The Fierce Beagle

Secrets, lies and oral hygiene

2012-01-30T19:38:00.000-05:00

Ethan looks just like my brother did as a toddler, and he seems to have inherited more than just the luxuriously long eyelashes and wavy-curled hair. Like Kyle, Ethan is an absolutely rotten liar. And by that I mean he's both terrible at it and terrible about doing it.

Kyle can't fib without the corners of his mouth freezing into this weird, uncontrollable Botox-gone-wrong half smile. Ethan's giveaway is his use of too much detail during denials.

Me: "Ethan, what are you doing behind that chair?"
Ethan: "Nuffin. Nobody didn't put glue on Daddy's [gui]tars. I don't know who did it."

Or.

Me: "Ethan, did you just take something out of Mommy's drawer?"
Ethan: "I didn't take your lip stuff. Don't look at me. Close your eyes and count to ten. Doughnut!"

* * *

Last night I came down with a fever and cold symptoms, so I sent Noah and Ethan out to the convenience store for Sour Patch Kids and Doritos (obviously). I was literally on my first Sour Patch Kid when a tooth broke and the crown put on it 5 years ago came off with it. Lovely. (The teeth problems are attributable to my mother's genetics; she was toothless from preschool until her adult teeth came in several years later.*)

Ethan, needless to say, made short work of my Sour Patch Kids while being riveted by my "tooth" that had apparently popped out fully formed and otherwise undamaged.

* * *

Unfortunately Ethan also has a bad habit of speaking very loudly, as when today after my dental appointment I was approaching him and Noah sitting at a picnic table on base and he shouted, surrounded by sailors coming and going from the gym, "Mommy, is your toof still in your mouf? Are you still mad because your toof fell out?"

I assumed Ethan's proclivity for massaging the truth came only from my brother, but I was wrong. Noah casually confessed that he told Ethan my tooth fell out because I didn't brush, so he should definitely brush, which he was happy to do after that little fable.

Who knows how many people now doubt my oral hygiene.

*It's just occurred to me that embarrassing one's mother is timeless.

The dream versus the reality

2012-01-25T21:35:00.001-05:00

Noah's not been feeling well the past couple of days (congestion, grumpiness), so I thought Ethan and I could surprise him by picking him up from work so he didn't have to ride his bike in the warmth and humidity.

So I blow dried (blew dry?) my hair, put on some makeup and a pair of cute slingback wedges with the intention of leaning against the hood of our car and being all, "Tell me about it, stud," a la Olivia Newton John (and if you don't know that's from Grease because you still weren't old enough to see the 20th anniversary theatrical re-release, you cannot ride this roller coaster). I even fancied a gentle breeze might tousle my hair and add some drama.

Except, Noah was over an hour late getting out. Let me tell you, folks. An hour on a small Naval base with a three year old and nothing to do. Several long walks along the ~~main strip~~ wind tunnel and two trips to the bowling alley bathroom later, and my hair was a tangled mess, I had blisters from my ~~kicky~~ nonsensical heels, and I was hangry.*

*hungry+angry

So poor Noah. After being kept late an hour, he was greeted not by a revamped and sassy Sandra D, but a shrew who'd been pulled through a hedge backwards.

Let me just add:

One reason to love Pensacola: Sunday afternoons at the beach

2012-01-17T11:31:00.000-05:00

I'm not vacationing in Florida, like I thought; apparently, I've retired here

2012-01-16T19:39:00.000-05:00

Through Noah I've been making some new friends, and with the exception of Matt Spangler, when I say "new friends" what I really mean is "attractive young people who were born in the 90s." THE NINETIES. (Not that you're not attractive, Spang, it's just that you were born in the 80s, and have thus lost your fetal glow.)

Here's how one of our conversations went at a poker game the other night:

Megan: "Wait, who's Sandra Bullock?"
Me: "You're not serious."
Megan: "I mean, I just can't picture her. What has she been in?"
Me: "The Net."
Megan: [blank stare]
Me: "While You Were Sleeping."
Megan: [shakes head]
Chris: "Wasn't she in that one Speed movie? The lady bus driver?"
Matt: "Miss Congeniality."
Megan: "I think I've seen that one..."
Me: "Oh! The Proposal. With Ryan Reynolds."
Chris: "That's the one where they bump into each other naked. So funny!"
Megan: "Oh yeah!"

Yeah. The only movie that Megan could attach Sandra Bullock to was one in which she plays, basically, a cougar. Which, basically, is what I now am. Or would be, if I lost 20 pounds.

I'm so glad I didn't say Hope Floats.

Back to the normal kind of depression

2012-01-11T20:28:00.000-05:00

Our first few days here were a bit bumpy. We returned our moving truck after dark, and the very next morning before sunrise Noah was up and back at work/school (swork? schwool?). Anyway, Ethan and I were stranded in the apartment for a few days while we figured out what to do about the transportation situation, since we only have one car.

Noah has gotten a bike. Actually, a second bike. Because we forgot our bikes back in North Carolina. Even though we specifically wanted to bring them. I know, monkey farts. Anyway, we found a great bike shop with exceptional customer service, and he bought a nearly-20-year-old steel-frame bike that he absolutely loves (you wouldn't know it was 20 years old, which called to mind this interesting article I read recently), and he's been biking to schwork every morning since, and loving it.

Meanwhile, I've had the car to putter around town, take Ethan to preschool, go to the beach, etc.

* * *

Today we had a rental washer and dryer delivered. Twas a lady deliveryman. And she hauled both machines up three flights of stairs on a dolly, by herself.

We got to chatting and I learned she's going to Navy boot camp in a few months. She has three kids, but she was a military kid growing up and loves the lifestyle and the benefits of joining. I assured her that being a little older (ahem) would actually be an asset, which we discovered when Noah, the grandpa of his class at age 28, excelled at boot camp.

The difference, I think, is that when you're a bit older, a bit more firmly rooted in adult life, and especially if you have a family, you know exactly what you're getting: a steady paycheck, fantastic health benefits, marketable job skills, etc. What's more, those things actually mean something by the time you're rounding 30, instead of being merely theoretical, as they are to a 19-year-old. Same goes for going back to school a bit later in life.

Did I mention she hauled both machines up the stairs by herself?

* * *

We're fairly settled in, we've had several of Noah's shipmates over to the apartment, Ethan's thriving in preschool, and I have vehicular freedom. Finally I've gotten over the harshest edge of homesickness and can devote my energies to the things that really matter, like judging myself harshly against my fit husband and the superhero deliverylady.

Preschool, consider yourself conquered

2012-01-09T11:47:00.000-05:00

Ethan started preschool today. Or rather, Ethan grabbed preschool by the horns today and wrestled it to the ground.

"He's never been to preschool?" said the director, amazed. "You wouldn't know!"

I was worried about leaving him. New place, new people. But I should have known better: He may look like a clone of preschool-aged me, but he's most definitely not me. He walked right in, said hello to his teachers, and started baking some bread in the play kitchen.

Now I have two hours until preschool is over to sit in a quiet apartment and contemplate life. I can tease out the tangled threads of emotion I feel about all this: He obviously loves being around kids, yet I project my own insecurities about being the New Person onto him. I feel like taking care of him is my job (especially since I quit the one that actually paid money), but now for 20 hours a week, other (very friendly, very trustworthy) people will care for him. I know he needs to be around other kids, but part of me wants him to only need me.

I now have 20 hours a week to myself—almost a whole calendar day. And frankly, I don't know what to do. I think I'll start by taking a nap.

We whizzed along like a herd of turtles

2012-01-03T19:57:00.001-05:00

Making a two-day trip as a small military family in a moving truck isn’t as Norman Rockwellian as it has the potential to sound. No wood-sided station wagon and Route 66 license-plate games for us! In fact, the truck smelled vaguely toxic, had virtually no sound insulation, and bumped along even the smoothest road like a cantering elephant with a limp. And the kid’s favorite game is pretending to hose other cars as they sped past. So less Norman Rockwell, more John Steinbeck: Reloaded.

We waylaid in Atlanta, where even the Sheraton Club Level (thanks, Richard!) features drapes lined in leopard print. I swear to you, the commercial promoting the local news team featured a muscular dude in a tight tank top and tattoo-sleeved arms, and a few other people gesturing sassily, I can’t really remember because I was too busy trying to figure out what the tattoo guy does. Anchorman with an edge? World’s most hardcore weatherman?

When we finally arrived at our apartment, approximately 400 hours after our departure from North Carolina, I was pleased with the place but in a dissatisfying, empty way. Like maybe when one goes on a date with someone really attractive but who has no personality.

“What am I doing here?” I thought as I watched Ethan relax in front of the computer playing one of his DVDs in our empty living room. I don’t know anybody, I don’t know this place, I’m 400 miles from our home of nearly five years.

But then later, as Noah and I put the legs on the dining room table, cracking stupid jokes and laughing contentedly, I remembered: He’s why we’re here. Also, the beach.

The pack is diminished, for a time

2011-12-28T22:43:00.001-05:00

Last month: Cody wearing one of Ethan's t-shirts, because I was told his being wrapped tightly might help his thunderstorm anxiety, like a baby being swaddled. Meanwhile, Bonnie licks the bedspread.

Tonight we took Bonnie and Cody to our friends Kim and Susan's home, where the dogs will be living while we're away in Florida. Kim and Susan have three wonderful kids and a good amount of property, and the dogs were incredibly excited to be there (they've stayed with this family before). I didn't realize how much I'd miss them until we were leaving and I glanced back, and there was Cody's little face with his innocent, neurotic, shining eyes watching me go.

Bonnie, closely monitoring Cody's anxiety levels.

We were literally steps outside Kim and Susan's door when the waterworks started, and it was only seconds later, when Noah said, "It's okay, let it all out," that the floodgates opened and full-fledged sobbing took over.

Cody, unsettled by a clap of thunder.

They were my constant, reliable companions when Noah was gone. They were always home with me, they were awake when I was (or sleeping near me) and asleep when I was (or sleeping on me).

Bonnie, never unsettled, for she is perpetually enthusiastic.

Without Cody, I'll have to make do with Noah's far-less-furry-but-astonishingly-Hobbitlike feet to tuck mine under for warmth at night. Without Bonnie, I'll only have a lifeless, furless pillow to spoon in the early morning once Noah's left for work.

Totally over it re: Cody's personality disorders.

This is an adventure they can't take with me, and I had no idea how much I'd wish they could.

I've dreaded out my hair and answer only to "Captain Crazy Eyes"

2011-12-16T19:13:00.002-05:00

Noah is coming home for Christmas on the night of the 23rd. We'll have been apart for another 4 weeks. In more than three months, we've been together for less than 24 hours.

Apparently the light at the end of the tunnel, so close yet still out of reach, is driving me a little mad—with the added stress of holiday prep and moving prep and whatnot. This afternoon Noah reminded me that I'm the captain of this ship, and I need to refocus, because right now I'm hanging out of the crow's nest guiding a flaming vessel into port at full speed.

"The captain's job is to bring the ship safely in," Noah said.

"OR go down with the ship," I replied.

The only way to fix this is with copious amounts of junk food and 30 Rock. Good for the long term? Not a chance. But it'll do for now.

Seven more days.

Like most advisors, I can trust his judgment about half the time

2011-12-13T21:03:00.000-05:00

Ethan tried out "Mom" on me tonight. "Can I watch TV all day, MOM?" he said, with a wiggle of his eyebrows and a sly grin.

"I'm Mommy," I replied.

"But Sid the Science Kid calls her Mom, and he said, MOM can I watch TV all day? And Mom said, no, that's not healthy for your...buns. You have to exercise."

* * *

Later on he tackled the conundrum of how to get to The Backyardigans' house (because they really miss him). He came up with two options: 1) He pilots a plane, I copilot, and we fly there, or 2) We buy a Backyardigans book.

I thought option two was most reasonable, but then he stipulated it must be a magical book, with sparkles, that we could jump into and play with the Backyardigans. So. Maybe the plane one.

I see too much of myself in Liz Lemon

2011-12-12T22:56:00.000-05:00

Preparing for a holiday and a pretty big move by myself is tiring, turns out. I've officially dubbed this "Mommy's Ghetto Christmas," but Ethan doesn't seem to mind, God bless him. Word to the wise: masking tape won't hold up twinkle lights for very long.

I can't pinpoint how much of this is exhaustion, how much is stress, and how much is related to the amount of 30 Rock I've been watching, but the other night I found myself slathering expired mayonnaise on a turkey sandwich and yelling at a blanket.

That, and how much my appreciation for the cat* has increased lately, convinces me that if I hadn't already snagged Noah, I'd be in serious trouble right about now.

*I use the singular here because I haven't seen Sophie in over a month. I'm telling myself that she found some other place to live and love, the way my preschooler self came up with the idea that my bunny, Snowy, ran away to have babies, instead of what really happened, which was the neighbor's dog dug under the chicken-wire rabbit run and broke her neck.

Go the 4^(% to Sleep, a one-woman off-Broadway show

2011-12-01T21:51:00.001-05:00

A while back I somehow stumbled across the Samuel L. Jackson recording of the book Go the F(insert moon illustration)ck to Sleep and while it's certainly crass, I think we've all been there. I for one have been there nearly every night, actually, these past few months.

My strategy for Ethan's bedtime involves tiring him out and tricking him to sleep, preferably before we're even in his bedroom at home. Because if we make it to the bedtime-story reading point, I'm in for a long night.

I love reading, and I love that Ethan loves reading, but after a full day of preschooler obnoxiousity and shenanigans, I rarely feel energized enough for a dramatic rendition of Yummy YUCKY ("Burgers are yuuummy. Boogers are YUCKY!").

When he selects the nursery rhyme book, I know I'm in trouble. See, this particular book is about 20 pages long, and it has an accompanying CD of a British woman with a quavery voice (maybe post-botched-surgery Julie Andrews?) singing them all. The situation is even worse when he chooses the children's Bible, which is EXTREMELY long, and I can feel God frowning down on me when I try to skim.

To avoid all that, I've taken to going to my parents' for dinner, staying a bit late, then when we get in the car I crank up the heat really high and drive as slowly as possible. I even invented this technique in which I keep the car in a low gear and tap the gas pedal rhythmically to create a boatlike motion to gently lull him to sleep.

That worked for a while—he would fall asleep fairly easily in the warm cocoon of our puttering car, and I could just transfer him to bed. Now, though, he's used to it, and has countered by getting as amped up as possible after dinner. I had to come up with something else, some sneak attack he wasn't ready for.

And then the eureka moment tonight: Christmas lights. I would use the seasonal tradition of driving around to look at Christmas lights to lengthen our drive and give my techniques time to really wear him down. Half an hour later, I was still driving around my parents' neighborhood, searching in vain for an elusive second Snoopy-in-a-Santa-hat inflatable lawn decoration that Ethan insisted he glimpsed and we passed without viewing. Operation Yuletide = fail.

I think this is God using one of his tactics on me. Well played, God. Well played.

The best day

2011-11-23T20:41:00.001-05:00

"Did you see Noah?" my mom asked when she arrived a few minutes after I was escorted to the section for families of award winners.

"No," I shook my head sadly, "they said after the ceremony."

She smiled. "He's standing right behind you."

He was standing at ease with two other award-winning recruits next to their division sign, and I walked right past him without even realizing it.

Even an award-winning sailor couldn't keep intact the 1,000-yard-stare feature of his military bearing when he saw the look of shock and surprise and excitement when I turned to see him standing there.

* * *

I knew that the award for Military Excellence was a big deal, but I didn't realize how big. Families of award winners and honor graduates were given a special pre-graduation presentation then escorted to reserved seating. Award winner families were given slightly more attention than honor graduates, and I was given more attention than all the other award winner families.

The ceremony was filled with impressive military displays—including an awesome drum corps—and when Noah was recognized as "the finest sailor" of all 269 graduates, that he was the one who best exemplified and excelled at the Navy core values of Honor, Courage, and Commitment, that every aspect of his time at RTC Great Lakes was marked by excellence—well, all I could do was look back at my mom and beam.

While the others were escorted to a hallway to await their reunions with their sailors, I and our family were taken down a separate hallway, where Noah appeared minutes later. I'd like to say I was overwhelmed with emotion, but I was really just overwhelmed. The emotion came later.

Our family alone was brought into a room filled with a whole lot of Navy brass. Noah introduced us to each one, then we witnessed a private presentation of a wristwatch, two commemorative coins from two different officers, and then, another award. The captain presenting the award called it a "flag letter of commendation," which sounded great, but the Rear Admiral present took a moment to explain that this letter is special because it's signed by a flag officer—a very, very high-ranking navy official—and that in 30 years she'd only seen about 20 of these given out. Um, WHAT?!

I don't know if she meant she'd only seen 20 given out ever, or 20 given out to military excellence award winners (of which there are about 50 a year, so that would be only 20 given out of 1,500), or maybe she'd only seen about 20 given out to brand-new sailors, but whatever it was she meant, that Rear Admiral wanted us to know that Noah was being recognized in a very meaningful way.

* * *

When Noah was granted liberty after the graduation, his discomfort was obvious. After following scrupulous rules for 9 weeks about everything from how to walk to how to talk, meandering down the sidewalk and chatting was awkward and even nerve-wracking for him. This, after all, is a guy who for the past 60+ days has eaten all his meals in 12 minutes or less, a guy who has stood in line naked with over dozens of other naked guys waiting to take a 5-minute cold shower, a guy who irons and folds his underwear and stresses over the orientation of his bed pillow.

I, on the other hand, am now a lady who has been a single parent, has kept a household relatively clean and functioning alone, who has been up to her shoulder in a storm drain, who has fostered friendships as an individual instead of as one-half of a couple.

We'd both dreamed of our reunion for weeks, but when it actually happened, we didn't quite know what to do, how to talk to each other. For the first several hours, the most comfortable Noah appeared to be was when he was demonstrating proper t-shirt folding technique.

In the afternoon, my parents and brother went out shopping and Noah's family took Ethan to go burn off some steam, leaving us alone for awhile. We settled in to listen to the new Coldplay album and after just a few minutes ended up crying in each other's arms, all the emotions of the past nine weeks and the past nine hours overflowing, mingling frustration and grief and relief and love.

* * *

We spent the evening relaxing together, asking questions and sharing stories and laughing.

My favorite story of the day: Before we were escorted to the post-graduation reception, Noah and the aforementioned Rear Admiral together, hand over hand, cut the celebratory cake with a ceremonial sword. Let me put it another way: Noah and a high-ranking Navy official used a cutlass to slice a party cake, wedding-style.

I don't know what to do with that information, other than to let it stand alone.

By the end of the day we were exhausted, but happy.

I drove him back to the base around 7, to the drop-off point in the chapel parking lot, where I met two of his shipmates, who were courteous and happy and complimentary. As the three walked away together, Noah paused to come running back and kiss me one last time.

It was the best day.

Basically, he's the best.

2011-11-21T18:36:00.001-05:00

Sea Change

2011-11-17T17:49:00.001-05:00

Have you ever read a book that was written in such a way that you thought, "Nobody ever really looks at the world that way"? The books that are hyper-detailed, heavy on description and light on plot? Like, "This book is just trying to be literary." That's what I thought about Jeremy Page's Sea Change, at first, but as I read, the book took a shape that rendered each detail completely convincing and, actually, heartbreaking.

Sea Change is about a man, Guy, who wants to remember things that never happened. He creates a life in his journals so vivid it's more real to him than the life he finds himself unwillingly living.

It's not so depressing as I've managed to make it sound. And as a wife of a sailor and a future-boat-owner-one-day-if-I-ever-have-money, I appreciated the details about Guy's life afloat, although I was saddened by his life adrift. It was a beautiful, melancholy book, and I imagine people who've suffered a major loss could connect with Guy very easily.

Since Noah's been away, I've avoided imagining scenarios that include him. I've avoided thinking things like, "If Noah was here, then..." That kind of thinking isn't productive, especially when you've got a house to run and a kid to raise. Then again, I've always known that my separation from him is temporary.

Perhaps the saddest thing about the story was how very real it managed to be, even though Guy was constantly aware that his inner life was fiction.

To read more perspectives on Sea Change, click here. BlogHer sent me this book to review, but the opinions herein are my own.

Atta Boy

2011-11-15T08:42:00.001-05:00

You know the old adage, "Loneliness is next to drunkenness"

2011-11-06T22:40:00.000-05:00

Apparently I'm not coping as well as I think I am in the eyes of everyone else, because after a recent Facebook/Twitter update, my mom asked me if I'd been drinking. Granted I sent out a request for someone with a steady hand to draw a fake tattoo on my butt at 10:30 on a Friday night, but in my mind it made perfect sense.

See for yourself:

Could it be any clearer?

Can people change?

2011-11-03T16:14:00.000-04:00

Since Noah's been away, I've only been able to speak with him for about 30 minutes, and I've gotten letters twice. He's been away since September 28. Perhaps because I've lost my sounding board, my patience in a lot of areas has plummeted. While I was reading Stella Duffy's Theodora, I loved the setting and the story intrigued—an actress/prostitute winds up as empress in ancient Rome—but Theodora herself really got on my nerves.

