rock the vote

Header headaches! I couldn't get a good picture of acid green baby leaves to save my life, reality would not mesh with this vision in my head. Oh well nothing too unusual. I can't decide which new spring header to put up out of the three below so I'll take input from my regular commenters (thank you Elise and Nancy) and anyone else who has an opinion and wants to voice it by Tuesday, my completely arbitrary deadline for the spring header debut. It's not like I've got a freelance assignment due Monday and have blown my afternoon and early evening on the headers, nah.

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i've fallen and i can't get up

Yeah, the picture is totally unrelated to this post. I just love seeing chubby toddler legs, especially Oona's, in a micro mini. I fell down the stairs yesterday while carrying my basket of laundry, it wasn't even overflowing with dirty clothes the way it usually is. The good thing - I was already halfway down the stairs. The bad thing - our stairs aren't carpeted so I felt all of those 7 steps I slid down on my back. It could have been worse - at least I wasn't carrying Oona and the laundry. Today I feel like someone took a bat to my back but I'm remarkably bruise-free, which I don't understand since I frequently find nasty, large bruises on my legs and can't even recall what could have caused them. Guess I'll have to be careful about coming downstairs all carefree in socks. A friend of Toby's visited us with his wife and year old son two Thanksgivings ago. They had a different method of parenting than us which caused some conflict between Toby and his friend and much handwringing on my part. Their son fell down our stairs three times and I honestly don't know how he survived one fall let alone three! I wince just thinking about it.

ouch!

Poor Owen got his finger caught in the car door yesterday. We stopped at Whole Foods after he was done with school to pick up some groceries and I opened his door for him (switched to childproof lock after he opened the car door on the highway last year) and told him to shut his door and come around to the other side of the car where I was getting Oona out. We've done this many many times before with no incident. But yesterday I see him yanking on the door through the window and yelled over annoyed, to ask him what he was doing. He didn't answer so I ran over and found him bawling, trying to open the door on his trapped finger. Oh dear! Did I ever feel bad for being annoyed and I felt doubly bad for having him do something he was possibly to young for. I opened the door and his index finger was rather deflated from where it had been stuck between door and car but fortunately, thank f*cking God, it wasn't horribly mangled and not so flattened that it looked like his bone was affected. It started to turn red and swell so we ran inside and I got ice from the fish department while I was trying to calm Owen down, I bribed him with a cookie and strawberry milk (an exception to the norm since he's not allowed sweets until he starts being less picky and eating meals more regularly). The bribe worked. The tears were gone and he started bending his fingers saying that it didn't hurt so much. But once we got to the checkout I realized that I had left my wallet at home and Owen, on cue, started crying again. I felt so awful, like a failed parent. We drove home for my wallet. I called his doctor's office to see what I should do about his finger and then Toby to break the news, of course I won't talk on a cell phone while driving so all this took a while. We went back to Whole Foods and Owen got his bribe and Oona and I got cookies too. All was well in the world and by bedtime his finger was back to it's normal size with just a slight red mark where it had gotten pinched. Thank God Owen is a skinny boy. I think his finger is so thin that it saved him from a more painful injury and me from worse parent guilt.

look out jackie chan

Owen's got a yellow belt. He was able to karate chop through his block of wood on the first try. Yeah, if you look at the date in the lower corner you'll notice I'm woefully behind in posting this. After he got his belt we all went to McDonalds - how American! We boycotted McDonalds for close to four years but finally folded because cuilinary plebian that I am I absolutely love their fries and cheeseburgers. It also seemed unfair to keep Owen from the place with the clown and playground that he would get so excited about seeing when we drove past. We don't go that often, more of a special occasion for Owen, but it's definitely a reality check on morbid obesity - I'd say 75% of the women we see their are close to 100 pounds overweight. The one picture gives you an idea of just how narrow the space is where they practice, good thing they're all so small. Toby is usually the one to take Owen to karate, Oona and I head to the gym for that hour. Toby has told me Owen's favorite thing to do in class is spar with the big sticks that resemble Q-tips. The sticks are probably taller than him.

april is the cruelest month

I am exasperated! The weather won't become nice and springlike and I'm sick to death of looking at the dead hydrangea header on the top of my blog. So dark, dreary and depressing. I want nice springy green baby leaves from a tree on a clear blue backdrop of sky. Why won't the weather conform? I look at the lovely, photo-filled, Portland,Oregon based blogs and they've had pictures of flowers and other springtime loveliness for weeks but here in the Steel city everything is grey. So I bring you our Easter eggs, they're a sorry lot but at least they're colorful.

lowest common denominator

So now everyone knows that Larry Birkhead is indeed Dannielynn's biological father, as if there was ever any doubt. I know I was thinking it was Zsa Zsa Gabor's hubbie for some time, class act that Prince. I think the only thing missing from the news conference about this yesterday was Maury Povich to announce the paternity results. I fear for our country when this is all the news we know and any world news is just a blip on our consciousness. My head is inundated with so much vapid, celebrity trivia I think it might explode. Poor Dannielynn, does she stand a chance when she's been on ET and Inside Edition daily since birth?

