So make your siren’s call 28 April 2010

A couple days ago, the mailman stopped his truck outside our house.  We have a walking mailman who comes straight to our door, but the girls already know that when he stops his truck, it means only one thing — we’ve got a package!  Both girls greeted the mailman with much fanfare as he handed over the parcel, and Grace immediately hollered that it was for them!

It was a box from our dear Beanie!

It didn’t take long for the girls to start tearing into the box to look for goodies.  Inside was all kind of cool stuff!  Pipe cleaners and pom-poms, a tote bag for each girl, a visor for each girl, markers and colored pencils, stick-on decorations and traditional stickers.

The girls could hardly contain their excitement!

ME doesn’t really know what all is in the box; all she knows is it’s all brightly-colored and she wants it!  She did immediately lay claim to the three bouncy balls that were found in the box.  Ever since she started saying, “BALL!” it’s one of her favorite toys.

It doesn’t take much to amuse her, that’s for sure.

Grace, on the other hand, was beyond thrilled to find a box full of art supplies.  She loves to draw and color, and now she can add more things to her artwork.  She’s already made several new pieces of art that feature the things she received from Beanie:

How cool is that?  All on her own, she came up with the idea to use the circles on top of the flower shapes to give the flowers faces — and then she drew in the eyes and mouths herself.  And the black at the top?  That’s to show that it’s nighttime.  I guess that would account for the stars as well.  Stars don’t come out  in the day time, right?

Didn’t think so.

She is seriously on an art kick.  She makes art for everyone we know.  She made my dad a piece of art instead of having me buy a birthday card.  She made her little friend a card when we attended his birthday party last weekend.  She draws things for Kurt, and then asks him to take them to his students on the base.  She even made me this amazing picture that shows me with the girls (I’ve got red hair while the girls have green hair), and she even labeled it, “From Grace to Mommy.”  Not only that, the figure that represents ME is saying, “BALL!”

I love that picture so much I’m planning on framing it.

I guess it was a good thing I started her out in art class when she was barely two years old.  Now if only there were a program like that for ME around here…

Hole in my head 24 April 2010

Things are starting to get back to normal around here.  There’s still a lot rattling around in my brain, things that have gotten exacerbated along the line, but I guess that’s just life.  You just keep putting one foot in front of the other and muddling along.  That’s all you can do, I’m starting to figure out.

And it helps knowing that I have friends.  Not just those I have in real life, though I’m very grateful for those, but you all who left me comments on my last post.  You are all wise women, and I will remember what you told me.  I do appreciate it.

On another note, my darling baby hit the terrible twos on Wednesday.  Yes, I do know the exact date it happened.  On Tuesday, she was still this sweet little silent baby, who watched everything going on around with great intensity.  On Wednesday, everything, and I mean everything, pissed her off.  We had screaming fits, we had temper tantrums, we had tears and runny noses.  She would lay herself out on the floor, full-length, and kick her heels in anger.  Nothing would soothe her.  Before Wednesday, if she cried, we could send her to her room, and because she didn’t like being alone, she would quickly calm down and come out to rejoin the family.  Now, she’ll just scream and scream and scream.  Not even her days of teething came close to this.  It’s shocking, really.

Now my world is turned on its head.  All these things that I could do before Wednesday with a calm baby can no longer be done.  We went out to dinner that night, and usually as long as we keep feeding ME, she’s a pleasant child to have at the table.  Run out of food, and, well…  But we know that’s the deal, so we keep her supplied with plenty of food.  That night, however, no amount of food was enough to keep her calm.  At first, she was fine, but when she felt she was done, she wanted out.  Out of her high chair, out of the restaurant.  I was so embarrassed by her yelling (and she really wasn’t that bad, but the restaurant was a quiet one; we’d gone out for Thai food, and ethnic restaurants here tend to be somewhat intimate affairs) that I ended up taking her out to the van.  That just completely undid her, and she laid on the asphalt as I opened the van door, screaming her fool head off.  She was so upset that as I buckled her into the car seat, she managed to hit me in the face with her set of Mickey Mouse keys, hard enough to stun me for a moment.

Where has my sweet little baby gone?  I’m hoping this is temporary.  She was extremely fussy during our trip to Arizona over Thanksgiving, but not long after we arrived home she mellowed out again.  I’m hoping that this doesn’t last long.  I don’t know how long I can stand this.  If this were the way she’s always been from day one, I would be used to it.  But I’ve been spoiled with such a good baby for the last nineteen months.

At least she’s not suffering from a lack of personality.  She has that in spades.

Amazingly enough, at an age when most kids are giving up that second nap, ME needs it more than ever.  The days when she doesn’t get her morning nap, she is a royal pain in the rear.  It means I have to stick pretty close to home (she tries so hard to stay awake as we’re driving from point A to point B, in case she misses something), but I’ve been somewhat of a hermit lately anyhow.  That’s actually a good thing, quite good for my pocketbook.  I do miss where we lived in Washington, though, near that cute little town.  At the age ME is now, Grace and I would head downtown at least once a week, have lunch at the bakery, wander to the used book store, and on sunny days, we’d play in the park on the water.  It was just the perfect afternoon excursion.

