(Written last night)
Today has restored most of the faith and general good humor I seem to have lost -- probably in the laundry -- over the past several days.
It's been a rough week. I think getting over a bad cold is almost worse than the cold itself, at least for the mama of the child with the bad cold. At least for this mama. Last weekend I felt so awful for my little girl with her fever and cough and lethargy, hated the way she just wanted to lie on the couch with a blanket for a few days, hated the flushed cheeks and sad eyes. There was very little I could do beyond smoothing her hair back, kissing her, bringing her drinks and making sure she had her blankets and stuffed animals. She didn't want anything more of me -- didn't really want to snuggle, didn't want to read books or color or do anything. It's the getting better that's tough -- the point at which she's still coughing, still dripping, maybe still a little feverish, but totally stir-crazy. She's bored with her movies and bored with being inside. She's cranky and touchy and demanding. And she's three.
And then then the dog got sick -- her semiannual ear infection and UTI. At the same time! Which meant a very expensive trip to the vet. A small word of wisdom: When your day is already feeling a little shaky, don't ever, ever say, "Well, at least I haven't stepped in warm dog vomit in bare feet." Because while that might not actually happen, there's a good chance that the dog residing in your house -- the same dog who cost you three hundred dollars in vet bills last night -- might decide to start throwing up all over the dining room. Her medication is hard on her stomach.
I didn't kill her on the spot for a few reasons (although it must be noted that for a flash of an instant I was running on enough stress and adrenaline to briefly consider it):
1. We just spent three hundred dollars on her stupid ear infection and UTI, so it would be a colossal waste of money.
2. She was polite enough to throw up in the dining room, where we have hardwood floors.
2a. She was not polite enough to avoid Matt's shoes or the cheap throw rug from IKEA that we keep by the sliding glass doors, but I don't really care about the rug because I think it cost less than two dollars. This is why I buy like five of them whenever I go to IKEA. (Sidenote: Matt thinks I should wash them and reuse them. I think that if I'm going to do that, I should get to spend a lot more than two dollars on a rug, because while technically you can wash them, they come out all dingy and crusty and GROSS and they are less than TWO DOLLARS APIECE, so if I get a couple of months out of one I think that's GOOD ENOUGH. It's just not worth the effort to try to clean. We may or may not have had an argument about that this week, and that argument may or may not merit its own blog entry, purely for entertainment purposes.)
3. I didn't have enough time, energy, or arms.
4. I've grown rather attached to her over the past nine years. Sigh.
Anyway, the dog vomit itself would normally not ruffle me much. It's dog vomit on top of the three-year-old's tantrums, the baby's bizarre refusal to nap, the blessed naps that finally came and were interrupted by more tantrums, the vet bill, the FIVE LOADS OF LAUNDRY I did one morning because of all the peeing and vomiting and pooping and vomiting some more and spitting up and spilling, the three-year-old's refusal to nap, the three-year-old's cabin fever, and MY cabin fever. This all led to my collapsing in tears in the study yesterday afternoon, weeping (over instant messenger, if that's possible) to Matt that some days I really want to be a SAHM forever but I'm pretty sure I'm just not cut out for it. (And let's not even talk about how I'm not sure that's remotely true -- either that I want to be a full-time SAHM or that I can't do it, or that I can say I want to do anything "forever." I want to do a lot of things. But the stuff that tumbles out of my mouth or on to my keyboard when I'm feeling emotional and overwrought is full of hyperbole and extremes.)
There was also a shooting at my church on Wednesday night. It occurred shortly before the soup supper and Lenten services were scheduled to take place, two things I enjoy but did not attend this week (see above). I'm not going to write about that right now, because it really shouldn't be crammed into a blog entry about other things -- especially when my "problems" really pale in comparison to what this family is going through right now, not to mention the counselor who was with the woman when it happened. It is horrible and sad and still so raw that I think the entire community is still struggling to process it. I really want to say more, but I just don't have the words yet.
