4/30/11

Ms Hoffman, you hit the nail on the head

Today, I finished reading "So Much Pretty" by Cara Hoffman.  This is not a review, so don't expect one.  (I will say that I generally enjoyed it, and the concept was very thought-provoking.  But I skimmed through the last few chapters because I'd already figured out what the author was leading up to and I just wanted to know what happened afterwards.  The writing was good, but she drew it out too much and gave too many hints, so the climax was not shocking or surprising in any way.  Maybe she meant it that way.  Whatever.)

Regardless, there was one particular paragraph of the book that stuck with me.  During this particular scene, a man named Con is watching an impromptu performance by Alice, the daughter of his friends Gene and Claire:

~Gene began to laugh quietly again, and his eyes filled with tears.  Con had seen this before.  One time when he'd accompanied Gene and Claire to a play at Alice's school, Gene had to walk out twice because he couldn't stop laughing whenever she spoke, tears just rolling down his face. "Sorry, sorry, sorry," he had told them, still laughing as they waited for Alice in the parking lot afterward and then heaving a shaky sigh to try and break the absurdity. "God! I love her so much."~

I don't know if you've ever had this happen to you, but I have.  Once when my brother was in some Charlie Brown production, every time he came on the stage, I could feel myself get all tachycardic and almost pass out with the excitement of just listening to him speak.  And there was the time I watched my sister dance in a summer production, when I could barely see her through the mist of tears.

And with E, I can feel that peculiar mix of emotions perpetually under the surface of my conscious, waiting for the moment when his impish smile, his adorable dimples, his oversized words, his infectious giggle, will make all of that affection overflow.  When I will struggle to control my laughter and will hold back tears in my eyes because my son is so alive.  And he brings me so much joy.

4/27/11

Welcome to Earth

In honor of my son's birthday, since this has filled my heart and mind since I read it, and nothing else could come close to being such a beautiful tribute, I present my only sister and her gorgeous words:

I remember when I learned about love.
It’s hard to think back to that one moment in time when your mind draws an association between an abstract concept and a concrete word. To remember when you thought to yourself “I am sad” or “this is what happy is.” I may not recall exactly when I learned what love was supposed to be and how to recognize its trappings, but I do remember when I learned about what love really was when it came from me in its purest form.

And it all started 8 years ago….
It seems impossible to come to this date without at some point in the day recounting the event of Evan’s birth. It was a wild tale that started 2 months before it was supposed to and ended with me babbling on the phone “Jesi’s…given birth!” to might-as-well-be-family who had the good grace not to laugh at me and/or have me committed (had I not been 17 at the time, I think that would’ve been the point at which someone would have handed me a stiff drink). There was a helicopter ride (not involving me), a car ride that almost ended in catastrophe (involving me), a father getting trapped in an elevator, two girls in prom dresses (who did not end up going to their prom), and a hotel that caught on fire. It was, needless to say, an eventful two days.

I will not pretend that the months leading up to it were easy for they were anything but. Everyone in the family was readjusting his or her course in life and it frequently resulted in flaring tempers and too many tears. We were changing as a family, in a state of metamorphosis, and in the process I think we all got a little bit lost in ourselves. I was not exempt and I fell inside myself out of pure selfishness.

However my selfish teenage world vanished the day my sister went into labor. My world became a hospital room. A sea of anxious faces. A person on the cusp of being. And a family. I was so fearful for my family that I simply didn’t have the space inside me to think about myself. And in those endless days I found that my love for my family was distilled to its purest form in the presence of fear. Love for my brother who I thought was too young to endure this. Love for my parents and their bravery as they had to let other doctors, strangers, take care of their baby girl. Love for my sister, whose pain and struggle was reflected in the faces of all my family members. And love for the tiny womb-held baby for whom I feared the most.
The story, as you know, has a happy ending. Evan arrived to us in time and grew to be a healthy, compassionate child with a distinctly un-childlike mixture of gravity and levity in him and a social insight far beyond his years. But in those days, eight years ago, while we waited on tenterhooks for news, good or bad, we did not know him yet. And yet, we knew that we feared for him and in that fear we grasped the strands of unadulterated love.

I am surprised no one was blown away by the collective sigh that was released when Evan was finally born in the wee morning hours of April 27th. The long wait had passed and Evan was finally with us. Of course, since he was so premature, he had to remain at the hospital but we felt that we had weathered the storm and the rest would be just some tricky sailing. While he was still in hospital, as a little “blue light special,” monitored by doctors and nurses and a revolving shift of watchful friends and family, my cousin Zach gave him a handmade card with a picture of the world and the words “Welcome to Earth.”

