How long is too long? 27 September 2010

I have been blogging for ten and a half years.  I doubt I have any readers left from my early days, but if you read my archives from Diaryland, you can see that this blog has seen me through the last three semesters of college, as well as documented the early part of my relationship with Kurt.  I was barely 21 when I started, a sweet young thing who had no idea what life had in store for her.  Indeed, I had no idea where I wanted to go with my life.  I had declared as a computer science major back when all companies cared about was whether you had a degree and a pulse, but by the time I graduated, the bubble had burst — and they wanted only “the best of the best of the best, SIR!”  I muddled through, found a job completely unrelated to my degree which I loved, married Kurt not long afterward, quit that job when the company foundered — and became a housewife.

Since then we’ve moved twice, both times clear across this enormous country, and I’ve given birth to two amazing children.  Kurt and I have gotten older and wiser, and I like to think we’ve aged like fine wine.  We’ve seen the internet grow from an interesting way to find information to this enormous time-sucker against which I have to fight so I can enjoy my books too.  There was no such thing as Facebook ten years ago, for which I am eternally grateful.  My grades were bad enough without it.

But the rules of blogging have changed and moved on without me.  I see a lot of people posting their blogs on their Facebook page, something I refuse to do, as I have always used this space as a way to vent my spleen.  I’d rather complete strangers know the weird crap that goes on in my head, instead of my nearest and dearest.  Technically, no one needs to know that stuff, but I still put it up here.

And that’s fine if people want to be public about their blogs.  It’s just something that wasn’t done when I first started blogging, back before the word “blog” had even to be coined.  There was only one real cardinal rule about blogs among me and my real-life friends, those of whom had jumped on the Diaryland bandwagon: “You don’t talk about your blog.”  Then again, we didn’t have celebrity bloggers, or those who made their living from blogging.  It was just something that internet nerds like to do in their spare time.

But now I can feel myself pulling back from this whole blogging thing.  For one thing, the interaction isn’t what it used to be.  And I’m not one to troll the net to find new blogs.  Every once in a while, someone will point out a blog they particularly like, but it’s been quite a while since I added a new blog to my Google Reader.  The blogs I do have listed, I can’t find the time to read.  Books are pulling me away, Flickr is pulling me away, Facebook is pulling me away.

The second issue is that I’m just not happy with what I have been seeing lately on the blogosphere.  I’ve always tried to stay out of the various flame wars that have arisen.  I hate taking sides, and I know that what is presented is only one person’s version of events.  But recently I was dragged into something not of my choosing, and not of my making.  Not only that, it didn’t even involve me directly.  And honestly, it made me very sad because it showed me that someone whom I thought was a person who tried very hard to put goodness and light into the universe was instead spewing vitriol behind the scenes.  I’m one of those people who think that we have enough hate in the world that what we should try our best to counterbalance it as much as we can by spreading love instead.  Which is not to say that I am perfect.  I know I have engaged in gossip sessions in which I really shouldn’t, but every time I have said something mean or unflattering, I assure you it’s come back on me ten-fold when someone says something terrible to or about me.  It makes me feel awful enough that I don’t want to cause that pain on someone else.

And so I feel all confused, those whom I thought were my friends maybe aren’t so much, and my world has been tipped on its side.  Everything is just all catty-wampus right now.  I don’t know what to do about it.

All I know right now is that I don’t feel all that comfortable here anymore, and that there is 161 items in my Google Reader that I don’t have the heart to wade through.  I’m not saying I’m finished with this blog, but if I’m scarce for a little while, at least you know the reason.

All my best, and all my sunshine and light and love to you all.

It took a nip of gin 14 September 2010

I am pleased to report that we seem to be completely binky-free!  ME’s voice has had time to recover, and she’s throwing fewer and fewer fits.  I almost had a breakdown my own self a couple of nights ago when ME was screaming and screaming in her crib instead of going to sleep, but I think it was just an overdose of stress and a lack of sleep on my part.  Fortunately I have a very understanding husband, and he talked me down from the ledge and brought me ice cream to calm me down.  Nom.

ME does, however, have a new skill.  After falling out of her crib one day last month, she’s figured out how to exit it without hurting herself.  We have the crib mattress set as low as it could possibly go, but her legs are long enough to swing up and over.  Then she straddles the top of the crib rail, swings her other leg over, hangs by her hands, and drops the last few inches to the floor.

*sigh*

Yesterday I had to put her back into her crib twice after putting her down for a nap because she absolutely had to have her MagnaDoodle in the crib with her.  I gave up and let her have the MagnaDoodle, but she was so angry that she was being forced to take a nap that she flung it with all her might out of the crib.  She finally fell asleep, though.  Today I put her in her crib to nap, and after five minutes of fussing, I hear an eerie silence.  I gave her a few minutes, and when I finally cracked open the door to check on her, she was peacefully asleep — in Grace’s bed!  Hey, at least she was sleeping, though.  Clearly I need to switch Grace to a big-girl bed, and put ME in the toddler bed.