american experience

PBS had a wonderful documentary about Jim Jones and the Jonestown mass suicide on American Experience last night. I was nine when events at Jonestown occured so I remember hearing stuff about it but didn't know the specifics. It was such a tragedy and the mass suicide should really be viewed as a mass murder because so many of the members were desperate to leave but feared they couldn't because Jim Jones set up an environment of isolation, sleep deprivation & paranoia. Over 250 children died on that day which is so unspeakably sad. Not to mention that the day of the attack his armed guards shot and killed a congressman (who had come to Jonestown on a fact finding mission and was in the process of returning to the states) along with four others. They interviewed former members of the Peoples Temple (Jones' cult) and a few of those interivewed were at Jonestown that day and lost mothers, wives & children, they escaped death by running into the jungle. Completely horrific events but it's fascinating to see how Jones started his church and then went nuts. He had a lot of innnovative ideas at the time - having a church that integrated blacks and whites, he was pretty progressive socially and the church stressed activism, I had no idea the political clout Jones had in the 70s. Unfortunately Jones was also a paranoid meglomaniac with a huge appetite for sex and drugs. I'd say rule #1 when considering joining a church is to be skeptical if the preacher wears dark sunglasses during sermons and bears a passing resemblance to Elvis in his decline. Rule #2 would be to question a religious organization that works on an atmosphere of sleep deprivation and hampering communication with close family members. I really feel for people that joined this church. During the 60s & 70s there was so much upheaval and I can understand people seaching for greater meaning in life. It's so sad when searchers (who I think are admirable people) get caught up in crap like this.

if it's not one thing...

It's your mother. Wynonna Judd said that on an episode of Oprah and I instantly liked her. Don't know all that much about her but she seemed so honest, forthright and funny while being surrounded by so much dysfunction in her life. That poor woman has gone through quite a lot of suffering. Seems almost like a prerequisite if you're going to be a country singer.

Owen's Easter break started today, he goes back to school on Tuesday. It stinks that the next 5 days are supposed to be cold with flurries. Plus we're trapped at home because Toby needed to take the car to go visit a steelmill. He asked Owen if he'd like to go visit one with him some day and I instantly said under my breath so Owen couldn't hear from the back seat, 'wouldn't that be kind of dangerous?' as I visualized Owen falling into a vat of molten steel. I seriously think I've got a case of hypochondria by proxy or I guess it's more like catastrophe by proxy. I worry about my kids safety constantly, to the point where it's a neverending litany of my brain saying 'watch out' over everything, constantly picking at that fight or flight response. I know that part of it is a result of my pregnancy with Oona, where I like to joke that I went from four months of throwing up, and losing a lot of weight in the process, to a five month panic attack. Having the hyperemesis was horrible and debilitating, Owen spent that fist trimester of my pregnancy being babysat by PBS while I alternated between the bathroom and the couch. I went to the ER five times, I probably could have gone daily to get rehydrated but stopped going because I had to dry heave in the waiting room for 3 hours before they would see me, I figured I'd rather be dehydrated in the comfort of my own home. When I finally stopped throwing up I could barely walk more than a block my muscles had atrophied so much from lying around all day. But I'd rather be that sick for my whole pregnancy than deal with how I lost my mind once the hyperemesis stopped. A week after the throwing up stopped my worrying about Oona's health started. I became convinced that she would die before she was born. This became an all consuming thought to the point where I couldn't get more than four hours sleep a night and Owen had to go into daycare because I couldn't function as a mother. I regret all the pain and frustration I put people through, but what I regret most is that my son saw me at such a low point and would tell me 'It's okay Mommy' when I couldn't stop crying. No child should be put in that position. My ob/gyn wanted me to take medication but I refused, concerned about how it might affect the baby. She tried to have me hospitalized for a few days, in a psych ward but I backed out of going at the last minute. My ob/gyn and all the mental health professionals were very concerned that once Oona was born I was going to plummet even deeper into my depression, which was already considered severe. But that's the remarkable thing, when Oona was born, alive and healthy and beautiful, the worrying about her surviving started to abate. Don't get me wrong, I was still worrying about her a lot more than the average Mom. I still do. My worry is a vicious muscle memory. But it didn't get worse. It's hard to imagine it getting worse when I look back on how bad I was. When I look back on that time it scares me and I feel quite sad that I couldn't enjoy what for many is a joyous time. I actually got mad that one of Toby's coworkers decided to throw a shower for the baby, I felt she was jinxing Oona's life by having a shower before she was born. I wouldn't buy any baby clothes, wouldn't decorate her room, wouldn't let Toby put the crib together until she was born. Needless to say, Toby deserves some special award for what he went through. My ob/gyn too, who was wonderful throughout and told me hormones can really do a number on some people. Bet she breathed a big sigh of relief when I told her I wouldn't be having any more children.

time in a bottle

I was looking at photos I've got stored in random folders on my desktop when I came upon this. My computer desktop is as cluttered as my house. One of the things I miss about being single is that my life was a lot more organized. I was also able to read on a regular basis and go see movies in movie theaters, imagine? You know it's bad if I long for a child-free week in order to clean and declutter the house.

Anyhow this photo is Owen on his first day of pre-k. He looks so cute to me (this jpeg has compressed horribly though and given him a crabapple face). I really should have worked on his hair more for his first day. Look at those tufts of hair horns poking out on the sides, the kid has a lot of cowlicks on his head. He also needed to use the bathrooom as soon as we got into school and they had no paper towels, starting the school year off right. So guess where he wound up wiping his hands? I know there are days that drag, where I'm watching the clock, counting down the minutes until Toby gets back from work. But it all can go by so fast, he's already looking more and more like a boy, losing the lovely chubbiness that toddlers have. I'll probably bawl when the day comes that he no longer wants me to lie down with him, 'just for a minute mama' with his small finger held up, at bedtime.