Every birthday is a reminder of that welcoming. Of how our anxious family tentatively welcomed him into the world, and how Evan – in a sense – likewise welcomed us back to Earth, back to ourselves. To a family that was irrevocably altered but stronger, tempered with the love that sometimes only fear can bring out.
That tiny, premature baby, born into love, has given back that love a million times over. His presence is a joy and his utter selflessness is a constant reminder to me of what true love is. I know there will be times when he’s older when he may say or do hurtful things, when he may grow weary of the constant stream of affection and attention the family throws at him, but I know that it will only be temporary. I know that it will come from a place of rebellion not from pure nastiness because he has nothing nasty inside. And I wonder if all the people who do, who carry ugliness inside them, I wonder if they do so because they were never properly welcomed to Earth.

4/26/11

Nitpicking

My son, yesterday, from the backseat of the car on the way home from his grandmother's house: "Mom, I'm essentially 8, right?"

4/12/11

Slave Driver

Exhibit: Chores I Make My Son Do (so I don't have to, but ostensibly so he can earn allowance):
    Sort the recycling (and exercise that green hippie streak I've so carefully bred into him)
    Clean the bathroom mirrors (this is cute, because he climbs up on the bathroom counter to reach and frequently ends up talking to himself in the mirror while cleaning.  Much like a modern-day, male Cinderella.)
    Dust the living room (rarely complete, but incomplete is better than not at all, which is what would happen if his parents were in charge of this.  He's always had a fascination with the duster, so it was one of the first chores he ever did.  As you can see for yourselves below.)
    Pick up dog detritus from the backyard (Ahem.  Gross.)
    Sweep the front step (Photo evidence below. Note the weather. What you can't note is the time.  Which was at about 830 in the morning.  We crack the whip 24/7 around this place!)
    Put away the silverware (which leads to much mixing of fork/spoon sizes in the silverware drawer & arguments over which way the silverware goes in the dishwasher, i.e. upside-down vs downside-up.  The boys have ganged up on me, so they tend to win.  Unfair.)
    Set the table (which is necessary much more frequently, now that I've instituted my family dinner rules)
    Laundry (More pictures below, and yes, I made him do laundry right after soccer practice on that particular day. I give no quarter for exhaustion.)
    Vacuum the bathrooms (with the dustbuster.  When we had a canister vacuum, it was easier for him to handle the real thing.  See below.)
    Make his own lunch (or he doesn't EAT! Kidding.  D checks before he takes off for school.  Usually.)
    Pick up the living room and his bedroom by 8 every night

Pretty good for an almost-8-year-old, I think.  And it's worked out relatively well.  With some kinks...  For instance, first, we told him he has to do 10 chores a week or he doesn't get his allowance (10% of which goes straight into savings and 10% to charity.  He might as well start saving for a car, college and heaven now, because he sure isn't going to get any of the three by relying on us!) Then he told us he didn't want his allowance, so he wasn't going to do chores.  This child has obviously never had to tighten his belt or pinch pennies to amass his enormous collection of toys.  It's a crime, I know.  So then we said not only would he not get his allowance, but he wouldn't get to watch any TV, if he went chore-less.  Which ended up being a really good thing for TV-time-sensitive Mom.  He has to prove he's a goodly way towards doing all of his chores before getting to watch anything, so usually it's towards the end of the week when he finally gets some 'toons.  Thus cutting down on his tube time, AND getting some darned stuff done around this place!  I win all around.
  
And the newest chore he's begun to participate in: evening meal prep.

This weekend, in order to get me to play with him after dinner, he helped me make dinner.  By which I mean, he made the entire meal.  He fried polish sausage, cooked jasmine rice, beat & scrambled eggs, and microwaved green beans.  At dinner, not only did he taste the green beans, but he asked for seconds and claimed they were delicious.  To my knowledge, that was the easiest and most successful first bite of a green vegetable in the history of children ever.  And then during dinner, he stated he wanted to start cooking more, because it was "fun".  He obviously hasn't ever watched my facial expressions during cooktime.  Cooking = not my favorite thing.  Princesses get their meals prepared for them, you know.

And if this newfound interest continues, I'm set for life, people.  Or at least until he moves out.

