Like a Virginian

I know, I'm way overdue. Tons has been happening...updates coming, I promise.

Meanwhile, to tide you over, this nugget from this morning's breakfast table:

Bookworm: Mom, one of your refrigerator magnets has a joke on it.
Me: Which one?
Bookworm: It says, "Life is too short not to live it as a Texan."
Me: Yep, that's a joke. Though being a Texan is very cool.
Bookworm: Yeah, but we live in Virginia.
Me: Yes--even I'm not really a Texan anymore.

(You can see this coming, right?)

Bookworm: Yes, you're a Virgin now.

(How am I going to break this to my husband?!)

St. Anthony is the Best

I hate losing things.  Anyone who has ever been around me when something I need disappears right under my nose knows I may need a little space.  It’s a weakness I need to work on, I know, but very few things loosen my grip on my good humor faster than realizing I can’t find something and it was just right there.  This is especially true if it is 1) irreplaceable, or 2) expensive to replace. 

My mother went to Catholic schools all her life up until college, and when I was a kid I remember her telling me stories about various saints and how they generally had some particular kind of help they were known for.  My favorite is probably St. Rita, the patron saint of hopeless cases, but I’m also a big fan of St. Anthony, known for giving help to those trying to locate lost things.  While I am not a Catholic, I am a big believer in prayer, and at times when the stakes are high for finding a particular item I am frequently found pleading for heavenly aid.  Like the time I drove off with my diaper bag on top of the car, and later realized that it, with my wallet, cell phone, and a few other things were somewhere on the streets near my house. I went over the route several times, praying it would turn up.  I didn’t find it, but I came home to find a message on my machine from the man who had found it, looked me up in the phone book, and called me to come and get it.  He wouldn’t even accept any money as a thank you.  Then there was the time I left my favorite raincoat, a nice Gore-Tex jacket I inherited from my father, in the car of a total stranger on the way home from work one day.  You may be curious as to why I was in the car of a total stranger on the way home from work…you can check out www.slug-lines.com for the essentials of metro DC’s professional hitchhiking system.  Anyway, two weeks later the driver of that car recognized me in the slug line; we traded phone numbers and the next day I got my jacket back.  Chalk up one more for St. Anthony—and don’t let anyone ever tell you there are no more honest people in the world.  But I digress. 

I’ve had quite a few people tell me that I am well-organized.  What these people don’t realize is this is how I manage to maintain a reasonable level of sanity.  If I stay organized, I lose things less often. I try hard to make a place for everything and get everything into its place.  This may not sound too hard, but it has gotten increasingly difficult as each child has come along.  Trying to get the kids to put their things away is almost as tough as getting them to stop walking away with mine and leaving them who knows where.

Bookworm takes after me in a number of ways, one of which is an unfortunate tendency to forget where she's put things.  She has also inherited my myopia.  When she got glasses last summer, we established a rule that she would never leave them anywhere but the top of her dresser, which is too high for Aslan (who loves to play with glasses) to reach.  She did, of course, forget and leave them in the living room on occasion, since she didn’t need them to read and would take them off to give her face a break.  So when they went missing again a few weeks ago, though I was irritated, I was certain they’d turn up again.  They always had.

Well, they didn’t.  Bookworm was positive that she had left them on the end table in the living room before dinner.  She’d then gone to a church activity.  When she came back that evening, they weren’t there, but she figured I’d put them back in her room and she didn’t realize they were missing until the next morning.  I looked everywhere.  I made Bookworm look everywhere.  And then I looked everywhere again.  I made Aslan and Buzz look everywhere, and then look everywhere again with me following to see where they looked, trying to get an idea of where they might have dropped them (though both, of course, adamantly denied having touched them).  I don’t know how many hours we collectively spent looking. 

Being both too aggravated and too cheap to promptly replace the glasses (which are covered by a warranty against everything but loss, sigh), I put off getting her new ones.  Every once in a while I’d think of a new place we hadn’t looked, rush there eagerly, and then go back to whatever I had been doing.  I quizzed the other kids again, promising immunity from punishment and even offering bribes for information leading to the recovery of the glasses.  They had, of course, heard and seen nothing.

So last week I picked Bookworm up from a school meeting.  While there, I learned that her desk had recently been moved to the back of the room, a position that required her sometimes to come and sit on the floor at the front of the room in order to see the board. Feeling horribly guilty now about having let her go for two months without her glasses, I went home resolved to find them or replace them by the weekend.

