Right up the inside 26 February 2010

Over on her site, CardioGirl posed the following question: “Would you enjoy spending a month of solitude in a beautiful natural setting? Food and shelter would be provided but you would not see another person.”  She put a few restrictions on the solitude — no internet, no cell phone, no radio, no tv.  No electronics, even!  That part might be a wee bit difficult for me.  I guess that includes my digital camera, which would make me sad.  But if she’d let me take it, plus several SD cards for data storage, I would be a happy camper.  If not, I’ve still got my dad’s old 35mm Minolta.  Either way, I’m taking a camera with me.

Yes, folks, I would relish the solitude.  Several of her posters pointed out that they need a break from the hectic life that is parenting children.  For me, that’s got very little to do with it.  Right now, I’m able to get away from the kids and hang out with adults whenever it strikes my fancy, since my husband is more than willing to take over parenting duties.  Having toddlers is totally different from having teenagers too.  For the most part, Grace isn’t very mouthy (and ME doesn’t even talk yet!), and whatever activities they’re signed up for are the ones I’ve decided on.  They’re not coming home and telling me that they’ve signed up for yet another after-school activity for which I will have to employ Mom’s taxi service.

[Here's a little aside -- why do parents have to provide transportation all the time now?  I have known several parents who do not trust the school buses, which I find a little... odd.  In fact, I have been called upon to supply Mom's taxi service to those children at times, when I don't even have school-age kids!  When I was in school, I walked to and from elementary school by myself by the time I was 4, or I rode the bus starting in the 5th grade.  And if I had to stay after school, I either walked home, took the activity bus, or bummed a ride from my friends' parents.  The one time I couldn't get a ride home from school, when I got a bogus detention in the 6th grade, both my parents had to come home early from work that day, as they carpooled together to the Navy base.  That was such an uncomfortable experience that I never again asked for a ride home from my parents.]

So my life isn’t so hectic that I need an escape.  I simply enjoy being by myself.  I always have been a solitary soul.  Growing up in northern  Virginia after my dad got custody of us, there were few kids of my age close to my house.  They all lived outside my allowable biking radius.  Books were my friends instead.  In fact, my mom would bug me to go outside to play, so I would just take my book and sit under the sugar maples and read as the sunlight filtered through the tree’s leaves.  Yes, I do have siblings — but my sister was five grades ahead of me in school, so when I was still playing with dolls she was interested in boys.  There was just nothing we had in common as kids.  When my brother came home, I was already  ten years old, so there was even more of a gap.  In a lot of ways, I grew up feeling like an only child, though I am actually the middle kid.

But in the ninth grade, when we were living in Nebraska, I became a social butterfly.  Part of that was because I needed to get out of my house.  It was a very stressful time for my family, and my parents have never handled stress well.  I decided to make myself scarce, and it was then I began to blossom into a more socially active person.  It was nice for a while, but the years went on, and I began to realize that not everyone who acts like a friend to your face is really a true friend.  That became painfully clear during college, so after graduation I walled myself off to some degree and began to nurture my solitude.

And then we moved to Washington state in the spring of 2003.  Two weeks after we moved into our house, Kurt left for what ultimately was a seven-month deployment to the Middle East, though we had no idea at the time how long he would be gone.  I didn’t have a job, and since I had just moved 3000 miles from my comfort zone, I had no family or friends to occupy me.  Amazingly enough, this was before I had such a support system over the internet, so I was really and truly alone for much of the time.  I spent a lot of time watching tv, of course, but I read a lot, and I walked the dog a lot, and I even spent a fair amount of time just sitting on the hill in my backyard, letting the sun wash over me and enjoying the shapes the clouds made in the sky.

A whole month to myself, then?  No contact with the outside world?  I could handle that.  Personally I would like a cabin in the woods by a pond, preferably with a stream so I can hear the movement of the water.  Each day I’ll leave a note on the fence with the food I’ll need for the next day, and some mysterious person will deliver my goods for the day.  I’ll read book after book after book, and I’ll get back into writing long-hand as well.  I’ll even take my stitching with me and finally finish the birth sampler I started when my best friend gave birth to her son two and a half years ago.

A month later I’ll emerge with a better understanding of myself and how I fit into this world.  And that can’t possibly be a bad thing.