 PS This last picture would give me a heart attack if I were watching someone else's child do it. But I know mine was supervised to within a millimeter of his personal space, so I don't worry.

4/5/11

Landfills

Today, I discovered these.

I realize that by posting this, someone will inevitably ask me if I'm with child or some such thing, but it's not so, I promise.  (And I promise that IF said event should ever occur again, those of you who read my blog (since you are, after all, my closest friends...and my mother) will know first.  Hopefully after I have figured it out for myself.  So maybe a close second.)  But, honestly, 99.99% of the women I know who are in committed relationships are preggers.  There's not a whole lot else going on in Internetland except burgeoning belly Facebook photos and discussions about whether the name "Bella" will forever have people associating her with twinkling overprotective men.  What the heck else am I supposed to have on the brain, I ask you, with that kind of propaganda floating around??  The world may tilt a little bit when all these freaking kids are born at the same time.

And now excuse me while I put away my soapbox.  I apologize to all the preggos out there.  You're very lucky and I'll be happy to babysit your kiddos whenever I can.  Back to the main point:

I took an admittedly convoluted route to get to this discovery.  It started with Kristen. This is my favorite mommy blog (probably because she's half Asian, and I have a thing for half-Asians), but lately she was doing this 30-day better-yourself challenge type thingy and it just hasn't been as interesting to read (because usually her posts involve her adorable children, her insane in-laws, her OCD husband, and many swearwords = much more entertainment for bored me). 

So, reluctantly, I've been gravitating toward Heather, who could in all fairness be THE mommy of mommy blogs.  Or at least the older sister.  And since she's not blogging fast enough to keep up with the insane amounts of time I have for internet browsing (don't ask...), I've been reading back in her archives.  I think I'm in the fall of 2010 by now, which is impressive, since she's very prolific.  Yes, I know, I have too much free time.  She takes these (really great) daily photos which usually have their own little blurbs, and she happened to post one about a CD that this daddy blogger had made to raise awareness for his stepson's syndrome (and I'm not at all ashamed to state that I don't recall ever having heard of it...that's what being away from primary care will do to you, I suppose).

Intrigued both by the syndrome and the gender of the blogger, I skipped on over to his blog, only to discover this beautiful series of photographs. 

As a sidenote: Oh, that we should all be so blessed with beautiful pregnancy genes.  All I remember of my pregnancy body is that my face became rounder than a person with Cushing's, and I couldn't fit into my favorite tshirts (and no, not because of my belly...).  Pregnancy definitely didn't strike me glamourously, in other words.

Thus ensnared, I started reading from the beginning of his blog, and lo-and-behold, his lovely better-half has a couple of posts dedicated to her answers to readers' questions.  She is probably much more interesting to his reading demographic than he is.  Probably because the majority of his demographic is women (I'm just postulating).  My own fascination for her can probably be explained by the fact that she's 1/2 Lebanese and 1/4 Japanese.  I can't help it, people, I was born this way. (In related news, I'm deliciously awaiting the arrival of a Lebanese-Persian-Cheyenne baby among all the other little packages the stork will be dropping off this year.  And thereby changing the climate.  And no, dear brother, I don't say "deliciously" because I eat babies.  So creeepy.)

Within one of these posts dedicated to her hotness, someone asked if she were still using Fuzzi Bunz for her 2-year-old.  Which, in turn, led to me googling them to find out what all the hubbub was about.  And THAT, my friends, is the circuitous road that led me here.  My Internet browsing is much like my thought pattern: pathological.

When E was born, trying to use cloth diapers probably would have pushed me over the edge.  As if changing his outfits every five minutes (due to various bodily emissions emerging to maliciously taint the innocent purity of Pooh Bear and the like) wasn't enough laundry for me to consider, add a bunch of nappies in the bunch and tell me I have to empty and wash them? I don't think so. 

In my next life, however, when I have another mini-me, and I am more put-together/organized/prepared/energetic/creative/joyful and never tired (see, this is why I call this my next life), I want to use these.  Call me a want-to-be hippy, tell me you can smell oatmeal, I can take it.  Because in this current life, I happen to enjoy being eco-friendly (in the few ways I'm not too lazy to do so), and take great joy out of the fact that my son and even my husband (hardbitten destroyer of Mother Nature that he was) have fallen in with this little personality flaw of mine.

Honestly, though, I think the fact that they come in different colors is what clinched it for me, though.

Next I'll be making my own baby food, and then you'll know I've really lost it.
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