Fluent Soul

SHALL I POST IN ALL CAPS SO YOU CAN HEAR OVER THE JACKHAMMER?

2007-02-28T13:53:00.000-05:00

Ah, the glorious sound of a jackhammer! There's nothing more beautiful at 7:00 in the morning -- when you're sick and tired of using the shop vac in the basement, that is. The basement problem is finally fixed. Or at least they say it is, and if it should happen to leak again, it's under warranty now. Yippee! Rain, you skies! Rain! Rain, I tell you!

Oh, and a sheepish thanks to everyone who commented on my last highly pitiful post. I did go see my grandmother and a friend yesterday, and I've emailed some friends, too. Eh, I get stuck in a rut sometimes, and I just need to kick myself in the butt to get started again.

Now if you will excuse me, I must go do the dry basement dance.

In Hiding

2007-02-25T20:26:00.000-05:00

I keep people at arm's length. It's one of my many faults, and it has taken me a long time to figure it out because I can tend to be all here's my life story and everything about me sometimes. The arm's length part comes after, when I'm feeling naked about having spewed my life story. It's a balancing act, sharing too little, sharing too much, trusting too little, trusting too much.

Tonight I told a friend why I haven't been calling. I haven't been calling because I'm a bit stressed out and, frankly, a little depressed. And, honestly -- okay, I didn't tell her this part -- feeling as if I've told her too much and she'll figure out I'm not fun to be around. Winter does this to me. I'm not the kind of depressed that warrants any intervention, just the kind of depressed that makes me leave my kitchen in a hellish, crusty mess for days at a time and makes me tell myself I have been too busy to return phone calls. I'm not busy. I'm hiding, covering my nakedness. And I told her today -- mostly because she hasn't known me long enough to know not to take my sudden and unexplained distancing personally.

It's not only friends, and it's not only in the winter, and it's not only when I'm feeling down. Generally speaking, I'm afraid of being judged. I haven't spoken to my "best friend" in over six months -- not an email, nothing. Yeah, she lives very far away, but still, six months is a long time. It's not that I don't love her to pieces. I just feel inferior. She is (recently) thin, has a great job, parents with tremendous patience, and is practical and unemotional. I'm the opposite of all of that. But the truth is it wouldn't matter if I were thin or had a great job or any of those other things. I would still find reason to feel inferior and judged.

I have been avoiding my grandmother. Not even consciously, but I've been doing it nonetheless. I should have visited her last week, but the kids had colds. I didn't call her, though. I just let her figure out we weren't coming. I know I have let her down -- and not just about my failure to call or visit. I've let her down with my failure to be a good Christian granddaughter, my failure to raise Christian grandchildren. And so, when I'm near her, I can think only of what a disappointment I am to her.

Last week I went to a moms' night out with some other women in the area. One of the women there was a friend, and the others are just acquaintances. But during dinner I realized that the other women were making connections amongst themselves. Their kids were playing together, they were talking on the phone, etc. Hey, what about me? Oh, yeah, I haven't extended my hand in friendship to any of them. Mostly, with that group, I feel inferior because of my stuttering. When we are all together, my speech is atrocious. So I say to myself, "Eh, why bother?" But, as I said before, if it weren't my speech, it would be something else. Like the fact that I'm the only fat one in the group. Or that they seem so much more together. Or something. There's always something.

And so there you have it. I'm a weirdo. I can't stand that I'm like this with people. Tomorrow I'm calling my grandmother. And I might even email my best friend. But I doubt I'll be able to do it without wishing I could hide instead.

That's Me!

2007-02-07T20:51:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a book called Live Large: Ideas, Affirmations, and Actions for Sane Living in a Larger Body by Cheri K. Erdman. Stuart Smalley affirmations aren't typically my thing, but I found the book at the library, and I like to read size-acceptance stuff whenever I can. While many of the affirmations are predictable, the section about "creating your body image" caught my attention and has me thinking.

When I look in the mirror or see a picture of myself, I am less surprised now than I used to be. I have been working on looking at myself in the mirror, studying myself objectively, and trying to keep my thoughts neutral. The goal is, as one large lady on a message board I used to read once said, to see myself in the mirror and think, "That's me!" Just a neutral declaration, no cringing, no flinching, no sucking in the gut. Just, "That's me!" I have come a long way toward that goal.

And yet, when I go about my day -- when I walk my son into his preschool, when I grocery shop, when I dance, when I shovel snow, when I do yoga, when I am intimate with my husband -- I see myself as much smaller than I am. I imagine myself as "normal." It's not a forced imagining. It's just how I view myself when I'm not thinking about it and when there's no mirror to prove me wrong -- as an average-sized woman. This completely unrealistic body image has caused me some discomfort as I've tried to move toward the "That's me!" mentality. I even tried a while back to picture myself as I really am while I was kissing my husband. It ruined the moment, and so I quickly switched back to my unrealistic self-image.

In the book I'm reading, I found the following on the topic of an unrealistic body image:

When we larger women underestimate our size, we are not in denial, or crazy, or
anything like that. We are actually responding to a sick culture in a
psychologically healthy way: seeing ourselves as smaller allows us to act as if
we are a smaller size, which in turn allows us to move through life less
encumbered by fat stereotypes. We can act as if our size is not an issue. Having
a creative body image is really a tool for living a quality life in the bodies
we already have.

Wow. So no more guilt about it. It's a coping mechanism. A way to make myself feel "normal" when the world tries to tell me I'm not. Cool!

I'm reminded of how much better my current view of myself is than the one I had when I was a teenager and a size twelve. When I was a freshman in college, I briefly dated a guy who would later sleep with my roommate. But before any of that happened, I pushed him away with/because of my negative body image. One day he kissed me and put his hand on my waist. I panicked, thinking only that he was touching an enormous, grotesque roll of fat, thinking how if I couldn't stop him from touching me, he would figure out just how hugely fat and disgusting I really was, because somehow he had failed to see it. I pushed his hand away. He tried several more times to touch me (he was an eighteen-year-old male, after all), and each time I pushed him away, preferring only our lips touch. Obviously, that relationship was doomed to fail. He was not right for me in many ways, so the story isn't a tale of "the one that got away." It's just a strange memory from a place very far from here.

Sure, it would be great to have the body I hated back then. Yet I'm so much happier now, finally looking like my old body-image, while my new body image is that of the size twelve body I never appreciated.

Big Pants

2007-01-22T15:13:00.000-05:00

Until my previous post, it had been a long time since I'd posted about fat. You might have been wondering, even, if I'm still fat. The answer would be yes. Yes, I am. As I was scrubbing something sticky off a pair of my jeans this morning, S said, "Those sure are big pants." So there you have it. The three-year-old tells it like it is.

I think the scarceness of fat posts is a good sign. Negative thoughts about my body don't consume me the way they used to. Sure, I still get down on myself, and I would love to be smaller, but this is the healthiest I have ever been in terms of self-acceptance. Granted, I still dream about weight loss when I exercise. I wish I didn't.

I am trying to make exercise fun. I like to move my body. It's only when moving gets all tangled up with thoughts of getting smaller and starving myself that I dread exercise. I got an mp3 player and some free downloads for my birthday (no dishwasher -- long story for another day), and I've been downloading some music that's good to exercise to. It makes it fun. If I rotate the music every few days, I stay motivated and look forward to it.

My mind wanders, though. I begin to think, "Gee, I wonder if I lost a pound today." "Will my pants start fitting me looser?" Or, after a recent bout with the flu, "I wonder how much weight I lost?" These are destructive thoughts for someone like me, and so I try to stop them. I go look in the mirror to remind myself who I am. I am still fat. I am a fat woman who likes to move her body. I can even like myself that way. I'll probably never be thin. I have to make that okay.

"Those sure are big pants," S says.

I smile. "Yup, they sure are."

Baffled Again

2007-01-19T13:43:00.000-05:00

Years ago when I read Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, I remember stopping midway through to re-read the back cover, where someone or other was quoted as saying the book was hilarious. I began to think I was either missing the point of the book or something was wrong with me because I didn't find it amusing. It was well-written and moving and downright sad, but I would never have called it funny.

I had almost forgotten about that until I read Fat Girl by Judith Moore, a book that has been called "a nonfiction She's Come Undone." Each time I tried to comfort myself with the thought that it was only a story, I remembered the book is nonfiction. I won't give anything away for anyone who might want to read it, but I'll just tell you that the story is not a happy one.

Then I noticed the quote by Augusten Burroughs on the front cover: "A slap-in-the-face of a book -- courageous, heartbreaking, fascinating, and darkly funny."

Hm. I'm all about the slap in the face. And the courage. And the heartbreak. And okay, I suppose it might be "fascinating" to some people. And dark, definitely. But Augusten and I part ways with the "funny" business. I didn't laugh once, and while I was willing to accept that perhaps I had just missed the point in She's Come Undone, I would be willing to bet Judith Moore wasn't giggling, or hoping for giggles, as she wrote Fat Girl.

Out of curiosity, I looked up She's Come Undone on amazon.com and read the editorial review. The review contained several fat/overeating jokes. My favorite is, "Whether you're disgusted by her antics or moved by her pathetic ploys, you'll be drawn into Dolores's warped, hilarious, Mallomar-munching world." Yeah, "hilarious Mallomar-munching world." Fat girls eating candy bars are just hilarious. There was another remark about how her gluttony was "rivaled only by Henry VIII." Hardy-har-har.

Are these books funny to people because the world from a fat and abused woman's perspective is so shockingly different from their own that they can't begin to empathize? Do the publishers say "funny" on the outside of a book just because people will only read about fat women if they think they get to laugh?

Sorry, but I don't get the joke.

Grab a Book

2007-01-18T14:16:00.000-05:00

I've been tagged by Meredith!

Here's the meme:
1. Find the nearest book.
2. Name the book & the author.
3. Turn to page 123.
4. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
5. Tag three more folks.

I grabbed Denise Giardina's Storming Heaven, a novel about the West Virginia coal mine wars.

He wouldn't listen.

"Them coal operators aint angels, C.J.," he said. "You got to reckon
with it."

Hm. I believe there's truth to that statement even today.

Anyway, this was a nice, quick, easy meme -- just perfect for a day when S. has abandoned all thoughts of napping and is now taking off his shirt and throwing everything off the couch so that he can stretch out, lift his chest up off the cushions, and sing like Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

And now for the tagging. Okay, Teej, Writergrrl, and Susan, grab a book if you're up for it!

Two Concerned

2007-01-17T23:16:00.000-05:00

People kept staring, sometimes glaring at us, the other night when we went out to dinner. L's speech has been the worst yet over the last couple weeks, and right now when she speaks, her voice gets very, very loud when she is stuttering. Very, very loud. So loud that it interferes with other people's dining experiences. If she were just loud, we could shush her. But she's not loud when she's fluent, only when she's stuttering. Granted, she's stuttering almost all the time these days, so it was fairly consistently loud that night, and she right now stutters in a way that the average person might not recognize as stuttering. ("AHHHHHHHHHHH-AHHHHHH-AHHHHHHHHH-AAHHI WAAAAAAAAAAA-WAAAAAAAAAA-Want water." Did I mention she is VERY loud. And yet, it's not as if she can help it.