But things are okay, because they usually end up that way sooner or later. There is sunshine and crisp spring air. There is a blessed extra hour of sleep because my husband doesn't have to meet his carpool so early and he gets up with the baby, leaving me luxuriously alone in our bed for awhile. There is a trip to the Seattle Children's Museum with my babies and my sister-in-law. There is watching my daughter play and laugh and sing and make "microphones" out of tinker toys at the new exhibit. There is my baby boy in his mei tai carrier, sleeping against my chest with his chubby little fist curled against his mouth. There is the way he wakes up and beams at absolutely everyone, the way he lets out happy baby squeals for the rest of the day because he is learning how to really use his voice and just couldn't be more pleased with himself. There's "Mommy, I made this for you!" There are baths without tears and stories in Mommy and Daddy's bed, snuggled under the "big covers." There are stories all day long, every day, stories in which Daddy is a king and Suzannah and Mommy are princesses (although tonight I tried to be a queen and was quickly corrected. "No, we're both princesses," Suzannah insisted). Sometimes we all get to be monsters or frogs or bears, too, even Baby Isaac, but we're a family of crazy monsters or frogs or bears, so it's all okay.
Sometimes I think there's nothing else I could possibly ask God for in this lifetime -- I've got these two beautiful, amazing children and how wonderful is that? What else could I possibly need? Even if sometimes they do make me want to drink copious amounts of gin and eat too many cookies.
So today -- was really okay. Better than okay. And tomorrow I get a haircut and maybe some good coffee or a jog down at the boardwalk, so I suspect tomorrow will be pretty okay, too.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Change is hard...
I left the bookstore too quickly.
We paid for our books and walked casually through the glass doors, back into the early evening light of downtown Seattle, and I would have returned to the car without a second thought except that Matt said, "I'm bummed -- this is the last time we'll buy books here!" And then I remembered. The entire point of our trip to Pioneer Square on Saturday was to go to to the Elliott Bay Book Company before it relocates to its new home on Capitol Hill. It's not closing, it's not dying, it's just moving, but things will be DIFFERENT and change is HARD. I really, really wanted to visit One Last Time.
The first book I ever bought at the Elliott Bay Book Company was Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. It was a sweltering July afternoon and my family was visiting, and we'd decided to spend the day downtown wandering through Pike Place Market. I don't remember why we decided to walk to the bookstore, but it was probably just that I'd lived here for something like a year and hadn't actually been there yet -- which seems so ridiculous to me now, because I'd never let a year pass between visits now.
I've heard people compare it to Powell's, but that doesn't really work for me. I mean, I love Powell's. The first time I visited Powell's I was so overwhelmed I nearly hyperventilated. Matt and I are incapable of walking out of Powell's without at least one grocery bag full of books. Powell's pretty much wins as far as the scope of their selection, and I won't bother to try to explain what it's like to go there because this entry is about the Elliott Bay Book Company and it is a totally different experience. They're not the same at all. They're both amazing, but they're not the same. I've bought dozens of books at the EBBC over the years, but it's not just about that. It's not just about supporting independent bookstores or the fact that I can find what Barnes and Noble and Borders don't have. It's also about the creaky wood floors, and the beautiful handmade journals by the entrance (my husband has bought a few of those for me). It's about sitting in the cafe downstairs, making reading lists and writing lesson plans. Once I sat down there for a few hours working on one poem, fueled by two or three cups of coffee. It's about being in love with language and writers and sentences and the way paper feels in my hand. It's about walking out into the world afterwards with whatever I've bought -- Joan Didion's collected essays or a signed copy of Special Topics in Calamity Physics or Sherman Alexie's new book of poetry -- and feeling like I've discovered one of the millions of keys to the meaning of life.
