I need a pause button

It's happening again. It's been happening steadily and perceptibly every year of my life, so I don't know why I'm wasting time remarking on it, except that doing so is getting me to sit down and write. Obviously, I've not been making myself do that much lately, and it's certainly not for lack of material.

Anyway, the phenomenon about which I am circling is the acceleration of time. Back in the pre-Internet Dark Ages when I studied physics in college, I'm pretty sure I remember reading that if you are traveling at relativistic speeds (like, much faster than the rate at which I have to travel in order to catch a rapidly crawling rugrat before she reaches the stairs) that time as we know it slows down. So does it follow that if I'm moving at an absolutely anti-relativistic slog, that time speeds up? Because that is what it feels like.

Things are a little better since school started again. It was tougher than I expected having the extra week of summer this year, due to Northern Virginia's stubborn insistence that school can't start before Labor Day even when that means waiting almost a third of the way through September. Having kids who are a little older is both a blessing and a curse; they are both more capable of entertaining themselves, and more likely to come complain about being bored when stuck inside on a rainy day and we've already been to the library. We had a number of excursions this summer, and a nice weeklong visit from Nana, but by September I think we were all thoroughly tired of being in the same house. Having looked forward to having half my houseful gainfully employed for most of the day, I still had to stop and count their ages on my fingers to be sure I could really have two kids getting on a school bus, and a third going to preschool.

In the last few weeks, it seems like the temporal wormhole effect has just hit even more frequently than usual, with one kid or another saying or doing something that I was sure they were years too young for. Bookworm made dinner pretty much by herself twice in the last ten days. (OK, so it was mac and cheese both times. She still did it herself.) Buzz picked up tying her shoes in one sitting (she was properly motivated by a new pair of tennis shoes I'd picked up at a yard sale...she took one look and said, "Are those Sketchers?" Up until she asked, I hadn't had any idea what brand they were. I asked how she knew, and she said some of her friends had some. A guardian angel definitely guided me to that yard sale...six, going on sixteen...). Aslan is learning the gentle art of snappy comebacks; she was demonstrating for Bookworm her new trick of pulling her lower eyelids down to show red, to which her properly horrified sister responded, "That's a dangerous thing to do." Aslan replied with a cheery, "But it's a fun thing to do." And Spot came to help me sort through a box of old shoes to make sure that everyone has something to wear for the fall...I put a pair on her to play around in, and she proceeded to crawl over to the ones she wanted and brought them to me. I never thought the whole shoe fetish concept was really a genetically programmed girl thing, because I don't remember ever having it that bad, but all my girls seem to have it in spades. Maybe my memory is going too.

And to top it all off, a few short weeks ago my husband and I celebrated ten years of marriage. When you consider that we have shared six moves, ten job changes (between us), and the production of four remarkable children, it's almost hard to believe that it's been only ten years...but it's also still a little hard to wrap my head around. Still, at least I can look back and reflect with satisfaction that I was not, after all, insane to get engaged to this dashing fella I'd been dating a whopping seven weeks at the time he popped the question. Ten years later, my family are still the best decisions I've made. I wish I'd generally done better at keeping journals and getting pictures into albums, to say nothing of keeping up this blog, but I've stored up many years' worth of hugs, laughs, good books shared, wisecracks traded, and quiet reflective moments. A pause button for my life would not improve these moments--it would just mean I might actually get the laundry done.

Through pink-colored glasses

Bookworm got new glasses the other day...the poor kid has definitely taken my genes and gone one better as far as poor vision is concerned. Her eyes have gone from -1.0 to -2.25 in just a year. Fortunately, she is a good sport about it, and loves her new pink glasses.

Actually, she is generally a pretty good sport about most things, and is good at finding a bright spot in a disappointing situation. I was reflecting on this yesterday after an exchange which occurred when our new church magazines arrived. Our church puts out a children's periodical called the Friend, the arrival of which is one of the highlights of Bookworm's month. When she saw the September package sitting on our kitchen table, she pounced and had the table of contents open in a flash. Quickly scanning the titles, she exclaimed with delight:

"Oooh, look! 'Maddie's Grumpy Afternoon'! I love reading about other people's bad days."

After her father and I finished snickering, we asked her why.

"Because they always figure out how to make them better."

Nothing to snicker at there. Gotta hand it to those church magazines!