We just did the best we could, tried to ignore the looks others were giving us, tried not to let L see that we were flustered, and tried to keep the kids' behavior at its best so people wouldn't mistake her loudness for misbehavior, or our failure to shush her for bad parenting. The good news is that L seems to be completely oblivious to her stuttering now (although the SLP seems to think if she's getting louder, she is aware of the stuttering on some level, but she's not crying and asking for help at least). And honestly, I would much rather she be loud than frustrated or ashamed.

Now if we could just work on our frustration -- our inability to help her, the constant loudness of this family what with not only the very loud stuttering but also the very loud three-year-old who likes to make fire alarm noises and the very loud crying and the very loud electronic toys and the tendency of both kids to talk over everyone else even though we've been working on that, really, we have. I'm a stutterer myself, and even so, I am sometimes at a total loss for appropriate ways to deal with L's speech. I am surprised at my frustration, and ashamed of it. I confessed to my husband one night how frustrated I was. A look of relief washed over his face, and he told me he was terribly frustrated, too, but was ashamed to tell me. I can only imagine how lost and frustrated and guilty non-stuttering parents must feel when their kids stutter.

In the study of stuttering, there's a history of blaming the parents for the onset of the problem. These days the parents are blamed less (or at least less overtly), although they still might be held accountable for not providing a relaxing enough home environment for the child's improvement. My parents were blamed for my stuttering. A psychologist who had never met me told my father I stuttered because I was afraid of him. My father was understandably upset, and he spent years blaming himself. The research these days exonerates my parents. They didn't make me stutter, except in the hereditary sense. Their reactions to my stuttering might not have helped me to deal with it in the most positive or constructive manner, but they didn't cause the problem.

Now, as a parent myself, I am particularly sensitive to implications that the parents are at fault. A few days ago I began reading A Stutterer's Story by Frederick Murray, a stutterer and speech pathologist. The book was published in 1980 -- not so long ago, really, but far enough back that the parents were still getting lots of blame. And so we run across gems like this:

Sometimes, especially when there is a family history of stuttering, adults will overreact when a child is going through this normal disfluency stage. The danger then is that, by making an issue of his repetitions and prolongations, the adults will make the child self-conscious about his speech and actually encourage the development of abnormal speech problems.

So the thinking was that adult stutterers make their kids stutter by having a cow when little Johnny says a sound twice. It couldn't possibly be that the stuttering family members are the first to pick up on the subtle difference between normal disfluencies and the beginnings of tense/abnormal/stuttering-like disfluencies, could it? I'm convinced that stutterers have a radar for other stutterers. Sometimes I can pick them out before they actually stutter. Once, in a room full of speech pathology students, I picked up on the professor's stutter weeks before they did. They thought I was crazy until one day he blocked in class.

But back to the book. Only a few pages later, we have another gem:

Parents sometimes respond to the development of a child's stuttering by wondering what they have done to him to make it happen. This question is probably unjustified; furthermore, when it does arise, it can influence parental behavior that will work against the child's improvement.

Interesting. So even though the world of speech pathology is required to wonder if the parents are to blame, the parents themselves must not wonder such things, for such wonderings will cause more damage than the parents have already caused.

I am so glad when I read those passages that so much has changed since that time -- for example, the studies on biological children of stutterers who were adopted by non-stuttering parents and how those children were more likely to stutter than were other children regardless of who was parenting them; or the research by the Human Genome Project that found a very strong family tendency in stuttering despite the lack of any one particular genetic code for the disorder. I am glad to be raising my children in a more informed era.

And then I read the following from the handbook the SLP gave me on the program we will use with L:

[This program] accepts for treatment any child whose parents are concerned that the child is beginning to stutter. We do this for two reasons: One reason is that the parents are almost always right. We have only seen two cases where the parents were worried and the child was actually not at risk. But our second reason is that parents who are worried about their child's speech react differently to it. The disfluency may make them upset, nervous, angry, or depressed. These reactions are perfectly normal, in most cases, and usually stem from the parents' love and concern. But often, in spite of their good intentions, the way the parents react to disfluent speech communicates inadvertently to the child that disfluent speech is to be avoided at all costs. So the concern of parents may end up contributing to the problem, and we treat it as a risk factor.

It bothers me not so much because I disagree about the parental frustration being a bad thing for kids, but because on L.'s initial speech evaluation, the SLP wrote that I was "a concerned parent." Now, NOW, I know what that means: she didn't think there was a problem, but since I was concerned, she would humor me. It makes me angrier than it should. I realize they admit that "concerned parents" are usually right, but still, the implication is that if the child is showing only normal disfluencies and the parents show worry about it, then that could turn the normal disfluencies into true stuttering. The idea is still out there that parents sometimes create stutterers out of perfectly normal children.

And I admit I can't stop thinking of that label "concerned parent." I admit that I am thinking about how frustrated I felt at the restaurant the other night. I am thinking that maybe L saw through my feigned patience and maybe has been reading my worry and concern all this time and maybe, just maybe, I have driven her to stutter so severely. It makes no logical sense, I know, and I don't think I really believe it. I don't think my husband really believes he is at fault, either. But I know he thinks about it, too, and remembers the quiet, tearful conversation we had on the couch the other night, in which we shared our feelings -- in which we confessed our guilt.

Why Does She Cross Her Legs When She Blows Out the Candles?

2007-01-08T14:08:00.000-05:00

I don't know if urinary incontinence happens to every woman who has had children, but I surely know my share of moms who wet themselves when they cough, or when they laugh too hard, or when they are puking their guts out during their subsequent pregnancies. Which is not to say, necessarily, that I am one of those free-peeing women. Which is not to say, necessarily, that I am not.

My thirty-fifth birthday is approaching fast. By this time next week, I will be a year older. Ok, well, a week older, technically, but you know what I mean. And if ever a woman such as myself were to get smacked upside the head with a point to illustrate her advancing age, it would be a night out at the comedy club for said woman and her thirty-something friend, both of whom are wearing some sort of, shall we say, feminine protection from the wetness that could possibly present itself during a particularly funny bit. Hypothetically, you know.

In stark contrast to the sad (but possibly hypothetical) reality of having to wear a Poise pad on the first night in years I've actually been carded, I am looking forward soon to something that will make me feel so much younger and more vibrant: a dishwasher! I'm getting a dishwasher for my birthday! We initially thought we would have to get the compact kind because we have such limited space in our kitchen now. However, when the guy came to give us an estimate on installation, he discovered a way we could fit in a full-size dishwasher. Yippee!!!!

We used to have a dishwasher at our old house. I've been doing the dishes by hand for the last year and a half now, and I have to say I've nearly forgotten how easy clean-up can be. I'm going to save tons of time! And I'll even cook more! Yeah, that's the ticket! And I will try new recipes and make all sorts of nutritious stuff and make my whole family happier and healthier, all because of a dishwasher! It will change our lives! I am beyond excited! And now I shall do the birthday girl's dance of joy.

After I run to get a pad. Hypothetically, of course.

Holiday Wrap-up: Interfaith Issues and New Year's Hopes

2007-01-01T14:46:00.000-05:00

I used to feel that sluggish, deeply dissatisfied, post-holiday let-down every year after Christmas and New Year's. I feel none of that this year. Instead, I am pleased to have the holidays over and done with. Not that we had a bad time, mind you. It's just that I'm much more an observer than a true participant in Christmas these days, and staying on the periphery like that keeps the season not only more enjoyable but also more in perspective.

We had a nice Hanukkah together -- it seems like ages ago by now. A note on Hanukkah, if for no other purpose than to remind myself for next year: Those really cheap gifts purchased for the last six nights of Hanukkah should be even cheaper next time. Like three for a dollar cheap. Or homemade cheap. The kids will get plenty of stuff from other people before January rolls around, whether we like it or not.

One more Hanukkah note: The super cheap Hanukkah candles we bought were cheap for a reason. They were not only slightly small for our menorah, but they also were not straight. They looked as if they needed Viagra. And anything that causes me to think of genitalia during holiday candle lighting, no matter the holiday's level of religious significance, cannot be good.

Now on to Christmas. All in all, things went very well. My mother's behavior toward my husband was friendly. I think she was in a particularly good mood because the kids and I visited her church with her on Christmas Eve morning. Sure, my son spent most of the service either crying or plugging his ears (he's not big on loud music and new things), and he asked loudly, "Can we go yet?" every time there was a quiet moment. But my mother still seemed happy.

In the parking lot of the church, another interesting thing happened. I overheard that my mother's best friend had converted to Islam. Although I had suspected she had been wanting to convert for a long time (her husband and children are Muslim), I was surprised to hear the news from someone other than my mother, especially since I ask about this particular friend frequently since the death of one of her children. Later, I asked my mom if I had heard right. Yes, she said. Her friend had converted over the summer. "Interesting," I told my mother. "I saw that coming a while back." My mother said nothing.

My mother's silence wasn't disapproval of her friend's conversion; it was apparent from the conversation I had overheard that my mom was supportive of her friend and perhaps even a bit protective of her. So why had she not mentioned it to me? And then it hit me. Whether my mother saw her friend's conversion coming or not, she's not so blind that she can't see the writing on the wall now. I think she suspects I will convert and fears/dreads that day; she wasn't about to mention another interfaith spouse's conversion to me and push me further in that direction.

Hm. So while I still worry about hurting my mother, I no longer worry about shocking her.
The topic of interfaith marriage and religion had already been brought up, so I asked my mother whether the people at church knew my kids were Jewish. I was surprised when she said yes, she had told the other women in her Sunday school class. Somehow I figured she was keeping that fact to herself, hoping we would change our minds. My mother is generally a very private person, so I find it comforting that she has confided in these women and has a support network. I feel more free to make the decisions I want to now that I know my mother won't suffer in silence.

And that leads me to New Year's. I'm not one for resolutions, really. And so I will stop short of pronouncing that I will most definitely speak with the rabbi. I will say I'm more inclined to now than I was. And I'll avoid all those eat right/exercise resolutions as well, even though I would like to be healthier. I was ready to join the Y even, until I found out the price. (How in the world do people afford to go there?) So I'll have to come up with a better plan.

I started off the new year at a friend's brunch this morning. There were so many bright and articulate people there, and all of them friendly. My speech wasn't too hot today, and I found myself keeping to myself, reading books quietly to the toddlers who seemed all to converge on my ample lap; somehow that was safer than the grown-up conversation. It didn't help that I hit my head on the dining room's chandelier as I was filling my plate, causing a very loud clinking and clanging, and voila, yours truly, right there in the spotlight. So I wasn't quite ready to open my mouth and and feel foolish again. There'll be plenty of time for that, though. It's only January 1st.

Five More Things About Me

2006-12-20T21:11:00.000-05:00

I have been tagged! By Meredith! Yea! I feel special! Okay, five things you don't know about me. Um. Hm. This is the place I come to talk about things I don't talk about with my friends and family. So you already know the deep dark secrets that people in "real life" don't know. But I'll try to make it interesting anyway.

