halfway to six

Today, my daughter turned three years old. It makes no sense. I was just pregnant with her a minute ago and now she is one tenth of the way to 30?!

Nola woke herself up clapping in her sleep this morning. We decided it was because she was so excited to celebrate her big sister Ossian’s birthday.

We started the day by sandwiching her between her parents and telling her how ecstatic we were at her birth and how much we love her. Then, we opened a few presents before cooking up some birthday blueberry pancakes adorned with glowing birthday candles. We spent the rest of the day making party inviations, decorating a birthday crown, stringing a birthday necklace, putting on all of the new (used) dress up clothes, making a dinosaur cake, taking a birthday nap in sissy the double-jogger, drinking a special cup of chocolate milk with our lunchtime birthday noodles, checking on our sleeping rocks that we painted and built nests for yesterday, talking on the phone to our grandparents and great-grandparent, and never getting out of our footie pajamas. We shared out dinosaur cake with friends salmon, zoe, cedar and their parents and then had a little jammie jam photo shoot. Now, we’re all asleep.

While eating dino cake at salmon’s house, Salmon’s sister Zoe received three phone calls from friends. She is six. It struck me that Ossian will be receiving important calls from friends someday, too. Well, not someday – in three years. She’s halfway there – unbelievable.

Happy Birthday, my sweet little monkey

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Cinderella

I snuck away from my life recently and had a giddy 8 hour romp in the big world. Due to whining, sniffling, and fevering children, our plan for a town-based saturday chocked full of errands and rush was unexpectedly cancelled. Instead, I was re-assigned to go solo for my longest childless excursion since my long hours of labor with Nola (does childbirth count as childless experience?? If not, then we’ll have to revise that to say since February 18th, 2007 – YES…more than a year ago).

I loaded up the Ipod and sped away with notepads full of grocery lists and errandly goals. Just the 1.5 hour drive in Blase’s molding and malodorous vehicle whose odometer has been stuck at 160k miles for a couple of years now was an extraordinary pleasure. I listened to a workshop called “Word by Word” given by Annie Lamott. She said everything I needed to hear. It seems that I’ve been a little stymied the consistent experience of rejection in my nascent writing career lately. Her humor and cynicism and optimism and anecdotes were gourmet listenings for me. She talked about writer’s block, too. Her suggestion was to stop writing because maybe when you’re blocked, you’re actually a little empty and you need to stop and fill-up. That’s exactly what my day did for me.. it filled me up. I stopped along the way to take photographs whenever called by some ambling cow, floating red-tail hawk, or waddling porcupine. With no children to wake up or talk-out of their desire to exit the car before reaching our destination, I was living large.

I did do some speeding in order to get to the object of my desire… an afro-brazilian dance class with someone I’ve heard about for years and wanted to dance with for as long. Dandha Da Hora is a renowned dancer and teacher… her name was well known in the samba dance circles I crashed for a few years. I made it to class and though I was nearly the oldest and certainly the rustiest dancer out of the more than 40 people in attendance, I sweated in bliss for two hours. Our friends in Samba Da drummed for the class which dramatically compounded my sensory feast.

After class, I walked back to the dusty and peeling Honda feeling shiny and new. My subsequent whirlwind tour of the grocery store, biodiesel station, Costco, and the laundromat were ridiculously easy. By the fifth hour of being child-free in the world, I started to remember what I felt like. “I” in the biggest sense of the one letter word. Like, oh yeah, I exist on my own, too. I am not just the vessel and keeper and fan club president of two small and awe-inspiring children, I have some dimension and tangibility, too.

I rode home to the tune of more ipod-based inspiration and nursing a gigantic rice milk mocha. The surf was luminous, cows were mesmerizing, and hillsides were delicious with infinite texture. I returned, 7 hours later, bursting with love for my little family and seemingly infinite patience for their needs and antics (the infinite part turned out to be a little short-lived.. oh well).

Off to bed they went, husband included, and again, I had another FIRST …I left home AFTER putting the baby to bed. It’s been more than a year since I’ve left home after bedtime. Wow – it sounds a little pathetic to actually type that reality but what’s a blog for if not to unnecessarily expose and diminish yourself by divulging the lame details of your intimate life? No matter. There was a Valentine’s Masquerade Party afoot and I had to round up a costume fast.

What used to be our costume loft before we had kids has now been reduced to a crumpled costume box – albeit wardrobe sized. Doesn’t leave a girl much to work with at 7:48 on a Saturday night in the middle of nowhere. The clock was ticking – I threw on a wig, donned a mask, slathered on a bit of turquoise eye shadow and some fishnets before teetering into the mud in my lovely black heels as “Zesty”.

Three dances, four hugs, and one bon bon later, the endearing phone call from “Zesty’s” husband holding crying baby while apologizing for interrupting my rarest revelry meant I must rush home to do what he could not: breastfeed. I did just that and decided to get greedy.. the baby was sound asleep again and so was the husband and off I went for round two. Another dance, a snippet of conversation, and a glass of wine later I found myself winning the potted primrose prize for Best Costume. As I began my acceptance bow and speech, the ringing phone broke through the mellow sounds of festive purposelessness and a hand reached out to give me the receiver. “Jen?”… it was Blase. Nola was up again and his mammaries still weren’t cutting the mustard. Off I went again, this time for good, with trophy in hand. All totalled, I accumulated 60 minutes at that party. What a thrill… to be footloose. I was Cinderella – just for an extravagant and ravishing moment. The best part? I still got to be in bed by 9:50.. with two kids that wake up like clockwork no matter what time mom turns out the lights, that’s my kind of nightlife.