It’s just funny because Grace was perfectly content in her crib until she was three years old, and the only reason we moved her into the toddler bed was because she was potty-trained, and I didn’t want to prevent her ability to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night.  Every day I marvel at how different my two girls are, even though they’re quite alike in other ways.

(Goodness!  Not even 7pm and evening colors has sounded.  The days are getting shorter and shorter…)

Grace seems to adore kindergarten, although we’ve already (!!!) had a few episodes of “But Mom, I need to do my homework!” right before bedtime.  Is that something every kid does, something they know inherently?!  I didn’t think it would happen in kindergarten, for crying out loud!

Homework is really no big deal, not for kindergarten.  Thus far she’s had to come up with something that could hurt someone’s feelings if it were said to them (part of a discussion on how mean things “wrinkle” people’s hearts, and why we should try our best not to wrinkle someone’s heart), color a few worksheets, and put together an “all about me” bag.  One activity per day.  It takes her probably ten minutes, tops, to do her homework.  I just need to be better about checking her homework folder.

There’s a lot for parents to learn about going to school, not just the kids!

In non-child related news, I had my eyes checked last week.  I’m on my last pair of contacts, and I needed a new prescription to buy more.  It’s been three years since I had my eyes checked, mainly because I wear my contacts for longer than I should, so a one-year prescription tends to last me more like three.  Oops.  But I never ever ever sleep in them.  Yikes.  I did that a couple of times in college, and I felt like my eyes were glued together.  It was nice to wake up being able to see without trying to find my glasses, though.

Amazingly enough, the naval clinic could examine my eyes for me.  I’d always been told they wouldn’t, since they won’t write a contact lens prescription for dependents.  I guess things have changed in the last few years, which is awesome because now I don’t have to pay for a contact lens exam!  So last week I show up at my appointment with contacts in, but with my case and solution in case I need to remove them, plus I’d brought my glasses in as well.  Good thing, too, because I had to take my contacts out to have my eye puffed (ugh, I hate that machine), and it was time for me to have my eyes dilated.

Grr.  If there’s one thing I really hate, it’s having my eyes dilated — and it’s been a super long time since it was done.  Oh well.  I lived.  But it was zero fun.

What confused the crap out of me was I had to return for my contact lens exam.  I understood why I had to take out my contacts to have my eyes examined, but I don’t get why they wouldn’t do the contact lens exam first, and then the glasses exam.  Fortunately, though, they had an appointment just two days later, so I was able to knock out both appointments quickly (complete with yet another eye puff at the second appointment), and with my brand spankin’ new prescriptions in my hot little hands, off I headed to BJ’s Wholesale Club, where they were having an amazing deal going on for glasses, and where I could get the best deal on contacts.

I approached the woman behind the eyeglasses counter, and when she asked what I needed, I said, “At minimum, I need contacts!”  That’s when I ran smack dab up against another of Rhode Island’s stupid little rules:

Third-party providers (like Walmart, Target, BJ’s, whomever) cannot dispense contact lenses.

I KNOW, RIGHT?!  You have to get them from your ophthalmologist or your optometrist.  An optician cannot fill lens prescriptions, only ones for glasses. This was not an option for me, as the naval clinic won’t dispense them to civilians like me.

Yay, Rhode Island, you have failed me once again.

Fortunately I live almost to the border of Massachusetts, so it was rather trivial of me to hop across the border and place my order with the BJ’s up there.  And I got a new pair of glasses to boot ($90 for lenses and frame — wahoo!), though I’m not sure how they look.  I went by myself, you see, and I never can tell if something looks good on me.  I found the perfect set of frames, but of course my ginormous head made them pinch my temples in a very painful way.  So I went with the second best.  I only hope they look all right.

What’s funny is I gave BJ’s $300 of Kurt’s hard-earned cash, yet I left with nothing.  The contacts will be sent to my home (they didn’t have a full-year supply in stock), and the glasses take two to three weeks to be made.  I prefer my glasses to be sent out to a lab, actually, because any time they’ve been done at an “express” place, they’ve not been ground properly.  It’s worth it to me to wait so they can be done right.

The other funny thing is I now have a prescription which is the same for both eyes.  That’s never happened to be in all the twenty-one years I’ve been wearing corrective lenses.  My right eye has always been worse, and so it’s had a higher prescription.  This optometrist (or he could have been an ophthalmologist, or one of each, since I saw two different doctors) told me that my right eye had too much correction on it, and sure enough, I saw better when he dialed my prescription back to match my left eye.  It’ll be interesting when I get my new lenses to see if I see as clearly.