1) I almost majored in music. I was a clarinet player back in the day and loved marching band in high school. (Insert obligatory joke about one time at band camp.) I even played in the concert band in college my first two semesters Not having majored in music is not one of my life's great regrets, though. I don't have the discipline to practice long hours, and although I was talented for my piddly little high school, I was not talented enough to pursue a career in music.

2) I had a hemangioma removed from my neck when I was four. It was only about the size of a strawberry, but it kept bleeding because the necklines of my shirts would rub on it. I can still remember being taken in for the surgery to have my "mole" removed. I called the plastic surgeon "the mole doctor" and used to answer every question he asked me with a robust shake of the head so I could feel my long ponytails whip around and hit my face.

3) I used to write poetry and even gave several (slow and stuttered) readings in college. I've written nothing but prose for a while now, though. I'm not sure why.

4) When I was a kid, I had a pony. My dad raises horses, and we lived out in the country, so it wasn't that out of the ordinary. I rode all the time until I was seven or eight when I was thrown. I wasn't hurt badly, but it scared me, and I never felt comfortable on a horse after that.

5) In the seventh grade, I wrote numerous shameless love letters (all G-rated, mind you) to a high school senior. Sheesh. My face still burns when I think about how bold and stupid I was. It was as close to stalking as one could come in paper form. That was my first real crush. I was sure it was true love, even though I had never actually met the boy face to face. And, hey, I just realized how funny it is that I never truly gave up the art of wooing men with writing. I did meet my husband online, after all.

Anyone who wants to be tagged and hasn't already been, I invite you to tag yourselves! Be bold! Don't sit around and wait! Just grab the bull by the horns! Shout, "Carpe diem!" Take charge! Go forth -- okay, you get the picture.

And the Verdict Is . . .

2006-12-11T22:57:00.000-05:00

Mold. The wee one is allergic to mold. You'll excuse me if I fail to swoon from the shock. After all, I believe I've been bitching about our wet basement for nearly a year now. I had narrowed her problem down to allergies or enlarged adenoids. The allergist has confirmed the former with the scratch test (which looked more like a poke test to me) and is sending L. for an X-ray to see about the latter.

The doctor recommended many things in addition to the two medications he put her on. He said we need to scrub the basement walls with anti-mold stuff or a bleach and water solution. He recommended an air cleaner and additional dehumidifiers and a hygrometer to monitor the humidity in the house. He recommended an exhaust fan be added to our bathroom. Oh, yeah, and he said we really need to try to get the basement guys to come fix our basement sooner if possible. I spent the afternoon researching air cleaners, bathroom fans, and mold cleaners.

My mom called later to ask about the appointment. I relayed the saga of our 2 1/2 hour visit to the allergist, including a detailed description of the two, count them two, poops my daughter made during the visit, my son's pre-appointment screaming fit, and his subsequent kind and loving brotherly behavior during the "scratch test" that sent L. into screaming fits despite the thirty-dollar numbing cream for which we had sprung. And then I told my mother at length about the two medicines the doctor prescribed and about all of his recommendations for decreasing the mold in the house.

"So I suppose you're going to try the medicines and that's all?" my mother said.

Well, actually, Mom, my first order of business is to knit her a scarf of mold. And I shall cover her bed with the moldy dust from under the oak leaves in the woods behind the house. And I'm working on mold earmuffs, and even a little mold pillow sprinkled with soft and dainty spores upon which she may rest her wee head. Oh, and we're moving her bedroom to the basement.

Furrowing my brow in confusion, I told her no, of course we are planning to get the air filter and the fan, and we are going to scrub scrub scrub. She sounded surprised -- you know, as if we were too cheap and lazy for such efforts. Because she's just our kid, after all.

My mom makes me laugh. Sort of. Nervously, sometimes.

But anyway, L. was still nursing all the little needle pricks on her arm and especially the giant welt that the mold scratch left near her right wrist. She refused to get in the bathtub tonight, pointing out her booboos as an obvious defense. Because clearly, what kind of monster would ask her to bathe with such terrible wounds? I am no such monster, as it turns out, and instead I let her sit on my lap while I washed her as best I could, stopping to kiss the giant mold booboo whenever she held it up to me. Which was often.

Since the scratch test and the bath had already proven traumatic today, I decided to enlist my husband's help in giving her her first dose of the new nasal spray the doctor prescribed. I mean, really, anything stuck up a toddler's nose is just not going to be easy. And here's how it went:

Me: "Okay, this medicine goes in your nose. It might feel a little weird. Ready?"

L: "Yeah."

Me: Squirt.

L: Blink blink.

Me: "Ready for the other side?"

L: "Yeah."

Me: Squirt.

L: Blink blink.

Hm. So she's a huffer. Forget the mold earmuffs. I'm making a tiny little mold inhaler so the spores can go directly up her wee nose. Because I'm cheap and lazy like that.

December Dilemma

2006-12-08T13:38:00.000-05:00

My son goes to a preschool that's run by a church. We chose the school because some other families at the synagogue had sent their children there -- there's no Jewish preschool in the area -- and had good things to say about it. The school receives state funding for at least one of its programs, so they keep the proselytizing out of the classroom. Christmas, however, at least in its secular form, is, of course, explored and celebrated extensively. This is my son's first time really dealing with the Christmas season and being an outsider to it all. While we do go to my parents' house for Christmas and "help them celebrate," we observe only the Jewish holidays in our home.

Because I'm not Jewish myself and have no childhood memories of Hanukkah, I'm at a bit of a loss when it comes to dealing with all of S.'s questions. He wants to know why the clerks at the store keep asking him about Santa. He wants to know more about Santa. He wants to know why his grandma and grandpa don't give him gifts at Hanukkah but give him gifts on Christmas instead. It's all so complicated. I think I've done pretty well with most of his questions, but the last one, about gifts on Christmas, is more tricky. I would really like it if my folks gave the kids at least one of their gifts on Hanukkah and wrapped the others in Hanukkah or generic paper. However, it's not so simple when we haven't been doing it that way all along. Three weeks before Christmas might not be the time to change the rules on them. And besides, it's not just my parents. There's my extended family, too, and I have a problem with telling other people how to wrap or refer to gifts that they choose to buy for my children. I always thought it wouldn't be a big deal. I mean, gifts are gifts. But now that we're getting these questions, I'm thinking maybe we've been doing this wrong.

I have to admit it makes me feel uncomfortable and a little guilty when I hear him sing Christmas songs. He's learning (and the emphasis should be on the ing, for clearly that learning is incomplete) some Christmas songs at school. Last week he was singing, "Jingle bells, jingle bells, all a sudden way." I have no idea what that meant in his little head. His lyrics were so weird and so totally him that I couldn't bring myself to correct them, though. After school today, he sang it again, his earlier error now corrected, and yet, it was oh-so-far from accurate. Now it sounds something like, "Jingle bells, jingle bells. Jingle all the way. Oh what fun it is to ride -- one whore, us, and sleigh!" That one we might have to correct, but not until after my husband gets home and hears it. I'm not messing with it until then!

I guess, as a non-Jewish mom, I'm always worrying that my kids will be "less Jewish" than the other kids at synagogue. It's one thing if a child of two Jewish parents, or even the child of a Jewish mother and a gentile father, sings a Christmas carol. But it seems somehow more noticeable when my kids do it. I'm always afraid they won't be "Jewish enough."

And yet my son, after watching my husband light his father's yahrzeit candle recently, today pretended to light a candle and began to recite his own made-up Kaddish. It sounded distinctly Hebrew and even had a few real Hebrew words thrown in, along with an occasional English word like died. The rhythm of the language is in him. And clearly, when he does things like this, I see that he is part of something much bigger, much older, than this family.

I'm hoping a few Christmas carols and a little Santa wrapping paper can't take that away.

Evaluation, Take Two

2006-12-04T14:15:00.000-05:00

The early intervention speech therapist, whom I will call P., came this morning for L.'s informal speech evaluation. She happens to work with the woman who conducted the formal (expensive) evaluation, and she had gotten some basic information from her last week. After that, P. called me and said that from what the original evaluator said, L. probably would not qualify for early intervention services. She went on to tell me about normal speech disfluencies and how they are different from genuine stuttering. The call upset me, partly because I felt they thought I was crazy or stupid, and partly because it worried me to think that L. would be denied professional help when her father and I knew that her speech was not normal. Fortunately, P. has since changed her mind and believes L. will qualify after all.

When P. arrived today, she said she just this morning had spoken with the initial evaluator, who told her that she had (finally) viewed the speech sample tape I gave her. L.'s speech on the tape was "significantly different" from her speech in the clinical setting. I could've told her that, and in fact, I did when I gave it to her. Gee, I'm glad she finally decided to watch it. Anyway, after doing whatever fluency-counting test they do on the clinical sample and the video tape samples, she told P. that L.'s stuttering was mild in the clinical setting and moderate to severe on the videotape. Finally. Confirmation of what we already knew. P. listened to her speak some today and noted several disfluencies herself, including some occurring in the middles of sentences rather than just on the initial sounds. That, she says, concerned her. The secondary behaviors also were a "red flag," she said.

It sounds awful to say this, but I am so relieved -- relieved that someone else has seen the problem and can shoulder some of the responsibility with us. I knew L.'s disfluencies were significant. Now that we have that out of the way, we can get on with the business of helping her improve her speech and/or become comfortable enough with speaking the way she does that it does not interfere with her life.

Although I liked the initial evaluator pretty well, I like P. even better. She has a son who stutters and -- I didn't know this until our meeting this morning -- a father who stutters severely. When I answered the door this morning, she said, "I'm P. You must be M." It's the little things like that. The little things like gracefully taking away the pressure of introducing myself. She didn't do it in a condescending way, either, just in a natural way. The way someone would if she had lived with stutterers her whole life.

She also was able to detect L.'s disfluencies when she was across the room playing with her brother and P. and I were conversing. I was impressed that P. would stop what she was saying and listen attentively to the kids' conversation in order to pick up some of L.'s disfluencies. She has a good ear for this kind of thing. In the initial evaluation, I was repeatedly frustrated that I could hear L. stuttering while the evaluator was talking to me and seemed absolutely oblivious to the "evidence" right there before her. I hadn't wanted to interrupt her to say, "Listen! She's doing it now!" Today, with P., I didn't have to.

When P. left, she seemed absolutely sure that L. would qualify for early intervention. She seems to think that while L. is too young to start the Lidcombe program, there are aspects of it we could do. She didn't elaborate too much but will do so in our first meeting after the L.'s eligibility/IFSP meeting next week, I am sure.

Finally, one of the best things P. told me was a story about her son, who is in elementary school. He was in speech therapy for his stuttering for several years, and now that he is old enough to really express his opinions and talk about speech, he is saying that his stuttering, his blocks, don't bother him. He stutters fairly severely but doesn't let it get in his way. They eventually dropped the speech therapy because he just wasn't interested. She was afraid the story would be a downer for me since it didn't have a fluent happy ending. It was quite the opposite. Her son's story reminds me that even though blocks and severe stuttering episodes were very upsetting to me when I was young, they might not be to every person who experiences them. Her son has an attitude that I didn't begin to have until I was in my twenties. Perhaps the influence of a grandfather who stutters and a mother who respects and understands stutterers is part of what made his attitude so different from mine. I can't fix L.'s speech for her, but I think I can influence her attitude about it. And attitude is more important than fluency anyway.

