in our house: 3
• number of visits from the Sears repairman: ZERO
• number of  calls from the Sears repairman: ONE (he does care!)
• number of weeks since repair call was made to Sears on behalf of our ailing washer: 8
• pots of neaps and tatties served at the highland games bday party: 3
• number of times aunt janelle has visited petrolia during a multi-day power outage: 2
• number of bad movies watched on a laptop computer in the dark:  4
• number of movies watched on any type of technology in the last 9 months (prior to the last week): 1
• number of dogs sleeping in our house: 3
• number of dogs that actually belong to us: 0
• length of time spent memorializing our dog Faucet at his funeral: 14 minutes
• number of planning discussions about the funeral in the preceding month: 27
• number of times the neighbor’s dogs have knocked over and scattered our garbage: 9
• furthest distance from dirty diaper on grass to garbage can of origin: 200 yards
• amount of ice cream eaten as an emergency measure to prevent spoilage, melting, and loss: 4 pints
• number of presidential primaries won by an anti-war candidate of color: 1
• number of yelps of joy emitted upon hearing primary results: 19.7
• number of generators stationed on the premises in the event of a power outage: 0
• percentage of Petrolia residents living off-grid and therefore un-affected by the outage: ~ 75

bring your own candles

I have a really good excuse for not blogging this week… the power has been out for 5 days and word has it that the lights won’t be on for maybe 8 more. So, we’re up to our earlobes in candle butts, rotting meat, and carpet lint. Oh, and of course, DIRTY LAUNDRY. But that’s cuz of Sears. The Sears guy never came back, by the way. Must be unrequited love.

This is a delicious stolen moment on the internet. I am sitting in the generator-powered elementary school staff lounge where several kids are being reminded about behavioral expectations for tomorrow’s big field trip to town. Nola is eating a paperbag.

My next ode needs to be for PG and E. Visualize windless, dry days so that those tireless crews can get their beleaguered trucks out of the mud and keep on stitching our power lines back together.

One of Ossian’s favorite powerless activities is to “be in my pregnant tummy” and then to be born. See photo for more details.

In the meantime, life is a little more charming by candlelight (as long as you don’t open the fridge or sneak a peek at the growing puddle of dark liquid coming from it).