She’s a fistful of dynamite 23 February 2010

Kurt’s away for a few days on a business trip for the Navy.  The class goes on this trip every nine weeks, but it’s been quite a while since Kurt’s had to accompany them.  This trip is already better than the last one; I haven’t had to visit the ER late at night like I did back when I was pregnant with ME, and Grace woke up with a clogged salivary duct.  I don’t mind him being gone; a little bit of distance is good for the soul on occasion.

That, and somehow there is far less housework to do when he’s gone.  I don’t mean that he makes a mess that he expects me to clean up because he’s pretty good about straightening his own mess.  I guess I feel a lot less obligated to do housework when he’s not home.  There isn’t anyone to “check up on me,” as it were.  It’s all self-imposed, of course, because Kurt really couldn’t care less whether I fold the laundry the same day I wash it or not, and he never makes me feel guilty if I take a lazy day.

The problem is I tend to become a hermit when he’s not home.  It just seems to be so difficult to get out of the house without his help with the kids, and I am utterly spoiled in that he’ll “let” me head out to the store or wherever with just Grace or even by myself while he stays home with the girls.  And if I need something picked up at the commissary, he stops by for me since he has to drive past it to get home.  As a result, there are loads of days where I don’t really go anywhere but to Grace’s school and to swim lessons on base, and I sort of enjoy that.

Today I decided, at the last moment, to combat my hermit tendencies.  I took the kids out to lunch at my favorite diner, and then we headed to downtown Newport, where I picked up some much-needed facial primer and my new favorite coffee drink, called a Third Degree Burn.  This stuff is deeeeelicious.  It’s cold-brewed coffee, steamed milk, and spicy hot chocolate.  And when I say spicy, I mean spicy. I’m sort of scared to think of how much cayenne must be in this drink, but it’s oh so good.  The only tiny problem is I can’t share it with Grace.  She loves coffee, and she loves hot chocolate, but she cannot stomach the spicy.

All the more for me!

I only wish I had spent more time downtown, but it was damn cold.  The temperature wasn’t that low, but the humidity was high and the winds were pretty strong.  The kids were warm enough in their winter coats, but I thought it was warmer than it was, so I had just thrown on a fleece over my t-shirt.  Brrrr.

So the early interventionist came yesterday to work with ME for the first time.  Our first appointment was supposed to be last Thursday, but I had read my calendar wrong and went out to breakfast with Kurt and his co-workers instead.  Oops.  I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect with the interventionist, but she got right down on the floor with ME and played with her.  It’s amazing how much kids learn through play!  The interventionist was also highly impressed with how dexterous she is and how tenacious as well.  ME will sit there and play with something, trying to figure out how it works, till she understands it completely.  She doesn’t just throw it down in frustration after a few seconds.  At one point, the interventionist gave her some plastic Easter eggs, and ME tried and tried and tried to get the eggs open after she found out they had toys inside.  Finally she brought one over to me and signed, “Help please.”  The interventionist about fell over in surprise that ME was signing so well, as well as putting two signs together.

But ME is still perfectly happy not speaking.  She’s getting much better at communicating, and that was my goal when I called the early interventionists.  In fact, she just walked over to me, handed me a toy she was having trouble with, and signed, “Help please” completely on her own.

She is one smart cookie, I have to give her that.

She may have said her first word this weekend, on my birthday, in fact!  We were  in the antique store, and she kept pointing at cat figurines and saying, “Keee.  Keee!”  Maybe that was her first word, trying to say, “kitty.”  One can hope that “momma” and “daddy” isn’t far behind.

You may be flat but you’re breathing 21 February 2010

Yesterday I turned 31.

It was absolutely the best day that I could possibly have asked for.  Usually we laze around for most of the morning, but Kurt encouraged me to get up so we could get going.  We headed out to the Pawtucket winter farmer’s market, where for lunch I ate a delicious crepe (made with buckwheat batter and filled with spinach, cheese, and scrambled eggs) while also stealing half of Kurt’s rabbit hot dog.  Yes, folks, I ate rabbit.  It didn’t taste any different from, say, chicken, but what I loved the most about it was the fixin’s on top.  The vendors had added this apple and celery root slaw with a sweet sauce, I think it was cranberry, and the flavors melded together perfectly in my mouth.  Yummmm.

