One of those days

My daughter has always been an easy-going, calm, adaptable baby (well, at least after that first six weeks of gas pain). She fills my days with so much joy. Just the other night I told Britt that sometimes I feel so much love for her that I think I'll just explode! (I picture tiny little glittery hearts bursting forth and showering down like confetti.) She is in such a neat stage right now, exploring things, actively learning all the time, and becoming aware of her emotions and voluntary expression thereof. She does such funny things sometimes, like purposely pouring her water into the cup holder on her high chair tray so that she can splash it! Or suddenly putting her hands over her eyes (palms out) to signal that she doesn't want any more food. Or wiggling back and forth after she takes her milk so she can hear it slosh around in her tummy. I wonder what she's thinking when that happens. If she understands that the sound she hears is coming from within her own body. If she can feel it sloshing and knows that is what is sounding. Her "research" fascinates me.

But then there are those days. Those days when, no matter how wonderful my baby regularly is, I just can't figure out what is wrong. Days when the usual schedule is unacceptable for some unknown reason. She's sleepy but she can't or won't sleep, and I don't know which. Should I let her cry it out and fall asleep because I know it's her usual nap time and she's probably just trying to convince me to pick her up (because she's beginning to understand how to play on our emotions), or is she really needy today and I should absolutely go to her so she will trust that I will help her in her time of need? Days when I wonder if her crying and grabbing my face and pulling it to her own face is some primitive language for "I NEED TYLENOL, MAMA...STAT!" Days when I have kept her right there with me most of the day instead of leaving her playing with her toys while I do the usual chores. Days when I have helped her poop, sucked her boogers, given her Tylenol, rubbed her aching gums with Orajel, given her an extra breast-feeding just in case she's hungry and snuggled just a little extra before nap time, and still she cries The Indiscernable Cry. The cry that makes me say ridiculous things to the poor darling like "What's the matter today? Tell Mama what's wrong." The cry that I haven't walked away from since she was just weeks old and I didn't know what else to do but pass her off to her daddy and cry myself.

So I finally decide I have done all I can do. She will cry even if I hold her. So I leave her in her bed and hope she will fall asleep soon. I busy myself, and soon enough all I hear is rain and the gentle hum of my computer and the creaking of the upstairs neighbors' stairs. And I bask in the peacefulness while it lasts, knowing that post-nap period before bed time could go either way. She might wake up refreshed and be a her usual happy self the rest of the evening. Or she might be so fussy that it makes me question my ability to survive the Terrible Twos in a couple of years. If I can't stand one fussy day now, then how will I ever make it to November 2006 without going loony bins?

Well, today was one of those days when she resumes The Indiscernable Cry as soon as she awakens from her nap, (as though she had consciously pressed pause on her cry feature in order to fall asleep and then pressed it again when she woke up) and once again her complaints are met with one failed attempt after another to correct the unknown problem. It was one of those days when I watch the clock, pleading with it to hurry to the part of the day when Britt comes back to rescue me from my single parenthood. One of those days when I feel like waiting at the door for him, immediately snatching the car keys, and fleeing the premises as soon as he's back. And all I know to say is "I love you, sweet baby" over and over.

And then by some miracle, she laughs. And laughs and laughs and laughs. And I feel relief from my anxiety, if only for a little while. And FINALLY Britt returns from the great beyond! (Only now it's too late to flee, so I fume a little bit.) And she laughs some more, easing my pain. And during her Daddy-orchestrated bath time, I take a vacation in some other part of the house to remind myself that most days are not one of those days, and the benefits of this job far outweigh its frustrations.

Fluttering FlyBaby

Someone threw a wild party in my apartment yesterday and left the mess for me to clean up! The audacity! It is a good sign that this drives me crazy. The way we lived in Waco, this was the norm (the mess, not the parties!). Since we moved in here, I have made a consistent effort to keep my sink shining and everything put away. Trying to retrain my (our) bad habits. So when I left a mess in the kitchen for myself to find after the latest law school function, I was so disappointed. It's so much easier to KEEP it clean than it is to clean it up! But I dropped the ball yesterday. I spent a good part of the morning making Chippey Cheeseys to take to the function. Then Ava woke up and needed tending to, so I left my mess. Then life happened, as it so often does, and I didn't ever get back around to the kitchen.