The Basement Blues

2006-11-27T13:48:00.000-05:00

I've been feeling a little blah. I figured it was just the time of year at first, but, as is often the case, I was eventually able to figure out what's really bothering me. Fortunately, it's nothing serious.

Problem #1: A wet basement. Our first estimate on the basement repair nearly knocked me over. I thought I had prepared myself for the worst, but I wasn't even close. Very depressing.

Problem #2: Fleas. They are back. But it's too early to spray again. Wet basements make flea problems much harder to get rid of, I have learned. They love dampness. Great.

Problem #3: Snot. For over a month now, my daughter has had what they were calling a sinus infection. She has been on antibiotics three times, and she isn't getting better. Her doctor said this morning that she will refer her to an allergist. My best guess? She's allergic to mold and mildew from our wet basement.

Problem #4: Feminine issues. I was on antibiotics myself for a sinus infection a few weeks ago, and I am left with the antibiotics' lovely sidekick, the yeast infection.

Problem #5: Feminine issues times two. I started my period the day after I started using the three-day yeast infection treatment. No tampons allowed during the treatment period. Great. Nothing like being crampy and itchy AND grossly uncomfortable.

Problem #6: Holiday shopping blues. We've been worried about money, especially after the basement estimate that took our breath away. I haven't had any work yet from the part-time venture I mentioned a while back, and all the shopping for my family's gifts overwhelms me sometimes.

Now, all in all, this stuff isn't much to complain about. The yeast infection and the period are both only temporary. We had a second basement estimate today that was only one seventh the cost of the first one (and we feel better about this company for other reasons, too). If we get the basement dry, then the fleas should be easier to get rid of. Also, if the basement is dry, L.'s snot levels might decrease, allergist or no. And shopping, I have to say, will be easier if we aren't destitute. Bring on the sump pump, baby!

Happy Thanksgiving

2006-11-24T20:03:00.000-05:00

We got home not long ago from a very nice Thanksgiving trip. My husband and I have had some nice Thanksgivings since we've been together, but I think this one was the best yet. For the first time, my husband and I didn't have to decide which side of the family to upset. This year my in-laws joined us at my parents' Thanksgiving dinner. It was nice -- for everyone, I think. Here are just a few of the things for which I am thankful.

my husband, who has made the last seven years of my life wonderful (and who is currently washing dishes, bless his heart)
my children, who make me laugh every day
my extended family, who welcomed my in-laws yesterday
my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, who braved one of my family's get-togethers
my health
the health of my loved ones
our home
my friends, both on- and off-line

There are other things, too. Lots of them. Like The DQ pumpkin pie Blizzard. And Glide dental floss. And naptime.

A belated Thanksgiving to you all, my readers. And that goes for both of you.

Assessing the Assessment

2006-11-17T14:30:00.000-05:00

The early intervention people came this week and started the intake process. L's evaluations should be done and an IFSP written by the second week in December. During the private evaluation, which we had to pay for, L was totally fluent. Strange as it seems to say it, I hope she is at her worst for the early intervention people.

Her stuttering is certainly cyclical. She was in a fluent period when she was evaluated, but she is now on the downswing. Her original secondary behaviors have been replaced by new ones: whispering and tilting her head to one side. These behaviors are cuter and more socially acceptable, and so people now don't even realize she's stuttering. In fact, she's so quiet, people don't even realize she's talking.

When she was stuttering at her worst in early October, there was a day she went to the grocery store with me and drew LOTS of attention from people. Every time she started a sentence, she would repeat the initial sound, stuff her hand against her mouth, and allow the pitch and volume of her voice to rise dramatically. People thought she was just yelling to be mischievous. One man even scolded her and said, "Is that you making all that noise?"

Now she does the other extreme: she repeats a sound until her air runs out, and then, rather than inhaling again, she continues to "speak" by moving her mouth but making absolutely no sound. No one else has noticed this but me. It's hard to notice. Sometimes I glance at her and see her little mouth working silently, and I realize she's been trying to talk to me for some time.
She is communicating less, or at least making fewer audible attempts to communicate. When I catch the tail end of one of her "silent stuttering" episodes, I can't understand what she has said because it's either too soft or too distorted by her use of residual air. I ask her to repeat herself, and she just pops her thumb in her mouth and turns away. Too much work. Yeah, baby, I've been there.

Again, it's not so much that she stutters. It's how she stutters that worries me. She just struggles too damn much sometimes, especially for a toddler. I cannot tell you the anger and disappointment I feel when well-meaning people dismiss as mere noisemaking my daughter's efforts to speak; she is only two, but people's reactions to her communication attempts will help shape who she is. I wish I could protect her. I wish I could live the rough parts for her.

And I wish a professional could see her when she is like this. I wonder if they would be so reassuring then. As much as I want L to experience the ease of fluency, I hope she stutters up a storm the next time a speech therapist is near her. I want an assessment based on all the evidence.

Happy Birthday, L!

2006-11-13T14:59:00.000-05:00

Today is my baby's birthday. As hard as it is to believe that L is already two, her birth seems so long ago. Postpartum depression as well as severe pre-eclampsia that kept me hospitalized until L was two weeks old made it difficult for me to be the kind of mother I wanted to be right away, and when I think of her birth, I feel more guilt than anything else. I remember the intense anxiety I felt as the nurses brought her to my hospital room each morning. I remember a sense of relief, followed immediately by guilt, when I was put on a medication incompatible with breastfeeding. So many times I think I'd like to just start over with her.

Now when she comes into my room in the mornings, she makes me laugh first thing. Just recently she has discovered she has the power to get up from her toddler bed when she wants. This morning S woke up cranky, and although I convinced him to climb into bed with us and calmed him down, the noise had already awakened L, who soon came pitter-pattering into our bedroom, announcing, "I up!" As my husband hoisted her up onto the bed, she said, "Hi, Daddy!" She giggled as we all hugged and kissed her. She is such a joyful child. I have trouble finding words to express how much I love her.

Apparently, S does, too. When he leaned over to hug and kiss her this morning, he laughed and crooned, "Wittle metucky fwied chicken!"

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Nine Weird Things

2006-11-07T23:02:00.000-05:00

Because I'm all about the self-tagging, I'm stealing this meme from Writergrrl. Nine weird things about myself? This one, I have to say, should not be too hard for me.

1. I am fascinated by my children's earwax. I look in their ears frequently to see if there is any ready to harvest. I am slightly disappointed when I don't see any.

2. My husband and I met online. No, we didn't have a torrid Internet affair and meet for the first time on our wedding day. We met through a personals site, met in person a couple weeks later, and dated for a year before getting married.

3. When I walk, I do a weird spelling/typing thing with my feet. I think of a word, and I imagine I'm typing it out on a keyboard, so I say each letter to myself (silently) as I step down on the appropriate foot -- the left foot for letters typed with the left hand, and the right foot for letters typed with the right hand. If two consecutive letters are typed with the same hand, I have to wait another step until that foot comes down again to continue spelling. Each word has its own weird walking rhythm. For example, the word rhythm would be R(left) H(right) (left) Y(right) T(left) H(right) (left) M(right).

4. I am really good at Pig Latin. My father used to have long, involved conversations with my brother and me in Pig Latin when I was small.

5. As I get to know new friends, I notice myself taking on some of their mannerisms. It bothers me a bit. I don't do it on purpose at all, and it makes me feel like a phony.

6. Not only do I sometimes pass out at the sight of blood, but I sometimes pass out at the mention of blood. I passed out in health class in elementary school a few times, always during the chapter on the circulatory system. And I passed out during my mother's first talk with me about menstruation. (Fortunately, the anticipatory talk bothered me much more than the actual event.) Once I passed out in an acquaintance's car when she casually mentioned that her baby's penis had bled inordinately after his circumcision. Somehow we didn't make that leap from acquaintances to friends. Go figure.

7. Some melancholy music just sucks me under. Certain songs by Nine Inch Nails, for example, can put me in a deep, dark funk for days.

8. Even at my very largest and my most out of shape, I have always been able to sit on the floor with the soles of my feet together, my heels back close to my body, my knees touching the floor, and my head to my feet or the floor. It's a fairly useless talent.

9. I have a bad habit of leaving the kitchen cabinet doors open. After I've made dinner, it's not unusual for almost every cabinet door to be open. Is it dangerous and annoying? Yes. Does that compel me to close the doors? It seems not to.

L.'s Evaluation

2006-11-03T14:38:00.000-05:00

L. had her speech evaluation today at a local university clinic. Initially we were told she couldn't be evaluated until January, but only a few days later we got another phone call saying someone could evaluate her sooner after all. It turns out they weren't initially anxious to see L because of her age; stuttering apparently begins when children develop more complex expressive language skills. To quote the speech pathologist, "When I first heard that a twenty-two month old had been referred for a fluency evaluation, I said, 'It's impossible. She's too young.' But then when I read the case history and the sample sentences she was saying, I decided okay, maybe I'm wrong."

During the evaluation, L. was incredibly fluent. Naturally. It reminds me of the Michigan J. Frog cartoon. There were only two or three moments when she stuttered, and even those were minor. I did, however, give them a tape of her talking at home, one segment from several weeks ago when her speech was quite severe, and one segment done last night when she was just mildly disfluent. Once they watch the tape, they'll realize why I took her in, I'm sure.

The plan right now (pre video viewing, of course) is to watch her for a while. They will contact me once or twice a month to check in, at which point we will decide whether or not they should see her again, based on how her speech is then. I am also to call if it becomes severe again. They gave me a list of things to do (slow my speech, encourage turn-taking when both kids are vying for the spotlight, etc.) , most of which they said they noticed I'm already doing. If L is still stuttering in 12 months, they/we will start an intervention program that seems to work well with preschoolers.

L. was very well-behaved for the evaluation and just ate up all the attention. She did manage to embarrass me a bit with her insistence that every doll's clothes must come off. Both the pathologist and her student couldn't get over L's language level. They were most impressed with her use of the word manatee (she saw one at the zoo and liked it) and the sentence, "I pretending Mommy a bunny." It was kind of funny watching these two grown women nearly wet themselves over the jabberings of a small child. The elder woman was orgasmic over L's correct use of the "-ing" ending.

Because I'm too lazy to put the rest in paragraph form, here are a few of the main points from our post-evaluation conversation:

L's good language skills give her a better shot of overcoming stuttering.
Secondary behaviors are indeed rare in children, but they are not unheard of.
L's being a girl gives her a better chance of outgrowing the stuttering.
The fact that my dad and brother outgrew their stuttering is another sign in her favor.
Stuttering usually begins very mildly and without any tension. It's rare for it to come on so strongly.
They said it was a good sign that the few disfluencies L had today seemed to be without tension. (I am not sure I entirely agree with their assessment on that point. True, there wasn't much tension. But I think it was there. Just a touch, under the surface. Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive, or perhaps it is my stuttering radar picking up on what others don't hear. I'll hope for the former.)
They recommend the Lidcombe Program of Early Stuttering Intervention if she does happen to continue to stutter after twelve months. (I had my initial misgivings about the program when they first explained it to me, but the more I learn, the more optimistic I am about it.)