I was on the hiring committee at school when we hired my friend Becca as our new addition to the English department. It was actually a phone interview since she was in New York at the time, but even though I wouldn't meet her in person for several more weeks I remember it more than I've remembered any other interview. I mean, obviously, I liked her enough over the phone to advocate for hiring her. She would probably like to believe I thought we should hire her because she sounded like a competent, knowledgeable English teacher. And obviously, she must have; she answered all the standard teacher interview questions and the committee agreed to offer her the job, but what I remember is the fact that she'd worked at the Elliott Bay Book Company and could talk with great passion and excitement about actual books she'd read. Because truth be told, while I suppose it's important to be able to talk about how you handle discipline in your classroom and your knowledge of standards and curriculum and all that other eduspeak, teachers know how they're supposed to answer those questions. Those may be the mark of a competent teacher, but the mark of a great teacher is whether or not she can convey a passion for books and storytelling and really amazing sentences. Becca spoke about John Steinbeck that day, and I didn't think of lesson plans; I thought of those little cards in the stacks at the bookstore, the ones written by the people who work there proclaiming their love of these books to the world and explaining why you should read them, too. This is the kind of passion we need in the classroom. I don't know if everyone who works at the Elliott Bay Book Company feels that connection with books and words and ideas and cares about sharing them with people -- I'm going to pretend they do -- but Becca definitely did. She still does.
I was there a little over three months ago, when I was very, very pregnant. It was my last significant outing before going into labor, and more than once that afternoon I really wondered if I was going to make it through the weekend before meeting my baby. Matt found a parking spot practically around the corner, and it was all I could do to waddle very, very slowly between the car and the bookstore. I wandered the stacks for less time than I normally did simply because walking at all had become so uncomfortable. I dropped a few hints for Christmas presents (including signed copies of Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro and The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, both of which my husband picked up for me), but I didn't want that trip to be my last. I was simply too preoccupied to make it worthwhile, to really absorb it.
But it turns out that I didn't really absorb it this time, either. As soon as we walked in the door, I promptly forgot about noticing everything for the last! time! and just did my usual thing. I suppose that's part of what makes it so special, though -- the fact that I am so quickly absorbed, that I forget everything else for a little while. Suzannah and her daddy made a beeline for the children's section and Isaac and I headed for the fiction, where I picked up and reluctantly replaced at least a dozen books I wanted. We browsed through the poetry section, where I immediately grabbed White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems by Donald Hall. (It seemed fitting, somehow. When I was pregnant with Suzannah, my birthday present from Matt was a copy of Jane Kenyon's Collected Poems; he bought that at Bailey Coy Books on Capitol Hill, a place we used to love to duck into when we were childless young things wandering around Broadway on Saturday afternoons. Bailey Coy, sadly, has closed, and I can't remember whether or not we ever went back after he bought me that book of poetry. So, I don't know, it seemed kind of fitting that my last purchase from Elliott Bay Books where it stands now would be a selections of her husband's poetry, including poems from Without, a collection dedicated to Kenyon.) It was a completely ordinary and therefore totally lovely visit; had I paused to consider that it was our last one I might have bought more of the dozen or so books I really, really wanted but managed to talk myself out of because a.) I have plenty of books at home to read, b.) I also have a baby and a preschooler and I'm still learning how to work my own reading time back into my life, and c.) oh, yeah, I'm not actually earning any money right now, so I am trying to be very careful about spending it.
My knee-jerk reaction, when I heard of the move, was pretty much sheer despair. I don't feel that way anymore. I think it really could be a great and necessary move (The Stranger makes a pretty compelling case for it), and obviously, the survival of bookstores doesn't depend on my emotional attachment to a particular place.
But I'm still going to miss it.
We paid for our books and walked casually through the glass doors, back into the early evening light of downtown Seattle, and I would have returned to the car without a second thought except that Matt said, "I'm bummed -- this is the last time we'll buy books here!" And then I remembered. The entire point of our trip to Pioneer Square on Saturday was to go to to the Elliott Bay Book Company before it relocates to its new home on Capitol Hill. It's not closing, it's not dying, it's just moving, but things will be DIFFERENT and change is HARD. I really, really wanted to visit One Last Time.