My first mistake was not unloading the dishwasher first thing in the morning. That seems to be the key. If the dishwasher is empty, I am becoming more disciplined at putting the dirty dishes immediately into it, thereby curtailing the problem of dishes piling out of the sink and onto the cabinets (and the stove top...and the floor...). In our new home there are two "dish disposals." One is the dishwasher; this is where any dish that can be washed in the dishwasher is to go immediately after rinsing it. The other is a dish pan under the sink; this is where plastics that flip over in the dishwasher and other non-dishwasher items go immediately after rinsing. This means nothing takes up residence in my clean sink until it's time to wash dishes after supper (which either Britt or I do every night now!). Many people would think this is just automatic, but not for us. We have to consciously consider these actions. So when I did not follow my rules yesterday, I left a huge mess in the kitchen (and consequently on the dining table). After the law school function, we came home to a messy kitchen and dining room, and I actually felt a little taken aback. Surprised! ME! To see a mess in my kitchen! That is fantastic! That means I am expecting cleanliness from myself now! The mommy heavens are singing a jubilant "Hallelujah!" for me today!

I owe most of my improvement to the FlyLady and her firm but gentle motivation. If you've never heard of her, let me sing her praises now. One baby step at a time, I am changing my bad habits and making my life more orderly and peaceful. I am ridding my home of CHAOS (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome). FlyLady is Marla Cilley, who manages a helpful web site and yahoo group for people like me--SHEs (Sidetracked Home Executives). Go to www.flylady.net if you are so inclined. It just might change your life. Be forewarned, if you sign up for the service, you will receive a lot of emails. The information contained on the site is also available in Sink Reflections by Marla Cilley. I prefer having a book to use as sort of a manual. I'm no where near FLYing just yet, but I'm getting my nighttime routine down to the point where I feel it in the morning when I slip up! And it's becoming automatic. Next is my morning routine. Baby steps!

Now, speaking of that crazy party mess...I have work to do.

Ripe when yields to gentle pressure

I really enjoy grocery shopping. It's like a hobby for me, really. I don't care so much for going during busy times, but even then I don't mind it too much as long as I'm not in a big hurry. I have now perused the aisles of three stores of the multitudinous Charlottesville grocery chains. I find the atmosphere to be most pleasing at the Giant, but the Kroger is convenient and mostly adequate. (Food Lion was fast relegated to last resort status.) I usually end up at the Kroger (or the "K-Roger" as Britt so daftly calls it). I am beginning to find my way around there. It is so hard to become familiar with the nonsensical arrangements of different grocery stores! It took me three trips just to find the orange juice section. It was adjacent to the paper plates and seasonal items, of course. Why didn't I look there to start with!? About the time I learn where everything is, they will change it, as grocery stores are wont to do. (sigh...)

The produce section really makes or breaks a store for me. I demand high quality produce! And nothing ticks me off quicker than a checker who flings my carefully selected, bruise-free fruits and veggies down the conveyor belt to their doom. That's what the conveyor belt is for--to gently move things along to the little holding yard at the end! (I have scolded many a teen checker. Especially while pregnant. And don't get me started on how NOT to load groceries into my car!) Anyway, produce makes me happy. I love the snap of a good fresh green bean! The produce section has such variety and promise for a lovely meal or two ahead. It has a good aura. It lifts my spirits. And the Kroger people have enhanced my experience by adding lights to simulate lightning and a thunder sound effect right before the water sprayers come on to shower the food! At first I thought this was ridiculous, but now I smile every time it "rains," even if I'm halfway across the store!

My favorite time to shop is late at night when I'm one of the only people there. I feel like I have the store all to myself, my shopping unabated by fellow basket-pushers. I can stand in one place to read labels as long as I want to without getting in someone's way. It's quiet. I can hear my thoughts. There are no stacks of laundry around me or dirty dishes. I guess grocery shopping is a form of escape for me. Kind of like going to a spa for a facial or massage I guess. Just a little retreat where you can do something you like and cast your cares away for a while. I don't enjoy that kind of experience all that much, usually, because I am a bit too practical to really let go. I feel like I should be using my time to get something done. I see the usefulness of it for most people, but I find that I feel idle while being exclusively pampered. (Exception: massage--this provides medical benefits for my back problems, so it is not solely pampering.) That's why grocery shopping is so great for me. It is both relaxing and productive. Who knew something so mundane and necessary could be so therapeutic.

Creative Reader Liberated

I am a slow reader with terrible comprehension skills. It takes me at least four times longer to read anything than an average reader. I read every word as though I were reading aloud. For those who cannot relate, this is an insufferable way to read. A teacher once told me I have a reading disability: I am a "Creative Reader." (At least I felt better having a label for my problem.) As you might expect, I have loathed reading for most of my life. I used to avoid reading at all costs. Until my mid-twenties, I had never experienced "reading for pleasure."