Overall, I am pleased with the evaluation and the professionalism of the evaluators. They were really good with my daughter and did indeed know their stuff. And they left me with the hope that L might very well shrug this thing off and trample all over it like a jacket she's determined not to wear. Nothing would make me happier.

Hello Operator

2006-10-26T14:57:00.000-04:00

Have you heard of video phones for the deaf? And that there are now video relay services in addition to the old text relay services so that deaf people can sign their phone conversations and have a real live interpreter voice for them? Yeah, I didn't either until I got a call from a former student a couple days ago. Wow. Let me just say that communication is so much smoother with the video relay service than it ever was with the old relay. For one thing, there's none of the super slow talking so the relay operator can type, and there's none of that GA/SK business to contend with. Plus everyone gets to communicate in his or her own language.

Still, the relay, video or otherwise, kicks my stuttering ass.

Talking on the phone under normal circumstances is hard enough for me. I was in my late twenties before I really got a grip on phone conversations; now I handle most phone calls with some easy stuttering at the beginning to clue the other person in and to get myself off on the right foot. But the relay takes me right back to my mega-blocking days of yore. What is it that is so stressful for me? There's a lot going on with a relay call -- two different languages spoken, the message being relayed through a third party -- but the pressure really isn't on me; it's on the relay operator. Yet my throat closes up on those calls. In fact, it has crossed my mind that I could just not answer the phone when it's the relay. But I gave up the drug of avoidance a long time ago; one hit, and I'm a goner.

You know, one of my funniest stuttering stories involves a relay call. When I taught at a residential school for the deaf years ago, most of my friends were deaf. One day a friend was visiting me at my apartment and needed to call her husband at work. She and her husband are both deaf, and at the time, I didn't have a TTY. So here's how the phone call worked: my friend signed to me, I voiced her message to the relay operator, and the relay operator typed the message to her husband, who read it on his TTY, and then the whole process was reversed. Complicated. And a potential pit of stuttering madness.

It started off okay, though. My speech was reasonably under control, and we were able to get through the first few exchanges okay. Then, THEN, the relay operator, a very smug-sounding man, interrupted me and said, "You know, lady, this would be a lot easier for me if you wouldn't stutter."

Dumbfounded, I began the usual spiel to educate my listener: "Well, it would be easier for me, too, but I have a speech disorder . . . "

And then my blood started to boil as I thought: Is the relay not a service for the hearing and SPEECH impaired? Are these people not TRAINED to talk to people with whom communication is guaranteed to be ANYTHING but EASY? The humiliation of being caught off guard and of having to educate someone who should already have been educated, hit me like a truck, and I finished my "education" with . . .

"SO F*CK YOU!"

And I slammed down the phone. Only then did I look up and see my friend and the look of horror on her face.

She signed frantically, "Why did you hang up on B.?"

Oh. OH! I had forgotten all about him! And her, for that matter! I apologized and quickly explained what had happened. Then I took her advice and called the relay back to speak with a supervisor about the operator's need for some sensitivity training (I also threw in a sheepish apology for the profanity). And then my friend and I had a giggling fit.

The relay center, by the way, called me no less than three times over the next twenty-four hours to offer their sincerest apologies. The call had apparently been recorded. I wondered how many times they replayed my outburst. And I hoped I hadn't gotten anyone fired.

I guess maybe that's what I worry about when I'm on a relay call now: the responsibility of speaking and maintaining everyone's employment. It can be too much for a girl sometimes. I'm going to have to look into getting me one of those video phones.

Progress

2006-10-22T22:57:00.000-04:00

Remember back on June 9 when I did a meme including my goals for the year? What?!?! You don't have every one of my goals committed to memory? Sheesh. Okay, okay. Here's a link. WHAT? You don't feel like clikcing on it? Oh, for crying out loud, what is wrong with you people. Fine. I'll list my goals here so that you may refresh your memories. (sighing loudly)

In the next year I will . . .
begin my conversion process. (See, I'm being decisive today.)
find a pre-school for my son.
find a way to get out of the house at least one day a week, whether it's
through membership in some kind of organization, a class, or a part-time
job.
find a babysitter so that my husband and I can go out more.
go on our very first vacation as a family of four.
enjoy every minute of my children's silliness.

Okay, to be perfectly honest, I had to cheat and look myself. So no hard feelings. But my reason for bringing this up is that I realize I've done several of these things already. Yay! And yeah, I know, many of them were not earth shattering. In fact, some of them are just silly. But still, I know life can throw things at us sometimes and knock us off our feet, and I am so thankful that I've been lucky enough to be able to move vaguely in the direction I wanted to go.

Let's see . . . well, the conversion process has not started yet. But I have become more active in the synagogue. I know that doesn't count.

My son has started preschool. It's a good preschool we picked, too, I have to say.

I'm getting out of the house a little more now because I've made some friends. I am also (drumroll please) preparing to begin some part-time work very soon. It's the kind of work that is unpredictable -- I have to wait for them to call me when my services are needed -- but I'm just a few days away from being officially on the list as a service provider. Yippee!

My friend now babysits for us sometimes. She's awesome!

We went on our family vacation back in July.

And I am still enjoying my kids' silliness. I squander a few moments here and there when I'm feeling overwhelmed or grouchy. I regret that. But I love them, those little boogers. They're such cuties. I'd do anything for them. Even convert.

But maybe not quite yet.

This One's Going Right Back to the Library

2006-10-20T13:51:00.000-04:00

Last night my husband and I watched one of the items I got from the drive-through library. It was this video about children who stutter. Aside from the strange choice of camera shots and the uber eighties glasses the narrator was wearing, the video was just so-so. It was supposed to contain clips of children stuttering. Real kids doing real stuttering.

But we were left with the feeling that they picked four kids who were borderline cases at best to make the techniques they were suggesting look good. Either that, or L. is the only kid in the world who stutters so severely. Which is our fear. There's not much written or videotaped about kids with stutters like hers.

Okay, so there was one cute little blond boy who was shown briefly -- demonstrating both the prolongation and the block, of course, since the other children seemed to have never experienced either -- doing some hard core stuttering. But they didn't show him again in the section where the parents were using the suggested techniques with their kids. All the kids in that section were almost completely fluent. And little Mr. Blond Boy was the only child who didn't make it onto the cover of the video, too. What the hell? It's a stuttering video! Let the kid with the biggest stutter win for a change! Naturally, I considered the possibility that the parenting techniques had no effect on a more severe stutter and that any footage of the blond kid was destroyed. Or maybe they were afraid showing a severe stutter would scare parents? Or . . . or . . . what?

As a parent of a kid with a stutter worse than little Mr. Blond Boy's, I was a bit offended. And alarmed, really. I mean, I've said before to my husband that my daughter stutters like an adult, that I've never (in my admittedly limited experience) seen a child stutter that way. Last night's video viewing reinforced that idea. It left my husband feeling down about L.'s prognosis, too.

Not that we think less of her if she stutters. Not that the stuttering itself bothers us. It's the thought that she will have to struggle, that she might feel the need to hide parts of herself, that people might not always recognize her immediately as the bright and charming person she is.

I said the other day that she was demonstrating two of the eight warning signs associated with increased risk for stuttering into adulthood. She has already added a third: she has "expressed concern" about her speech (when she asked me to help her . . . which, by the way, she has done twice now).

She also substitutes words. She had conned me into reading one of those insipid, plotless Dora the Explorer books yet again and, pointing to a picture of Dora, said, "I-i-i-i-i-iiis D-d-d-d-d-----d-d-d---- (pause) She w-w-wear sssswimsuit?" She gave up on saying Dora and substituted with she. That is such an adult way to stutter. Crap, part of me is proud of her ingenuity. She's not even two, for crying out loud.

I can remember being totally fluent when I was a young child. Or, at least, I can remember not knowing anything about stuttering, at least not being aware of it, not ever feeling tension when I spoke. I can remember a time when I said what I wanted to whomever I wanted, a time when I didn't have to weigh my words or judge the receptiveness of listeners. I remember a time when I didn't know speaking fear. And later I always saw myself that way, as just normal, but with this thing that happened to me and kept people from seeing the real me when I spoke.

What if L. retains none of those fluent memories? What if she remembers only fear and tension and being different?

A Morning of Pampery Goodness

2006-10-19T13:34:00.000-04:00

Did I tell you I've made a friend? A really good friend? We met at the dreaded storytime last summer, and we soon found ourselves making playdates for the kids just so we could get together. She and her family moved her a few months ago, and it turns out that before we moved here, we lived only ten minutes from her. And we know some of the same people. Including another interfaith family. And she used to work with one of my best friends. Freaky.

Anyway, the point is that my friend decided I needed a morning to myself. She very graciously offered to keep my daughter (who is just the best of buddies with her daughter) while my son was at preschool, so that I could do whatever I wanted. Yes, that's right. Whatever I wanted. At first I couldn't think what that meant. And I admit I wasn't very good at it since most of what I chose to do was in some way related to my children, but hey. It was still pretty cool.

So after I dropped my children off, I went to Toys R Us to do a little birthday shopping for the wee one, who will be two in just a few weeks. Mind you, we cannot go into that store with my son, for it turns him into a screaming and whining beast. So I got to shop at my leisure and even purchased a Chanukkah gift or two while I was there. Yea, me.

Then, then, I did the coolest thing. Okay, which I totally could've done with my kids. But still. I drove through at the library -- the one we dared not enter yesterday -- and picked up an assortment of reading and viewing material for the family. This was my first time placing a hold and picking up the books at the drive-up window. I must say it was exhilarating. Okay, so I could've gone in today for I was without child. But I didn't. I drove through. And I see a lot of that driving through business in my future.

Next, I drove through another establishment, picking up a strawberry milkshake just because I wanted one and because I could do so without having to buy one measly thing for my messy offspring. I then drove around town slurping my milkshake until, finally, I went over to my friend's house and claimed my daughter.

It was a lovely time. Really. I'm pretty bad at using my free time these days since it's such a new thing for me. I feel like a cave man looking at a computer. He pokes it, chews on it, rubs it with a stick to start a fire, finally sits on it. Give a mother a fish, and she looks at you as if you're crazy. Teach a mother to fish, and . . . well, she says, "When the hell do you think I'm going to have time to do that?"

Um, but as I was saying, I had a nice morning. And it made me extra patient when my daughter, apparently paying me back for having abandoned her, threw a big fit in the parking lot of the preschool. I patiently and calmly peeled her up from the asphalt three different times, waited while my son retrieved his dropped backpack twice, and didn't even make an obscene gesture to the totally evil and snooty and perfectly made up high cheekboned beeyatch who, rather than waiting the twenty seconds for me to get my children out of the way of her gas guzzling SUV, tried to drive around us and rolled her window down, opened her thin little impatient mouth to say something snotty but -- and she should thank herself for this -- thought better of it.

Ah, amazing what catastrophes a little me-time will prevent.