The first book I ever bought at the Elliott Bay Book Company was Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. It was a sweltering July afternoon and my family was visiting, and we'd decided to spend the day downtown wandering through Pike Place Market. I don't remember why we decided to walk to the bookstore, but it was probably just that I'd lived here for something like a year and hadn't actually been there yet -- which seems so ridiculous to me now, because I'd never let a year pass between visits now.
I've heard people compare it to Powell's, but that doesn't really work for me. I mean, I love Powell's. The first time I visited Powell's I was so overwhelmed I nearly hyperventilated. Matt and I are incapable of walking out of Powell's without at least one grocery bag full of books. Powell's pretty much wins as far as the scope of their selection, and I won't bother to try to explain what it's like to go there because this entry is about the Elliott Bay Book Company and it is a totally different experience. They're not the same at all. They're both amazing, but they're not the same. I've bought dozens of books at the EBBC over the years, but it's not just about that. It's not just about supporting independent bookstores or the fact that I can find what Barnes and Noble and Borders don't have. It's also about the creaky wood floors, and the beautiful handmade journals by the entrance (my husband has bought a few of those for me). It's about sitting in the cafe downstairs, making reading lists and writing lesson plans. Once I sat down there for a few hours working on one poem, fueled by two or three cups of coffee. It's about being in love with language and writers and sentences and the way paper feels in my hand. It's about walking out into the world afterwards with whatever I've bought -- Joan Didion's collected essays or a signed copy of Special Topics in Calamity Physics or Sherman Alexie's new book of poetry -- and feeling like I've discovered one of the millions of keys to the meaning of life.
I was on the hiring committee at school when we hired my friend Becca as our new addition to the English department. It was actually a phone interview since she was in New York at the time, but even though I wouldn't meet her in person for several more weeks I remember it more than I've remembered any other interview. I mean, obviously, I liked her enough over the phone to advocate for hiring her. She would probably like to believe I thought we should hire her because she sounded like a competent, knowledgeable English teacher. And obviously, she must have; she answered all the standard teacher interview questions and the committee agreed to offer her the job, but what I remember is the fact that she'd worked at the Elliott Bay Book Company and could talk with great passion and excitement about actual books she'd read. Because truth be told, while I suppose it's important to be able to talk about how you handle discipline in your classroom and your knowledge of standards and curriculum and all that other eduspeak, teachers know how they're supposed to answer those questions. Those may be the mark of a competent teacher, but the mark of a great teacher is whether or not she can convey a passion for books and storytelling and really amazing sentences. Becca spoke about John Steinbeck that day, and I didn't think of lesson plans; I thought of those little cards in the stacks at the bookstore, the ones written by the people who work there proclaiming their love of these books to the world and explaining why you should read them, too. This is the kind of passion we need in the classroom. I don't know if everyone who works at the Elliott Bay Book Company feels that connection with books and words and ideas and cares about sharing them with people -- I'm going to pretend they do -- but Becca definitely did. She still does.
I was there a little over three months ago, when I was very, very pregnant. It was my last significant outing before going into labor, and more than once that afternoon I really wondered if I was going to make it through the weekend before meeting my baby. Matt found a parking spot practically around the corner, and it was all I could do to waddle very, very slowly between the car and the bookstore. I wandered the stacks for less time than I normally did simply because walking at all had become so uncomfortable. I dropped a few hints for Christmas presents (including signed copies of Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro and The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, both of which my husband picked up for me), but I didn't want that trip to be my last. I was simply too preoccupied to make it worthwhile, to really absorb it.