I sure hope so!

I tried to catch your eye 8 September 2010

My baby is all growed up!  Can you believe it?  She has started kindergarten today.  ME wanted to get in on this first-day-of-school photo, so of course I had to oblige.  I have to admit, ME’s expression is cracking me up, like she’s so distrustful of this whole “school” thing Grace is now involved in.  I assure you she wasn’t actually cranky.  It’s just her patented look of disdain.

I was a little worried for Gracie, going to school for a full day for the first time in her short life, but she seemed to handle it quite well.  She was a bit nervous when she first got there, but she must have warmed up quickly because when I retrieved her off the bus this afternoon she could not stop talking about all the fun things they did.  The first thing she said was, “Mom!  We had music today!”  Yes, folks, she is definitely my child.

She was so excited about everything.  They went outside two times!  (And that’s how she put it too, “two times.”)  They had music class!  She had hot lunch!  She got to ride the bus home!  She even met a new friend that she had to tell me all about.

I’m really excited for her, especially after I figured out that Grace is part of a multi-age class.  I was told that wasn’t an option for her since we wouldn’t be here long enough, so I was pleasantly surprised to find out this morning that she did make it into that class.  I think it’s because she can already read and write that they felt it was the best placement for her.  I’m quite glad about this.  I had been really concerned that she would be bored out of her skull (as I was throughout most of my public school education) in a regular kindergarten class with kids who were still learning their letters.  Now she’s in a class that’s a two-to-one mix of kindergarteners to first graders, and they do a lot of activities with the other multi-age class, which is a two-to-one ratio of second graders to first graders.  She won’t need to be bored; if she’s more advanced than one group of classmates, she’ll be put with another group.  Plus I’ve heard really great things about her teacher from other parents whose kids were in her class, and I guess the whole school is really great.  I’m almost sorry to be leaving halfway through this school year.

It was so weird here alone with just one kid all afternoon.  I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself all day.  And now I’ll have to figure out how to entertain ME, since Grace was doing such a great job of it for me.

ME had quite a break-through herself today as well.  While Grace was at school, ME’s speech therapist came for the first time in two weeks.  We only get four sessions a month, you see, and somehow we got all our August sessions out of the way early.  So finally the therapist came today, and ME couldn’t stop talking!  It was so great to hear all the sounds that were coming out of her mouth, especially since the therapist was there to hear it.  Usually if ME gets talkative, it’s only around Kurt and me.  But this time she “performed” on demand!  Yay!  She was even attempting words she’d never said before, like “girl” and “fly” and “choo-choo” for the scenic train’s whistle that we can hear from the house.  What’s funny is that the speech therapist and I would be discussing something else, letting ME play on her own, and that’s when her speech would start really coming out.  The more we paid attention to her, the quieter she got.

Fickle kid.

So in a way, we intentionally discussed other issues, to make ME think we weren’t paying attention to her, and maybe that’s why she was talking so much.  Whatever works!  It made me so proud to hear all the sounds that she was making, and how hard she was trying to communicate.

We’re also attempting to wean ME off the binky.  Taking the bottle away from her was super easy.  We just switched her over to sippy cups once she was 1.  She never seemed to miss the bottle at all.  The binky has proven so much more difficult.  I wanted to take it away now, before it got even harder, and I was reminded yesterday of what happens when a parent gets distracted by other issues — I saw a four-year-old little girl with a binky planted firmly in her mouth at the naval clinic yesterday.  Yikes.

I talked to the speech therapist about what we could do about ME and taking the binky away.  It’s been a good week since she’s had one, but it’s been a very hard week.  Everything, and I mean everything, has angered ME in some way, shape or form.  And when she gets angry, she starts screaming.  She wants nothing but her binky at that point.  She doesn’t want to be held; she squirms to get down.  She doesn’t want her water bottle; she flings that away.  Anything you try to give her to distract her, she’ll throw as hard as she can.  She’s been screaming so much her voice has gone hoarse.  Fortunately it’s seemed to calm down a bit between yesterday and today.  Kurt put her down for a nap today, telling her that he’d be right back, and she laid down and resigned herself to her fate.  No yelling.  Today she threw a fit because she wanted a snack right before dinner was ready, so I ended up putting her in the corner to calm down.  A few moments later, there was silence — and she came walking back into the kitchen.  I asked her if she was done, and she nodded yes.  She wasn’t quite, but at least she was trying.

But I’m not giving her back that damned binky.  She’ll be two tomorrow, and it’s time to give it up.

Both my girlies are growing up so fast.  Man alive, I can’t believe it.  They’ll be in college the next thing I know!