I'm not sure what was historically researched and what was purely Duffy's imagined characterization of Theodora, but the part of the book about Theodora's Christian conversion and subsequent life actually made me angry. I won't pretend to know anything about the Christological and theological issues of the time—even Wikipedia didn't rightly clear it up for me—but I will say that Theodora didn't think or act much different after her conversion than she did before. She even said herself, "Some might say I haven't changed at all."

Ultimately the book was about the woman, not specifically about her faith journey, but I couldn't get over the fact that her professed conversion yielded no real or lasting changes in her personality or worldview. I see so much today people who profess one belief or creed or political ideology but in short order are revealed as frauds. I had trouble liking Theodora much after that.

David Foster Wallace once drew an analogy about the absurdity of writing an ethics book based on what people actually did instead of what they ought to do, a succinct analysis of the human condition I'd say Thing is, if we can't hope to be changed for the better by grappling with ethics, or faith, or political ideology, then what's the point?

What I took away from Theodora—quite contrary to the author's intentions, I'd bet—was the disappointing truth that very few people are truly willing to change.

I'll be compensated for this review by BlogHer, but the opinions are purely my own. Obviously. Because I'm sure the Penguin Group would prefer I like their characters. Find further discussion here.

Don't ask, don't tell

2011-10-30T21:29:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd be blogging all the time, just like the old days, but raising a preschooler solo and spending 45 minutes a night handwriting letters kinda takes it out of me.

According to his letters, Noah is transforming into a completely alien creature who irons his underwear and takes pride in the crisp 45-degree angles of his bed sheets and receives recognition for his towel-folding skillz and gets mad at himself for improperly orienting his pillow. In short, the Navy is slowly and systematically making him into a Stepford Wife.

On the other hand, I've had to do a number of things that, in my humble opinion, have earned me a few "You're The Man"s:

Found myself shoulder-deep in a storm drain retrieving a crappy toy ring for a crying child
Found myself elbow-deep in a really gross submerged water meter after a nearby water main burst
Come to think of it, I've been elbow-and-shoulder-deep in way more things than I ever have been before
I've chopped wood more than once, on the old stump out back
I've started and maintained several fires (legally, in my fireplace)
I've killed bugs that looked threatening and caught and released others that somehow made me feel sorry for them
I've identified and interred a dead mouse (if you count "picking it up with a shovel and throwing it into the woods" interring)
I've identified and made my dad dispose of a dead rat (OMG GROSS)
I've suppressed tears more than once but was ultimately overcome most of the time

In reality, I think my level of pride in doing these manly things make me less The Man than it makes me A Gay Man, but whatever.

Dispatches from Boot Camp

2011-10-24T09:30:00.000-04:00

On Thursday I finally received letters! There were about nine of them, and I expect to get more again this Thursday. Noah is thriving and in fact excelling among his division, which is no surprise to me. He passed a swim/survival test on the first try, and he got the highest score in his division of 73 people on another exam.

It was truly a relief and a thrill to finally know some of what he's been going through, thinking, and feeling. So I thought I'd share some of the highlights from his letters.

Enjoy!

*

"So I headed to the food court in the International Terminal... The lady pointed out the "Navy Special." ... She said, "You take care of us, we take care of you." ... I then sat down with my Thanksgiving feast and watched all the Europeans coming and going."

"We had to wait on the bus to take us to RTC—unfortunately, we learned, the bus would not be arriving for approximately seven hours. So, we literally sat down in rows on the hard floor of O'Hare's baggage claim, for seven hours, indian-style. They let us up for bathroom breaks, but that was all. They didn't allow us to talk either."

"I'm trying my best to be an asset to my division and a positive example to my mostly 17-20-year-old fellow recruits. I am not the oldest, however! We have a 36-year-old with a master's degree and a thick African accent..."

"I'm hoping to keep myself out of trouble, of course, but inevitably someone is gonna get us all in a bad position...especially since some of these guys are apparently incapable of shutting up."

"I'm also one of the better bed-makers in the division—many have admired my crisp 45 degree folds and sought advice from me."

"I am also the Trash Petty Officer, which means my rackmate, Kellogg, and I, yep, take out the trash. A glorious duty. ... Kellogg is distantly related to the Kelloggs of cereal renown. ... Spangler, the former professional trumpet player and aspiring writer. Blaesser, the future nuke who also got a 98 on the ASVAB. ... There are many more worth mentioning, all fascinating in their own ways."

"I must admit there have been times when I've asked myself what the heck I'm doing here."

"I miss you guys more than I can say—please give Ethan a kiss for me, and tell him not to grow up too much—he promised, so please remind him."

"I worry about you guys being on your own and hope everything is operating smoothly. Remember, you are the Captain!"

"I can't say how much hearing you guys over the phone brightened my mood—I love you both so much and am looking forward to our reunion already!"

How about I probably punch you in the face

2011-10-18T19:45:00.001-04:00

In case you were wondering what exactly Noah is going through, here's a short video that gives a glimpse.

Don't ask me any details though. I WOULDN'T KNOW. Three weeks tomorrow (a third of the way!) and still no real letter or personal phone call. Aside from missing my best friend, there's plenty of Important Business Matters that I need information on that only he can provide. Such as, you know, when exactly are we moving to Florida. And when exactly should we attempt to get a lease on the apartment down there. And will he be able to come home and help us move, or am I going to be loading up a moving truck and driving myself down there. Because I am fully prepared to go all Little Miss Sunshine up in here.

Today I called the only phone number I have (aside from the Red Cross, which can contact him in case of emergency), a Public Affairs Office number, because I've yet to recieve any paycheck from the Navy. "Oh, he probably won't get paid until the beginning of November. Just write to him and ask him."

Thanks, lady. I've sent 21 letters and gotten a half page note. Real effective. And "probably" just isn't good enough for me anymore.

10 minutes

2011-10-13T22:19:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning, around 11, I was doing some laundry when the phone rang. "US Govt" said the caller ID. There was once a time in my life when this would have been weird, but I'm so far past that. Once you've received phone calls at home from the D.A., very little surprises anymore.

"Hello?" I answered. There was a pause.
"Erin..."
"Noah?!"

I had just received my first correspondence from him in more than two weeks the day before, so I was not expecting a phone call. He explained that it was technically a "business" call; he needed some more detailed information about his work history and my mom's and brother's foreign birth certificates, but while I looked up what he needed, we were able to talk.

How do you sum up two weeks of a changed life in just 10 minutes? Well, you don't, is the thing.

He was somewhat restrained in what he said and how, but he's doing well. Still, I'm his wife, and I could hear the happiness in his voice. We proclaimed our love. Ethan even got to speak to him, which was wonderful. I told him I'd sent him 11 letters the day before, and also some photos and drawings that Ethan had done. Just as we were about to hang up, I told him once again that I loved him and that hopefully he'd receive my letters by week's end.

"And you'll have lots of smiles!" Ethan added with ingenuous sincerity.

After we hung up, Ethan and I cheered and ran into each other's arms.

We couldn't cover much ground on a business phone call in just 10 minutes, but I realize now that's what the letters are for. I've always communicated best through writing anyway. Hearing his voice, though, was marvelous. Apparently, more than seven years of marriage hasn't squashed my schoolgirl infatuation with Noah. At the same time, I'm also realizing the maturity of our relationship, my love for him revolving more around who he is than what he does for me (emotionally, domestically, whateverally). That's one of the things I wrote in tonight's letter to him.

The letters sustain. The phone calls, well. Those are a gift.

The first letter

2011-10-11T16:29:00.001-04:00

Didn't realize how much I was prepared for disappointment until I opened the mailbox, saw the letter, and involuntarily danced up the driveway. Ethan and I danced around the house for a solid minute before I even got down to opening the thing.

The handwriting on the envelope, written in pencil, is a perfectly drawn uppercase in neat rows, without slant or inclination. Diagonals strike through the zeros, the eights composed of two small, individual circles, one stacked atop the other. The letter itself is in Noah's familiar, jagged cursive.

Written on the back of the official correspondence regarding his address and graduation, Noah's letter was hardly a page in length—He opened with, "I only have six minutes..." He's doing well, likes his fellow shipmates and instructors, informed me of the sad news that his ridiculously lustrous and thick hair is in fact gone (sob!), and that his bed is horrible compared to home but he manages to sleep. He also said he's been writing letters but was unable to send them as of that date, which was October 6. His graduation will be November 23, the day before Thanksgiving.

As soon as I could possibly corral Ethan and get him into the car, we were off to pick up a few photos I'd printed and buy an envelope big enough for twelve letters, four photos, and a couple of Ethan's drawings. Now it's my mantel and not my mailbox that's letter free.

Capabilities

2011-10-10T22:14:00.000-04:00

For the first few days, everything felt familiar but somehow off, like I came home to find the living room furniture arranged on the front lawn. Now, nearly two weeks in, and still without a word from Noah, my home feels like my home again.

I'm experiencing things with Ethan that I wouldn't have before. During his bedtime routine, for instance, reading through (skimming, ahem) the 7,000 books on his nightly reading list has actually been fun. Tonight, as we listened to the CD that accompanies his nursery rhyme book, he asked, "Mommy, why are the ants marchin?" I told him it was to get out of the rain. He cocked his head and put on his concentration face; when the song confirmed what I'd said, he smiled and nodded.

Today I cleaned the boys' bathroom (aka the main bathroom). I've cleaned every dish, done every load of laundry, myself. I've even been sleeping quite well (thanks in part to 3 mg of Melatonin—buy it in the vitamin aisle, it's cheaper than in the sleep-aid aisle). The budget hasn't crashed and burned, and all the bills are paid. I even split wood out back today for a fire. Just call me Annie M. Oakley. (The M is for Martha, as in Stewart.)

I've realized something important: In many material ways, I don't need Noah.

We were married young, so neither of us lived on our own as adults. I've never had to run a household on my own, nevermind parent a child on my own. Granted our families are a wonderful help (and spending the day at my parents' when we were both sick with bad colds was definitely a bonus), but when it comes down to it, it's just me and Ethan. Living.

I'd be lying if I didn't confess absolute joy when the child strokes my face and tells me he loves me so much, that I'm his best friend. Our friend Nate, a lifelong Air Force kid, encouraged me: children are flexible. Ethan's adjusted. I'm relishing these special moments we're sharing because of Noah's absence. And yet, Ethan's been talking about Noah again, about wanting him to come back home, about wanting to call him. His openness has allowed me freedom to feel what I feel, which quite happily isn't always gloom and sadness.

As Ethan and I share time alone, I've realized something else important: In many foundational ways, we absolutely need Noah.

I can manage without a partner, apparently, but I really really want a partner. Well, one in particular anyway. We've spent nearly 10 years crafting our lives around the core presence of each other, giving and taking, creating a landscape in which we can both pursue our individual dreams from the safe harbor of our relationship. We've certainly had ups and downs, but we agree that our relationship has only gotten richer with time, each day's renewed commitment building on all the others that have come before.

Eleven letters now sit on the mantel above the fireplace, waiting for an address. Oddly, it feels like they've already been sent and received.

Three boxes

2011-10-05T21:39:00.004-04:00

I have permanent dark circles under my eyes and Ethan is sleeping in a cardboard box. So, how are we doing? Pretty well, all things considered.

* * *

Box 1

Two days ago, a large box arrived from Pottery Barn. I'd bought a couple of lamps I've been wanting, which were on sale. I was excited to receive them. I was disappointed there was still no letter from Noah. Ethan's been playing with the box in his room and has tried to convince me to let him sleep in it since it arrived.

Ethan's clinginess hasn't abated at all. If anything, it's gotten worse. I don't mind all the cuddles and hugs and carrying him (obviously), but these past couple of days his clinginess seems to stem from desperation. He doesn't have the vocabulary to talk about what he's thinking and feeling.

Last night when my mom said, "Guess who's coming to our house for dinner?" referring to my friend Heather and her daughter Ava, Ethan added, "and Daddy." Mom just looked at me, and I had to remind him that Daddy wasn't going to be back for awhile. He commented on the empty space at the table and said it was for Daddy (even though that's not where Noah would normally sit).

Today Ethan had a huge meltdown. He didn't want me to leave the room, and he didn't want to come with me to the kitchen, and right before my eyes he transformed into a banshee. I went to the kitchen and got my snack then returned to him, scooping him up and letting him sob on my shoulder.

"Do you miss Daddy?" I asked. He nodded. "Do you want to talk about him?" He shook his head.

Tonight, after the tantrum and the hours of being clung to, I didn't have the heart or the energy to persist in saying no. I'll move him later, but for now he's curled up on a couple of blankets inside that box, cuddled with Big Bunny, Baby Bunny, Sammy, and the enormous serves-as-a-pillow Big Froggie, sleeping as soundly as either of us can anymore.

* * *

Box 2

Yesterday I arrived home and found a small cardboard box on the front porch.

I knew immediately what it was. Noah had written my name and our address on the side, and had printed his name in permanent marker across the seal on the top of the box.

Inside was his backpack, his shoes, jeans, a t-shirt, and two of the three small notepads he had taken with him. I pulled out each item, inspected it. First the shoes, then the clothes, finally the backpack. Inside the bag was only the Navy materials he'd taken to read over on the flight and a car key, as well as his phone with the battery removed. None of the clothes smelled of him. I suppose they smelled of the journey, the fresh cardboard and O'Hare airport and the hotel in Raleigh.

There was no note. The return address on the box is the address of the main base in Great Lakes. No division number, no ship number. On the mantel my stack of letters is getting bigger, still waiting for a destination.

* * *

Box 3

The mail truck was pulling onto our street as I left to go grocery shopping today. I probably would have waited in the driveway for it, but Dad had picked us up and we were dropping Nanny off at a friend's house, so checking the mail would have to wait.

As soon as I returned home, before even opening the front door, I walked down the driveway and opened the mailbox. It was empty.

Division 008

2011-10-03T14:22:00.000-04:00

Friday, September 29. 2:23 a.m. Noah calls for the last time, says he'll call again in a couple of weeks, will send a letter as soon as he can. He loves us so much. Duration: 1 minute, 58 seconds.

Friday, September 29. 7:33 p.m. My friend Kim comes out to greet me in her driveway after I motored around the entire city for an hour trying to find her house, the house that I've been to 146 times. I begin crying in earnest when she hugs me. (I'd already been crying in the car, after her husband Steve kindly and patiently charted my course over the phone. Noah's usually the one I call when I end up 20 miles west of where I intended to go.)

Friday, September 29. 8:40 p.m. Dad calls to say he just spoke to Noah, who called because he needed my mom's and brother's foreign birth certificates faxed for his top-secret clearance. He said he'd barely slept in the past 48 hours.

Friday, September 29. 8:42 p.m. I'm mad that Noah couldn't have called me.

Friday, September 29. 8:42:30 p.m. I cry into my roasted marshmallows.

* * *

Today I feel much better than I have for the past few, with a major thank you to the friends who made my happiness their business this weekend. I suppose Ethan and I are settling into a new routine, although if I think about the fact that he doesn't ask when Daddy's coming home anymore, I feel like crying again.

I haven't cried in two point five days, but that could be because my eyes are Saharan and fatigued from squeezing out the sorrows of my soul and also from the heater, which I turned on last night since it's getting cold out.

* * *

I've been frequently checking the Navy boot camp family website, hoping to see a graduation date posted that seems like it's probably Noah's, but I don't know his division number to find out for sure until he writes, which is what I told my parents just before my Dad informed me that he's in division 008, and he knows this because that's where he had to fax the birth certificates. UM, THANKS DAD.

Is division 008's graduation date listed yet? No. But it's information! New information! Of which I have almost none!

I can't describe how happy it makes me to know that Noah's in division 008. Knowing something, anything at all, even though I have no frame of reference for understanding what it means, helps me feel connected to him somehow.

The day Noah left

2011-09-28T20:17:00.001-04:00

We both woke up with nearly perfect hair, which was a miracle since we'd already planned on going to breakfast and that left one less thing to do. I guess nearly perfect morning hair also indicates a contented night's sleep—another miracle, all things considered.

Ethan was in great form, dancing in the diner booth at our favorite little breakfast place up the road. We took a walk when we got home, took a few pictures, and then it was time. Ethan asked why we were crying, and we told him because we were a little bit sad and we'd miss each other.

As Ethan and I waved from the front porch watching Noah drive away, Ethan stuck out his little bottom lip and worked hard to mist his eyes. When we went back inside, he gently put his arms around me and asked quietly, "Mommy, is your heart broken?" Well it is now! Thanks, kid!

I knew Ethan didn't really understand. Heck, I have a hard time grasping the relative length and brevity of two months of not talking every day, seeing each other, cuddling up in the evenings, fighting the dogs for bed space (I'm outnumbered now). When I think about what we were actually doing two months ago (Vacation Ethan anyone?), it seems like such a long stretch. So much can happen in just two months! Of course when I hold this little swatch up against The Grand Scheme, it's a drop in the bucket. It ain't even a loss, just a temporary separation. An adventure, as Noah has trained Ethan to say.

"Daddy's going to the Navy like an adventure and Mommy cried for him," Ethan told my dad.

My parents took us to dinner and then to pick up our car where Noah had left it at the recruiting office. Ethan asked, brightly, if we were going to pick up Daddy.

"No, sweetheart," I must get used to saying. "Daddy's going to be gone for a long time, but not too long."

It's those kinds of moments that will be difficult for me, having to repeatedly disappoint my son with the inscrutable sum of reality.

Hates change, seeks adventure

2011-09-22T21:05:00.000-04:00

Last night Noah and I dined at one of Winston-Salem's finest restaurants, Noble's, courtesy of several wonderful friends. Although slightly out of our element—it's the kind of place where you don't flush with your foot, if you catch my drift, and the disposable hand towels were better in both nap and thickness than many of my regular towels—we had a fantastic evening.

Noble's encapsulates a truly charming upscale nonchalance, as thought it's where the wealthy go to get in touch with their Southern roots without also having to get in touch with pigs feet and a deep fryer. A sophisticated Shrimp and Grits is a menu staple, for instance. For our part, we ordered Hushpuppy style shrimp in a dijonaise, Caesar salad, tomato bisque with local goat cheese, filet with roasted veg, salmon with fingerling potatoes in an onion sauce, a side of gourmet macaroni and cheese (listed, classically, as a vegetable), and a Moravian bread pudding. Folks, it was superb.

"Don't eat crumbs of the table," I hissed at Noah as I picked garnish from my teeth.

"Look at all that good batter left on the shrimp tail," Noah replied, longingly.

* * *

For the past couple of weeks, Cody's reticence for "hopping up" on the bed at night graduated into something more: a general creakiness and delicacy that makes me suspect arthritis. Consequently, he's been sleeping on our bedroom floor a lot—that is, when he doesn't stand by my bedside staring pathetically directly at my face until somebody hoists him up.

Last night, he settled by the floor vent, so Noah suggested we give him a couple blankets to snuggle. You'd have thought I was asking him to sleep on a hot skillet, so suspicious of those blankets was he.

"How's it going?" asked Noah. Bonnie was on the blankets and Cody was pressed against the nightstand several feet away, glancing distrustfully toward the pallet.

I led him over and commanded him to sit, then lie down, which he did with a surprising blend of decorum and self-pity, an unusual combination he's mastered through the years.

"Come on up, you big lug," Noah said, performing a dead-man's lift on that ridiculous canine.

* * *

I can't blame the dog, really. I'm no good at change either, particularly to my home life.

Yesterday afternoon, about two hours before our dinner, Noah called from the Navy recruiting office with news. His job training in Pensacola, the 11 weeks immediately after his 8-week boot camp, had been extended to six months.

We've certainly been thrown for a loop. Fortunately the Navy will now temporarily relocate Ethan and me, so we'll be with Noah the entire time, which is fantastic. And after a few hours of processing the information, I realized I'll finally be able to use the phrase "Oh, I'm wintering in Florida."

This temporary relocation has brought a hurricane of things to do (see how I'm picking up the lingo already??), including finding extended-term housesitters. I'll miss having our families literally minutes away, and I'll miss our church family tremendously. And while I love vacations—and winter on the Gulf Coast is a grand one—I never quite sleep right when I'm not in my own bed. I'll miss our home. But it's just for a short time.

I think Cody and I will adjust to our new Florida bed. After all, we'll be in it together.

If Who's on third, who's in the castle? And who is Who's mother?

2011-09-15T20:16:00.000-04:00

Noah's never been great at parsing out his family tree. When his cousin was born, he thought the lad was his nephew. This was two years ago. Not surprisingly, Ethan has been...perplexed...whenever we discuss family relationships.

I tested the waters the other day by asking if he knew my parents' last name. "Nana and Poppy Effridge," he said matter-of-factly. When I told him their last name was actually "Townsley," he looked at me as though I said dog poop makes good brownies and reemphasized that their last name is Etheridge.

Tonight I must have said something about my mother, because he asked, "What you say about your muvver? Who your muvver?"

"Who do you think is my mother?" I countered. See, we've been over this before.

"Umm...Mimi?"

"No, Mimi is Daddy's mother."

"Mimi is your muvver and Daddy's muvver."

"Well it doesn't work that way. Mommy and Daddy aren't brother and sister. Mommy and Daddy are married. KyKy and Mommy are brother and sister, and our mother is Nana. Daddy's mother is Mimi."

