Posts from — September 2009

Not That Far Fetched, Actually

Noah and I were tooling around town the other day in the Super Subaru, when we spotted a mail truck delivering mail to a nearby house.  Noah, in a lamentatious (lamentful? lamenting? Is there no adjective for this word? Lamentable.) voice said, “That mail truck can never go home.”  I thought this to be very philosophical of him and so I asked for an explanation.  Turns out he was under the distinct impression that there is only one mail truck for the whole of the earth, and it performs its job dutifully and tirelessly on an endless loop, sort of like a daily Santa Claus, only with a slightly less fun job. I enlightened him to the fact that there were actually hundreds upon thousands of mail trucks plodding along their own unique daily routes all over the country and as if to prove my point, just then we passed a second mail truck going about its business.  This was solid proof to Noah that I was not making these facts up, and he happily accepted this adjusted world view although I spent the next five minutes or so wondering if every time I get a bill it’s because I’m on Mailman’s Naughty List.  Guess who’s getting cookies and milk tomorrow!

C Stands for Cap, Colorful, Cat, Creatively Challenged
Noah was assigned his first homework today at school, and can I just say that the fact that I have a child old enough to be sent home with instructions for an assignment makes me feel like going ahead and sending off for my subscription to AARP and possibly start haggling for the Tuesday senior discount at Kroger.  Granted it was a picture of a cat and the instructions were to “Color the cat” so we’re not talking Advanced Thermodynamics or anything, but still.  I CAN HAS OLD KID?

Parents were encouraged to help, and after drawing (by request) a (admittedly lame) cap for the cat Noah and I hunkered down together with the old Crayola markers and went to town (where “went to town” means “worked with concentrated diligence” on his part and “occasionally looked up from Facebook to fill in the cat’s feet” on my part).  After a few minutes Noah interrupted my internet trance and said, “Mom, yours is not very pretty.” So I looked down at our creation and saw:

Right. You just keep on coloring kiddo. Mama will just be over here, enrolling herself in Kindergarten.

Rosie Would Very Much Like For You To Have This

Maybe You Didn’t Know There Is a Musical Audition To Qualify For My Friendship

I realize that it is proper etiquette to look appropriately modest and all “Oh You Shouldn’t Have” when being sung to on your birthday, but I’m also pretty sure that throwing yourself a party in honor of yourself is also probably one of the first entries on the No-No List.  Either way, it would have been ridiculous for me to pretend last Friday that I wasn’t tickled all shades of pink that there are people in this world who are willing to come over to my house and stand in a room and celebrate in (harmonious!) song the mere fact that one day a while back, I got born. On your next birthday, I highly recommend that you go out and get yourself a party.

You smell like a monkey… from racher on Vimeo.

Since I was old enough to know what tattoos were I declared that I could never get one.  It wasn’t because of the needle – (DID I MENTION THERE WAS A NEEDLE AND SOME DRAGGING OF THE NEEDLE AND SOME MORE DRAGGING OF THE NEEDLE OMG) it was because I couldn’t imagine coming up with anything that I could get behind strongly enough to have it PERMANENTLY SEARED onto my flesh. I mean, there have been occasions in my life where I have driven to seven different stores searching like a fiend to find just the right pair of some article of clothing like wide legged pants only to find myself in front of the mirror a week later going “I don’t know you guys. Wide legged?”  So the thought of deciding on a design to live on my skin foreverandeveramen seemed too daunting and foolish a task to undergo.

And then around January of this year, I don’t know, I just got the urge.  Not so much the urge to be all GIRLS GONE WILD and tramp stamp myself right out of future PTA Presidency but the urge to leave behind some of the insecurities that have been rattling around in my head making so much noise all these years. NO TAKE BACKS.

Since leaving medical school I have been forced to identify what really makes me who I am.  In some ways, my place among the future doctors of America was a hiding place – a place where my credentials could do all the talking for me.  I wanted to be able to say, “I’m a medical student.  I’m going to be a doctor,” and let those things define me to other people so that I would be able to present myself with – I don’t know, extra credit? IQ points? Street cred?  I wanted to have a ready-made identity.

This didn’t occur to me until after I left med school, of course.  It took several hours in a room on a chaise lounge with a trickling fountain and a box or three of tissues (oh yeah, also, a counselor) to figure it out. But once I did, it wasn’t so much a heavens-parting-and-angels-singing kind of moment as much as it was like a WELL FUCK WHAT NOW kind of moment.

Enter: this blog.