Why We Spent the Morning Reading Quietly at Home

2006-10-18T14:52:00.000-04:00

We played hookey from storytime today. Oh, the guilt. But our last library visit for storytime ended in sibling warfare, serious mommy embarrassment, and some substantial kid grief over my confiscating the identical blue balloons over which they were fighting. I had to drag my children kicking and screaming (and I do mean that literally) into the elevator and through the normally quiet library lobby. If not for the kind look of sympathy from the first-floor librarian, I might well have been frustrated and humiliated enough to advertise both of my offspring on ebay that very afternoon.

So it was official: I became one of THOSE mothers. You know, the ones whose parenting skills I used to question silently in my childless days of yore.

This morning when my son asked if we were going to storytime, I said yes, but then I proceeded to remind him of the proper way to behave, and how he lost his balloon last time, and how if he ever acted that way again at the library I might never ever ever ever take him back, and did he think he could stay quiet and obey me. At which point he said, "I don't think I want to go."

And yeah, I felt some guilt that my warning was dire enough that I might have made him afraid to try again, but on the other hand, I was relieved that I had an excuse to stay home. Because really, it is hellish. I'll take them again next week. I'll be a really good parent then. Somehow I'll manage not to be one of THOSE mothers.

More Notes on L.

2006-10-17T20:06:00.000-04:00

Today was a really bad speech day. L struggled on nearly everything she said, especially this evening. I wondered if she was aware of the struggle. Actually, I wondered how she could not be aware.

And then tonight, after struggling on one word for fifteen seconds or more, she cried a little, tried the word again, and then stopped, looked me in the eye, and said, "Mommy, help me."

So I guess that answers my question.

Bedtime Conversation

2006-10-16T20:40:00.000-04:00

My Son S: Mommy, where am I going when I wake up?

Me: You have preschool tomorrow.

S: Will you take me there when I wake up?

Me: Yes, and we have to remember to pick out some nice clothes for you to wear because you're having school pictures taken.

S: Well. Okay. But I'm not going to say cheese.

Me: And why's that?

S: Because I think I'm going to say vagina.

Calming Down

2006-10-16T14:27:00.000-04:00

Well, things have settled down here. I am no longer panicking. I received my packet of information from the National Stuttering Association, and I have regained my perspective. The NSA is just awesome. I used to be a member and even led a local chapter, but then I got busy and not nearly as active, and eventually I failed to renew my membership. I rejoined last week. One of the booklets I got from them for a meager fee is called Young Children Who
Stutter. It answered several of my questions. Here's what I've learned:

Secondary behaviors can indeed happen in young children.
Even children who stutter severely enough to have secondary behaviors often "outgrow" their stuttering.
Only about 25% of preschool stutterers continue stuttering into adulthood.
There are eight risk factors that might indicate a childhood stutter will continue. (My daughter exhibits two of the eight: a family history of stuttering, and signs of struggle and tension when she stutters.)

Also, on a visit to my parents' house this weekend, during which my daughter stuttered some but not nearly as much as she was doing in the middle of last week, I was able to ask my parents a few questions. Here's what I learned:

I began to stutter at age 4.
For the first year or so at least, my stutter was not as severe as L.'s is.

I think what was scaring me last week was that her stutter seemed more severe each day. Finally, by Friday afternoon, it was improving. I was afraid she would struggle like that every single day. Stuttering is cyclical, I know, but it worried me to think that her cycles might go from severe stuttering on her bad days to moderate stuttering on her good days and never any higher. I see now, though, that she still has almost-fluent periods. I'm glad of that. She'll appreciate them.

And Teej's comment about L.'s having an advantage because I stutter myself reminded me of the stuttering daughter of an adult stutterer whom I met several years ago when I was active in the NSA. I remember watching her discuss her stuttering openly in a group meeting. I never would have felt comfortable doing that at such a young age. So maybe I can't give my daughter fluency, but I can show her by example that stuttering is nothing to be ashamed of. I think I was twenty before I figured that one out.

Stuttering Yada Yada Yada

2006-10-12T14:21:00.000-04:00

I talked to my father yesterday about my daughter L.'s speech. I mentioned it to him mostly because I wanted information about the beginnings of my own stutter. I knew my parents always thought I was just imitating my brother, who went through a pretty noticeable period of normal disfluency. But that was all I knew.

My dad says he never noticed my stuttering himself. The speech pathologist who did my kindergarten screening was the one who noticed. The pathologist told my parents that I was demonstrating the beginnings of what he feared would be a serious problem. They put me in therapy, but deep down they didn't think I needed it until, well, until it became obvious a year or two later that I did.

Initially I took this information as bad news. If my speech problem was hardly noticeable at age five, and L.'s is so totally noticeable at age 23 months, that's a little scary. Then I found some information that says a child whose stutter develops after age 3 is more likely to continue stuttering as an adult than is a child whose stutter develops at a younger age. So, oddly enough, I'm finding L.'s early onset of stuttering to be not that upsetting; at least hers isn't developing just like mine. I'll hold out hope that hers won't be as severe in the future.

The severity of her stuttering, however, still concerns me. From everything I've read, her problem is not a "borderline" one, but one that most certainly requires intervention. I haven't read anything at all about secondary behaviors in children under the age of six. I hope I'm just not reading the right stuff and that it's more common than I realize. The secondary behavior has evolved from just the back of her hand over her mouth to sometimes her hand stuffed in her mouth while she is struggling to speak.

She has also developed a strange way of dealing with the word I, which gives her much grief. Just yesterday, she was repeating and prolonging the I with much tension as her voice rose in volume and pitch. Now, however, she is repeating less and simply prolonging a gurgling version of I that sounds more like the Hebrew /ch/ in words like chaim and challah. Is distorting sounds to make them easier to handle a secondary behavior? Whatever it is, she's doing it.

We decided to proceed with scheduling a speech evaluation for her while we wait for E.I. to contact us. I contacted a local speech clinic, filled out and sent in a case history form, and am now waiting for them to contact me about scheduling the evaluation.

It was so bizarre calling the clinic and requesting speech therapy for my daughter. I told them, not so fluently myself, what the problem was and then added, feeling like a total dork for even having to say it, that "stuttering runs in our family . . . obviously." Sheesh.

Which brings me to a related topic. Someone suggested to me that L. might be picking up the stuttering from me -- you know, just imitating me. I'm all about guilt and blaming myself and all that good stuff, but you know, this time I think I'm off the hook. When I'm at home with the husband and kids, I hardly ever stutter. Even when I'm at the grocery or on the phone or any of the other places L. might hear me talk, I don't stutter that severely lately and most certainly not with that secondary behavior -- mine is more uh and um, thank you very much. Funny, but she learned to stutter all by herself. She's independent, that one. She grabs hold of a gene and just runs with it.

That's my girl.

I'm No Good at Waiting

2006-10-10T14:31:00.000-04:00

So I'm waiting for a call back from the early intervention folks. I'm impatient. I want a professional to see her yesterday. Her speech has gotten so much worse just overnight.

It's as if our Little Miss Words was flying along at 90 m.p.h. and hit a brick wall. She was chattering about anything and everything only a week ago, mild stutter and all, but now even the basics are a struggle.

She has developed her first secondary behavior. When she is blocking on "I" or "is" or "pretending," three of the words that trip her up the most, she now covers her mouth with the back of her hand. A secondary behavior at twenty-three months? I have never heard of such a thing. But then, I only know the adult side of stuttering. Maybe it's not so rare? Maybe it's not such a bad sign?

She has been laughed at twice in the last twenty-four hours by well-meaning people, once on the playground and once by one of my husband's coworkers. When she tries to start a sentence with "I," she blocks and produces only a choking sound that goes on for five seconds or more. People don't recognize it as stuttering. They just see this tiny child opening her mouth and producing a strange sound, so they laugh.

Today while riding in her carseat and trying to ask me a question about the song playing on the car stereo, my daughter got so frustrated she cried. I was driving, and I couldn't reach her to comfort her.

I'm supposed to know what to do. I'm supposed to know how to deal with this. So why do I feel so helpless?

Come on, folks. Call me back, call me back, call me back.

My Daughter, My Mirror

2006-10-08T15:38:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong, and sometimes you're half right. My three-year-old son quickly outgrew his pseudo-stuttering phase. I thought we were in the clear. He's the son, after all, and boys are more likely to stutter than girls.

My daughter, however, who is not yet two, has begun to stutter. And I don't mean the easy repetitions that her brother was doing. She's repeating initial sounds in words throughout each sentence, and she repeats the sounds at least four times. Tension and forcing have begun to show themselves, and while I've not noticed all-out frustration, she has most certainly resigned herself to stop speaking mid-sentence several times, finding it just wasn't worth it. This, folks, can't be anything other than the real thing. Dammit.

When I first mentioned it to my husband a couple weeks ago, he initially dismissed my concerns. Several days later, however, when my daughter repeated and semi-blocked on several words in a sentence, he said, "Whoa. You're right." And I told my friend about it a couple weeks ago, too, but she said I was probably worrying about nothing. Then when our kids were playing together last Friday, my daughter's stuttering was severe enough that my friend, trying to hide her look of alarm, said, "Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, maybe you should get that checked out."

It very well might go away. She hasn't been stuttering for more than a month. She could end up with perfectly fluent speech. And yet, with the family history she has (a stuttering mother, four stuttering great uncles, two stuttering second cousins), the odds are not on our side, and I feel the need to give her the best chance possible. Right now I don't know what that is -- therapy, or just a relaxed wait-and-see approach with careful monitoring.

Part of me is in take-charge mama mode: researching tips for parents of toddlers who stutter, looking for speech pathologists and early intervention programs in the area, etc. The other part, under the surface, is fighting feelings of guilt and sadness. I mean, it's not as if she has a terminal illness or a profound disability. I know what to expect, I know what she will need as she grows, and yet, crap, I hate to see the hard parts of my life repeated in hers.

Today my husband wanted to show us some photos he had taken at a little get-together we had yesterday. The kids and I joined him at the computer, watching the slide show of pictures, each one flashing for only three seconds or so. We were all commenting on the photos. My daughter had a lot to say. "I-i-i-i-i-i-s tha-tha-that br- I-i-is thaaaat brother?" But by the time she finished, the picture was invariably gone. I did my best to answer her questions, but before long she stopped talking, unable to keep up the pace. I could always slow down the presentation for her next time. But life isn't like that. There will be so many times when the conversation will be too quick, and she will fall behind, not stuttering, just mute. How I want to slow it all down for her, to give her the time and space she needs to let her words out, every last one of them.

This week, I have some phone calls to make. Wish me luck.

Alert! Empty Toddler Bed at Naptime! Summon the -- Oh, Wait. Never Mind.

2006-09-30T21:38:00.000-04:00

Today I mourn the loss of an ally of mine, perhaps the greatest savior of my sanity over the last three years: the double afternoon nap. Its death was a slow one. We all saw it coming, and yet we held on. Today, finally, I let go. For the first time in ages, I did not put my three-year-old down for a nap when my one-year-old went down. Farewell, free time. So long, afternoon solitude. Au revoir, uninterrupted blog reading. Adios, sense of self.