He chewed that one over for a minute. Then he started in on a very confusing monologue about kings, castles, and mothers, and what it came down to is, If he (Ethan) was a daddy, and also a king, who would be the mommy to live with him in his castle?

Apparently the way Noah is...the king? And I live with him in his castle? Considering the family relationship confusion and the specificity of detail, this raises a lot of alarms. I may convene a review of Noah's bedtime lesson plans.

Woe to those who would use him as a paid informant

2011-09-14T20:42:00.000-04:00

This evening I had a headache so I did something crazy: I asked Ethan to go upstairs (we were at my parents' house) and ask Nanny (his great-grandmother) what she wanted from Japanese takeout for dinner. I told him it was a Special Mission, and his job was to ask her, simply, "Egg rolls for dinner?" He agreed.

"Talk loudly, and into her left ear!" I shouted as he whizzed past.

He's still working on the diff between right and left, but I figured we were looking at a 50–50 shot at the proper ear. The message, on the other hand...I mean, I knew what I set up was basically a game of telephone destined to yield no usable results.*

*If this situation were made into a movie, their parts would be played by Sylvester Stallone and Marlee Matlin. (Based on a true story, seeing as the ages don't jive.)

Less than a minute later he came bounding in and explained, "Gigi said egg rolls is fine!"

I was elated, similar to the first time I asked him to close the front door (he was just shy of two years old) and he did it. His abilities are impressive, sure, but the possibilities for me and what I can make him do? Totally exciting. Think of all the messages I can now make him relay for me! As with the whole doing-things-I-ask scenario, I know that this is a race against the clock. I have a short window of time in which these new tasks I assign him will remain exciting, gold-star-worthy, if you will. Before I know it, we'll be at "No, you do it!" all over again.

A few minutes later, Nanny came down the stairs (backwards, one at a time—she says it's easier that way [?] )—and asked, bewildered, "Is the dinner not ready?"

Apparently Ethan hadn't actually inquired whether she wanted egg rolls for dinner. He instead told her dinner was ready, then came back down and reported to me.

At this point I'm unable to discern if in his enthusiasm to complete his mission Ethan cut some corners, or if he purposefully bungled the communique to get out of future assignments. Finding out is probably impossible, since Ethan has proven himself a highly unreliable witness. (The other day, after a brief car trip with Noah, Ethan announced they had seen a giant pumpkin on the side of the road, "the big pumpkin...in Daddy's life!" Noah debunked this rumor immediately. No pumpkin, nevermind the biggest one he'd ever seen in his life.)

Regardless, it seems I have less time than I thought.

400 words on pen pals, tennis, butt picking, The Office, and emotional eating

2011-09-12T22:17:00.000-04:00

Back when I was organizing our office, I surveyed the collected remnants of my youth and noticed a pattern: I've had many pen pals. Steve, Lindsey, Annette, Johnny, Tony, and even a couple other shorter-term correspondences of one or two letters. Recently I've fallen into a new pen pal–type relationship with a lovely woman named Jill, who lives in Minnesota. Of course we're twenty-first-centurying the whole process and exchanging emails about everything from a mutual love of David Foster Wallace's work to the tennis pro tour.

Jill and I are both Roger Federer fans, so I was sad to see him lose to Novak Djokovic in the U.S. Open semifinals last week. (<--Segue to the rest of the post, FYI.) I told Jill that I have this weirdly complex emotional response to Roger Federer, because I love him as a player (and he seems like a super awesome guy), but I also instinctually root for the underdog, who he almost never is.

In the Open finals tonight, Djokovic took on (and beat) Rafael Nadal, the machinelike butt-picking Spaniard...

... who, while incredibly impressive on court, just doesn't have the finesse and je ne sais quoi of a Federer.

Turns out, Djokovic (incredibly pronounced Joke-ah-vitch, considering he's certainly the most jovial and wacky personality on tour)...

...quickly began to spank Nadal's wedgied little bum. Despite all logic and against all my principles, I began to root for Nadal a little bit—since he was turning out to be the underdog.

Sports just make me go emotionally haywire. I love to win, but I always feel bad for the loser (after I've gloated for awhile). I love for my team/athlete/whomever of choice to come out on top, but I inevitably despair for the vanquished opponents. It's nuts.

On top of all this, I now have to steel myself for The Office Season 7's "Goodbye Michael" episode, which we hadn't seen yet because we didn't have TV this year and had to wait for the season to come out on dvd because we got so far behind watching them online. I did the only thing I know how at a time like this: I bought a can of Pillsbury Grands Extra Flaky Cinnamon Rolls with Cinnabon Spices and Cream Cheese Frosting in anticipation of the emotional eating I'm going to need to do to get through it.

Taking the repeats

2011-09-08T21:07:00.000-04:00

It's an infrequently acknowledged fact that depressed people are super annoying, and I say this with authority, having gotten on my own nerves when I was one. It's also true that depression, like any brain-centered mood or appetite malfunction, ultimately betroths its host to a lifetime of Symptom Management. I think these things are what Dominique Browning's Slow Love recounts.

For the first half of this memoir, Dominique didn't win me over. She had been a big-time magazine editor, which interested me, but it turns out that a highly successful (if cut short) career doesn't necessarily indicate a well-adjusted personality behind the wheel. Over and over I told her (book) to get a grip, which is what I ineffectually told myself back in the thick of it.

Happily, as Browning slowly ascended from the mire, her book became lovelier. One of the first passages I marked was on page 138, about "taking the repeats"—a musical direction meaning the musician should go back to the start and play the phrase again—which Browning adapted simply and meaningfully to her whole life.

Life is full of necessary repeats, Browning convinced me. Do-overs can be wonderful gifts, opportunities to start again only with a better idea of what to expect, what to relish and disregard. At the least, taking the repeats is nothing to be ashamed of.

There's a lot more to discuss when it comes to this book, and there's a lot of discussion happening about it on BlogHer's Book Club page. Check it out!

What happens when the comedienne loses her jokes

2011-09-06T22:56:00.000-04:00

I'm not gonna lie, lately I've been drained. I'm an internalizer when it comes to stress. Instead of getting frazzled and snappy, I get tired (and then I get frazzled and snappy, but it's because I'm tired). As Noah's departure for Navy boot camp creeps closer, the anticipation of it is getting to me. I've begun frequently throwing myself prostrate at/on him, clinging pathetically and pressing my face against his so he can't take a breath without inhaling my suffering.

And I've bitten the bullet and made a decision. I'm not putting Ethan in preschool yet. I had the application, I'd talked to the director, and we even thought we'd go to the open house today at the preschool that is literally around the corner (walkable, and we live in a part of town with no sidewalks, that's how close it is). But it's just too much. I say it's too much for him—too many changes, what with Noah leaving—but I think it might just be too much for me. Can't quite parse that one out. He has two and a half years until kindergarten, so we have plenty of time to enroll him for readiness purposes next fall.

It's hard for me to blog when I don't feel jovial, because humor is not only my bag, it's my defense mechanism of choice, and when I'm not able to muster, it leads me to doubt my Fierce Beagleiness, which is why all twelve of you guys come here and read what I write. Right? Ugh. I just don't have any jokes right now.

Three things that are trying to kill me

2011-08-31T21:35:00.000-04:00

Ava, the new baby I babysit. She's not actively trying to kill me, but she's definitely gunning for me with cuteness. Having a girl around is a whole different ballgame, and not just in the diaper arena (although I will say that after Ethan and my nephew, I've become accustomed to the extra equipment in the Pampers). Noah's a wreck, for one thing. She gave him a kiss on the cheek today and in return he gave her our camera to play with. Heaven help us if our next child is a girl.
Ethan's been very into theology and spirituality lately. Today, for instance, he picked up my Bible and was flipping through the maps in the back. When I explained one of them was the road that Jesus took, he said, "I wanna walk on it too, and then I talk to God for a few minutes." The whole talking to God thing has been a major topic of discussion. He asked, "Mommy, how do we get to God?" I said, "Well...God is everywhere..." (Noah interjected, "Oh, so you're taking a pantheistic stance?") "...and can hear you anywhere, and he's in your heart." To which Ethan replied, "I think he's way high in the clouds. We need a ladder." (Noah interjected, "How about a tower?")
Tomorrow morning, we will A) Officially be in the Ber/Brr Months, and B) we will also be officially in the month at the end of which Noah leaves until, essentially, February. Boot camp at Great Lakes for two months(ish)—(Oh, how vague and little is the information the military shares!)—during which time we can communicate through the ol' Pony Express. After that, it's off to Pensacola for further training for eleven weeks. We can visit him there, but, you know. This impending departure is beginning to bother me, not just because I'll miss him, but because we know that Ethan really doesn't get it. How could he? Tonight I was hugging Noah, and Ethan asked me what's the matter, and I told him I was just going to miss Daddy when he goes to the Navy. Now, as far as Ethan understands, The Navy is that office at the mall with all the recruiters in it where Noah has to go from time to time, and where Ethan gets cool SWAG like Navy-themed baseballs and coins. "Daddy," he said sweetly after I told him I'd miss Noah, "when you go to the Navy can you get me some more coins?" "I'll get you a treasure box full of coins," said Noah.

The times they are a shakin'

2011-08-24T09:22:00.001-04:00

Lately I'm looking more and more like the Old Woman Who Lived in the Shoe: Frazzled, surrounded by children...that's really all, though. I guess that was a bad analogy. I'm so tired I can't come up with anything better.

Since returning from vacation, we've been working hard to expunge any inappropriate resurgence of Vacation Ethan, but it's been difficult because our house seems to have been cursed by the anti-sleep fairy. None of us are sleeping well, Ethan's been waking up at least once almost every night, etc. It is a season of change, of course. Back to school, which affects Noah and his schedule, and which actually affects Ethan and me as well. Although not traditionally, for this semester I'm taking a hiatus from school. Partially because Noah will be leaving for bootcamp next month (!) and I'll be single momming it up in here, and partially because my biannual urge to Take A Principled Stand against the school (which is as user-friendly as a midcentury telephone switchboard) is now justified by what I consider exorbitant and ultimately prohibitive tuition increases. That being said, I'm disappointed.

I'm directly affected by the school season, though, because my friend Heather is also going back to school, and I've offered to keep her darling girl, Ava. Ava is 1.5 years old, gorgeous, and very laid back. Basically she's better behaved and less trouble than Bonnie. I'm thinking of dressing the Bonster in some of Ava's clothes and trying to send her home with Heather instead. Today, though, I also have my nephew Grayson while his Mommy's at work saving lives (nurse). SO. I have THREE kids today, and two dogs, and less than seven hours of sleep under my belt.

* * *

In other news, we had an earthquake yesterday (Duh, it's news everywhere). We're a couple hundred miles from the epicenter in Virginia, but for me—a seasoned earthquake survivor—I knew exactly what it was. Thought it was a strong gust of wind at first, the way the house groaned and listed, but when it didn't stop and the couch I was sitting on began to move beneath me, I was quite excited.

I haven't been in a discernible earthquake since we lived in California, the land of epic 'quakes (that's what people in the know call them). If you don't know what an earthquake feels like, the simple answer is: like nothing else.

There are different sensations, depending on the quake, as well. While things in your house will shake, typically the ground feels more like it's moving in tiny concentric circles, or sometimes it even feels like it's rolling the way a small wave does.

This one was so small for us that people driving didn't even know it happened, and my dogs didn't even react. Which, considering Cody's issues with irrational fear and frequent experiences of temporary dementia, is really saying something.

If I was a mentee, but my mentor is now my friend, does that make me de-mented?

2011-08-17T22:19:00.002-04:00

When I was a college freshman steeling my nerves behind a facade of sarcastic humor and nonchalance, I had a professor who saw right through me. She had a timeless face, almost like a Lladro figure or a Renaissance-era painting, and what I stupidly considered a thick Southern drawl. (Oh, how foolish and inexperienced I was! Back then I'd never had neighbors who parked their John Deere in the middle of the yard all winter, or considered a whitewashed tire a fine garden planter.)

It only takes so long, though, for incisive words to cut through the distractions of voice inflection. And Dr. C had a lot to say.

She was the one who challenged me to be more honest in my writing. I was crushed by her (gentle) criticism, and mostly because I knew she was right. She prompted me to send some of my poems to literature conferences. She supported my friend Alicia and I when we started a literary journal. She was the one who made sure I, a college freshman, had an English Department–funded plane ticket and hotel reservation when I was accepted to a conference in Utah.

Probably the most challenging class I ever took in college was one of hers: Literary Theory and Criticism. Sounds dull, I know; it was anything but. By the time we enrolled in Lit Crit senior year, my classmates and I were a tightly knit coterie of honors students. Epic arguments abounded in that class. Foundations were rocked. Tears were shed. Heck, Dr. C nearly cried once.

She had our graded mid-terms clenched in her hands as she stood at the lectern, searching for words. She explained that we had done excellently as a class, but there was one person who did poorly. It was killing her. She lost sleep over it, she said. She tried to find a way to make it better, but she just didn't see how. People were groaning fitfully, Allison even announced, "It's me, I just know it!" but when Dr. C could stall no more and began handing back the tests, we were all holding our breath.

It was me.

I had misread one of the essay questions and answered it completely wrongly. It was as bad as the time I parenthetically referred to humans as "Homo erectus" in an essay for another class—only worse, because this essay was elegantly and air-tightly written around a totally erroneous thesis. I went to see her privately later on. We talked mostly about life, and almost not at all about the test.

Dr. C was the professor who pulled me out of senior seminar to tell me that another of my poems had won first place at the Southern Literary Festival. Although Dr. C and Mr. Dr. C (as we called her husband, also an English professor, mostly to try and get on his nerves in an ironical way) couldn't come, they had facilitated a trip that is still one of my fondest and proudest moments from college. Friends and professors came with me to accept the award at Mississippi College. We all blew off the second day of the conference to go bash around Oxford and meander reverently through Rowan Oak. (But not so reverently that I didn't filch a peach pit from the yard and attempt to grow my own tree, a descendent of the original.)

Aside from being a great encourager, Dr. C was something of a fashion icon for me. Comfortable jeans, black Birkenstock clogs, and blazers with the sleeves rolled up. Yes, I thought. I could live my life in that. Incidentally, at this very moment my black Birkenstock clogs are in the shoe basket by the front door, waiting to be slipped back on in cooler weather.

* * *

Dr. C is now signing her emails "Dana," which throws me off even six years since I sat in her classroom. Transitioning from respected teacher and mentor to friend—and colleague.

Dana got in touch with me about copyediting her novel, which is about to be sent out to publishers. Guys, it's fantastic. As I told her, it reminds me of Dan Brown but literary, of Neil Gaiman but more accessible. All that's about genre, though. The writing is thoroughly, beautifully, Dana Chamblee-Carpenter.

A very important character from the novel, Mouse, has been writing diary entries at MouseScript.blogspot.com. From a publishing perspective it's a brilliant move. Plus, it's super-fun and wonderfully written. I mean, imagine one of your favorite characters from a novel keeping a live journal. That is what this is. Go on and subscribe to it, and one day when a movie's being made of the book, you'll get special recognition in the credits. Okay so I don't have the authority to say that, but that should tell you how good this book is.

In other book-related news, I've reviewed Sapphire's latest novel, The Kid, which is the follow-up novel to Push, which was adapted into the Academy Award–winning film Precious based on the novel Push by Sapphire. Get all that? This was not an easy book to read, aesthetically or thematically. Check out the review, and let me know if you've ever pressed on through a challenging book. Include the juicy details: what was the book, what was challenging about it, etc. Because I love book gossip.

Vacation Ethan's To-Do List

2011-08-10T21:36:00.002-04:00

- Harass costumed characters

Here's Mary Poppins reconsidering that spoonful of sugar advice

Here's Winnie the Pooh, about to eat it

Aaaand mentally composing his resume

Unpictured: Donald Duck getting a forcible tonsil check

- Spray-bottle/fan sneak attack on unsuspecting Chinese tourists. Bonus points for doing it indoors.

- Dump every complimentary bottle of spa-quality shampoo, conditioner and lotion into the stoppered sink; claim you're "making soup."

- Test Mommy's sadly unpracticed wiener-handling skills by really committing to Daddy's why-not-go-pee-in-an-empty-soda-bottle-so-we-don't-have-to-stop-42-times idea.

- Comment loudly on strangers' bowel movements in public restrooms ("What's that smell? What's that horrible stinky smell? What's that horrible stinky smell? What's that horrible stinky smell?" and "Somebody fah-ted!")

- Public urination (x2)

- Experience Kubler-Ross's Stages of Grief every night from 7pm until 11pm

- Never ever under any circumstances willingly participate in an adorable photo op

Par exemple

- Maintain a blase manner as often as possible

Like so

- Treat souvenirs irreverently

Here's just one idea

It's not all bad, though. Times like these are intercut with Kodak moments (unsponsored) and sickeningly sweet displays of affection. And when I say "intercut" don't think I mean dissolving gradually from one scene to the next with gradual buildups and gentle fadeouts. I'm talking frenetic, MTV-style, vintage shaky-camera NYPD Blue splicing. The bipolar swings are exhausting. Unfortunately, even some of the better moments have been doused in a spray of misdirected urine.

Such is life with Vacation Ethan.

Vacation Ethan

2011-08-08T11:33:00.000-04:00

Don't get me wrong, we do experience some classic moments for the family annals, such as this one:

Unfortunately, this guy is the one we're dealing with most of the time:

Vacation Ethan. What can I say about Vacation Ethan? First off, he's something of a prima donna. He treats me, seeking adorable family photo ops, like a paparazzo.

This is him telling me off for following him around trying to take his picture:

This is him posing for a pre-pool-visit portrait:

This is him enjoying a kid's dream come to life, meeting a Disney character:

And finally, here he is enjoying a fine dinner out:

Yes, I realize that I wrote "tabecloth" instead of "tablecloth." But I don't have time to go fix it, because His Royal Highness is demanding use of the computer to watch Dora.

Croquet Glory: An Oxymoron

2011-08-08T06:00:00.004-04:00

Although we graduated college six (!) years ago and travelled our separate paths, Austin and I have remained good albeit long-distance friends. Some of my fondest memories of college involve Austin, including an English Department trip to Oxford, Mississippi.

As a nervous freshman, I found myself walking down a lonely hallway one afternoon. A guy sitting in an office off the hall leaned over, looked me dead in the eye, and smiled the most excellent grin right at me. Although we didn't know each other then, or really for a couple of more years, it was Austin, and I'll always remember that moment of unencumbered friendliness.

He's graciously agreed to let me share this essay of his with Fierce Beagle readers. It's fantastic. As someone who makes up for in competitive spirit what I lack in athletic ability, I can only dream of one day having my own moment of Croquet Glory, or something like it.

Enjoy!

* * *

“Croquet Glory: An Oxymoron”

Few of my athletic achievements are worth recounting, even if I give the word “achievements” a generous interpretation.

At David Lipscomb Middle School, I distinguished myself by sustaining the worst broken leg in the history of the football program. This injury occurred during practice before the season had even started, so I didn’t even have the satisfaction of changing the momentum of the game.

In high school, I made my tennis coach cry.

During a mission trip to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, the summer before my junior year of college, I scored a goal with my right foot from midfield. I happen to be left-footed, so this wasn’t so much an achievement as an accident. At least millions of people care about soccer and start riots after their favorite teams lose or a referee makes a bad call. No one breaks windows and overturns cars after a croquet match.

Other than Scrabble, croquet is the only game that I’m confident I can win every time. Neither game is an Olympic sport, and neither does anybody care who wins. I may as well be the No. 1 seed in grocery shopping or hair braiding.

I grew up playing croquet in the side yard of my grandparents’ big Dutch Colonial in Nashville. On summer weekends we played hours-long, heated games during which aunts and uncles bickered about strategy and whether Steve’s foot had slipped off the ball and moved it during a roquet.

My grandfather, who was hard of hearing due to a case of childhood mumps, would look from face to face, trying to read lips and follow the argument.

“What? What?!” he’d bellow. “What’s that she said? It’s your turn! No? Well, whose turn is it then?”

He was also color blind and played with the yellow ball because it was easier from him to distinguish from red, green, and blue.

This all seemed quite normal to me until I learned in high school and college that other families don’t play croquet. Most of my classmates had never heard of it. Some confused it with a lightly fried salmon patty. Being a skilled croquet player was less impressive than the ability to flip one’s eyelids inside out. Despite my friend Hunter’s patient tutelage, I never figured that one out.

I finally found an opportunity to shine during the fall semester of my senior year of college. I studied abroad for three months in Oxford, England, and lived with forty other American students in a Victorian mansion that had been converted into student housing. It was called “The Vines” and wasn’t as nice as it sounds.

We lived on Pullens Lane just below Headington, and our cozy narrow street had earned the nickname “Rape Lane” from the locals. I didn’t share that endearing moniker with my parents until I got home.

As Josh, the Junior Dean, was showing us around the grounds, he pointed out a level stretch of grass behind the house and said matter-of-factly, “The croquet pitch.” I never knew it was called a “pitch.” I thought you just carried the mallets, balls, and wickets out to the yard and set everything up.