That night, I said a fervent prayer to Heavenly Father, St. Anthony, and anyone else who might be listening.  I then rolled up my sleeves and proceeded to take apart the living room molecule by molecule.  I’d already gone over the girls’ bedrooms with a fine-tooth comb, emptying drawers, looking behind dressers, and even between mattresses and box springs.  Now I moved bookshelves to look underneath them, swept every crevice in the sofas, and looked behind the books on each shelf.  I found socks, puzzle pieces, and many other odds and ends not seen in this house for periods ranging between two days and two years.  It was during this process that I found myself looking with new clarity at our bookshelf stereo system, a compact little thing that puts out a decent sound for our living room with twin speakers and a little 6” subwoofer.

I’d looked behind this set a couple of times already.  Only this morning, after resolving to solve the problem once and for all, did it occur to me that the subwoofer is actually a box with a big hole in it sitting right at a three-year-old’s eye level.  The hole opens into a tube that extends back the length of my index finger, and it had never occurred to me to look any further inside.  A closer inspection revealed that beyond the tube, there was an open space several inches wide that dropped off into the bottom of the box.  Oh, boy. 

So then began the saga of trying to get inside the subwoofer.  On the off chance that you have actually read this far, I will try to summarize this quickly.  The speaker’s hole is too narrow for my hand and the front panel is very securely glued.  Creatively twisted pipe cleaners failed to do anything more than rattle the invisible innards enticingly (I had already disconnected the power, which involved unscrewing the bookshelf from the wall to scoot it out far enough to reach the plug).  Eventually I had to untangle three sets of wires from the back, unscrew and remove the back panel, push aside another set of wires to unscrew the speaker’s inner cover, and pop it off—finally revealing a hole wide enough to get my hand into. 

At this point, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a family of opossums in there.  Instead, I unearthed a hair clip, two sets of doll clothes, the broken handle from a toy pan—and Bookworm’s glasses.

I’m not sure why I went through all this.  Part of me asks whether it was worth it, especially when you tally up all the hours I spent looking before I finally got to the entertainment of taking apart my stereo.  Maybe it was sheer stubbornness.  Maybe it really was divine intervention.  All I can say is, pulling those glasses out of that box felt AWESOME.  Thanks, God.  Give St. Anthony a big hug for me. 

And by the way, I put the subwoofer back together—and it still works just fine.

Mother Nature'd Better Not Mess With Mom

Bookworm had an assignment this week for her Brownie troop to write a letter to the President. Each Girl Scout was supposed to think about problems in our country and how she could ask the President to help her make changes.   Now, a little background:  Bookworm was in a school group last year that encouraged recycling and picking up of trash.  We encourage this at home as well, but with four kids frequently heading in three different directions when we're out and about (the fourth kid isn't walking yet!) I have had to be sharp a few times when Bookworm or Buzz take off in parking lots to pick up water bottles or drink cans left behind by the less-environmentally-conscious.  Apparently this conflict has reached the level of requiring executive intervention, as illustrated by the first draft of her letter:

Dear Barack Obama,

Congratulations!

You are the 44th President of the United States!

But anyway, I have a problem.

Around stores and on my school playground people are littering all over the place.

I help Mother Nature by picking it up and either recycling it or throwing it away.

But that's another problem.

Mother doesn't want me wandering around picking up trash to help Mother Nature.

She says I can't clean up after everyone.

I don't know what to do to help Mother Nature if I can't pick up trash.

Sincerely,

(signed her full name)

So, Mr. President, now you know...the real threat to our environment isn't deforestation or rampant industrialization.  It's the vengeful Mom sparring with Mother Nature with one hand, while trying to get four kids and a cartful of groceries into the car with the other.  Choose your side carefully.

It's Official!

The Spotster has mastered forward motion! The baby gates are back in service! And Buzz is so excited she can hardly sit still. OK, so she generally doesn't sit still anyway, but this definitely isn't helping. And the little 'un is quite pleased with herself too.



So now I'm going through the house again, reviewing anything below two feet above ground that can't go into her mouth. Something else to do while I attempt to finish a little of the spring cleanout I started during Spring Break. I had to actually look back at the calendar to remember what I did for the two weeks since then, since it passed in such a blur. There were quite a few highlights: egg hunts at church and at Grandma and Grandpa's, our last NSO concert of the season (a marvelous Deutsch Requiem), turning 37 (for the first time), and surviving my first Blue & Gold Banquet with the Cub Scouts ("Jurassic Pack"). We did manage to clean out the garage and get a bunch of stuff given away. Now I have exactly two weeks before my mom comes to finish cleaning out the rest of the house and plant something in the front yard, which underwent a major slash-and-burn event last weekend--well, I didn't actually burn anything, but I dug out and tossed most of those nasty overgrown lion's mane grass things that could have been the inspiration for the Venomous Tentacula. As far as I know they haven't grabbed any people yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to find they've snagged a few garden tools or small animals by the time I get the last of them out. Wish me luck.