My son had been having trouble sleeping at bedtime. He had been lying awake for over an hour, or even getting up out of bed and sneaking around until 10:00. It wasn't like him. He's always been a really good sleeper. I suspected THE NAP, which he had begun to take a bit later and, oddly enough, a bit longer, was the culprit. But I looked for every other excuse. It's the difficult transition of preschool, I said. It's because his daddy was out of town this week, I told myself. Deluding myself was no solution, however. The truth is that he was sleeping too much during the day and then was unable to sleep at night.

So today he stayed up all day and wasn't even exceptionally cranky this evening. Oh, yes, there is hope he will be cranky and begging for a nap tomorrow afternoon. But in my heart, I know what's true: my afternoons will be a bit noisier from now on, filled with more whining and less productivity.

On the other hand, though, I will get my son all to myself, and vice versa, on weekday afternoons. That's nice. I think he needs that one-on-one time with me without his baby sister. Honestly, I enjoyed my son more this afternoon than I have in a long time. He's funny and sweet, and even if I can't read my blogs without interruption anymore, I have to admit he's great company, that kid.

Clowning Around at the Flea Circus

2006-09-29T14:35:00.000-04:00

We have had houseguests. I had no idea until one jumped from my daughter's hair onto my arm. And another jumped from my son's shirt to his neck. So I checked my cats and found them to be hosting quite the three-ring. Did I mention our cats are indoor-only cats? And that they haven't had fleas since the flea treatments/flea bomb shortly after I adopted them and took them home to my one-bedroom apartment lo those ten years ago?

Three theories:

1) The fleas came in on our shoes and pant legs and then found their way to the cats, who offered them comfy places to copulate.

2) The previous owners of the house left a few of the critters behind when they took their dog, and those critters made their way to the cats and slowly increased their numbers and only went to the children's bedrooms when the carpet was removed from the rest of the house a couple months ago.

3) The two salamanders I found in our basement last month were actually agents of the circus. Smoking cigars late into the night and speaking in hushed and husky voices, they negotiated with my aging felines until the cats made a deal with the devil.

I'm leaning toward Theory Number 3.

Yesterday was the great de-fleaing. The cats were treated. The house was bombed. We vacated for two and a half hours and fed the kids Wendy's Frosties way past their bedtime to keep them from driving us crazy while we waited. And so far there have been no new flea sightings. The cats are happy to be out of their evil kitty carriers, and I am happy that my children won't be getting any flea bites for a while.

And now, because I am not completely heartless, we shall sing the following to remember those tiny ones who fell in yesterday's siege:

Baby saw that when they pulled that big top down
They left behind her dreams among the litter.
The different kind of love she thought she'd found
There was nothin' left but sawdust and some glitter.
Don't cry out loud. Just keep it inside.
Learn how to hide your feelings.
Fly high and proud. And if you should fall,
Remember you almost had it all. . . .

Um, yeah.

Salad Island

2006-09-24T22:28:00.000-04:00

Personally, I prefer red wine vinaigrette or peppercorn ranch, but the hubby and kids are all about the thousand island. I used to like it, too. In my teen dieting days I forced myself to eat many a salad topped with the stuff, and I know that it tastes quite nasty coming back up. But, as I said, my husband likes it and has now introduced the kids to it.

"Mommy, I want salad island on my salad!" my son says whenever he sees greens on his plate.

Salad island. Makes sense to me. I've been enjoying his cute mistake for weeks.

Today my daughter, whom we call Little Miss Words, and whose vocabulary never fails to freak out her pediatrician, added her own interpretation.

"Do you want dressing on your salad?" I ask her.

"Yes!" She points to her plate. "I want Coney Island right there!"

So Coney Island it is. It makes it sound somewhat more palatable, makes it sound fun and whimsical and -- oh, wait, smelling a bit like greasy food upchucked into a rusty metal trash can beside the tilt-a-whirl.

Um, yeah. I think I'll stick to my "popcorn" ranch.

Adjusting

2006-09-12T15:50:00.000-04:00

My little boy is officially a preschooler now. This is his second week of school, and he is, let's just say, adjusting. By "adjusting," of course, I mean that he clings and/or cries. His assistant teacher cannot leave the room because my son is permanently attached to her. Today was the first day he actually cried when I left, but there were tears during the day last week -- mostly during music class during one "sad song" or another. He's very sensitive to music, that kid, and cannot handle minor chords.

It's tough leaving him when I know he's missing me, but at the same time, I know he needs to get used to it now. He's three. I feel guilty for not having prepared him better -- by putting him in daycare, by leaving him with sitters more, etc. He's the only kid in his class who seems to be having this difficult a time adjusting. It's not as if he's constantly in tears or anything -- he loves his school and his teachers and has learned something like a million songs already -- but he's just not adjusting as smoothly as the other kids are. Last week I worried and worried about it. It's easy to blame myself, or even to become impatient with my son.

He is who he is, though. It's not fair of me to expect him to be something different. Change is difficult for him. He's coping the best way he can -- by going to school (usually willingly) despite being afraid, participating as much as he feels able, asking for the support he needs (i.e. clinging to the assistant teacher), and pretend-play rehearsing learning circle and music class when he is home as sort of a practice for the real thing. If it takes him longer than it takes the other kids, fine. I have to stop comparing him to them. He's making progress at his own pace. I need to chill out. He'll adjust.

If I keep telling myself that, perhaps I'll adjust, too.

Notes on Socialization (And Some Notes About My Children, Too)

2006-08-11T13:55:00.000-04:00

Wow, have I been busy. In a nutshell, I've spent this week getting a life. I've finally connected with a few other moms in the area and found some ways to socialize a little while letting my kids socialize, too. Oh, this feels so much better. I also spent some time working on the possibility of part-time employment in my future.

The biggest news of all, though, is that Phase One of potty training is over. My son is completely potty-trained. Finally. He is only a few weeks away from pre-school, so you can imagine how relieved we are. He has been peeing in the potty for a long time and even stays dry at night, but he was afraid to poop in the potty. He would just go put on a diaper when he had to go. A few nights ago, though, he did his business where his business should be done. I have never choked back tears at the sight of a turd before. Let me tell you, I was deeply moved, but I did not allow myself to cry. My son's therapy will be expensive enough as it is without the extra years tacked on for dealing with my having wept over his poop. Now, my son likes to walk around, chin high, shoulders back, and say nonchalantly, "Oh, I poop in the potty all the time."

And me? Oh, I get out of the house and talk with other moms all the time.

PMS and the Library

2006-08-02T22:10:00.000-04:00

This post is laced with female hormones, the ones that make me particularly cranky and sensitive this time of the month. I didn't realize it was that time until I found myself crying as I walked the last half block from the library to my car this morning after story time. The tears didn't come exactly from nowhere. Although I'm embarrassed that where they came from is such a petty place. It can be humiliating to cry so easily.

Our trip to story time didn't start off well. We had to park two blocks from the library. It was already nearly 90 degrees. As we began to walk to the library, my daughter asked to be carried. Did I mention it was hot? And that she weighs nearly 30 pounds? And that she usually walks? I said no, at which point she began screaming bloody murder, dropping dramatically to the sidewalk, slumping and screaming louder. Eventually, through a mixture of carrying her, convincing her to walk while holding her brother's hand, and, at some points, pulling her along despite her incredibly loud protests, we made it there.

This is only our second trip to story time here. It is painful sometimes to watch my son with other children. He hangs back. He watches them but clings to me. He is three, but he is always trying to crawl into my lap. At one point the children were taking turns playing a game of using a flyswatter to try to swat a flashlight beam "fly" on the floor. My son was wriggling with excitement, waiting for his turn. But when his turn came, he walked forward slowly, gave one hesitant little swat, and turned back toward me. "Go on," I encouraged him, as did the story time librarian. So he swatted a little more, but not the way I know he wanted to.

It's painful watching that inhibition. He is too much like me in that respect. I was like that as a kid -- and, who am I kidding, as an adult -- always hanging back, always wanting to join in but not knowing how or feeling I wouldn't be able to do things as well as the other kids, always feeling as if I were on the outside looking in. How did I pass this on to him? Gah! I wanted to scream, to drop him off at the nearest daycare or preschool, to say, "Take him! I'm ruining him! He needs to get away from me!"

Then came lunch. They feed kids a sack lunch after story time in the summers, and my son, as usual, was very much looking forward to eating. He had asked about this bag lunch twenty times that morning. As soon as the librarian got out the lunches, most of the other kids hurried to get in line. I told my son to go ahead, that I would follow with his sister. He hesitated, although I know he wanted to go ahead. But he waited for me. And we stood at the end of the line, politely letting little ones get by with cutting ahead of us. We were considerate. When we saw a little boy had been waiting for quite some time for his lunch, we made sure he got his first. And then, and then . . . they ran out. That's right. We were the last ones in line, and the food was all gone. I watched in horror as she handed the last bag to a little boy. And then she turned, as if the three of us were not even there, and walked away to help someone else with something. Mind you, she never would have done that on purpose. She was busy -- there was quite a crowd there today -- and somehow didn't realize my two kids were going to have to go without lunches. She never would have let it happen intentionally without at least an apology.

Still, when my son didn't get his sack lunch, it was painful. My daughter didn't care one way or another, but my son, my son who is trying to get used to trusting teachers and to waiting his turn and to having fun in a classroom setting for his upcoming start of preschool . . . my son cared very much. "I'm sorry, sweetie," I explained. "They ran out. We'll stop and get you something else on the way home."

His face fell, and then as I waited for the inevitable wailing to start, I felt a lump in my own throat.

Geez, I told myself, it's just a sack lunch. It's no big deal. Yet I had to fight back the tears.

I took my son out of the room so he wouldn't have to watch all the other kids eat. I talked to him and did my best to calm him down and reassure him before we left.

And that's when it got really fun. It was now about 95 degrees, and I was carrying library books, and my daughter was refusing to walk. She had a kicking and screaming and throwing her shoes and socks off fit in the middle of the sidewalk. So I had to carry her almost the entire two blocks to the car, at which point I realized I had lost one of the library books, so we had to go back and look for it. Once I was holding all the books, my son's hand, my daughter, and her socks and shoes, I made my way to the car. And I was crying. Crying hard enough that I was making little noises, and my son asked, "Mommy, why are you laughing?"

"I'm not laughing, sweetie," was all I could answer. I saw the traffic going by, was humiliated to think how many people were looking at us and seeing me cry. There was no way to miss me -- the fat, sweaty, crying lady with the messed up hair and the two little kids and the library books. I cried all the way home. I hate when I do that. I wanted to model good coping skills -- okay, so the food was gone, we'll have fun anyway. But no, I cried. It sucked.

It sucks to feel invisible. It sucks even worse to watch your child feel invisible. And it all sucks more still when you have PMS.

Random Notes From Vacation.

2006-07-29T23:01:00.000-04:00

We've been on vacation this past week -- three nights out of town, and the rest just enjoying ourselves around here. Tomorrow our week of fun and family will wind down, and it will be back to the grind Monday morning. But boy, has it been fun. I'm too overwhelmed by the thought of recounting chronological details of our vacation, so I think I'll settle for some random notes.