That evening Josh explained the game to the ten or so people who wanted to learn, and I tried to hide my eagerness. Play commenced—we were in England, after all—and I had the pleasure of giving Josh a good old-fashioned American bushwhacking.

“You’re not bahd!” he said afterward.

“Not bad”? That, I thought, was a bit of an understatement, considering that I’d just paved the pitch with his English boarding school condescension. Perhaps “not bad” is a phrase that Brits use when they’ve had their “arses” handed to them.

Croquet was the only game we played with any regularity that semester, and my performance in that first game gave me an instant status as some kind of croquet talent, though I hesitate to use “croquet” and “talent” in the same sentence. Alas, if only I had been born at the turn of the 19th century!

Alliances formed, and my new friends developed special strategies to keep me from winning. I had become a force, a personage. I loved it. I was the Donald Bradman of croquet; the Hank Aaron of the running double wickets.

When the special strategies didn’t work, they simply stopped inviting me to play, or when that was too obvious, they conveniently forgot to come and remind me that they were starting. I would hear the thwack of two wooden balls colliding and know that they weren’t enjoying my winning streak as much as I was. Either I looked pitiful or they realized that their exclusive games were a bit juvenile because the Vines Croquet Club eventually agreed to let me to play again if I agreed to certain conditions.

I had to start at the beginning while everyone else started halfway, or I had to play on a team all by myself, or I wasn’t allowed to roquet, or I could only swing my mallet in front of my body, not between my legs. I still won, and my new handicaps seemed more sporting to my fellow Oxford Scholars.

One evening, five of us decided to play: four of them against me. Zach played, and Erik, and Ashlee, but I can’t remember the last person. Maybe it was Garrett. I’d managed to pass all the wickets despite being roqueted every three turns. If I hit the last stake, the game was over.

To their credit, my friends had improved at strategy. When we first began playing, I’d have to say things like, “Now would be a good time for one of you to hit the other’s ball, take those two strokes, and come after me. Otherwise, I’m going to win.” They had since begun to craft their own schemes and execute them. I had already tried for the stake a few times, only for one of them to roquet my ball off into the longer grass.

The last roquet had sent my ball seventy-five feet from the stake. A couple of the others were close to the last stake themselves, and were quite proud for having held me off. The distance gave them an extra boost of confidence. They were finally going to get me because there was no way I could win in less than two strokes.

Knowing what happened has probably changed my memory of my thoughts and feelings of the moments leading up to the shot. When I gripped the mallet and lined up the shot, I experienced no prescient knowledge of the outcome. I wasn’t “in the zone,” but I did feel confident when I swung the mallet and hit the ball without skinning or shanking it.

I watched it bounce over the uneven patches of ground toward the stake. As I drew the invisible line of its course, I knew it was going to hit the stake.

Then it did—game over.

“That’s just ridiculous,” Ashlee said and threw down her mallet in disgust. She had been close to finishing. “That’s not even fun.” She stormed inside.

Erik was more encouraging: “Dude. That—was—awesome.”

Zach shook his head in disbelief. “That has got to be one of the most incredible things that has ever happened during a game of croquet.”

“Thanks, Zach,” I said.

I couldn’t help but smile. I hadn’t had many moments like that. In an ancient English town behind a house with ivy growing on the facade next to a road nicknamed Rape Lane, I stood in the twilight and savored the most magnificent shot of my obscure croquet career. Perhaps five people witnessed this singular accomplishment. Perhaps five more even cared to hear the story. Perhaps all ten have since forgotten the incident.

The legend will die with me—the seventy-five-foot closer, my fifteen minutes of croquet glory. At least I knew that it wasn’t an accident. Luck comes with practice. Legend comes with commitment. What story do you want your life to tell?

On our 7th anniversary

2011-08-07T20:27:00.000-04:00

In our awesome room at The Yacht Club at DisneyWorld...

At The Rose & Crown Pub in Epcot, one of the places we dined on our honeymoon...

With a bonus, The Most Accurate Family Portrait We've Ever Taken:

A better worldview

2011-08-03T07:53:00.001-04:00

Yesterday evening I spent some time working on the computer, but what I was really doing was listening to "Manifesto" while watching my family members talk to each other, do things around the house, and generally go about their lives. Interesting point of view, I can tell you, watching people but being unable to hear them. It's almost like watching someone you know well when they don't know you're watching—that sounded stalkerish. Rewind.

It's like when you're meeting someone at the mall, say, and you see them before they see you, and you get to witness what life is like for them when you're not in it. You get to see the him or her as they are when alone, with an enclosed aura reserved only for life among strangers, but in which he or she exists unself-consciously, moving through the wider world as an individual, arranging the place mats and cutlery just so at a table for one.

* * *

In the wee hours of Saturday morning, one of our police officers as-yet-inexplicably ran off the road, was pinned in his patrol car, and as he tried to communicate his location to dispatch, the car caught fire. By the time they found his car, it was totally engulfed. His funeral is on Thursday.

Russell Willingham. He was 28, an officer for four years (two with our department), and married. We didn't know him personally, as he worked midnight shift and started with the WSPD at the same time Noah transferred to his non-patrol squad.

This is quite unfortunately the second police funeral in as many years, and there's something particularly awful about a funeral for a person whose death was purely purposeful or happened because that person pulled the lottery ticket on an unlikely but ever-possible job hazard. The last two police funerals we had, the two sergeants had been murdered. We're still not sure why Officer Willingham went off the road or why his car caught fire, but his death was a direct result of his profession, just like the two before him, and the dozens before them.

These kinds of things are always a shock to the system of a police family, because in order to function, we have to ignore that persistent yet unpredictable life-or-death possibility. We must avoid a full empathetic experience of our unlucky friends, because we are in the same shoes already, only we're still balancing on the precipice.

* * *

Ethan has enjoyed fiddling with our camera lately, and I truly love seeing the things he finds interesting or lovely. Ethan's little life moves forward in a perspective of wonderment and simplicity, and that's a world worth watching.

My thoughts on ebooks

2011-08-01T17:13:00.000-04:00

from here
I feel like I should comment on the format of the book [Rules of Civility, featuring one of my favorite female protags of all time]. I have a Barnes & Noble Nook (which I love -- it’s the newer, touch-screen e-ink Nook, not the Nook Color, which is really more like a pseudo iPad), so I had to download the book in Adobe Digital Editions, a program that I sort of see the point of but I don’t find it to be very intuitive for some reason. (Stupidity on my part, maybe?)

Anyway, because of the type of e-pub it was, I couldn’t highlight or make notes in the Nook. I could bookmark pages, which was nice, but I found it inconvenient to be unable to interact with the text as I can with other e-book formats, and of course with cloth-and-paper books. And the formatting of the e-pub itself was weird in places when I enlarged the font, which was necessary because the full-page view was basically unreadably small.

My question is when will there be an industry standard for e-pubs? A type of across-the-board standard that translates on all e-readers? Giddyup, publishing industry.

Different but parallel wavelengths

2011-07-27T00:05:00.002-04:00

As of two weeks ago, Noah's been a fixture in the REVO band. So naturally he had to buy another guitar. Most of you readers have never been in our house, but I can tell you that we're not suited to hold Noah's alarmingly increasing collection of guitars. Harmonicas, maybe, but not guitars.

"But this one, this is a really good guitar," Noah explained, as I stood befuddled, wondering how we got to this place yet again, this place where he's using Jedi mind tricks to convince me that another guitar is practically a necessity.

Three weeks ago he swung around the corner to our friend Vince's house, where a lonely Telecaster was languishing in his basement. "He's loaning it to me," said Noah. A few days later, he broached the subject: "You know, Vince said he was thinking of selling this guitar." Which was just a hop, skip and jump from Noah trolling Craigslist instrument listings and finding The Guitar, The One That He Really Needs.

He brought it home tonight. It is beautiful, I admit. I'm especially fond of the abalone inlays on the neck. But admiring its general cuteness is about as far as my comprehension can take me. My ~~willful~~ ignorance is no obstacle for Noah, though, who launched into an in-depth seminar and demonstration, something along the lines of a much-anticipated Apple summit, regardless of the fact that I sat slack-jawed as he delved ever deeper into the minutiae of it.

"If you tweak this flange, the humengarder coil changes the tone for a crunchier feel. As you can see, by simply turning this dial and switching this pick-up, the sound is definitely brighter—although it's a lot more obvious when the volume is turned up high. Haha! So not only can you select this whatsit panel, or this one, but when placed in the center, you can combine the two!" Pause for expected outcry of pleased surprise and applause. "And just smell that case! Like new! Of course I'll have to get used to tuning with a double-sided headstock, but this one doesn't have that little tray, so palm muting will be much easier."

Unlike Steve Jobs and his developers, poor Noah didn't have a ~~dorky~~ captive audience literally squirming at the thought of three hours of new revelations in gadgetry and performance. After about 30 minutes I figured I'd better interject.

"Oh, I see! So basically it's like one of those bras that the straps can go any which way."

He looked at me for a moment, sighed.

"Yes."

In the darkness, the monsters live

2011-07-25T21:48:00.001-04:00

Sometimes when I sit down to write, I come up blank. Not for lack of material.

I've written poetry and won some awards for it back in college; I've tried my hand at short fiction, but my most successful story was written at the age of 8 and featured an intrepid pioneer family whose ideas were far ahead of their time. Lately, creative nonfiction moved to the front as my forte. Which can be a problem, because unless I choose a subject that's completely outside my range of experience (which I've been known to do from time to time, and from time to time I spectacularly fail), I worry about crossing into the danger zone of Other People's Experiences.

This is nothing new for memoirists. Basically every memoir published lately that features living people is blasted for falsehoods or for caricaturing—and alienating—the friends and family members whose personal stories have been mined for content.

Blogging, as it happens, is a Chinese finger trap for the serial diarist. (And let's face it, anyone who writes a blog is a serial diarist, commentating on professions or current events or life with varying degrees of personal exposure.)

Lately I've struggled with telling bits and pieces of my daily life story, because the stories of other people have been careening in and out of my own. As a minor character in someone else's drama, or as a member of an ensemble cast, I hesitate to write about what I really want to write about, because...well, I don't know really. Because I don't want people to be angry with me? Because these other people didn't choose to document their lives in a public way, even though they live their lives in a public way?

I hate when other bloggers do the whole I have a big juicy secret or You would not believe what just happened or My life is so crazy but I'm not going to talk about it posts. Why titillate? Why even mention something that you can't or won't write about?

Oftentimes examining the worst parts of life, with specificity, is far less sensational as all the cryptic hinting and artful dodging, and it's certainly more helpful. We could all do with more light cast into the shadowy corners, I think. The dark bits are where the monsters live and feed, and they will inevitably come out anyway.

For today, I'd like to leave you with something Russell Brand wrote about Amy Winehouse's life and death.

When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they’ve had enough, that they’re ready to stop, ready to try something new. Of course though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it’s too late, she’s gone. ...

All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but un-ignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his “speedboat” there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief. ...

Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s, some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call.

It's all in the details, kid

2011-07-20T10:40:00.001-04:00

The biggest barrier to communication between me and Ethan these days is specificity. For a good while there the obstacle I battled against daily was his stubborn unwillingness to learn how to look for things instead of descending into panic-induced blindness (this is still an issue, but I've gotten used to it).

He's a great little talker and his vocabulary is quite impressive, if troublesome (I'm thinking of the day he started saying "flinkin' stinks" out of the blue [?!]), he's still learning the intricacies of opposites, for instance. He's got big and little down pat, but he still confuses front and back sometimes (particularly referring to the yard), and we're delving into the advanced territory of *amount* as opposed to size. Additionally, he often leaves out key information that isn't necessary to the success of a conversation, but is more than necessary for the person listening to respond appropriately.

This morning, during one of his 4,000 daily peepees, he shouted out that there was still some toilet paper in the potty.

"Just flush it down!" I called back.

"It's a lotta toilet paper!" he said.

"That's okay!" I replied.

[flush sound]

"Mommy, it's still in there!"

Crap, I thought, I'm going to have to plunge the toilet. Dealing with toilets is the stuff of nightmares for me. I pulled the neck of my shirt up over my nose and mouth (cootie shield) and walked into the bathroom ready to confront the plunger, my absolute least-favorite household tool.

As soon as I walked in, the enormity of the problem hit me. There wasn't "a lot" of toilet paper in the bowl. There was an entire, brand-new roll of toilet paper half submerged in the pot.

"It got knocked down by Bunny," Ethan explained.

Fortunately a small portion of the roll was still above water, so I was able to pluck it out of the danger zone without experiencing the dampness (gag).

"Ethan, I need you to go in the kitchen and get be a bag from the cabinet with the doggie food."

"What's it?" he asked with a quizzical tone.

"It's the one right by the fridge."

"Oh, okay." He started out the bathroom door then paused and turned back. "What's it for, Mommy?"

"ETHAN. It's to put this toilet paper in."

"Oh. Why?"

At this point I'm feeling faint. "BECAUSE IT'S ALL WET AND WE NEED TO PUT IT IN A BAG."

"Oh, okay," he said, then dashed off to the kitchen. The angels must have been looking out for me, because moments later he returned with a grocery bag. I was able to resolve the situation before losing consciousness.

From here on out, of course, I'm going to respond to every call for help wearing a hazmat suit.

Tips for the appropriate year-round use of National Lampoon's Chrismas Vacation quotes, Part 3

2011-07-19T13:22:00.003-04:00

Part 1: "Are you serious, Clark?"
Part 2: "Fixed the newel post!"

Special Motoring Edition

When National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation opens, we find Clark Griswold and his family en route to selecting their Christmas tree. According to Murphy's Law, when a family is headed out to celebrate a holiday or special event, the lead-up is compromised by either a big argument or some outside force of Evil acting to ensnare one or more family members and thus destroy the happy, slightly reverent atmosphere.

In this case, a couple guys from Deliverance make a cameo in a pickup truck, threatening to ruin the Griswold family Christmas cheer (and possibly kill the entire family) by drawing Clark and his sensible station wagon into a Talladega Nights roadrace scenario. Never one to back down, Clark engages.

Exegesis

It takes some skill to unpack this scene, so many useable quotes are there. First we've got "Hey, kids, look! A deer!" + inappropriate gesture. Clark preserves his kids' image of him as wholesome as wheat bread by diverting their attention from his behavior, the diversion being a pastoral image of a deer. This quote is best used in situations when you either 1) Want to hide your nasty behavior from others, or 2) Want to avoid the inappropriateness altogether by implying the idea of rudeness. I know this is complex, but we'll get into it in the next section.

Second, we've got the "Let's burn some dust here. Eat my rubber!" line. Clark, ever the nerdy father, keeps a bad situation light by throwing in some colloquialisms; his attempt at levity is both betrayed and aided by his malapropisms. This can be used as a throwaway line in almost any driving situation. One can also employ this line ironically. You'll see what I mean in just a moment.

Finally, and one of my favorites, "Let's get around this egg timer." Again going for a light tone, Clark fools no one. However his use of deadpan—almost innocent—sarcasm is redeeming and, ultimately, mimickable.

Real Life Application

"Hey, kids, look! A deer!" — I like to use this quote in place of a rude gesture. When some idiot on a cell phone cuts me off, a hearty "Hey, kids, look! A deer!" relieves the tension without running the risk of a roadside fistfight. I also find this to be a satisfying alternative to inappropriate behavior of all sorts. For instance, instead of beating Cody with a broom handle after several hours of high-pitched, inexplicable dog whining, a resounding "Hey, kids, look! A deer!" shouted into his face helps me feel better without comitting animal abuse.

"Let's burn some dust here. Eat my rubber! — I find this quote comes in handy when emerging from what my driver's ed teacher called a "wolf pack," e.g. a group of cars clogging up the roadway and driving dangerously close to each other. As I mentioned earlier, this line is particularly effective in an ironical sense: say, when you're driving a new friend in your sensible but paltry-cylindered Ford Focus and getting up to speed from a stoplight takes several minutes.

"Let's get around this egg timer." — Also working well in a sarcastic sense—say, when you triumphantly pass a car that was weaving dangerously but got caught several cars back in the next lane at a stoplight—this quote can be used literally and be just as funny. When passing one of our nation's elders going 15 under on the highway, for instance, or when you finally get the opportunity to get around that 45-year-old frat boy on a moped making everyone suffer for his multiple DUIs.

Mystery solved

2011-07-14T22:43:00.001-04:00

I received another package yesterday. This one was a glass bottle with a wax seal, a cork, and a message inside that could only be read by shining my special flashlight on it. In other words, the second best thing that's ever been delivered to me in the mail.

All these secret goings-on, however, have made me particularly sensitive to oddities. For example, after washing a load of Ethan's stuffed toys, it was highly disconcerting to walk past the washing machine and see this:

Unsettling regardless, we can all agree, but in my ~~paranoid~~ highly perceptive mind, what I saw was actually this:

Fortunately, the final package arrived today, clearing things up. The wealthy but sickly industrialist Winston Malgrave needs my help, and by golly he's going to get it.

However SpongeBob is still going to spend the night locked in a closet.

Espionage, Julie Andrews, and me

2011-07-12T21:13:00.000-04:00

Today I received the best package ever delivered to me. I wasn't expecting anything in the mail, so seeing a small package on the front doorstep was extra exciting. On my Excite-o-Meter, an unexpected package ranks quite high.

I've always liked getting mail, but now that I'm a stay-at-home mom the level of exhilaration actual good mail—or, let's face it, a good catalog—incites would have embarrassed Teenaged Erin.

But this package would have registered high, even back then.

I opened the box to find—wait for it—a brown paper package tied up with string! Guess what? It turns out that really is delightful! I should give kitten whiskers a chance, come to think of it.

So I untie the neat little bow and slip my finger under the tape to reveal a smallish silver box with the words "Greetings, detective" written on top. (!) Inside the box, nestled in a bespoke foam cutout, was a small flashlight that when shone at particular objects functions as a black light.

And that was it. No note, nuttin'.

This is obviously some marketing initiative (because the last time I checked in with the CIA they said that, yes, my application is on file in the Spy Services folder, but no, having watched all five seasons of Alias still doesn't count as a qualification). But it's brilliant! I can only hope that some more mysterious/fun packages are in the pipeline.

Still, I plan on fleshing out my alter ego just in case.

Elsewhere, I recently reviewed Karen White's The Beach Trees for the BlogHer book club. For a summer read slash mystery novel, it was quite engaging and featured some really beautiful writing. Although since becoming a mother, anything I read featuring an orphan makes me want to punch somebody in the throat (or, alternatively, cry and weep and then punch somebody in the throat). This book did get the writerly wheels turning in my head about first versus third person narrative, interweaving narratives, and whatnot. Check it out here.

Check yo'self

2011-07-07T19:23:00.000-04:00

"You not be rude to me, Mommy. You be happy and we be happy."

He also lectured me about how grown-ups should get things for little kids if they can't reach them (he wanted to play with some magnets that I didn't particularly care if he played with, but I also didn't want to encourage him playing with/losing them, so I told him if he wanted them, he'd have to get them himself).

I was feeling off this afternoon for a variety of reasons, and I knew I was being snappy. Ethan totally called me on it. I'd like to think his unflinching moralizing proves I'm a decent parent...even if it was me he was preaching to.

After I apologized for being rude, he told me he loved me, and we hugged. He's such a good parent.

Tips for the appropriate year-round use of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation quotes, Part 2

2011-07-05T20:56:00.000-04:00

Read Part 1, "Are you serious, Clark?" here.

One of the reasons I love National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation—and Little Miss Sunshine, incidentally—is because the characters respond to difficult and/or ridiculous circumstances exactly how you would want to respond if social conventions and reason didn't typically prevail.

In NLCV, Clark Griswold's Norman Rockwell–like expectations for holidays are confounded by his unenthusiastic (at best) and imbecilic (at worst) extended family. After a series of holiday-festivity flops—including the untimely demise of the painstakingly chosen Griswold Family Christmas Tree—Clark has reached a breaking point. En route to chopping down one of his own garden shrubs to replace the destroyed tree, Clark pauses to "fix" the newel post.

Exegesis

To properly use this quote, a series of events beyond your control must bring you to a breaking point. Hyperbole and a Half describes this process as the Sneaky Hate Spiral. Once at the breaking point, the next thing to go wrong will seem laughably easy to rectify. When you move rapidly from intense, desperate anger to preternatural composure, it's time for the quote.

Real Life Application

When Noah and I moved out of our apartment to our house nearly four years ago, it took forever. I was in the early stages of pregnancy and throwing up all the time, so we couldn't accomplish much without my needing a lie-down. We couldn't afford movers, but we had a month of overlap between our apartment lease and our first mortgage payment, so we decided to move in stages.

After several taxing trips in the midsummer heat over the course of a few weeks, Noah went back for the final sweep of the apartment. Easy peasey! Not so fast. In the time since we'd moved out, a colony of fleas had moved in and infested the carpet. Noah couldn't even grab the last few boxes of office items without being dang near eaten alive. A trip to the store for flea bombs and two hours later, Noah was finally able to go in to finish things off.