Wonderland

I got a very nice compliment yesterday from a first-time reader, which served not only to stroke my ego, but also to remind me how much I love writing these. So here is one of the several entries I've been composing in my head of late without getting around to posting. I've often admired the photo logs I've seen posted in the blogs of friends and family. I don't compare my photography skills to theirs--mine still need plenty of work--but this is one story that is really told best in the photos.

So we decided this summer that we weren't up to another long road trip like those of last Christmas and the summer before Spot was born. We've spent most of our time off this year hitting local parks, hanging around the neighborhood, and rearranging furniture in our house (which kind of freaked the kids out, but even that was fun in its way). But last week, for a change of scene, we dusted off an idea we'd gotten from some friends with kids about the same ages as ours. They had spent a spring break exploring Pennsylvania Dutch country, which is only a few hours' drive from us, and found a little family amusement park called Dutch Wonderland that they said had something for any size visitor. So we booked a hotel room just a few minutes away from the park, piled everybody in the car, and headed off down the rabbit hole.

Trip Tip #1: If Google Maps tells you to get to Pennsylvania by taking the DC and Baltimore Beltways on a Wednesday afternoon after 2:00, ignore it. We got around DC with only moderate difficulty, but forgot to figure in Baltimore's rush hour, and spent way too much time sitting in traffic. Thank heavens for portable DVD players. We took a more westerly route home in half the time.

By the time we got to the hotel, although there was still plenty of time to send the kids to the pool as we had planned, the thunderstorm had caught up with us. Fortunately, the kids found plenty to do in exploring the room, especially when we let them play with the camera.

Almost everyone got a turn.

They were very impressed with the big screen TV.

But the biggest hit was probably the makeup mirror, which had both Aslan and Buzz spellbound.

They took great delight in posing for each other...

and in snapping shots of everyone who would sit still...

...or not.

So the evening passed quickly, and the next morning we got up and headed to the park. Now for those of you who haven't been there, Dutch Wonderland is a great place for people like me who don't have the time or crowd tolerance to handle Disneyworld, at least not with a stroller-dweller who has to wait outside all the rides. Plus, I can handle roller coasters just fine, but just can't stomach paying six dollars for a hot dog. Dutch Wonderland is small enough that a day is plenty of time, especially given that we never had to wait more than five minutes for a ride. The rides are sized so that all the girls except Spot could ride virtually anything, at least with a parent or big sister along. The restrooms had toddler-sized stalls and sinks right next to the regular ones, and are also among the few places in the world I've ever found a changing station actually stocked with the paper pads. And the chief mascot of the place is a princess in a marvelously floofy pink dress, whom we had the luck to encounter minutes after crossing the castle threshold.

Then on to the rides...

Even Dad liked the Sky Ride enough to get talked into three trips. This one was Bookworm's favorite--she liked the view--though he's shown here with Buzz.

Buzz and Aslan made Mom proud by choosing as their favorite the biggest, fastest coaster in the place--the Kingdom Coaster. OK, it's pretty tame compared with anything you'd find at Six Flags or Busch Gardens. But it packed enough of a thrill that I was a little concerned about how Aslan was taking it...until we got to the end, and she immediately begged to go again. Sorry, no pictures of that one...no way I could get the camera out of the bag at that speed!

Bookworm was kind enough to stand in as the "responsible rider" a few times when Aslan wasn't big enough to ride alone. Big sisters are the best.

Spot wasn't able to ride much, and had to settle for merely being the most admired by passers-by. She was quite good natured about the whole thing. Actually, it worked out well, as she got some real quality time with Dad while the rest of us rode. (Aslan later asked, "Daddy, why are you allergic to roller coasters?")

We finished off the day by letting each of the kids play to win a stuffed animal. Here is Bookworm with her prize, won by beating Mom at a game of Whack-a-Mole:

By the time we got to the car, she was affectionately calling it "Direct." I asked why, and was told, "It says so on the tag." (Note: we have quite a few Beanie Babies at home.)

All in all, it was a fabulous outing. We took the kids to Applebee's with the coupons on the back on our tickets, then plugged back into the car for the three-hour trip home, arriving a little after nine that evening. My one complaint: by the time we got home, Dad and I were more than ready to head to bed. After eight hours at an amusement park and three in the car, all four kids were still awake. It's just not right. Maybe we'll have to take them to Disneyworld sometime after all.

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.