In third grade (G/T program) I had to read a book (or was it sixth grade?) for some reading promotion at school where you get points for pages read (or something like that). I remember whiling away many painstaking HOURS one fine Saturday afternoon (in my dad's gold rocking chair that used to be my grandfather's chair) reading How to Eat Fried Worms. I HATED spending my Saturday that way! I can still remember how I ached with desire to be outside running barefoot on the hot pavement with my friends, playing "teenagers" or some such nonsense.

I remember the first time I sought out a cheater method (i.e., Cliff's Notes) of getting around reading something. I was expected to read some book called The Borrowers, which I believe was about tiny little people living in someone's house and taking their stuff. (Again, I can't remember if this was third grade G/T or sixth grade...) My family had a multi-volume set of books called The Junior Classics (or something like that) which contained ultra-condensed versions of children's novels. Amazingly, these volumes contained a tiny version of The Borrowers. I can still remember the smell of fresh cut grass all around me that springtime evening as I sat on the front porch trudging through the Junior Classics' watered-down version of that book. I think it was fourteen pages long, and I thought I'd never get to the end of it. Oh, it's all coming back to me now...it WAS third grade G/T, and I was expected to give an oral summary of the book in front of the class full of children far more gifted and talented than I. (I shiver with heeby-jeebies just thinking about it...) I was so impressed by Joe Bishop's project and report of The Westing Game (which years later Britt said was his childhood favorite). And someone did a neat diorama of The Wizard of Oz. Anyway, I have blocked most of the events of that day out of my mind but still bear the guilt of becoming a cheater-reader.

By high school, I had gotten very good at reading as much as I could manage, paying attention in class, taking thorough notes, and asking my reader friends all the right questions before quizzes. Remarkably, I got by with As and Bs in my high school English classes using said method. And I graduated #11 in my class of about 375. (This is shameful, of course.) So I was on my way to being a stellar college student.

I started college with the notion that English was my best subject (I loved every aspect except reading), ignoring the fact that I am a dreadfully poor reader. Suddenly I found myself lost in classes where I knew no one (and thus couldn't ask what happened in the assigned text for the day) and had no idea how to keep up. I still enjoyed the discussions and the dissection of the characters and themes, etc. and still had a knack for quality writing. By my fourth semester of beating my head against the wall of English literature, I was sinking in my chosen major and didn't know what else to do with my future. My short fiction professor held me after class one day and asked me why in the world I was an English major in the first place. (Well, actually a secondary education major w/ English specialization, to be technical.) He said I did the best job of writing essays about characters I knew nothing about of any student he'd ever taught. This skill did me little good as I delved deeper into the English major requirements. (That was about the same point in time when Britt forced me to admit that my passions have nothing to do with English literature. Persuant to this lengthy conversation, I turned to my love of "hearth and home" and became a Family & Consumer Sciences major. Best thing I ever did in college besides make Britt mine. That is neither here nor there.)

A few years ago, I compiled a list of books I wish I had finished in school, books displayed as "Summer Reading" at Barnes & Noble, books Oprah liked, books that sounded interesting to me at some point, books other people recommended, etc. I had already been in the habit of checking stacks of large print books out for my chair-bound grandmother, so during one of those library trips, I checked a stack out for myself too. And I opened one. And I read a while. And if I hated it, I put it down and tried another. And another. And eventually I liked one. And finished it. And another. And another. And I found that I was enjoying myself! And I would exclaim to Britt, "I finished it! I'm becoming a reader!" As long as I allowed myself the freedom to close a book I am not compelled to read by the end of the first chapter or so, then I was happy to taste new ones. And sometimes I laughed aloud or even cried. And I found out why so many of my friends enjoyed reading. It was liberating.

So why all this talk about reading? Well, I find that I read and read and read on the internet now sometimes (to the detriment of my blog it seems). I read about babies and child-rearing and nutrition and plants and I read other people's blogs to get ideas and then find that I'm hooked. I read whatever interests me. I often have a stack of books by my bedside table, most of them bearing some form of the word "pediatric" in them, but books of my choosing nonetheless. And I read. FOR PLEASURE. And I enjoy myself! I'm getting faster a little every year. And it doesn't feel like work anymore. And I don't have to think about doing it. I just do.

I'm a reader now!