That's when he spotted our couch—secondhand, with large swaths of fabric chewed off both arms by Cody. It all came rushing back: Cody's resistance to being housebroken, the heat, fleas, wasted time and money. In a superhuman effort of hyperrationality, Noah took a small hatchet we kept in the outdoor storage for firewood and hacked the couch into pieces which he then casually deposited in the dumpster across the parking lot.

When he finally made it back home—bloody-knuckled, flea-bitten and sweaty—there was only one thing to be said.

"Fixed the newel post!"

In on the action

2011-07-04T16:33:00.000-04:00

Ethan's discovered Kyle's old toy box in my parents' garage, and he's really taken to the action figures. Every time we come over he wants to go search for more, although Kyle informed him, "There are no more guys. Now you're just grabbing accessories."

It's stunning the recall Kyle and Noah have of all the guys, everything from the pointy-yellow-headed Anime guy to various iterations of the Ninja Turtles to some weird gargoyle, a WWF wrestler in a speedo with a drawn-on hairy chest, and a green amphibian looking thing whose name is apparently Piccolo, which Ethan uses as his battle cry. "I smash you! Piccolope!"

Most of his action figure bad guys are far from nefarious at this point, though. One altercation happened where some dude dressed in fluorescent armor told the other dude, "I'm a bad guy. Wanna fight?" Another reached boiling point when a barrel-chested fellow refused to share with the guy whose head was smaller than his biceps.

What can I say? It's a boy.

Tips for the appropriate year-round use of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation quotes, Part 1

2011-06-30T23:24:00.000-04:00

If I have anything, I have a good recall of movie quotes. I also have a gift for the timely application of those movie quotes to maximum effect. A disproportionate amount of those quotes come from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, for obvious reasons.

Today I'm going to home in on how to use Eddie's dim-witted, "Are you serious, Clark?" line. Observe:

Exegesis

In this NLCV scene, the adults are in Group 1, led by Clark, whose purpose is to up the Christmas-cheer ante by making the kids, Group 2, believe that Santa was en route. Eddie, the plastic-skulled slow-coach, ruined the illusion with his idiotic, "Are you serious, Clark?"

This classic can be applied to any situation in which there are two groups present: 1) People who are in on the joke/hoax/fib and 2) People who are fleeced by the joke/hoax/fib. When someone from Group 1 doesn't cotton on and unexpectedly joins Group 2, a well-placed, "Are you serious, Clark?" will do the trick nicely.

Real Life Application

Tonight, my parents babysat Ethan while Noah and I had dinner with friends. When we picked him up, he was so wired that he performed a wild dance while thanking God for our tomatoes, then he knocked off everything from atop of the coffee table in a single violent sweep. Naturally, I didn't want him to know Kyle was coming over to do P90X with me—Uncle Kyle coming over would be the perfect excuse to fight the onset of some much-needed sleep. So we staged a hoax: Uncle Kyle would come out to the car and kiss Ethan goodnight, then follow a few minutes later.

Finally ~~contained~~ settled into his car seat, Ethan sweetly said goodnight to Kyle and gave him a kiss.

"I THOUGHT KYLE WAS GOING TO YOUR HOUSE," my mother said loudly. While everyone else shouted their reproaches, I knew exactly what needed to be said.

"Are you serious, Clark?"

Just when you think you know something

2011-06-29T21:47:00.000-04:00

I'm reading a book by the renowned Quaker theologian Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, and no that is not a joke coming from one of the most undisciplined people in the whole wide world.

In college it sometimes seems a lot of a professor's work goes into convincing her students they are smarter than they think, and their opinions have value. At some point, though—I would suggest around age 20, when Grown-Ups really do start to listen to what you're saying—we must put on the brakes and remember that moxie only takes you so far; to stay smart you must continually learn and also quit thinking your'e so smart after all.

Foster makes a strong distinction between the gathering of information and the accumulation of knowledge. He also counsels that the discipline of Study is more than book learning.

If we will observe relationsihps that go on between human beings, we will receive a graduate-level education. Watch, for example, how much of our speech is aimed at justifying our actions. We find it almost impossible to act and allow the act to speak for itself. No, we must explain it, justify it, demonstrate the rightness of it.

He singles out writers among those people most prone to this compulsion, people, he says "who earn their living by being good with words." Zoinks.

It's difficult for someone like me—naturally prone and academically trained to make my statement then present the evidence—to allow the act to speak for itself. The companion compulsion is to self-diagnose, then spend a good amount of time wallowing. I am GREAT at that.

In doing all this we are not trying to be amateur psychologists or sociologists. [Editor's note: That really stinks, because I've basically made a second career out of being an amateur expert on psychology (especially canine), sociology and even medicine as the need arises.] Nor are we obsessed with excessive introspection. [Editor's note: Throw me a bone, here, man!] We study these matters with a spirit of humility, needing a large dose of grace. We want only to follow the dictum of Socrates: 'Know thyself.'

Oh, Socrates. YOU MAKE IT SOUND SO EASY.

The third strike

2011-06-26T20:17:00.000-04:00

Babysitting my two-month-old nephew has changed my perception of Ethan. First, he now appears to be a Giant Man-Boy by comparison (his newest sneakers—Spider-Man, per his request—were size nines, sob). Second, I get nostalgic about when he was a widdle baby bundle, so soft and warm and willing to cuddle without the aid of bribery. Take note parents of infants: One day, snuggles are going to cost you.

Ethan's a beautiful little boy, really. My mom noted yesterday that his hair, recently shorn to a summer length, can only be described as "minky." It's a light dirty blond, but the softly clipped edges around his forehead and neck take a silvery cast in morning and evening light. When he sings, which he's doing often these days, his little voice floats delicately straight to my pathetic, slobbering heart.

Remembering carrying him for 37 weeks, being together always, and then thinking of the crazy-miracle moment of giving birth...frankly doesn't do anything to change the fact that the kid's a despicable stinking liar.

Thrice he was told, and thrice he ignored. The rule around here is no picking green tomatoes. I'm willing to try the fried green variety, but I've never heard of fried green grape tomatoes. Or fried green pinky-fingernail-sized Roma tomatoes. So I told him, no picking green tomatoes.

There's an old adage about the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law, and by age three Ethan is already an expert at following the letter and ignoring the spirit.

He was playing out back while I worked in the kitchen. I peeked out every minute or so, and after a few minutes he had disappeared. I knew where to look. I peeked around to the other side of the deck, and found him standing beneath one of the towering grape tomato plants, reaching upward contemplatively, much like Eve must have approached the forbidden fruit.

"Ethan!" I shouted, as he plucked a barely orange grape tomato and hugged it to his chest. He shot me the cheesiest grin he could muster. "What are you doing?"

"Nuffin."

"Whaddya got in your hands?"

"I'm happy, Mommy."

"That's wonderful. What do you have in your hands?"

"Um, nuffin."

"Ethan, show me what's in your hands."

"I don't want you to see."

"What. Is. In. Your. Hands."

"Um, rocks." That's when he took off up the hill, with me in fast pursuit. He gave up when I was a few feet away (as most suspects do when the reality of defeat is imminent), slowly released his hands from what could have been a position of prayer in front of his heart, and guiltily revealed three not-quite-ripe grape tomatoes.

I set them in the windowsill and in a couple of days they'd finished ripening on their own. Although the outcome of this particular infraction was ultimately juicy and delicious, Ethan's lying remained rotten the whole way through.

He sat on timeout for three minutes for picking the tomatoes when he knew he shouldn't have. Kid felt the swift hand of justice, however, when after his timeout he was informed by me that he'd be spending the rest of the morning in his room. He could play, yes, and watch a video on the ancient TV/VCR in the corner (I mean, this isn't Guantanamo Bay or Singapore after all), but if he set so much as a toe across the open threshold of his bedroom door, the full force of the law would reign down upon him.

This was definitely the harshest punishment I've ever enforced, but third strike, amIright? And the lying! The bold-faced lying! I wondered if my punishment wasn't harsh enough (recalling a young Michelle Tanner singing "This is no fun, no fun, looking at the wall!" on Full House, the great moral authority of the early 90s). But he talked about it for the rest of the day. He told his daddy and his Nana and his Poppy. While he was by no means scarred, he definitely discerned the seriousness of the situation.

I'm still not sure if he truly "gets" what lying is, though. I mean, how do you explain the concept of lying without also talking about the equally cerebral and emotional concept of truth? In the end, I said that telling Mommy something he knew was the wrong thing was lying.

"And pickin' the 'matoes," he added gravely.

I hear this is how Al Capone started out

2011-06-22T10:22:00.001-04:00

Yesterday Ethan had a typical 3-year-old day: went to the park, threw a few tantrums, resisted going to bed. I'm very fortunate that he's not usually a typical 3-year-old. I don't know many other kids his age who don't regularly throw fits, or incorporate hip thrusts in their dancing, or refer to their mother as "Hey, little lady."

Maybe because I'm so unpracticed handling an obstreperous child, but for some reason Ethan thought that if he could convince me that he was "happy now," he could come off timeout and get whatever it was that he wanted.

When Noah came home, we had to run to the grocery store. Just before we left I discovered an inordinate amount of highly under-ripe tomatoes that Ethan had picked after being told he absolutely is not allowed to pick tomatoes that aren't red yet. He was told that he would not be getting a "plise" ("surprise," e.g. pack of gum or piece of candy) at the grocery store since he had been naughty. Katie, bar the door. He went crazy. Folks, the screaming. It was unreal.

I sat in the car with him as he, as they say in France, lost his $4*t. After a few minutes, his little quivery voice said gently from the backseat, "Mo-omm-ey, I ha-ap-py no-w."

"That's great," I said, "but you still can't get a plise because you picked the green tomatoes after Mommy told you not to."

"But I HAPPY now," he reiterated.

"No."

"BUT I HAPPY NOW! I HAPPY NOW! I HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPY!"

I felt a mixture of pity and amusement and aggravation as he ineffectually tried to convince me that he was happy and thus deserved clemency. Insanity would have been more believable.

Still, amid all the screaming and the screaming screaming and the screaming, I couldn't help but smile to myself thinking of how I had discovered the tomato bandit: hands behind his back, eyebrows knit with anxiety, and the cheesiest, fakest grin I have ever seen in all my living life. My first hope is that Ethan doesn't pursue a life of crime. My backup hope is that if he does, he learns how to lie better so he doesn't embarrass us on one of those World's Stupidest Criminals shows.

When you put it that way...

2011-06-21T14:48:00.003-04:00

Editor's note: GAH. Of course, I would majorly screw up and misread the numbers. As Anon pointed out below, the US has 300 MILLION people, thus significantly raising the amount per person that is given charitably each year. However, the numbers on the GDP foreign aid percentages are still solid:

I just finished reading Ron Suskind's The Way of the World, and one of the book's main themes was how in the past decade or so, America has lost its moral authority in the world by giving in to the specific temptations that come with great power: deliberate deceptions, a lack of respect and understanding for both our allies and our enemies, and on and on. More than once he mentioned the Marshall Plan, the post-WWII aid program to help rebuild Europe, as an example of our last great exercise in giving and also as a model for how to rebuild our moral authority through sacrificial giving. During the four years following WWII, the equivalent of nearly 20% of a year's US GDP was given in aid. As compared to now, when today we give less than .2% of our GDP in foreign aid. That is 0.2%, folks. Zero point two percent.

So, if as Anonymous pointed out, we give significantly to charities as individuals, why is it that our foreign aid has dropped so starkly? I really want to know, actually. Because obviously my brain can't process this kind of thing.

According to the U.S. & World Population Clock, there are more than 300 ~~billion~~ million people in the United States. According to The Center of Philanthropy at Indiana University, charitable giving rose this past year to $280 billion (still down from 2007's all-time high of $310 billion). Those numbers combine donations to everything from the arts to social programs to churches to education.

While any number above 100 is staggering to little ol' math-challenged me—particularly when it comes to dollars—we're not actually giving very much at all in this country. Yep, many billions of dollars across the board. But nope, not even one dollar per person. Considering some of those recorded donations are large ones from corporations or uber-wealthy individuals, we're looking at a whole heckuva lot of people in this country who aren't being generous with their money. In fact, I'd call it downright stinginess.

I know what it's like living paycheck to paycheck, and sometimes still not even being able to make ends meet. But those numbers tell me that either a tremendous amount of people have literally zero extra dollars to give for the benefit of society in general and other people worse of specifically, or we're just rather tight-fisted. Or, the people with most of the money are way more tight-fisted than they can afford to be.

~~Regardless, it simply is not enough. We're the richest country in the world, and we give charitably less than one dollar per person~~ ~~per year~~.

Read more...

Ethan's Eye View

2011-06-17T15:56:00.000-04:00

Ansel Adams Junior got hold of the camera the other day when his father and I were occupied in the office.

Later I was taking some photos for my next Burpee Home Gardens blog post, and he commandeered the camera. I've culled the many hundreds of shots featuring Ethan's finger, but here are a few of my favorites.

Although he might not yet be ready for National Geographic, he's certainly better at taking pictures than my mom, who is responsible for such inexplicably off-center gems as these:

Incidentals

2011-06-15T23:54:00.004-04:00

Tonight I learned that Nanny is going deaf in her right ear, which is unfortunate because now I can only tell my jokes into her left ear. In most circumstances this wouldn't be anything but a minor inconvenience (for me), but she sits to my left whenever I eat over at my parents' house for dinner. So now I'm never sure if she doesn't think what I've said is funny, or if the joke just hasn't made its way around the table to her yet.

Second, I have a bruise on my right upper arm and guess what? Apparently my right upper arm is involved in way more of my daily activities than I realized—brushing my teeth, swatting at gnats, getting dressed, napping—and it hurts like heck.

Speaking of napping, since when did it become illegal for me to take naps? I dozed off the other day while reading in bed in a perfectly controlled climate in the late afternoon, and Noah was all, "Ethan, why did you let Mommy fall asleep?" and my mom was all, "Do you need your medication adjusted?" What? I mean, so it's cute when infants nap and cliche when old folks nap, but medically perplexing and conceptually offensive when I do it? That's ageism! People of medium age should be able to take naps!

In conclusion, Revo just leased a building for its offices/storage/band studio, and get this: It's an old motorcycle shop/bar that was literally made to look like hell on the inside. I am talking flames painted on the walls, intricate murals of demons and poker scenes, gargoyle heads on the corner blocks of every door casement, purposefully and artistically mangled plaster walls. I find this to be hilarious. On the outside of the building there's a large painting of a biker, which I personally think we could easily transition into Jesus on a chopper by simply lengthening the beard.

Finally, at Saturday night's Dash game, not only was Ethan on the jumbotron (Holla for cuteness!) I was on the jumbotron during the kiss cam! That was kind of a win-lose situation: win in that I was sitting next to my dad, so he kissed me on the cheek, and everyone was all, "Awwwww," but lose because Noah and I have a pact that if we're ever on the kiss cam, we're going to flip it and instead of him mauling me for laughs....wait for it....I am going to pounce on him. Missed opportunity!

And THEN, Noah was sitting next to his mom, and they put the kiss cam on them, and just as he was kissing her cheek, these kids stood up right in front of them, so he totally missed his "Awwwww" moment. Although don't feel like he was gypped, because a few ball games ago he was featured—facial close up with a slow pan out—during the national anthem. I guess because he's all good looking and takes liberty seriously and whatnot.

O is for Squib

2011-06-13T21:01:00.000-04:00

I used to spend my days debating story budgets and editing magazine articles and giving feedback on design for publication.

Today, I wiped up an exorbitant amount of infant spit up and had an argument with a preschooler over the animal representing the letter O in the alphabet book. (He said it was a "squib" and I said that while it looked similar to a squib, er, squid, the word "octopus" begins with O, therefore we were looking at an octopus.)

This evening we had some friends over for dinner, and between all our children and the two dogs, it was a complete circus. No leisurely, philosophical conversations for us. No lounging around into the wee hours when wee ones have 8 and 9 o'clock bedtimes.

It was a good day.

Things I like by people I love

2011-06-09T21:56:00.002-04:00

I've been considering doing a video post since, oh, December, back when I acquired a computer with a built-in camera. I thought to meself, "Why not do a video post featuring things you like that you use every day that other people might like and use?" Because I've found many useful things in just this sort of way.

Maybe by putting this intention out there, I'll actually do it. At the moment, however, I am not shall we say camera ready. So instead, here's this.

Need a really cool, affordable gift? How about a handmade journal or address book from my friend Stephanie, of Tama Press.

I bought an address book for my mom and a journal for my bff Kim, and both were beautifully crafted. Steph also does letterpress stuff, prints, etc.

Need a fun read, possibly chick-lit, but something refreshingly different and unboozy? How about a book by my friends Anne and May (not their real names, although I know their real names [insert maniacal laughter of someone drunk on almost no power]), or by my friend Kimberly Stuart.

Anne Dayton and May Vanderbilt have cowritten a number of books, among them the young-adult series The Miracle Girls. I gave my mom-in-law a few of their books as a gift, and she totally loved them, both as a sixth-grade teacher and a person who knows how to read.

Kim's latest, Operation Bonnet, is fun, funny, and heartwarming. The perfect read to offset all the ridiculously sombre and frightening nonfiction I've been reading lately.

Need a gift for a new mom? How about some baby leg warmers made by my bff Kim.

Because anything that minimizes the number of times you have to take off your kid's pants for diaper changes is a boon, and if it can give the illusion of pants into the bargain, well. You're doing better than I ~~did~~ am.

In need of a creative boost? How about downloading my friend Austin's free e-book, Melting Chocolate Kettles.

Austin's thoughts on the creative life just might be the shot in the arm that you need.

Have any creative friends you want to brag on? Do tell!

On trend

2011-06-07T22:26:00.000-04:00

He's too young to realize how ridiculous it is for a three-year-old wearing a fedora to interrupt an adult conversation to announce, "I have a point."

Talking points

2011-06-03T18:35:00.000-04:00

He peeked his head out from behind the bedroom door. 10:16 p.m. "Mommy?"

"Yes?"

"I need to go pee."

"Go on, then."

He was so upset that he shuffled into the bathroom, stood in front of the toilet, and peed in his diaper. Lip out and blotchy-cheeked, he started to cry. I sat down next to him and wrapped him up in my arm, wiping his face.

"Why ya cryin?" I asked.

"I not tired and I not sleepy and I just wanna go out. And that's my question."

For the next 45 minutes we sat on the couch and had a talk about "his favorites": favorite color (orange), favorite thing to eat (strawberries and grapes), favorite place to sit (the "ball game" chair in his room), and on and on.

Earlier in the day, I'd engaged in a forum about one of Lady Gaga's latest music videos that employed a lot of Catholic imagery (I don't feel like linking to either the forum or the video, but they wouldn't be that hard to find if you feel like it). The gist of it is, I don't think Gaga was trying to do anything except stir the pot, which she does exceptionally well. I also mentioned that it's invalidating and even silly for people who aren't religious to denigrate the faith of the religious as "fairy tales" (which had been happening, with frequency, in the forum).

Someone commented that my assertion that everyone has faith in something is tired. Maybe so, but isn't it true? I replied that faith in the unprovable or as-yet-unproven isn't something that's exclusive to the religious. (I didn't even mention about faith being a trust for future actions based on the past; for instance, I have faith that the chair I sit on every evening for dinner will hold my weight tomorrow, just as it's done today.)

Anyway, that's not even what bothered me. Nor was the anti-religious and anti-religious-people and anti-people-who-believe-in-God-at-all sentiments surprising or offensive. I expect a wide differential of opinions and beliefs, and I concur that everyone has the right to choose what he or she believes, even if they believe something I don't.

What bothered me was the militancy of several commenters. It rubbed me the wrong way, sure, because when a discussion becomes a debate and then an argument, what's the use? But it frightened me and saddened me as well. I'm sad that so many people have been hurt by organized religion and the misapplication of doctrine (at best) and crusading (at worst) by people who gather under a religious banner. And it frightened me to see several people—presumably highly educated people, based on the jargon—admit firmly and unabashedly their hatred for others based on their religious identity. Is that not, essentially, the very thing they claim to despise about the religious?

I mean, holy cow, right? (No pun intended, nor offense for those who may consider cows holy.) It frightens me that folks who are smart enough to employ esoteric academic language and toss around erudite cultural and gender theory with ease would be so willingly blind to the dangers of blanket hatred. Education, it seems, does not cover all manner of evil.

Not to be braggy or anything, but I've paid for enough education to be able to throw around theory and spout rhetoric so overused it's lost all meaning once intended. But who really cares? How does a cumbersome string of qualifying adjectives do anything to truly define who I am? How will "checking my privilege" change the realities that influence my point of view?

I'm just tired of talking without meaning, pretending that what I think has nothing to do with how I feel, and arguing with no intention toward empathy. I'd rather get to the heart of differences instead of circling them like boxers in a ring. I'd rather have real conversations with low-brow vocabulary.

A good place to start, I think, is favorites.

For the love of Jane

2011-06-02T00:01:00.002-04:00

There's been a lot of Heavy around these parts lately. And there's a lot more I haven't even begun to address or share on the ol' blog. I'll get to some of it, but for now, I think it's about time for some simple truths, no? How about this one:

Shame, humiliation, disgrace: hard feelings to accept if you've been brought up to believe that you should never have to experience any pain. ... No suffering, no growth—and no recollection, no suffering. We have to see what we've done, we have to feel it, and finally, we have to remember it. ...