That farmer’s market is scarily huge.  It’s in this old textile mill in Pawtucket, near Providence.  There are so many vendors there, it’s crazy.  We got there at 12:30 (I’ll explain why we were so late when we ostensibly got an early start), and the place was absolutely packed.  It’s kind of a bad layout, the way the market is set up.  There’s a long hallway that traverses the mill with rooms off on either side of the hallway.  Some of the rooms are homes to various stores, while one room is taken over by people selling pre-made food, sort of like a food court.  But the hallway is where the vendors are, lining either side, so if you stop to look at something, you’re impeding the flow of traffic.  That, and people are idiots and they don’t look around them when they try to merge into traffic.  I can’t tell you how many times  I had to stop dead with ME’s stroller to prevent it from running into the back of someone’s leg who cut me off.  Gah.

But it’s worth it.  I love all the things for sale.  There’s one farm that sells loads of winter produce, and the last time I went, we grabbed some gorgeous parsnips and some really yummy carrots.  And that same farm pickles these spicy dill beans that are to die for!  Green beans picked with dill and cayenne and herbs, so spicy that you start sweating as you eat them.  So, so good.  Of course, I had to get another jar. Besides, I’m supporting local producers.  Score!

As if that weren’t enough, we stopped by one of my favorite antique stores up in Massachusetts, one where it’s a huge store containing stalls owned by many different vendors.  I almost walked out without buying anything (shock of all shocks), when something drew me to a collection of cookbooklets languishing on a table in the basement.  Several booklets down, I spotted one called “10 Cakes Husbands Like Best.”  I immediately snatched it up, as that is the name of a forum I belong to consisting of my dearest friends — named after that very cookbooklet.

On the way home from Massachusetts, the check engine light came on in the minivan, but even that wasn’t enough to cast a pall over my birthday.  Kurt ran by the auto parts store to find out what the code meant, did a wee bit of troubleshooting, determined it must have been a glitch, and reset the light.  I love having a handy husband!

And yet my birthday was just beginning.  I threw a chicken in the oven for my family to eat, and two of my girl friends here in the neighborhood took me out to dinner and to have drinks.  Wayyyy too much tequila was ingested in the form of a couple of pitchers of margaritas, one being the normal lime flavor and the other being this wonderful hibiscus-infused concoction.  Of course, that wasn’t enough for us, so we wandered down to one of the fancy wine bars down on the wharves, where we had another drink called a fire dancer.  I looked it up this morning, and what it boils down to is more tequila.

No wonder I pretty much went straight to bed when I got home.

I was really so wonderfully spoiled yesterday, and I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday.  And I haven’t even gotten to presents!

Look at that loot!  The impossibly adorable apron is from my sister, the gold disk is actually a hand-formed glass suncatcher with various New England motifs embossed on it that my dear friend presented me with last night, and the wee little thing on the right?   That, my friends, is a smartphone.  A Samsung Moment, to be precise.

Kurt presented me with a small stack of presents as soon as I finished getting ready to go yesterday morning.  He told me I had to open the largest one first, and as I sat on the couch to open it, he grabbed me around the shoulders and murmured in my ear, “Please don’t kill me please don’t kill me please don’t kill me.”  How am I supposed to want to open a gift with that sort of beginning?!  I was starting to wonder if he’d bought me a rattlesnake or something.

I ripped off the wrapping to find a new cell phone in the box.  I looked at him in confusion because I didn’t need a new cell phone.  Then he began to explain, and he told me he was frustrated that I wasn’t always able to get a WiFi signal on my iPod Touch, and now I can check things on the internet wherever I am.  And yes, he upgraded our plan so that now we both have unlimited data.

This phone is So Cool.  Not only do I now have a decent camera phone (I have massive envy of the iPhone’s camera) and the ability to get on the internet wherever I am (not that I really need to) while keeping the slide-out QWERTY keyboard I love on my old phone, but I have this really neat navigation program that is miles away better than the GPS we have in the car.  And my favorite part?  The texts that I send and receive are nested into conversations, so now I don’t have to scroll back through my Sent box to figure out what the hell I asked you four hours ago.

I am so easily amused.  And now you know why it took us so long to get out of the house yesterday.  I had to play with it!  The case was Grace’s gift to me, and she even picked it out herself!  She did well too; the back of it is covered with cherry blossoms.  It’s so pretty.

So yeah.  I have a feeling that 31 is going to be a good year.