The real reason tape recorders are obsolete

This evening while I was standing at the kitchen counter getting dinner ready, Aslan comes up to me and says, very politely: “Excuse me, Mommy, I wanna be a wion.” So I moved aside, allowing her access to the floor mat I’d been standing on. She promptly curled up in a ball and began snoring like a drunken sailor. If this is indicative of the sounds of lions in the wild, no wonder lionesses have to do all the hunting.

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When I was a kid I would occasionally tape record myself talking or reading aloud. I don’t really remember why I did this, though it may have been in imitation of my dad, a communications professor who used to spend hours at home transcribing recordings of conversations with a foot-pedal Dictaphone. What I remember about my own recordings, though, was that I always thought my voice sounded really strange. I knew that it was me, but it felt like someone else was speaking my words. It was weird to hear what I sounded like to everybody else.

This sensation of having my words played back to me has returned with a vengeance since my kids learned to talk. The first time I really remember it happening was when Bookworm was about four. We’d been battling for about year over asking for things politely; we’d progressed from “I want some goldfish” to “May I have some goldfish?”, but getting her to add “please” was like trying to get my hair to hold curls on a rainy day. So we were at a family reunion watching a football game with one of Bookworm’s uncles and a few cousins, and the following exchange took place:

Uncle Keith (to Bookworm, who was snacking away on her usual): Say, can you hook a brother up with a goldfish?
Bookworm: Not if you ask like that!

We have since taken to keeping a little notebook handy in the house to jot down the priceless things they say, since I generally can’t remember them by dinnertime. This procedure is now so familiar to our kids that if my husband or I bust out laughing at something someone says, the kids immediately ask “Can we write that down?” even if they’re not sure what the joke is. There are a number of gems in this book. Lately, though, I’ve noticed that some of the most fun and fascinating things to come out of my children’s mouths are noteworthy not so much because they are funny (though plenty of them are), but because I can tell exactly where they came from. In the age of credit-card sized video cameras and digital recorders that have pretty much replaced my old push-button cassette recorder, the best playback devices in my house are the kids. Not that any of them are copies of me or their dad; they have four completely different personalities, but we can both identify particular traits that remind us of ourselves as kids, or phrases whose provenance is obvious. If you ever want to get a brutally honest assessment of your parenting style, listen sometime when your children are disciplining their dolls.

The playback effect can be particularly entertaining with Aslan, who is quite articulate for a three-year-old, but who still can’t quite manage the sounds “r” and “l.” With two big sisters acting both as models and as competition, she misses nothing and is rapidly developing her skills in reasoned argument and negotiation. But it’s hard to keep a straight face sometimes when her most earnest reflections come out sounding like those of an intellectual muppet:

I can’t have Cown Fwakes because I’m awergic to soy. But I’m not awergic to Cheewios.
Mommy, I can’t find my bwankie. Is it awwight if I bowwow (Spot’s) bwankie?

Or others, like her comment during a recent diaper change when I realized I might need to tone down my verbal frustration at her lack of interest in potty training:

Ewww. That’s extweemwy gwoss.

If her pronunciation is less than precise, there is nothing wrong with her perception, or her determination not to be misunderstood. This one from a few days ago sums it all up—I had gone upstairs upon hearing the baby wake up crying, leaving Aslan at the kitchen table with a bowl of pretzels. She came up to join us, pretzels in tow, before I’d finished changing Spot’s diaper:

Me: Hi there, did you get lonely?
Aslan: Yes, I got wost.
Me: Oh, you got wost?
Aslan: Not wost, wost! Oh, I dwopped my pwetzews.

The older ones come up with some priceless comments too, but with them the odd déjà vu sensation of hearing my own words played back tends to have more punch, often inviting me to reexamine both the wording and the attitudes that I’m modeling for them at home. On a recent occasion when Buzz asked if I knew where her favorite dress-up dress was and I didn’t, she responded with some heat, “Don’t you tell me no!” I have also attempted to break my unfortunate habit of speaking aloud my opinions of some of the less-than-considerate motorists in the metro area ever since Bookworm innocently inquired what a moron is. I sincerely hope that their flattering imitation of my expressions will continue to motivate me to improve their quality.