How tempting it is to rewrite our personal history in a more flattering way, and how familiar we all are with the person who experiences a moment of self-knowledge—after a breakup or a failure or a sin—only to go right back to being the same person they always were. For Austen, maturation means refusing to forget. Humiliation, for her, is a gift that keeps on giving.

—from A Jane Austen Education

One of my very favorite recent reads was A Jane Austen Education. I've underlined and marked so many pages, and as soon as I finished it, I wanted to read it again. Perhaps most surprisingly, it's written by a man. It's the best non-scholarly scholarly thing I've read about Jane and her work. Basically, it's a book not only about Jane Austen and her work, but it's also about how reading can change your life.

I wrote about the book more in a review for BlogHer (no spoilers):

In A Jane Austen Education, William Deresiewicz chronicles many years’ worth of mining Austen’s works as well as distilling what he found into distinct categories: everyday matters, growing up, learning to learn, being good, true friends, and falling in love. He very aptly adapted the lessons from her novels—which could be denigrated to “quaint” or relegated to the beautifully (if not twitterpatedly) cinematic (Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen, be still my heart!)—to make sense, actually startlingly practical sense, in today’s social constructs.

Click here to read the rest.

So tell me, any books cut you to the core lately?

Hopefully "Studies in Robot Elimination" will be available by the time he gets to the Ivy League

2011-05-30T10:38:00.000-04:00

"So Ethan, what do you want to study in college?" I asked this morning. He's three now, and the time has come to start preparing for his future. If I don't put the bug in his ear now about full-scholarship Ivy League, I might as well forget about it.

"Um..." he said.

"Do you want to be a doctor? Or an astronaut?" Noah asked.

"Um...a robot," Ethan said, with decision in his voice.

"Robotics! That's a good field," replied Noah. "You could build the first Cylon. I mean, somebody has to do it."

"And there's a airplane and it's got poop, and it flies by the robot factory," said Ethan.

"There's an airplane full of poop?" I asked incredulously, but Noah's curiosity lay elsewhere.

"What's inside the robot factory?"

"They take the robots and they put it on theyselfs," Ethan explained.

"So you think that robots are people wearing robot suits?" Noah asked.

"Yep," said Ethan, with a conclusive flick of his finger. "I'm gonna be a policeman tonight and kill all the bad robots."

"That's good. You should kill bad robots whenever possible, basically," Noah concurred. Then he and Ethan went off to play cowboys.

Essentially, what I get from that conversation is we're talking either Harvard or Brown. But I'd be just as happy with Penn.

Clean All the Things

2011-05-26T22:13:00.000-04:00

We're expecting company on Sunday evening, so naturally the house is in shambles. All of my own devising.

"Don't even worry about cleaning," my friend Cary said. "Just close doors!" offered Susan. HaHAHA. They don't know me very well yet.

In the past week, we've retiled the hearth, painted the built-in bookcase (which Noah built last month) in the office, hung some art on neglected walls, and we're in the middle of painting the kitchen cabinets. While the paint is drying, Noah's going to finish laying the new quarter-round from last month's floor installation, and I'm going to sew new cushions for the kitchen chairs. Saturday will be for cleanup, mowing and weeding, and cooking the most delicious danged deviled eggs anyone's ever tasted.

Sunday morning through afternoon will be for panicking then trying to look natural, as though, Yes, Our Home Is Always This Clean, Organized and Low-Key!

Meanwhile, Noah knows the real me. This one, only with brown hair:

(Illustration from the brilliant Hyperbole and a Half)

Living the dream

2011-05-25T22:16:00.003-04:00

This evening Noah auditioned to play electric guitar in REVO's band. Always the over-preparer, as soon as he learned of the audition a couple weeks ago, he created a full, concert-length set list that he was disappointed to learn needed to be drastically whittled for the one-song demo.

I did my best to help him get ready, even composing a list of key questions to ask before The Big Day, such as:

How many costume changes is he allowed?
Who do I talk to about getting the right kind of bottled water and snack food for his dressing room?
What percentage of the set list needs to be played with his teeth or the guitar behind his back?

Turns out the whole thing was quite low-key (although I did wear my new fedora). A few dudes from the band and our friend Nathan were the only ones observing besides me, he recorded one song of his choosing, and then played a pop-quiz chorus/bridge from a written chord progression to a click track. For those of you who don't live with someone who ~~obsessively self-teaches himself a musical instrument~~ plays an instrument, that means he was given a sheet of paper with lyrics and written chords above them (F, G, F#, etc.) that he played against a metronome.

He should know tomorrow if he's officially part of the band (a years-long dream of his that I have yet to help him fulfill, having surrendered my bass to his younger brother and taken up keyboard, though not yet good enough for our family band—also starring my brother on drums—to put out our first record, which we've already named "Iraqi Bootleg," so our fans will know up front the quality they can expect).

We drove to my parents' house for dinner afterward (they were watching Ethan, because a 3-year-old in a room full of expensive instruments and recording equipment? um, NO), and Noah played his audition song for them, Skillet's "Awake and Alive."

That was actually Skillet, not Noah, although I mean it could have been.

Ethan danced through the whole thing, even expressing his Hardcore Face every now and again, then he cried when Noah went to stop playing. No matter what happens with REVO band, he's already a rock star.

Life Without You: The next three days

2011-05-23T21:07:00.001-04:00

Continued from   here.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Dear N-to-the-oah,

I’m exhausted. I’ll just put it out there right now. There’s not a lot to report in the way of what we did: went to Epcot, rode Spaceship Earth (and heard it in English this time—Dame Judy Dench narrates, incidentally), rode the Nemo ride, went to Cirque du Soleil.

What I would like to revisit (literally and figuratively) is La Nouba.

It was weird. I get that it’s supposed to be a dream, and in that sense, it’s pretty cool. But it’s weird. Ethan handled it pretty well, though, and luckily we were surrounded by understanding women who didn’t mind a little noise (not that it was a quiet theatergoing experience by any means). With about 15 minutes to go, he had had enough.

I whisked him out into the lobby—I didn’t want to be the person whose kid was responsible for causing one of the swinging acrobats to fall because of his repeated screams, “Lets get outta here”—where we ran into another mom and her 3-year-old daughter. They turned out to be from Liverpool, her brother- and sister-in-law were performers in the show, and she was a completely lovely woman. One of those people I instantly connect and feel comfortable with, which is rare. On reflection, I wish I had exchanged contact information with her.

Her daughter, Isabella, needed to use the bathroom. After a minute or two, Ethan wanted to go find them. He of course charged ahead and began peeking under stalls to find their shoes. Suddenly he exclaimed, “Oh, there ya are!” as I caught up to him. Out from the stall came not Isabella, but Nancy Carell, Steve Carell’s wife, aka Carol Stills on The Office.

I didn’t panic like I normally do when encountering celebrities. Maybe it’s because I was in Mom Mode. But I knew I had to confirm that it was her, so I could tell everyone with certainty that I had a bona fide Celebrity Sighting. After she washed her hands and as she was walking past me, I touched her lightly on the arm and said, “I’m sorry to bother, but did you play Carol Stills?” She smiled and affirmed. I then said, “I’ll let you get back to the show, but I just wanted to say I love[d] you[r character].”

That’s where my recollection gets a little hazy, and I want to remember that I complimented her acting instead of declaring my personal adoration, but nevertheless. She got the point. She then sort of laughed, and I think said thanks, and then—I remember this clearly—she said, “That’s so funny!”

Upon reflection I’m not sure what she meant. Was it just a spur-of-the-moment response tossed out by the relatively limelight-free spouse of a very famous comic actor? Or was it something else? Something more along the lines of, “That’s so funny…that’s you’d approach me at a completely inappropriate time, i.e. during a toileting experience.” Or, “That’s so funny…that you have the nerve to talk to me after your son tried to spy my lady bits.” Or, “That’s so funny…I was about to say that I love you too, because I’m a regular reader of your blog.” Probably the second one.

Oh well. If Ethan’s behavior hadn’t been horrific, I never would have met Carol Stills. The things I wish I could have said, if there had been more time and a better venue, like say a preplanned meeting in a coffee shop. I would have told her how much the show has helped me get through, as silly as it might sound. I’d tell her how much I appreciate her husband’s roles on TV and film, but how I also understand his need to step away from it. After that we’d dish about being moms and talk about our careers and become best friends. Then we’d finish our coffee and go win the Tour de France as the first tandem team in history.

Alas, that’s my own personal La Nouba. I guess I’ll just have to settle for saying that I met her, that she was lovely, and quite tall.

Love to thee,

Erin

*
Friday, April 8, 2011

Noah darling,

So this is it. Our last night not spent directly en route to home. Ethan had three tantrums today, 2/3 transportation related. Getting on the bus this morning to Magic Kingdom, when he didn’t want to leave Tom Sawyer Island (because he wanted to get all the bad guys), and getting on the boat at Old Key West to Raglan Road. Thankfully there were kind people in both the transportation situations who helped me manage the stroller while I managed the Tasmanian devil.

He’s just tired. So am I. I’m actually getting better at being numb to bad behavior, and handling it accordingly. It is what it is, as I always say. I wouldn’t say I’m bad at single parenting. I will say I prefer tag-teaming it. My only consolation for thinking about your time in boot camp and training is that we’ll be in familiar territory at home.

As much as he’s frustrated me on this trip, I’m in love with the kid. His facial expressions, the inflection and accent in his voice, his cleverness, his affectionate little spirit. He has a memory like an elephant (that being said, I was still shocked and impressed that he recognized our stop from the last trip at Old Key West). He’s precious. The challenging bits never last very long, and they’re always easier when there are other understanding people around to help, even if they’re strangers. Once, on one of our many trips to the playground, I thought that the truth of the expression, “It takes a village to raise a child,” outweighs the cliché of it.

Our time alone together, though, was largely rewarding. As we made our way around Tomorrowland looking for things to do, he kept saying, “Let’s go have some more fun!” He also peed in many bushes throughout DisneyWorld, because he’s afraid of the toilet flushing sound and it’s pretty much constant in women’s bathrooms. I kept expecting to get caught and reprimanded, but if anyone saw us, nobody said anything.

I can’t wait to see you, and not just because you can take Ethan to the bathroom.

Love to thee,

Erin
*

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Dear Noah,

This is the letter for Saturday, but by now it’s already Sunday. From past experience I know it’s rarely a good idea to write after midnight (it’s five past one) because I’m typically so tired that the usual scaffolding of rationality has fallen from my Tower of Emotion. Yep, and based on the drama in that last sentence, that’s exactly where I’m at right now.

I am so very happy that this time tomorrow night I’ll be in my own bed, with you. I honestly have nothing left emotionally at this point in our week apart. All I can really do is recount what happened.

We were literally 10 minutes away from arriving at the hotel when your mom hit the other car. I was actually texting you at the time, so I didn’t see it coming. All I know is that we hit the car, hard, and something was dragging under your mom’s car.

Ethan was absolutely fine in every way. He wasn’t even crying. I got him, Bunny, and my backpack (with the laptop and camera) out of the car and moved a safe distance away, into the center of the wide, grassy median.

The people we hit were from Indiana, and they were very gracious. The police officers were very kind and calm and drove us and our essential luggage to a nearby McDonald’s, where we awaited a cab. (They couldn’t drive us to our hotel, because it was outside the city limits.)

It took the cab driver awhile to find us due to some miscommunications, but that was fine. While your mom was filling out the paperwork, I had called our hotel and had the concierge get me in touch with the cab service (once again, they couldn’t send their shuttle because we were just outside the city limits). I got Ethan an ice cream cone, then at the attached gas station we bought some mints and butterscotches (which Ethan has trouble remembering the name of; at one point he called them “buttercups”).

When we finally made it to the hotel, I immediately took Ethan down to the pool. A couple families who were apparently vacationing together had some kids around his age that he played with. They then offered us half a pepperoni pizza they had bought, which was wonderful since it was almost 7. When I texted my mom and told her about the pizza, she wrote back: “That’s nice. They will be blessed.” I laughed out loud. I was doing a lot of it at that point (hysteria, I suppose), and I can only imagine what the people at the pool thought.

As I lie here, somewhat achy and certainly exhausted, his little sleeping self next to me, I also can’t help but feel a little sorry that the intimacy we’ve shared this past week is about to be over. Don’t get me wrong, I’m ready for normalcy. He’s a windmill when he sleeps. And he’s a bear to get to sleep without his own bed and familiar surroundings, especially in one-room hotel situations.

Tonight, though, after I’d turned out the light and we were lying cuddling, he wanted me to tell him about “his dreams.” I told him how we were at our house, and he was in his room with Daddy (and Adam, he said), having a rabbit fight. At some point, we also went outside to play with the soccer ball and the baseball, and I think even to shoot some hooks [ed. note: For Ethan, shooting hoops is "shooting hooks"]. I told him that Cody and Bonnie wanted to come into his room, but we said, "No way stinky buns." He, however, wanted them to come in. He must be feeling charitable. I also said that maybe a kitty cat was hiding in his bed again. And then the doorbell rang, and it was Nana and Poppy coming over to see him. He said he’d hide, and I said that Poppy would come sit on the couch to wait for him, and he’d sit on him thinking he was squishy pillows. Then the doorbell would ring again, and Bonnie and Cody would go barking, and we’d tell them to shush, and it would be KyKy at the door, saying he was home from Oklahoma because he missed us. We’d tell him to come on in, we’re having a party. I made cupcakes, but this time Ethan said the cupcakes should be yellow.

Then he turned over (sideways, really), and went to sleep.

For all the difficult things about this week, I am so glad I was here with our boy.

I love you,

Erin

Life Without You: The first three days

2011-05-19T22:29:00.003-04:00

A little over a month ago, in fact the very day after I returned from Seattle, Ethan and I accompanied my mother-in-law on a weeklong trip to DisneyWorld. Noah and I have never been apart for as many nights, nor has Ethan been away from either one of us for so long.

The trip was somewhat last minute, so I didn't have much of a chance to write about it before we left. What I did do, though, was write Noah a letter every night. One thing I realized on this trip: I was getting a taste of what life will be like for me and Ethan when Noah goes to basic training and then on to Pensacola for advanced training. He encouraged me to share some of what I wrote with you guys (I've edited out all the parts describing our meals and also the sexy bits). Anyway, here are some of the excerpts.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Dear Noah,

As I sit here typing, Ethan is sleeping like the exhausted baby he is on the bed next to me, while the only slightly muffled sounds of Bambi being shown on the pool deck just outside our room reverberate through the walls.

Our first stop after arriving was the World Showcase and The Rose and Crown Pub. We were seated almost exactly where you and I sat for my birthday on our honeymoon. The fact that the place had such significance to me made your absence felt even more. When on our way back out of Epcot your mom noticed a duck with a broken bill (you could see the tip of his tongue even when his mouth was closed because of where his bill had been damaged), I nearly cried.

I also really felt your absence when Ethan and I went swimming in the pool walla [ed. note: that's what Ethan calls the pool] after dinner. Seeing other kids (especially boys) in the water with their dads, and feeling very much like a mom (who knew that one day I’d prefer to breaststroke above water to avoid wetting my hair and face?), made me sad. I wanted you to be part of it, and I wanted him to have you be part of it. Geez, I’m depressing myself all over again.

When we came back to our room, and just before reading books and eating Doritos and whining for another 10 minutes before dropping suddenly off to sleep, Ethan took a bath with his new bucket o’aliens from Toy Story, our first purchase of the trip. Out of the blue he said to me, “Today was really fun.” Can you believe the kid said that? Of course it sounded like “tidaye wass reey fun.” Still. Dagger through the heart.

Love to thee,

Erin

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Dear Noah,

After sleeping for 12 full hours, Ethan woke up by falling out of bed. This was no fluke, either. Several times throughout the night my MommySense alerted me to danger, and I’d wake up to find him teetering on the edge. Literally. Arms and legs dangling off, and a couple times even his head. You know how top heavy that kid is. It’s a miracle he didn’t fall off the bed sooner.

We went to Hollywood Studios today. Although it’s still not my favorite park, it’s grown on me. We did the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids playground, for one thing. I had to Go In after Ethan a couple of times when he hadn’t emerged from the giant ant-hill caves for awhile. Eventually he had to be dragged out literally screaming.

He’s gotten quite adventurous on the slides, by the way. He went down the giant Kodak film slide approximately 400 times. I had to repeatedly remind him to wait his turn (he discovered a shortcut along the inside wall that put him ahead of all the other kids in line—rather clever, really, but I didn‘t want to look bad in front of the other parents). Don’t worry, I got video.

Playgrounds are becoming a big thing for him. We stopped at one each day on the road as well, at his request. The kid is social, which is more than I can say for his mother.

This morning at the hotel shop I talked Ethan down from an un-marked-price Cinderella’s castle replica to an elaborate, $60 Cars play set to an acceptable $12 Cars play set, which he eventually traded of his own accord for two $4 sets of Cars and Toy Story silly bandz. I felt a little guilty since he really seemed to think he was coming out on top, but we have no money. So.

At the moment I’m looking at Ethan’s turtle nightlight and thinking about you packing all his stuff, and missing you like crazy. I really prefer life with you in it. I’d rather it be you getting on my nerves than anyone else is the long and short of it.

Love to thee,

Erin

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Darling Noah,

Let’s start with the afternoon and work backward. After we returned from Animal Kingdom, Ethan and I went to the pool. We swirled and twirled for a few laps, then he wanted to get out. At that point I decided it was high time to go looking for the rumored kiddie pool.

We found it quickly, and Ethan’s eyes lit up. He was hesitant at first, what with the two sprinklers on the one side, but he soon found his sea legs and was in and out of the wading pool and the spray like a pro.

Woops

What really gets me is seeing how quickly he makes friends. He sees a kid who looks interesting, tails him or her for a moment, and once eye contact is made, he’s got a new buddy. Today I saw him befriend two three-year-olds (a girl named Angelina and a boy named Austin), a couple of toddlers, and a couple elementary schoolers. Angelina’s nana even offered him grapes as they were leaving, and Angelina was still shouting goodbye after Ethan was no longer in sight.

It’s now nearly 8:20 and phase 14 of my Tire Ethan Out for the Love of God In Jesus’s Name Amen Program (TEOLGJNAP, for short) has been rendered unnecessary. If he wasn’t acting sleepy, I was going to take him out to the pool deck to watch tonight’s feature, Bolt. Now I don’t have to—but I would have, and gladly.

I realized today while at the kiddie pool and the playground(s) that these things were made for parents. When I was younger and not a parent, hanging out with a kid and basically acting as the catcher in the rye all day sounded dull. As a parent, I will sit and watch him blow off as much steam as possible with joy in my heart. Plus it really is fun to see him “interacting with other kids.” Ugh I hate sounding like a parenting magazine.

My heart aches seeing him put his little self out there in the wide world, optimistically assuming he’ll find some kindred spirits along the way. I’ve seen him fearlessly (but politely) speaking to adults when the occasion calls for it. He isn’t easily intimidated (although he still has a cautious streak when it comes to adventure…another trait from me).

He does the cheesy face when he's tired.

Honestly, he’s always the focus of my attention, so I don’t have time to be apprehensive about Talking to Strangers. Especially people with kids. Automatic common ground, you know? Plus having a kid always provides an instant exit strategy. You can just leave without warning and not be perceived as rude. "The wheels are coming off the wagon," you can nonverbally say with a weary shrug, and people just nod their heads or smile ruefully. My kind of goodbye, really: short, abrupt, and with minimal theatrics.

Speaking of theatrics, Mom told me when we pulled away on Sunday afternoon, you said, “There goes my life.” Gosh that makes me love you, babe.

Love to thee,

Your wifey

To be continued....

In pictures

2011-05-13T23:15:00.000-04:00

Hubba hubba.

And yet, Bonnie is not so intimidated. She gets the gold star for World's Boldest Criminal, for attempting to literally eat his lunchtime turkey wrap out of his hands.

In other news, we're making progress when it comes to Ethan and underpants. Although the direction is a bit off.

The book Affected me; its Effect was depression

2011-05-10T21:59:00.002-04:00

Did you guys like that little grammar lesson in the title? People helping people. Now, back to regularly scheduled programming.

Whenever I've finished a Jon Krakauer book (or a film adaptation, for that matter), I'm ruined for days. And I'm pretty close to despair for the several reading days, so let's go ahead and round up and say Jon Krakauer messes with my life for a good two weeks any time I pick up a piece of his work.

Reading J.K. Rowling screws me up, too, but only because Harry Potter's universe is so fun (when you don't account for the evil magical warlord and all the death and horror—spoiler alert, it gets really dark at the end).

My latest foray into Krakauer was Where Men Win Glory. In the book, Krakauer distills and aggregates a lot of information about and conducts his own investigation of the fratricide of former NFL player-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman. I remembered the story vaguely (he was killed in action several years ago), but I probably didn't have a stronger recollection because of what Krakauer reveals to have been a pretty large-scale coverup of the true story.