The sun sets over the Blue Ridge Mountains

I am a resident of Charlottesville, Virginia. I live in Virginia. I live in Virginia. This is Virginia. There is a hazy mountain range visible from my front stoop. This is not Texas. This is not a vacation. This is real life, and I live here now. Semi-permanently. I sort of feel lost in space and time right now. I've been lost in time ever since I quit my job in February. I generally have no idea what day of the week it is or even what month or season it is. It's very odd. And now I can add to that not really comprehending where I am. I need one of those huge electronic clocks that shows in big red laser letters "TODAY IS FRIDAY, AUGUST 20, 2004" hanging right by my computer. It's not enough that the computer screen already shows me this information. That little bar is small and unassuming. I need something garish that I cannot miss. Something I can see from anywhere in the room. Maybe I should have this item affixed to my body in some way. I'll have to work on this.

So I hate my dishwasher here. I miss my old Performa. It was a low-end Maytag with the best usability I have ever seen in dishwasher configuration. There were specially shaped pegs on the top rack that perfectly fit the bowls standing upright in such a way as not to clang into each other repeatedly during the wash cycle. And that was a major space saver to boot! I didn't realize how much so until we started using the Whirlpool. There is no good way to put the bowls in without obstructing necessary space for other dishes. We have tried many options, and there just doesn't seem to be a good way to input bowls. And we dirty up a lot of bowls somehow. The utensil basket is annoyingly toward the back of the bottom rack, which means you can't simply open the door and fling in a fork with ease. NO...you pretty much have to open the door fully and pull out the whole bottom rack in order to put something in the utensil basket. And this is a major inconvenience multiple times each day now that we are trying to instill the good habit of putting dirty dishes directly into the dishwasher as they are dirtied rather than creating a mountain of dirty dishes in the sink (which inevitably turns into a mountain range of dirty dishes all over the kitchen cabinets and stove top). And to top it all off, the soap dispenser doesn't open. Nope. You just have to hope the "prewash" bin full of soap will do the job. So what we really have is a dish sterilizer rather than a dishwasher. It is highly frustrating. Rodney (the unfortunate head of maintenance here at Squire Hill) will be hearing about it. Among other things.

(Cue Annie.) "I think I'm gonna like it heeeeere!" Why?
1. The sun sets over the Blue Ridge Mountains right outside my front door! Mix a little air pollution with the setting sun, and it's an orangey-pink delight!
2. Whole Foods Market! Oh my goodness, I was in nutrition heaven. Now if only I had money.
3. So far a "hot" day is about 90 degrees with humidity around 60%. I successfully missed out on the hottest part of the Texas summer. It's like losing hours when you cross time zones. I'll take it.
4. I can paint the walls if I want to!
5. I can walk to the mall from my apartment.
6. BOSTON MARKET!!!!!! (My new favorite fast food eatery.) Vegetables! Need I say more?
7. There's a New Balance store within minutes of my apartment. This is fabulous timing, as my shoes are shot, and my feet, legs, knees, hips, back, neck, and head remind me of this fact daily.

The down side is...
1. We lost a LOT of storage space that we were spoiled to having.
2. No Mrs. Bairds bread. (I sure do miss the smell of bread baking at the Mrs. Bairds plant as I drove over the 18th Street bridge at just the right time back home.)
3. No Ranch Style Beans.
4. No Saturn dealership.
5. The dishwasher is terrible. See diatribe above.
6. There are crazy drivers everywhere!
7. No Target store! (But there's one coming to a town near me!!!!)
8. No HEB, and no HEB prices either. Milk is $4/gallon! And people are shocked by gas prices!?
9. My parents are no longer right across town providing a convenient safe place for Ava any time I need to do something without her. This will become a challenge in the coming weeks.

Okay, that's all I can think of off the top of my sleepy head, so at 12:32am Eastern, I shall say goodnight to the Blogger dashboard and head to the kitchen for my nightly bowl of right-before-bed cereal. (The point is to dirty up one more bowl before the close of the day just so I can remind myself of how annoying the dishwasher is one more time before bed.) I am now faced with that pesky decision of which Food Lion delicacy to indulge in...will it be Bran Flakes, Frosted Wheat Squares, or Honey & Nut TasteeOs? Oh to have HEB here in VA...

This one's for Mommo

Okay, so I haven't had much luck actually POSTING any of the several posts I've written in the past week. I have been trying desperately to get back on the blogging wagon after quite a lengthy, cross-country-move-induced respite. However, some ogre inside my computer is preventing passage of my musings through the gates to cyberspace. FRUSTRATION! This is perhaps another vain attempt to get a post to actually post. And if this one should post, it shall be dedicated to Mommo, who so faithfully checks for a new post in vain, time and time again.