Writing for other people’s eyeballs was neh-HEH-ver something I considered doing with my time. I didn’t like writing. I didn’t consider myself good at it.  I didn’t consider it, period.  It just wasn’t on the table.  And to write a WEBlog, well that meant putting myself out in the open for other people to see. And more basically, it meant that I had to, you know, have something to SAY. Saying something meant being something. Being someone. Being willing to be critiqued and observed and judged and commented on, both openly and in private. I think I never considered myself having enough moxie to be able to do that.

But I did it anyway.

And you know, it became this kind of exercise for me. I would start to write, and I would think “Yikes, can I say that in front of my mother-in-law? My neighbors? My college roommate?  My grandmother? Do I want them to know this?” And a lot of the time the answer was no, but I wrote anyway.

What happened and what continues to happen, as more people find this site, is that I am forced to be real.  All the time.  I see people at the grocery store, at church, at the library and they mention something I wrote, and it reminds me that that is me who wrote that. That is me who thinks that. And slowly my written words, which feel like the words of my truest self, have started to strip away the other things that I have hidden behind all these years, revealing things about me that I never knew were there.

There have been other things, of course, that have helped me arrive at the place I am now.  There is not a first draft manuscript of my self-titled autobiography “The Blog: STOP EVERYTHING AND GET YOURSELF ONE RIGHT NOW IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER I SWEAR” in my bedside table drawer.  But I do believe that the writing I’ve done here has been an enormous catalyst in the metamorphosis I’ve experienced in the last couple of years.

Because it has helped me find my voice. And my voice is helping me find myself.

And by golly, I can strongly get behind that.

Today is my birthday, and already, I’ve gotten:

Breakfast at Waffle House with two handsome guys:

Porch swing + Sun porch twinkle light put-upping (I. Heart.) :

And ALSO…

(More to come…)

Happy birthday to meeeeeeee!

Of Course, Maybe It’s The Pulverized Advil PM We Put In His Spaghetti-Os

Man, for all the bitching and moaning I did for Noah’s first three years of life about his abysmal sleeping habits (I didn’t have a blog for most of that time, so you’ll have to just trust me on that one) I have to give it to him – now that he’s four he sleeps like he’s dead.  This comes in especially handy, as Rosie likes to mix it up every couple of nights and caterwaul like a harpy with absolutely no warning.  There’ve been (uh, a couple of) nights we’ve been in there for a good thirty minutes with Rosie fish-flopping in our arms at a decibel that would shatter glass (and/or eardrums) and Noah doesn’t so much as twitch a limb.  A couple of nights ago he fell out of bed onto the floor and though he wailed a bit, he was back asleep before I could even lay him down again (which makes me think he never even woke up in the first place).

Of course the flip side is that some nights he takes an hour to GET dead to sleep, coming out of his room on multiple occasions to tell us he’s scared (see: rats) or (less often) that he needs a drink of water (The Age Old Bedtime Avoidance Method. Pretty sure Jesus got out of the manger with that excuse once or twice.) The scared routine has gotten pretty stale with L and I, and in case you didn’t know “stale” is the point at which parenting skills take a sharp downturn. After Noah’s third (or maybe sixtieth, who can even keep count anymore) trip out to the living room in the name of I’m Scared one night, L turned to me and not-so-sotto-voce said “Do you think it would make him feel better if I told him the monsters would eat Rosie first?”And I actually considered for a moment if it would.

Linky Dink

I have been spending too much (valuable rat-thwarting) time passive aggressively enjoying this site.

Although this may be the funniest thing I have seen in a long while. (Although the humor is supposedly unintentional.) (Presumably.) (Doubtfully.) (At least I hope doubtfully.)

I bought this for Noah (because HI HAVE YOU MET HIM) and have been eagerly awaiting it in the mail (for a MONTH and yes, I have had words with the seller already) so that in case he’s not home and someone who doesn’t know him comes to visit I can just point to it and say, “This pretty much sums it up.”

To Whom It May Concern

While I was cooking dinner a few nights ago (a Festivus miracle!), Noah was bent over in mad concentration with a coloring book.  At one point he asked me to spell the word “found,” which might have seemed odd if he hadn’t already asked me 634 other random off the wall questions that day like “Did dragons come before or after dinosaurs?” and “What does ‘wispy’ mean?” (I invite you to try to come up with a quick four-year-old friendly definition of “wispy.” IT CANNOT BE DONE. ) So I spelled it and finished fricaseeing the vittles (What are vittles, exactly?  I imagine them to be some sort of meat chunks with a sauce like substance. My Mac dictionary cannot define them for me, which may be a good reason never to eat anything called vittles.) and did the dinner drill and the various other frillion things that surround that (hellish) hour of the day and forgot totally about that small interaction until later that night when I passed by the table and saw this lying open on the table:

Triumphant, Noah has spotted the location of the Spidey imposter!  BUT BOY HOWDY HE’S NOT TELLING YOU WHERE.