This isn't meant to be a book review, really, but I'm always struck by how Krakauer frames his narratives: He tells you the details of the Main Event at the very beginning—in the prologue, even. The way he tells the story, how he delves into the history of the environments, settings and people, is what gives his books their steam. And in this book, he interviews Tillman's wife extensively as well as quotes heavily from Tillman's journals. The more I learned about Tillman's inner life, the more I dreaded his story's culmination.

It pained me to read how Tillman had been used by the media on both sides of the political divide. Krakauer gave such a multilayered portrait of Tillman, his strengths as well as his imperfections, that I was reminded that you don't really know someone unless you know him. Something easily forgotten, especially in this wacko land of blogging.

I suppose reading and recovering from this book has contributed to my Serious, Introspective Mood lately. Noah quite tactfully suggested that Krakauer may be responsible for some of the complaints I've lobbed in his direction lately, to which I said, "Up yours, but also maybe."

When I was in college, a favorite professor of mine confessed to weeping at the end of Atonement (the novel). She also admitted that she didn't have a favorite book, because every book she loved was her favorite. Another beloved professor told us that serious marital strife happened in her household when she and/or her husband was without a book to read. I get it.

Please tell me you guys are affected by books? We'll even call it "artistic sensibility," instead of the probably more accurate but less grabby "emotional instability."

A-holes Anonymous

2011-05-09T12:00:00.001-04:00

When sifting through the catalogue of Things I Can Get Behind in Life, I've recently had to make a revision. I can no longer be derelict of duty when it comes to holidays that may or may not be real holidays, nobody can remember because they're so commercial now.

"Oh great, here we are being forced to spend money on yet another holiday invented by the card industry!" anti-card-industry demonstrators self-righteously sniff, when the reality behind the veneer of anti-capitalist sentiment is Curse the greeting-card industry for reminding me of my obligation to celebrate mothers/fathers/liberty/love/the arrival of spring/secretaries/etc. I know because I, too, have bristled at the onset of holidays. Usually the ones for which I haven't fulfilled even the minimum requirements of celebration.

Yesterday, for instance. I am admitting on the internet that I didn't buy my mother, grandmother, and mother-in-law their Mother's Day cards until noon on the day of. You know what was really depressing? The hordes of people I had to fight my way through to access the sparsely stocked, pink section demarcating the celebration of the hour.

"You could have just written your mom a letter instead of buying her a mass-produced greeting card at the last minute," Noah reminded me helpfully, four hours after our Mother's Day dinner.

Although I wouldn't characterize Noah as a guy rife with weaknesses and personality flaws, I will say that service is not one of the areas in which he falls short. This is a guy who has pursued careers in ministry, the police, and the Navy, not because he's a religious fanatic or a born commando, but because he felt impelled by duty. Noah for weeks has gotten up pre-dawn to go help the guys at our church assemble the entire facility (stage, band, sound and video, seating, and children's rooms) at the Milton Rhodes Arts Center, then break down the whole thing and pack it up again not three hours later. Serving is just part of who he is.

He's also the kind of guy who would feel weird about not pulling his weight around the house and with the kid. Our marriage is very much a partnership. We don't purposefully adhere to traditional gender roles, although I am typically the household calendar keeper, God help us, and he's the one who handles the money.

We were discussing REVO's five principles yesterday evening (Love Big, Serve Hard, Grow Deep, Move Forward, Live Bold), and I pointed out to him that serving hard is not one of the areas he has trouble with.

Instead, maybe the internal restlessness he's been feeling lately is an indicator that he needs to focus on one of those more personally challenging areas. Because when you feel like you're making progress as a person, but everything else in your life looks the same, the change isn't spiritual; it's intellectual.

Intellectual change is an important and wonderful part of human development, but knowing something and acting like you believe it are two different things.

"For someone who hates golf, you sure did use a lot of golf metaphors just then," Noah said, immediately missing the point I had so ineloquently been circling. I was talking about how each person has his or her own par—the baseline of who they are—and then there was some other stuff about above or below par, I don't really remember, because after all it was golf imagery and I'm pretty sure I put myself to sleep with it.

My point was, Noah is naturally inclined to serve. He's naturally inclined to pull his weight. These are just some of the qualities that make him a great guy who is loved by many, but they are also qualities that come easily to him. By nature I'm very compassionate, so it's fairly easy for me to love, or at least understand other people's points of view. Boldly living out my convictions about love and acceptance and understanding is less easy.

Evolving into a better person (which, if you get right down to it, is a pretty basic and universally applicable goal) means moving beyond the intrinsic, better parts of yourself, the goodness that is easy for you. Becoming a better person means addressing the less-attractive parts of who you are—the negative and hateful and antagonistic aspects of yourself that exist, in the words of Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessup, "deep down in places you don't talk about at parties."

I'm not into self-flagellation, metaphoric or otherwise. There's an epidemic of body-image issues in this country, and I'm certainly not advocating for dwelling on the negative. Sometimes, though, the time comes to face the music. To get rid of the distractions and get to the root of the problem. To confront your demons! Boldly go where...ugh, whatever.

My name is Erin, and I blame the card industry for my shortcomings.

Perception

2011-05-07T23:06:00.000-04:00

On Thursday evening Noah's brother, our sister-in-law, our three-week-old nephew and the family dog, Kingsley, moved into a house nearby, the backyard of which overlooks a quarter-mile-wide expanse of undeveloped land that directly connects to our neighborhood. Noah, Ethan and I have already blazed a trail across what Ethan refers to as "The Woods," a short journey nevertheless marked by such consequential topographic features as Ant City, The Gulch, and The Cheap Dresser That Somebody Ditched Out Here and Is Now Mostly a Heap of Moldering Wood and a Few Handles.

Nick and Jen have admitted it's pretty hilarious to see us emerging from the brush a la Field of Dreams, except instead of corn it's pine trees, thorn bushes and construction gravel we disappear and reappear from. To them it's funny; to our neighbors, it's certainly perplexing and possibly disconcerting, considering we've entered the woods only to come back an hour later with a very small infant and an excitable pug in tow.

I haven't yet explained to anybody what the heck it is that's going on. Part of me wants to push this until one of the neighbors just can't stand it anymore and is compelled to ask where we keep getting that baby from, and why. I'm sure they're also curious about the pug, but I can imagine discovering the baby's origin is priority one.

About six years ago, we adopted our cats. They were several months old at the time—an elderly woman who lived in the mountains discovered them and cared for them as long as she could, then handed them over to an animal rescue. Even though they weren't tiny kittens at that point, compared to our best friends' Ben and Alicia's cats Mamfa and Bandit, our cats were miniscule.

Truth be told, our cats looked normal. Mamfa and Bandit looked enormous. Comically huge. Granted, Mamfa was a Maine Coon and so naturally on the bigger side, but as compared to our petite fur balls, those cats looked positively ridiculous. In time we readjusted to their size, feeling less startled and prone to giggling every time we saw them, the way you get used to an acquaintance with goofy hair or a coworker with a loud, honking nose-blowing technique.

All this is to say, when compared with our nephew Grayson—who at three weeks has a belly larger than his waist and barely any cheeks in the diaper region—Ethan seems absurdly large.

He's still my baby, although I've noticed lately when we cuddle, his arms and legs spill out of my grasp while bony knees and elbows dig into my soft middle-bits. Instead of fat little hands pulling at tendrils of my hair, bony little fingers with dirt under the nails pry my eyes open and twiddle with my lips as I rock.

Last week, he stopped saying "Da-ee" and started saying "Daddy." Instead of calling his uncles Amma and Ky-ky, more and more he's addressing them as Adam and Kyle.

This time two years ago, he was still relatively immobile; just learning to walk, really. Now he dive bombs me in the gut from the back of the couch, barrel rolls down hills, climbs stairs, kicks soccer balls, and even swats whiffle balls out of the air with a baseball bat.

He's still my baby, but he's not a baby. And that is what makes this situation, this parenting thing, so completely and maddeningly and heart-wrenchingly ridiculous.

My next sermon will be on the mysteries of creation

2011-05-04T21:45:00.001-04:00

Since my last post was so heavy—and thanks to everyone who responded here, via Facebook, and through email—I thought I'd show you something a bit lighter.

Oh, no that's not my ultrasound. My oven is bunless. Bun-free. That, my friends, is the womb of Jamani the gorilla at the North Carolina zoo. You guys, do yourself a favor and google gorilla babies.

Okay, so that last one is my nephew. But still. Enough said, amIright?

With Liberty and Justice for All

2011-05-02T21:46:00.001-04:00

On the one hand, he had it coming. Anyone who masterminds the killing of thousands of innocents could be described as Having It Coming. He was ruthless to everyone who lived outside his excessively narrow sliver of righteousness, and he was even ruthless with those he would incite to suicide.

On the other hand, death is a time for grieving. I feel relief that he is gone, but I grieve for his death. Maybe not the end of his particular life as he chose to live it, but the one that he might have lived if he had been a better man, the one that all of us might live: a life of goodness, kindness, and peace.

We live in a universe governed by balance, cause and effect. Yet we’re always trying to outsmart this system. We seek to prevent disease from following its natural course. We ask for a warning when we know that, in reality, the law itself is warning enough.

In the natural world we sometimes can change the course of an effect by introducing a new cause. We can diminish cancer by introducing chemotherapy. We can avoid serious injury when the airbags deploy. Luck, fortune, providence, whatever. There are moments when we can transcend the universe’s idea of justice.

Technology might alter the course of the natural world, but mercy interrupts the hand of justice in the social realm. We buy car insurance from a company that promises to look the other way on our first offence—accident forgiveness. We institute rehabilitation programs in prisons, like our local New Leash on Life program that allows difficult dogs and troubled humans to find redemption together. We seek to treat people suffering from addiction instead of merely condemning them to their fate—although the choice is always theirs to make.

Choice: That’s the great double-edged sword of free will, the ability to change the course of life. Our choices—our liberty—does not make us immune to the consequences. On the contrary. Our nation was founded on the principle of liberty and justice for all. Not liberty for the typically good and justice for the obviously criminal. Liberty and justice—for all.

Our friend Nathan recently addressed the question, Who is God? He emphasized two points: God is great (Elohim), or tremendously powerful; but God is also good (Yahweh), or completely personal. Or through another lens: God is just, but he is also forgiving. I, it seems, am neither.

On the one hand, I feel entitled to justice when I’m wronged. When the car dangerously cuts me off, when my opinions are belittled, when I’m misunderstood. On the other hand, I never feel I deserve to be on the receiving end of justice. I hadn’t even been pulled over before when I got a speeding ticket last year on a dubious charge, so couldn't I just have been warned? I would have answered the question correctly if it had been worded more clearly. I shouldn’t have to apologize when the offended person misinterpreted what I meant.

All along, what I’ve really been pledging is liberty and justice for me.

It’s easy to blame God when something goes wrong. I’ve done it, and I sympathize with others who do as well. Heck, that's the story of the garden of Eden. It’s natural to rail against the Powerful One, who has the ability to alter the universal scaffolding that dictates cause and effect, but doesn't.

I realize now that if God completely did away with the notion of cause and effect, if he made it so that no bad thing could ever be allowed to develop into its full and awful bloom, he would also be taking our liberty.

“A god who is good would never allow _____...” Fill in the blank. Death. Suffering. Pain. Abuse. Hell.

In my belief, the God who is Good grieves alongside us. He allows nature and human nature to run their courses, yes, even when those courses cut deep canyons into the landscape of life as it is meant to be lived and enjoyed; but he also implanted in the very essence of humanity the divine concepts of mercy and forgiveness.

And yet. Mercy is not necessarily an antidote to justice. Our world is still governed by cause and effect. Crimes must still be punished, even if the perpetrator repents.

I’m embarrassed to think of how, throughout my entire life, I always expected—no, felt entitled—to second and third and fourth chances. Now, with a better understanding of the tremendous cost of freedom, I am all the more grateful when I am given them.

He had it coming, yes indeed, but I am as overwhelmed with grief as I am relieved. I grieve for the thousands upon thousands who died, and the exponentially thousands more who still suffer.

I think if we really consider it, justice itself is cause for grief. Grief for the offense, grief for what had to be done to atone for that offense. Grief that we live in a world where things happen that never should.

The Whole Package

2011-04-28T22:58:00.002-04:00

Whether it's some personality defect that makes me attracted to brokenness, or maybe it's one of those "blessings" of a compassionate spirit that often leads one to be a schmuck—well, regardless of the reason, I happen to be the owner of four ridiculous animals.

Our twin-sister cats do things like climb up trees and stay there for a week, mewling "Heyulp meeee" from the treetops, literally. And offering up live vermin as demonstrations of gratitude. Drinking liquids intended for humans out of human beverage containers. Bringing in small snakes to keep as pets. Explosive diarrhea in the bathroom sink. Whatnot.

The dogs are their own special brand of nutso. We've known Cody was handicapped by crippling anxiety and an inferiority complex not long after he graduated from his Puppy Stage, a dark period that included a lot of destruction and mayhem. Like the time we came home to find him in his kennel neck-deep in a cloud of fiberfill that just hours earlier had been his pillow. Or the time we came home to discover he'd chewed both arms off the couch.

Potty training Cody was a challenge—that dog's poop chute works at the speed of a machine gun, and I'm not kidding. You'd turn your back for two seconds—to pour some coffee, say, or pop a couple ibuprofen—and when you turned back he'd have stink-bombed about six different locations. One of his favorite drop zones was that couch he later ate.

Since then, though, he's become very modest about his pottying rituals. I appreciated his refraining from crapping in the apartment, but I could have done without traipsing through dense stands of juniper, clutching a leash that disappeared into the brush so Cody could do the necessary in private. Also kind of difficult to explain to your neighbors why your dog is buried in foliage, only his head and the tip of his cobra tail visible. Praise the Lord for our own house and a fenced yard.

I stupidly thought that getting through his teenage years would see an end to the drama, but alas. Instead of a bumbling, awkward youth (his nickname used to be Noodles Magoo), he has grown into a bumbling, awkward adult (his new nickname is Hey, Bozo).

Cody is a very cuddly dog. All 80 pounds of him. He's also a very farty dog. He loves being Furminated, to the point of indecency, honestly. But he's afraid of storms. He's suspicious of out-of-place objects. He's a worry wart. Truth is, Cody suffers from crippling self-doubt.

The youthful exuberance that had him leaping ill-advisedly and inexpertly from one place to another and pulling Christmas-turkey legs off counter tops has matured into a middle-aged creakiness that can only be described as Chronic Hesitation. A broom casually tossed on the floor can keep him trapped in the kitchen for hours as though the 1-inch handle was nothing less than a barricade in the Faubourges.

We try not to reinforce ridiculous behaviors through cosseting, but the nighttime pacing put me over the edge. He started doing this thing where he'd jump off the bed, then spend 20 minutes pacing back and forth next to the bed, sometimes throwing himself bodily at the side of the bed, other times slamming his forepaws on the edge, then recommencing to pace, all to show how impossible it is for him to make the jump up onto the bed.

His doing this at bedtime was irritating. Coaxing and coaching and cheerleading him through it became part of my nightly routine. "Hop up! Hop up, Cody! You can do it! Plenty of room! Hop up, Cody! HOP UP YOU IDIOT." Etc. When he started doing this in the middle of the night, waking up me and Noah both and inciting us to unChristian language, I decided we had to do something about it.

We removed the box spring and put down plywood between the mattress and bed frame. Granted, it's a 14-inch box spring, so the bed sits higher than the average bed. After taking it out, we felt like we were practically sleeping on the floor. But! It put the mattress at an exceedingly manageable height for Cody. The mattress height was to Cody what the hoop height is to Shaq: almost laughably reachable. And yet.

Noah aptly realized that perhaps it wasn't the height of the bed but the texture of the floor that was giving Cody pause. The smooth laminate is by no means slick, but I could see how the dog would feel uncertain launching seven dozen pounds of trembling canine from those spindly legs. We bought bedside rugs.

"Look, Cody! Lovely, thick, handwoven rugs for you! Look how easy it'll be to hop up!" Heh.

You know, it's not even how irrational he's being. It's not that he needs excessive encouragement—when it comes to athletic activities, car maintenance, and math, I'm guilty as charged. It's the incessant whining and interminable clacking of 20 long claws that worms its way through my brain and dines on my cerebral center of understanding, reason, and also the part that reminds me that violence isn't the answer.

Much as I've realized in the past with Ethan, I have come to realize that Cody's peccadilloes are integral to his makeup and perhaps he's not the problem, but I am. What I see as annoyances are part and parcel with the unflagging loyalty, quiet companionship, protective instincts, and warmth on my toes on cold nights. Maybe my response to his flaws is more the problem than any deficiencies I perceive in his character. And you know what? I've found a better way of dealing with it.

I now take sleeping pills.

My brother, the star

2011-04-27T20:56:00.000-04:00

First, it was starring in a stop-motion video. Now, it's television.

Incidentally, ladies, he's single.

Pretending, that beautiful art

2011-04-24T21:09:00.002-04:00

It's that time of year again: the end of my school term. I only have one class this semester—there are four of us, and we've gotten to read really good books by really great editors and spend the majority of the rest of our time playing with the Adobe Design suite.

Despite the general Awesomeness of this setup, I have been working my tuchus* off on a project that includes coming up with a book idea, writing a query letter, designing the jacket, and laying out the book's front matter and first few pages.

*Don't you just love Yiddish? Now that's a Wikipedia page worth spending some time on.

I actually wrote a short essay (about my mother) for the first chapter of a collection I'm calling Rootless. The title's meanings are as deep as they are several, and I won't presume to tell you what to think, but I'll hint that it has to do with me having lived for long periods in various and disparate places, and also math. Like square root? And how I don't do math, in the philosophical sense?

While the essay itself is an actual attempt at writing something worthwhile, I found that when it came to writing the blurb for the jacket flaps, I had run out of steam. About the third paragraph, I just went where my thoughts took me (always a dangerous little game).

Well, here:

(click on it to enlarge)

Yeah, um, it's incumbent upon me to confess that those cover quotes are either made up (Quaddafi, for example) or borrowed (Michiko Kakutani's and Chelsea Cain's were lifted from the back of a David Sedaris book and modified).

But it's fun to pretend, isn't it?

That's something I've learned from Ethan lately. Within the past few weeks, his imagination has really kicked in. Last night I was sitting in his dim room, rocking while he was supposed to be going to sleep. He began telling me a story in a whisper, which slowly became sotto voce, and finally ended up as just plain old shouting.

At first we started off in a spaceship, which had to be maneuvered around comets, "cay-noes" (volcanoes) and "melums" (meteors), then there was something about planting all sorts of vegetables (yesterday we also planted tomatoes and peppers in containers), and in a surprising twist, we ended up working our way through seven tunnels, one of which was a hexagon. I dunno, the plot was complex.

Beyond the unpredictability and excitement of his developing and wild inner life, Ethan's creativity even extends to relationships. He's started viewing people differently, as companions, instead of just props and useful automatons. I've mentioned Ethan's best friend before, although in his young mind he has many best friends: all the people who love and care for him. I know this, because he tells us so.

"Mommy?"

"Uh huh?"

"Daddy's my dude. He's my guy. He's my good guy."

"I know, sweetheart."

And the other night, when he came in from sky-watching with Noah, he told me I was "pretty like the stars." Hmm. I should have used that as a jacket quote.

Seattle, Part the Second

2011-04-18T14:10:00.000-04:00

Read Part 1 here.

Aside from all the super special eliteness of being flown to Seattle and taken to Nintendo headquarters, I gotta say that the folks from Brand About Town and Nintendo planned that thing to. the. hilt. The logistics were mind boggling. They booked flight information for over a hundred people from around the country, coordinated it so that several of us could catch the shuttle at the same time, each one of us had our own room at the Hyatt, offered two cocktail parties, a dinner out in Seattle, and breakfast buffets.

Now I realize that 90% of you have stopped reading because I sounded like such a spoiled twit listing all that stuff. Who are we kidding? I am a spoiled twit! I even skipped out on the second day's cocktail hour because I was so stinking tired from flying coast-to-coast to be wined, dined, and video gamed.

But don't leave yet. I have lots of good info about the Nintendo 3DS. Trust me, you might think you don't care about handheld video game systems, but this thing does some pretty incredible, game-changing things for the world of technology.

Keep reading here.

Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.

2011-04-15T11:18:00.000-04:00

I have lots of posts lined up about the rest of my trip to Seattle, a last-minute weeklong trip to Disney World with only Ethan and my mother-in-law that ended with a bang (literally, we wrecked the car just outside Savannah), and a White Sox vs. Winston-Salem Dash game that took place what feels like 400 years ago, but then this happened:

That's my new nephew, Grayson Nicholas, and in the background of that last photo, that's my sister-in-law, looking nothing like she just gave birth the day before, amIright?

Grayson arrived 2 1/2 weeks early (the nerve), so that really threw a wrench in my plans. I have a whole backlog of posts! I have a Humane Society newsletter to edit! I have a paper and a project to finish for school! THANKS A LOT, KID.

Seattle, Part the First (written on 4/1)

2011-04-12T21:09:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting in the Seattle airport waiting for a delayed flight (oxymoron), and golly I'm just starting to process everything that happened these past couple of days. Off the bat I need to thank a few of my Princess Peach group/bus 1 buddies, who gave me a place to sit at lunch: Jenny, of She Likes Purple; Amy of Just a Titch; and Kate of La Petite Chic. Dolls, every single one of them.