Tired ass mother

Excuse the language.. gheez. It’s the best I can do after a week of consoling two flu-afflicted children, preparing and serving 40 plus barbeque dinners for the wanting monday night masses, launching a new internet cafe, laboring to meet a story deadline in hopes of landing a writing contract, and preparing for a visit from my beloved mama.  This matrix of events has been overlaid across the backdrop of my own sputtering immune system, a grant funding rejection notice, estrangement from a few clusters of trusty friends, and an unusually crisis-filled dockett to navigate as the high-school counselor.  Ahhh… but the sun has been brilliantly shining.  Even after 5 sleepless nights spent soothing a fevering baby, my bleary eyes brightened with every opportunity to absorb the late morning sun.

Just to update, Matt – the unknowing object of my laundry-based obsession – Sears repair man did finally re-visit me. And, he fixed the hell out of my washing machine. After three plus months of staring at the thing, it finally spun us some sweet smelling sheets and jammies. Our reverie, however, was short-lived. The hot water heater gave up the ghost just 36 hours after the washing machine was revived. Turns out, the washing machine won’t work when there is no hot water pressure …even if you beg it to wash things cold. So , here we are again… belaying down bluffs of crumpled laundry while scratching dirt off our unbathed skin. I’m, of course, being unnecessarily dramatic. It’s all to say that things like bathing and washing dishes are taking a little longer as of late and that compounds the tired-assedness of this mother.

Ossian astounded us two nights ago by letting us know that her peach colored plastic baby doll, Emma, was “not impressed” by us (her parents and baby sister).

Yesterday, I noticed the back door open and then shut. Intrigued, I ventured closer to find it had been opened by a speed crawling baby Nola on her way to greener pastures in the great outdoors.

Our dear friends, Justin, Amy, and Violet recently spent the weekend here and introduced us to Guitar Hero. Thank god I don’t have that apparatus permanently available to me in my own home. I could easily spiral into a tv tethered, power chord hammering addict.

Thank goodness for the luxurious solace of unfettered sunsets and leaping lambs.

Udder delays

I am certainly no stranger to the demands of udders or to the various methods of becoming late. Today’s tardiness in my expected return home from work at the high school was, however, not even remotely my fault. I have grown accustomed to swerving around and even briefly waiting for cows to move out of the road. For the first time, today I encountered cows who all decided to nurse their squirrely little calves right in the road. Just as I’d squeeze between two clusters of cow cliques, another would amble out – slowly but deliberately – in front of my car. Udders swinging, they stopped to give me long looks. It was the most acceptable traffic delay I’ve ever experienced.

I was rushing home to squeeze my little girls. Nola turned 10 months old yesterday and has mastered the sport of speed crawling. She loves to chase the vacuum as I make my daily futile attempt at keeping some square of the house clean for some moment of the day.

On Nola’s 10 month birthday, Ossian painted several portraits of gazelles and said, “Nola looks famous!” Then, as she was preparing for bed and showering various household object and family members with pre-sleep love, she proclaimed, “I want to hug the planet!”

Who wouldn’t swerve through vehement cows and lactating udders to get home to that!

the hum

This place is hard to keep on the map… we’ve been pounded with rain for days and days and days and days and days. Water is stampeding down hillsides, bursting from ditches and filling the roads. Inspiring and swollen, the river looks like a riptide freeway in brown.

The only thing fuller than the creeks around here was our car last Sunday night. A full day in town yielded a hard working diesel toting tired children, bulk foods, and the requisite nine loads of fresh-smelling laundry. I should back up a bit…First, the power went out during Saturday’s rolicking wind and rain storm. Then we went to town for groceries. While there, the rain turned to snow on the Wildcat. By the time we headed for home, the blizzard was impassible to those of us silly enough to lack four-wheel drive or a decent set of chains. Five minutes outside of Ferndale, the snow covered road was blocked by three stuck cars and peppered with trucks left impotent in soggy ditches. Back to town we went. Whoops…we were snowed out instead of in. We drowned our homesick sorrows in sushi, baklava, and dvd’s of Six Feet Under.
The next morning, the road was clear and the tree branches tickled the roof of our car with their snow laden fingertips. It was wonderland.

When we arrived, the power was back on and the rain was in intermission. The clock was ticking.. we had 3 hours to unload the car, feed the kids, and make 20 chicken dinners for tonight’s take-out barbeque. Once again, the yeast was flying as rampaged I through 21 cups of flour, 6 packets of yeast, and ten pounds of beets to muster up some appetizing side dishes to accompany Blase’s bourbon chicken. It all came together with a lot of internal cursing and grandiose mess-making.

Then, the power went out again. Out for 3 plus days this time. Those PGE elves have been busy and now we’re basking in the hum of our refrigerator again.

I started leaving rambling messages for the Sears’ repairman… hadn’t heard from him in weeks. Just as I was about to videotape myself singing a snarky song to their seemingly abandoned answering machine, he called. The Sears’ repairman dispatcher actually called ME. He’s coming. This Saturday. He has my part. I’m beside myself with excitement.