But it turns out that I didn't really absorb it this time, either. As soon as we walked in the door, I promptly forgot about noticing everything for the last! time! and just did my usual thing. I suppose that's part of what makes it so special, though -- the fact that I am so quickly absorbed, that I forget everything else for a little while. Suzannah and her daddy made a beeline for the children's section and Isaac and I headed for the fiction, where I picked up and reluctantly replaced at least a dozen books I wanted. We browsed through the poetry section, where I immediately grabbed White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems by Donald Hall. (It seemed fitting, somehow. When I was pregnant with Suzannah, my birthday present from Matt was a copy of Jane Kenyon's Collected Poems; he bought that at Bailey Coy Books on Capitol Hill, a place we used to love to duck into when we were childless young things wandering around Broadway on Saturday afternoons. Bailey Coy, sadly, has closed, and I can't remember whether or not we ever went back after he bought me that book of poetry. So, I don't know, it seemed kind of fitting that my last purchase from Elliott Bay Books where it stands now would be a selections of her husband's poetry, including poems from Without, a collection dedicated to Kenyon.) It was a completely ordinary and therefore totally lovely visit; had I paused to consider that it was our last one I might have bought more of the dozen or so books I really, really wanted but managed to talk myself out of because a.) I have plenty of books at home to read, b.) I also have a baby and a preschooler and I'm still learning how to work my own reading time back into my life, and c.) oh, yeah, I'm not actually earning any money right now, so I am trying to be very careful about spending it.
My knee-jerk reaction, when I heard of the move, was pretty much sheer despair. I don't feel that way anymore. I think it really could be a great and necessary move (The Stranger makes a pretty compelling case for it), and obviously, the survival of bookstores doesn't depend on my emotional attachment to a particular place.
But I'm still going to miss it.
Monday, March 1, 2010
"My little monkey."
Suzannah and I were reading stories today, and in the middle of one of them she said, "Mommy, do you like monkeys?" (There was a monkey on the page, I think. It wasn't all that relevant to the actual story, but whatever.)
"I like monkeys, Zannah."
"I like monkeys, too. Do you have a monkey?"
"I have a little monkey named Suzannah."
"You're my little monkey too, Mommy."
***
Matt and I "take turns" with Suzannah when we're driving. Sometimes it's her turn to pick the music, and sometimes it's our turn. Sometimes we have to endure 100 Toddler Favorites and sometimes she has to listen to Bob Dylan (whom she has actually been known to request).
(I think we instituted the "taking turns" rule after a road trip to Minnesota in which we listened to HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS of Toddler Favorites, and YES MOM AND DAD, I know perfectly well that you're reading this and thinking, "Well, now you know how we felt when we had to listen to The Lollipop Dragon all the way to South Dakota when you were three years old." Hey, guess what, I can still sing that song. SO CAN MY DAD. Anyway.)
Anyway, we take turns, and the other day it was Suzannah's turn. So we're singing "The Wheels on the Bus," and it's all good, and then we get into "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt."
And my daughter sings, very enthusiastically, "John, Jacob Jingleheimer SHIT!"
I did not correct her, and I laughed really hard, which made her sing it even more enthusiastically. I am a bad person.
"I like monkeys, Zannah."
"I like monkeys, too. Do you have a monkey?"
"I have a little monkey named Suzannah."
"You're my little monkey too, Mommy."
Matt and I "take turns" with Suzannah when we're driving. Sometimes it's her turn to pick the music, and sometimes it's our turn. Sometimes we have to endure 100 Toddler Favorites and sometimes she has to listen to Bob Dylan (whom she has actually been known to request).
(I think we instituted the "taking turns" rule after a road trip to Minnesota in which we listened to HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS of Toddler Favorites, and YES MOM AND DAD, I know perfectly well that you're reading this and thinking, "Well, now you know how we felt when we had to listen to The Lollipop Dragon all the way to South Dakota when you were three years old." Hey, guess what, I can still sing that song. SO CAN MY DAD. Anyway.)
Anyway, we take turns, and the other day it was Suzannah's turn. So we're singing "The Wheels on the Bus," and it's all good, and then we get into "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt."
And my daughter sings, very enthusiastically, "John, Jacob Jingleheimer SHIT!"
I did not correct her, and I laughed really hard, which made her sing it even more enthusiastically. I am a bad person.
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