There's a reason that penultimate sentence sounded something like a nerdy 7th grader wrote it; in some ways, the visit to Nintendo's headquarters was like a school field trip. There were over a hundred bloggers (which I heard one of my colleagues refer to as "a herd of cats"), the security was inscrutably tight, and we all had to be accounted for at all times and even escorted to the potty when the need arose. On the other hand, the wonders that we beheld while inside the Nintendo campus were made all the more alluring by their very elite-ness.

Click here to read more...

The Brassy Bawdress

2011-04-11T12:22:00.001-04:00

I recently joined the BlogHer Book Club, and I have it on good authority (my own) that I'm the premier reviewer in the program.

How about you go read my first review, eh? Click here if you didn't already click the previously linked words. Or click the word "click": Click.

And the winner is...

2011-03-28T16:46:00.000-04:00

Click here to find out who won the $60 CSNstores.com giveaway.

I know, cry me a river, right?

2011-03-24T21:47:00.000-04:00

So I'm going to Seattle next Thursday. All by myself. Actually, not technically by myself. Nintendo is flying out a plethora of brand ambassadors to...do something. I dunno, it's all very secretive. I know it has to do with the Nintendo 3DS, but I've compiled a list of tests for Noah to perform when I get back—like asking me questions I shouldn't know the answers to, such as "What's 7 times 8?" and "What's the capitol of South Dakota?"—to make sure that they haven't messed with my brain or experimented on me with new nanobot technology.

Continue reading...

Breaking the ice

2011-03-22T18:24:00.001-04:00

"I'm king of the forest!" Ethan shouted while waving the Union Jack and wearing my green cloth headband around his forehead. I'm not sure where this came from, because his typical alter-ego is the all-American, bad-guy-killing SuperBoy.

When Ethan was a baby, seeing his tiny thoughts become actions was a thrill. I still remember the first time I saw him lean over, grab a basket of toys, and actually select a specific toy. "He selected a toy! He selected a toy!" The elation and fascination only a ~~lunatic~~ mother could experience over so small an act.

Lately it's his imagination that has me on the edge of my seat, waiting for the next delightful surprise. The other day he claimed to have seen a spaceship in the sky, for instance. Today I was the recipient of a one-sided conversation (while he was on the can, incidentally, and forcing me to watch from the doorway) that ranged from lessons in anatomy to something about being up on a high mountain to...actually, I'm not really sure. He covered a lot of bases. Without using any transitional phrases.

One of my favorite things about Ethan growing into a preschooler is watching him learn to have friends. He has a particular friend at our new church—Drake, who is four—and as we were leaving from our small group last weekend, Drake shouted, "Bye, Ethan! Don't forget about me!" To which Ethan replied, with complete sincerity, "Okay!"

Maybe I'll relearn some important lessons about friendship as I watch Ethan learn to navigate the tricky terrain of human interaction. Actually, I've already relearned one thing. As the boys played in the next room, somebody ripped a tooter, and much giggling ensued. Lesson: It only takes one brave soul to break ~~wind~~ the ice.

Fierce Beagle Giveaway: $60 to CSN Stores!

2011-03-20T22:44:00.000-04:00

Okay guys, for realsies this time. I have in my possession the discount code for $60, to be applied to any CSNstores.com purchase of the winner's choosing.

Click here to enter!

You, too, can benefit from my neuroses!

2011-03-10T08:00:00.001-05:00

Apparently my recent and public spiral into the vortex of home decor has reached epic proportions, because Sean from CSN Stores contacted me about doing a giveaway.

In case you're not familiar, CSN Stores is basically the place where people like me go to unabashedly revel in our sickness. For instance, I could spend some serious time—serious. time.—combing my outdoor lighting options for sprucing up the back deck and adding some landscape lighting out front. Click on the link if you dare, folks. Click if you dare.

Read more...

The scariest bathroom scene since What Lies Beneath (Because I refuse to watch Psycho)

2011-03-09T14:57:00.001-05:00

I like almost everything about this bathroom, but there's one thing that just doesn't work for me...

traditional bathroom design by charleston architect Frederick + Frederick Architects

I don't like the little white plastic fan on the vanity. Oh, did you think I was going to say the horrifying and dangerously placed taxidermed hyena head? Just goes to show, you only think you know me.

Fattie

2011-03-08T20:24:00.001-05:00

I didn't realize it was Fat Tuesday until Etsy told me so with their daily newsletter, entitled "Fat Tuesday." By this time it was already early afternoon, and I'd missed a meal's and a snack's worth of debauchery. My intention for Fat Tuesday was to indulge in a bacchanalian glut of bacon and marshmallows, for this year I am not only giving up meat, I'm also giving up sweets.

My dad bristled when I reminded him (as he's the family chef) and asked why again I was becoming vegan. When I explained that I wasn't vegan, I am ovo-lacto-pisce-tarian, he said, "That's how I interpret that big word."

I'll break it down for you:

I'm not Catholic or Episcopalian or even any kind of liturgical religious tradition. I just like to observe Lent as an annual discipline in my otherwise fairly liberal faith. I also like the idea of flashing my boobs and eating whatever I want without guilt, which I'm pretty sure is why They invented Fat Tuesday. Although at this point in my day the only person I can flash is Noah, which I suppose would still count as a medium-scale thrill in our maturing marriage (vintage 2004).

Also, over-sharing is allowed on Fat Tuesday. That is the law according to the rules.

As to the marshmallows, we just inherited a bag of camp-fire-sized ones from my parents, who got the idea of roasting them over the fire from us before remembering that their gas fire has a glass plate in front of it. I've already eaten two today, unroasted. Only 22 to go.

Noah's not observing Lent, but he's very supportive of me. He's out chopping wood for the fire.

When worlds collide

2011-03-04T23:35:00.002-05:00

That was perhaps the most melodramatic way of saying, I am cross-posting with today's SimpliFi blog!

I don’t like living life by comparison: Her jawline is better than mine; their house is bigger/fancier/more expensive than ours; etc. Being a human, though, makes such comparisons inevitable. It’s how we learn about ourselves, by making distinctions. It’s also how we marginalize others.

This little inexpert sociology lesson has a point, and the point is I’ve seen a couple of documentaries lately that really make my little home seem like a castle of safety, pleasantness and wealth. Crossing the Line catches up with one of four American defectors to North Korea who has now been there for over 30 years.A State of Mind follows two young North Korean girls in training for Mass Games, a huge gymnastic demonstration of North Korean discipline and single-mindedness. Finally, the PBS series Auschwitz asks direct questions about how…well, just how. How does something like the Holocaust happen.

My home is comfortable, handsome, warm or cool as needed, and we’ve got a significant amount of property. Each person in our household can eat more than five eggs per month if we so choose. There’s no imminent threat of disenfranchisement and abuse here.

Daily peace in many ways represents incalculable wealth. I am so fortunate.

A modest proposal

2011-03-03T09:05:00.000-05:00

Last night we watched A Crude Awakening, so now we know exactly how horribly we're screwed by our country's dependence on foreign oil production, which is peaking right about now. All you Republicans out there, don't worry: I'm pretty sure Michael Moore had nothing to do with this film, and there were several Republican experts (including one former adviser to G-Dub), who concur.

I'm not one to despair, though. And seeing as I'm not scientifically minded, I hold out little hope of inventing a solution. What I am good at is ideas. I've come up with a number of temporary solutions that, I think, will keep us going until the real experts can come up with some viable options.

Chop off the top of Mount Everest and see what's under there. In fact, chop off the tops of all major mountain ranges, because I believe they're holding as-yet undiscovered reserves of fossil fuels. And if they're not, well we'll have to find some other way of keeping my car running.
Wind energy, revisited. Apparently one of wind energy's cons is that the wind doesn't always blow strong enough. Picture this: We round up all the illegal immigrants, make them stand next to the turbines, and blow. That way we can also monitor the illegal immigrants round the clock, because I hear most of them are criminals escaping the other criminal drug lords in Mexico.
Tax incentives for people who buy and use horses as their main mode of transport.

There's more where that came from, but I'm protecting my intellectual property and saving it for my letter to Congress.

A mixed bag

2011-03-02T21:33:00.002-05:00

My mom just joined Facebook, and she has a lot of questions and very little patience. But one Internet-related thing she's great at is email forwards.

When I finally got around to checking my inbox tonight, I had several good ones waiting from her:

Some beautiful photos of icebergs in Lake Michigan
Truly awe-inspiring images of Holland in tulip season
A joke about a dead cowboy, St. Peter, and a biker gang
The gruesome story—with photos—of a golfer whose arm was bitten off by an alligator at the 16th hole
A tongue-in-cheek warning about the dangers of a bum lift
Slides of Street Art Done By That One Dude Who Draws 3-D Chalk Landscapes, Vol. 2

Just for fun, I'll throw in one of the photos....

Psych! I give you the Netherlands:

I attribute this mania to the sunshine and also the government

2011-02-28T20:29:00.001-05:00

Recently Noah resolved to cut back on negativity-based thinking, so I used this opportunity to tell him I wanted to paint the kitchen. Which we did, if you recall.

Today I tested his resolve by going out and buying a quart of the next darkest shade to the one we just painted, so we could repaint the kitchen wall that gets the most sun and thus the most color-washing-outness (sp?). Too much glare and whatnot, and I just knew that going a single shade darker on that wall would in fact make that wall look the same color as the rest of the room. Let it be known that I was right.

Since we got our federal tax refund on Friday, I've been on a virtual (mostly digital) binge of home decor related pornography. I've been trolling Houzz, BHG, Isabella&Max, et al., and I ordered the new flooring for our bedrooms and living area. (Noah made me call our bank to make sure that the funds were truly available to us four minutes after they posted to our account.)

Since then, I've made this sunburst mirror (yet to be painted), bought the gray and white plaid fabric I'm going to use for a cushion on a bench I have yet to refurbish (or even bring home from my in-laws' garage), and restocked my supply of Cabot Polystain in Dark Oak.

I'm so happy I could braid my hair, douse myself in paint and do The Willow a la "Whip My Hair." Considering the amount of Just Dance 2 I've been playing, I'm confident in my ability to Bust A Move.

Yet another in the endless battles of North and South: U.S. regions, Ireland, Korea, Back Yards

2011-02-24T21:43:00.001-05:00

My two dogs produce more annoying behavior than the square footage of our house can handle. I'd say one unnecessary howl OR one piece of laundry pulled out of the pile OR one chewed scrap of paper per day is all that can go excused when you calculate the pollution-to-livable-area proportions.

A couple of weeks ago, Bonnie got under our backyard neighbor's fence and was bitten by one of their two outdoors-year-round dogs. Since then, Bonnie and Cody have existed solely for vengeance. Don't mistake that for violence. My dogs aren't violent. What they are, is loud. And obnoxious. And unable to forgive and forget.

They spend most of the day running amok, unable to control their rage and thus taking out their frustrations on our home's interior: various forms of jostling each other and us; trash pulled out of the bin, dragged throughout the house, and chewed; nosing around in Ethan's room for inedible items to eat; cornering the cats and assaulting them with their frantic sniffing (presumably in a desperate search for information); practicing their take-down moves on each other; dog-screaming every time a leaf trembles within 100 yards of our perimeter.

Then when I can't take it anymore and let them outside, I succumb to a hypothalamic jolt of anger as I watch those two lummoxes high-tailing it up the hill to the far edge of the fence, where they shout what I presume to be the canine equivalent of yo mamma jokes, threats and epithets. It's all very tiring.

I've written to the president; it's only a matter of time before the U.N. steps in, please God.

John Paul Jones, I salute you

2011-02-16T18:58:00.002-05:00

Oh, did you think I meant legendary Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones? I mean, yeah, I salute him (obviously). But the JPJ I'm referring to at the moment is the historic Naval hero entombed beneath the chapel at Annapolis.

The first time Noah and I visited Annapolis, we fell in love with the place. The history, the beauty of it, the water, the Naval Academy. (My paternal grandfather served in the Navy during the Korean War, by the way.) So when we went to D.C. last summer with my family, we had to take a day and go visit again.

I chronicled the D.C. and Baltimore portions of our trip already (on the Fierce Beagle homepage, click the "D.C" link under Labels in the right sidebar), but I purposefully left out the day at Annapolis. I've been saving it.

Four of the five days of our trip were swelteringly, blisteringly hot. The one that wasn't—the day that it rained close to torrentially and the sun never came out—was the day we had chosen to go on a walking tour of historic Annapolis and browse around the shops downtown. I need to disclose that browsing isn't one of my favorite activities in the world, but browsing in a downpour ranks high on my definitive list of Things That Stink. I was disappointed, but we still had a fabulously delicious lunch in one of the city's pubs and had a grand time on our walking tour: We were the only ones being escorted by the knowledgeable gentleman in knickers.

Each tour is slightly different based on what's open and accessible, and this time we got to stand in the exact room on the exact spot where George Washington resigned his commission. (Can I get a holla from all my nerds?) Our tour concluded, once again, with a visit to the tomb of John Paul Jones, a dim, cool, subterranean mausoleum of marble with an elaborately carved sarcophagus in the center. Around the circular room, artifacts relating to John Paul Jones are displayed in warmly lighted architectural niches. It is an atmosphere of constant reverence.

There's a reason I've been saving this little memory of Annapolis, and our inexplicable but tangible attachment to the place, and the reason came to fruition today: Noah was sworn into the U.S. Navy Reserve and is on track to go to basic training, then specialized training at the Naval base in Pensacola to become a cryptologic technician.

I'm not so naive that I think it'll be all Officer and a Gentleman meets Top Gun wrapped up in an A Few Good Men tortilla with a side of G.I. Jane—believe me, as a police wife, I'm fully aware of the sacrifices of service—but I'm so proud of Noah, his intrinsic compulsion to serve, and his ability to do so in a specialized capacity.

And visits to the beach at Pensacola while he's in training, well. That doesn't hurt.

If you are what you eat, then I'm headed in an unfortunate direction

2011-02-14T19:15:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago we bought a truckload full of split red and white oak from Noah's barber, whose cousin runs a tree business and sells the remains of dearly departed arbors on the cheap. That may be the most ridiculously Southern thing I've ever reported on this here website. Yeehaw!

Be that as it may, you can't beat a huge surplus of already-seasoned firewood (in case you didn't know, wood has to sit for quite awhile once it's been split so the sap and moisture dries out), for just $100. I tell you, we've had some blazes worthy of the Yule Log Channel. The countless evenings of glowing fires we've enjoyed sitting on the hearth, Noah throwing another log on and shouting "Burn, baby, burn!"

I know what you're thinking, but I promise you, we buy only locally grown, sustainably raised marshmallows. You guys, I've been roasting them by the thousands. Have you heard about the new "campfire-sized" marshmallows? They're enormous; at least four regular-sized marshmallows' worth of volume, and who knows how many mini-mallows' worth. (I feel another science experiment coming on...)

It's odd for a former city girl like me to feel comfortable wildly using resources such as ex-trees. Where I grew up, burning wood was a dangerous situation to be avoided according to Smokey the bear. And I only now just realized how odd it is to name the mascot for avoiding wildfires "Smokey." That's like making Stay Puft the official mascot of that insidious entity, the marshmallow industry.

Anyway, I've been eating so many marshmallows my back teeth are starting to hurt whenever I even look at the bag of them, which is kept conveniently on the mantle piece. Incidentally, this year I'm observing Lent by giving up meat and sweets. So I've got to get rid of them somehow.

A horrible crime has been committed

2011-02-10T16:47:00.000-05:00

The Evidence

The Suspect

The Crime: Paw prints leading from the kitchen down the hall and onto my bedspread. At least the washing machine is broken.

Boys are so creative. Wait, is 'creative' the right word?

2011-02-09T23:45:00.000-05:00

"You can do it," I told Ethan in that encouraging tone that says I believe in you and also I don't want to do that thing you're asking me to do for you. In this case, I was prepping to paint the kitchen* and Ethan wanted me to escort him to the bathroom, pull down his pull up (I feel like that's some sort of literary device, but I'm not sure which), and watch him pee.

*from Behr's Asparagus, which we've had for three years but turned out more yellow in our very sunny kitchen than I'd hoped, to Valspar's Paris Mint, a more greyed down green

There's a special irony (a confirmed literary device) that being a stay-at-home mother means I'm largely in charge of teaching Ethan how to operate his sprinkler system, a job I'm supremely unqualified for. My best advice to him has been "Point toward the middle of the potty!" while I make sure he's pressed his little legs against the bowl.

Today, though, off to the potty he went by himself. After the sounds of a brief struggle (lil' dude vs. lil' duds), I heard the tinkle of weewee on damp porcelain and, despite my aversion to la toilette, shouted my praise down the hall. Shortly thereafter I heard a flush and the quickstep cadence of little feet in the hall.

When Ethan reappeared in the kitchen, surely to gather more praise unto himself, he stood before me in all his glory. I mean that literally, by the way. He was completely nude.

Whatever works.

Don't even start me on the postal system right now

2011-02-08T22:21:00.000-05:00

When I began reading Twilight, I'll admit it: I was sucked in. I didn't care about the prose so purple it was practically black in the depth of its dramatic angst. I didn't mind the tedious and repeated descriptions of Edward as hotness on a Popsicle stick or Bella's aggravating self-deprecation about her homely paleness (a lack of pigmentation that was startlingly alluring on Edward and his clan, but apparently had the opposite effect when applied to the warm-blooded Bella).

In case you haven't picked up on it, I've had a change of heart. With each new movie, I've come to like the series less—which is odd, because most people have grown to like the films progressively better.

Perhaps it's the mood I've been in (I joke about Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I might not be that far off the mark; when sun worship seems like a logical religious outlook, you know you're feeling S.A.D.), but Noah's repeated inquiries as to whether I want to watch Eclipse on Blu-ray (he's remarkably supportive) have garnered little more than a pathetic veneer of enthusiasm from me, an assent with the inflection of a question mark on the end. "Ummm....yeah?"

I know it's counterintuitive to say I'm trying to be less annoying by watching the Twilight saga, but that's how deep this goes. We're reaching unplumbed depths of emotional complexity here, folks. So Noah pops Eclipse in the player, and I have to suppress a gag as the chiseled, exquisitely tortured visages of Edward, Bella and Jacob appear on screen. I am so Team Jacob, I think, before realizing that I'm actually Team Doesn't-Give-a-Fig-Just-Get-the-Melodrama-Out-of-My-Face-or-Give-Kristen-Stewart-a-Zoloft-or-Preferably-Both.

Needless to say, we didn't watch Eclipse. "How about we look for a comedy on Netflix?" Noah asks. "I mean, yeah," I reply reluctantly, "but what if it's not that good? I'm just really in a mode where I'm expecting disappointment."

There've been a lot of minor aggravations this past week that would be easier to handle with some naturally occurring vitamin D supplementation. Late deliveries, broken appliances, unresponsive dudes representing institutions that've got us by the moneysacks. If only my overcast worries centered on being too beautiful, or so much in love that it hurts and the pain shows on my face.

Alas, the only grimacing I'm doing relates to constipation. And that, my friends, is an inconvenient truth.

There's a nip in the air

2011-02-02T20:23:00.000-05:00

When Christmas morning rolled around, I was the first to wake up because my side of the bed is closest to the window, and I heard Noah's parents pulling into the driveway. The plan was that they and my parents would wait in the driveway until we opened the front door, so everyone could come in and see Ethan's reaction to the bounty brought by Father Christmas.

Best laid plans, and all that.

Noah's mom needed the loo, so I staggered out of bed when I heard their voices outside. I grabbed a cardigan and threw it on over my new Christmas pajamas from my mom—a trendy pair of roll-cuff sweatpants and a turquoise tank top with a groovy peace sign on the front.

I reached the front door just as my in-laws were coming up the steps. Leaning over, I grabbed the jingle bells on the handle and quietly opened the door to Noah's mom, who flinched as though I motioned to strike her, then spread her arms to provide protective cover and shouted, "Erin, your boob is out!"

Alas, so it was. In my clamber out of bed the tank top had become twisted. The cardigan had slipped as I leaned over to silence the jingle bells, thus exposing the misaligned tank and my integrity to the elements.

In summation, I flashed my mother-in-law on Christmas morning. I assured everyone this isn't about to become a new Christmas morning tradition, although next year I may go to bed wearing festive pasties, just in case. My only consolation is that it wasn't my father-in-law who made it to the door first.

Who says I'm a one-trick pony?

2011-02-01T09:40:00.000-05:00

I know I haven't written much these past couple of weeks, but there are a number of reasons, among them

Seasonal Affective Disorder (although two days ago we had a glorious afternoon in the 60s, which I considered a miraculous blessing on that day, but yesterday while I was shivering it came across more like a mean prank)
It was my mom's 30th birthday, so we had a lot of festivities
I'm refurbishing a bassinet for my sister-in-law, who is due in April with my very first and much anticipated nephew
My very first Video Game I Bought Just For Me (Just Dance! 2 for the Wii) has me boogieing my butt of daily
I've been hard at work learning the intricacies of Photoshop in my Publishing class this semester:

This little impressionist piece represents my frustration at the repeated tuition hikes.