Now that I think about it, there’s a place sort of like that here, though it’s a little farther away.  We were there yesterday, having lunch at this little wrap shop on Main Street, and afterwards, we wandered down the street to let the kids run around a bit.  Somehow we found ourselves in a book store.  How that happened, I have no idea!  Haha.  It was an independently-run bookshop, which meant I just had to buy something.  I came home with The Emancipator’s Wife: A Novel of Mary Todd Lincoln, as well as a book about the human body for Grace, and a nifty children’s book called Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village.  I’ve always been fascinated by medieval times, and this is a book full of stories and poems and songs that bring the English medieval village to life.  It was half price, and in hardback, so I just had to pick it up.

That bookshop had its own resident pets, one of whom we noticed as soon as we walked in.  There was just the smallest sliver of sunlight pouring through the window display, and a gorgeous calico cat was perched there, soaking up the sun with her eyes closed in bliss.  I’m telling you — cats are solar-powered.  That’s the only explanation.  Then as I talked to the proprietor of the shop, I noticed behind her a dog in her office, a grey schnauzer that looked so much like my dear Koolit that it gave me an ache in my heart.  I still miss that dog, and it’s been almost a year already.  I can still smell his scent as I cuddled him, and feel his thick, curly fur under my fingers.  We had that dog nine years… I miss him so.

*sigh*

I just didn’t expect it to hurt so much still.  Goodness.

A monkey on a chain 20 April 2010

One day, something happened to prompt a friend of mine to ask if we ever end up questioning everything we ever thought about ourselves, in that we think we’re kind and gentle when in reality people see us as cold and selfish.

You know, this is something I butt up against more often than I would like.  I like to think I’m an okay person, doing my best to treat people with kindness and respect, to protect others from hurt feelings, to treat others as I would like to be treated.  In general, it works out well, or seems to.  But then there’s yet another friend who slowly stops returning my calls, the person who doesn’t want to hang out anymore, the friendship that just fades to black.

And I’m left wondering, what the hell.  What did I do, what could I have done differently, what did I say.  Am I really this kind and gentle person or am I this jerk who does nothing but take take take?  Half of me says of course I’m not a jerk.  But half of me wonders if I really did all I could.

I guess what I’m saying is I’m a lot more fragile than I look.  A lot of people see me, see what I have been through, see what I go through with being a military wife, and they assume that I’m solid as a rock.  In some ways, it’s true.  I’m not going to be emailing my husband the day after he leaves for a six-month deployment with a laundry list of what all has gone wrong already.  I can soldier on and muddle through.  Besides, what is he going to do when he’s several thousand miles away?

Not much he can do.

But the same things that made me strong have also made me weak.  I’ve never really felt secure in the most basic of relationships.  I always felt as thought I would be loved IF.  What came after that “if” depended on the day, the person, the phase of the moon.  But it was always there.  And my foibles were always pointed out to me in great detail.  There was no escaping it.  It was just this litany of what I had done wrong, what I had said, what I had acted like.

There was one summer where we’d gone away on vacation, and we were all having such a great time.  At least, I thought we were.  There was the normal gentle bickering over playing games and who was winning, but I thought everything was hunky-dory — until the explosion rocked my world, until I was informed that I had been acting horribly the whole week, and that I should be ashamed of my awful behavior.

Time and again, something like this has happened.  And it’s made me so terribly confused.  I don’t know what to believe or think about even how other people perceive me when this sort of thing happens more often than I like to remember.

I do know that I should be past a lot of this.  I am, after all, in my 30s now, and the mother of two children.  But it’s because of them that I want to be secure in myself, to show them how to feel good about oneself in a world that seems intent on tearing one down.  I just wish I knew the magic answer.

Fortunately I do have a lot of great friends who are supportive of me, who let me vent about the craziest things, who listen when things get absurd, and who assure me that I am loved and lovable.  And I’ve got my best friend, who’s stuck by me for the last eighteen years of my life.  That’s saying something, isn’t it?  Through eighteen years and more states than I can count between the both of us, we’ve stayed close.  And in four more months, we’ll actually be living in the same city.

I can’t hardly believe it.  It’s been so long.

So I’m guessing the evidence points towards “good person.”  That’s what I’m going with, anyhow.  I just have to learn to hold my head high and not let things, situations, people, get me down.

And now for the most random thought of the day: As I mentioned above, my best friend and I have many, many states between us due to our both being military brats and now military spouses.  The one gift we can never get one another, or get for our own selves, is one that pins us down to a certain location.  Can you imagine?  I’ve never had bookplates a day in my life — and that is so something I’d want to have.  But what’s the point, when the address on the bookplate won’t be valid in a year or two?  I’ve always wanted a stamp for my return address.  It’s not worth the money, knowing we’re moving soon.  I’ll just make do with the free return address labels from the SPCA.  A pretty plaque for the front of my house with my street and house number on it?  No real point.  What if it’s not to the liking of the next people who own or rent our house?  We could take it with us, but why?   I just found a sketch journal online that looked really neat (as if I can draw — haha), and the frontispiece features the author’s basic information, including address.

I think I’m getting kind of tired of always leaving that sort of thing blank, of never being able to pinpoint myself down to a particular location.  Maybe the nomadic lifestyle is getting me down, finally.

Maybe I finally want to start putting down roots that won’t need to be disrupted for years and years.