Traveling with two small children is easier than I thought it would be. The hotel stay wasn't bad at all. True, at 9:30 the first night, my daughter was still standing up in the hotel crib with the sheet wrapped around her head, a panda bear in one hand and a stuffed bird in the other, dancing to entertain my son. But by 10:00, soon after I decided to get in bed with my son and fake sleep, everyone was sound asleep. Naps and bedtime got much better after that first night. And okay, sure, the car trips weren't always easy, what with the wild screaming fit with intentional vomiting, and the fifteen minute whining fit about the itchy butt, but all in all, it was better than I expected.
Today is our sixth anniversary. I can't say enough how much I love my husband. I have loved having him around during his vacation. I love it when he, the kids, and I can all goof around together all day. He is a fabulous father and a terrific husband. I am quite lucky. And I'm going to miss him terribly when he heads off to work Monday morning.
Since we got home Thursday afternoon, I've dreaded setting foot in the kitchen. It's just terrible to go from eating delicious food that I don't have to prepare, to having to cook mediocre food. My husband understood this and said, "Why don't we ease back into this cooking thing bit by bit? For now, let's just get stuff for sandwiches, and we'll eat off paper plates." Whew. Did I mention I love my husband?
We spent the very last of our vacation money at a yard sale across the street. We bought two cups of lemonade (hey, who can pass up a lemonade stand with adorable little salespeople?) and a toddler bed for our daughter. The bed, which we spied as we drove past, was our reason for going to the sale. It was a good deal, and although we hadn't planned on moving her to a toddler bed for a couple more months, today just turned out to be the day. We carried the bed home, and my son was so excited about it that my daughter became interested in it, too. And then at nap time, we just put her in the bed, and she went right to sleep. Can it really be this easy?!?!?! With my son, it was not. He was very excited about his bed -- so excited, in fact, that as he watched us put it together, he began to claw the skin from his face. His face was bleeding by the time we were done. And then he just wanted to get in and out of the bed over and over and over and over and over and over again. It took a couple days before he slept in it as well as our daughter is sleeping in her bed now. And it took weeks for his scratching tic to stop. Okay, actually, for the record, the pediatrician was hesitant to call it a tic. But whatever it is, it still comes back once in a great while in moments of great anxiety.
My son is afraid of heights. I had suspected this for some time but knew without a doubt a few days ago when we got on a Ferris Wheel. He hated it. He was so afraid that I began to feel afraid, too, although I didn't let him know that. I sang to him and talked about all sorts of things to keep his mind off how high up we were. "Mommy," he said through tears, "does Dora the Explorer ride the Ferris Wheel?" "Yes, she rides it with Boots on one of your DVDs, doesn't she?" I replied. "Why?!" he asked. My son also dislikes the Tilt-a-Whirl. He screamed for his daddy the whole time we were on it. As he wiped his little tear-stained face after the ride was over, a woman asked him, "Did you have fun?" "Yeah," he said. A few seconds later, he said, "Mommy, what's 'fun'?"

Things I Hate

2006-07-19T13:24:00.000-04:00

I've stolen yet another idea from Meredith. What can I say? I'm a thief -- but an honest one.

I Hate:

1. Menstrual Cramps. They're not so bad lately, but before my kids were born, before I had a laparoscopy to diagnosis endometriosis and remove some adhesions, my period was the worst. If I didn't take way more Aleve than the directions on the bottle said, I could not function. Now, I make it through most months without so much as one Motrin, but when the cramps are just bad enough to remind me what it used to feel like, boy oh boy, do I hate them.

2. The Feeling of Being "Dismissed," when the person with whom I am speaking ignores me or brushes me off. This used to happen especially with a very macho male boss I had, but it happens from time to time in other situations. I would wait fifteen minutes to speak to him about something important, and then when it was my turn, he didn't seem to notice I was there. He would half listen to me until another male, or occasionally a very attractive female, happened by, at which point I would be "dismissed" with a casual turn of the head. Nothing pisses me off more.

3. Putting Away Clean Laundry. I don't mind carrying it downstairs to wash it. I don't mind sorting it. I don't mind washing it or drying it or even folding it. I don't mind carrying it back upstairs. But I HATE putting it away.

4. Spiders. (shudder)

5. Centipedes. (double shudder) They're faster than spiders, and more of a surprise. Ick, ick, ick. We used to get them in our basement every now and again at our old house. Fortunately, the house we live in now seems to be centipede-free.

6. Oversimplified/Partisan/Either-Or Politics. I am overwhelmed by the complexity of many tough political issues. When the issue is too big, it's easy to point fingers. I understand why the blame game happens, but I still think it's a cop-out when people say, "It's the Republicans' fault," or, "It's the Democrats' fault." Getting to the heart of the issue, and finding real solutions, on the other hand, is much more complicated.

7. Diet Plans Aimed at Children and Adolescents. I dislike most diet plans, and the entire misguided War on Fat. But when children are encouraged to lose weight (rather than choose a variety of nutritious foods and find some fun ways to be active), I nearly blow my top.

8. Children's Books That Try Too Hard to Rhyme. Look, it doesn't have to rhyme to be a good children's book. Leave the rhyming to Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein already. Prose can be rhythmic and beautiful. And maybe, just maybe, if these authors quit trying to rhyme, their books might start to develop something like, oh , I don't know, plot.

9. Meat That Looks Like the Animal It Came From. I really should be a vegetarian. It would be much less hypocritical of me. I don't have it in me, under non-starvation conditions anyway, to kill a creature for food. Even a fish. If I see where it comes from, I don't want to eat it. Chicken with skin-bumps where feathers used to be? No thanks. Meat that's still on the bone? Gee, I already ate. Steak that runs bloody pink? Thanks, but -- (upchuck noises). Yes, I grew up on a farm. Yes, I occasionally ate a cow I had seen in the field or a chicken whose clucking had helped me develop my fabulous chicken imitation. The thought of it sickens me. Now I prefer to have no prior knowledge of my entree. Really, I prefer meatless things, and yet, I remain a half-hearted carnivore. I feel guilty. But yeah, I let someone else do the wet work, and definitely, I'll take the anonymous chicken.

10. Wallpaper. No, I don't mean I hate to see wallpaper in other people's houses. It looks really nice sometimes. I just hate wallpaper at the moment because I've had to remove so much ugly and old wallpaper from this house that I can't look at it without wanting to peel a little off to see if it's the kind that comes right off or the kind I'll have to fight for hours with a spatula and a bottle of Downy water. I have wallpaper left in the bathroom and kitchen, still, and I hate the thought of having to remove it.

Little Mommy Home

2006-07-14T12:26:00.000-04:00

I'm posting earlier than usual today. Well, okay, so posting at all is unusual for me this week, I know, but if I had posted all those other days, it would have been later in the day than now. So why am I posting so early? Because I have no children to watch today!

That's right. My children are staying with my mother. They were there last night. Which means I slept in until 7:00, and I got up and sat on the couch for a while, and then I ate a leisurely breakfast.

Oh, sure I miss the kids. I've already called three times. My son is happy as a clam, though, and my daughter is doing pretty well, too. She did have one brief episode of sadness after my phone call last night. My mother tells me she said over and over, very sadly, "Mommy home. Mommy home. Little Mommy home."

Yes, my daughter calls me "Little Mommy" sometimes. I suppose she thinks little is a term of endearment since I cuddle her and call her my little girl. Naturally, I'm not going to correct her.

Anyway, while the kids are gone, I am doing all sorts of stuff to the house that I wanted to do before but didn't have the time. The hideous wallpaper is gone from our hallway. The hideous, hideous, HIDEOUS carpet is gone from the dining room, living room, and hallway. And the hallway walls have been painted. Wow. Is this my house?

My husband and I had been working on the carpet removal piece-meal after the kids went to bed each night. We weren't getting much sleep. Not because the removal was taking so long, but because afterwards we would just sit there for hours staring at the beautiful hardwood, saying things like, "Is this really our house?" and "Why would they have covered these floors with such ugly carpet?" and "Wow, this looks great!"

When I finish with my leisurely lunch and leisurely blog today, I shall then do some leisurely mopping and some leisurely cleaning up. And then, and then, Little Mommy is going to take a long shower, in the middle of the afternoon.

And then I'm going to call to make sure the kids are okay.

I Am Woman -- Hear Me Snore!

2006-07-10T13:52:00.000-04:00

Being productive is exhausting. I am quite tired, but I have gotten a lot done with the house over the last couple days. After the long process of removing a huge plastic flower pot and the downspout that the previous owners had routed through it (yeah, it was truly weird), we gained some insight into our basement leak problems. Part of the problem might require an expert to fix. But one problem we discovered is that the cement drain which a repairman patched recently has another huge crack/hole that he missed.

So, handywoman that I am, I borrowed my dad's caulking gun and just went to town Saturday evening. I mean, I caulked. I didn't literally go to town. Caulking is much like decorating a cake. And my skill at caulking is much like my skill at decorating cakes; my handiwork doesn't necessarily look great, but it tastes good -- er, it's functional. We'll see at the next rain whether my cake decorating did any good.

Then last night my husband and I ripped up the dining room carpet and removed the staples and tack strips from the hardwood. Under that hideous carpet we found one of the few pleasant surprises this house has had for us. The hardwood is really in pretty decent shape. Oh, it's not perfect, especially around the edges, but when we stand in the next room and look at it, it looks really nice. Tonight the plan is to start on the living room. We might find that the rest of the hardwood is a mess, but at least the dining room, where carpet is just not practical for us, is in good shape. If we have to re-carpet the rest of the house, then so be it. We're hoping, however, that dim lighting (which is the only kind of lighting we have in this house) and some area rugs will hide most of the problem spots.

After all my Bob Villa-ing yesterday, and after the shot glass of Benadryl I took for the cold or allergies I'm fighting, I slept great last night. So great, in fact, that for the second night in a row, I must have bitten down on my tongue for the entire night. My tongue is sore. I mean, it's really, really sore. It hurts to eat. It's too embarrassing to mention to a doctor or dentist, and I can't think of any -ectomies I could have that would take care of the problem and leave me with any kind of quality life anyway, so I'm just going to have to eat soft and bland food for a while until it heals and hope I will soon go back to my usual habit of grinding my teeth without the tongue clamp-down.

Saga of the Potty

2006-07-07T09:18:00.000-04:00

It is 9:14 A.M. My husband left for work almost an hour and a half ago, and from the time his car disappeared down the road until just a couple minutes ago, I have been at the mercy of a potty-training three-year-old.

He spent nearly an hour sitting on the potty, trying his very best to poop. I provided him with special potty-pooping-only toys, including a little chalkboard and chalk I found in my parents' basement cleanout. He drew, he erased, he dropped the eraser into the toilet. He moved from the big toilet to his little potty and back again. He asked for privacy, he begged for company. He tried it all. And we were so close. So very close. Just one grunt away from victory, and he bailed out. He pulled up the pull-up and finished that way.

I hid my disappointment fairly well. As I changed him, I praised his effort, said we were so very close and surely one day very soon he would poop on the potty. I then calmly went about the business of cleaning up the bathroom -- sorting and putting away all the, shall we say, accoutrements de poopage -- the chalkboard, the wet eraser, the books, the Kandoo wipes, the little bits of toilet paper ripped up and tossed about like confetti. At last it was all cleaned up. With a sweet smile, I checked on the kids, who were reading a book together in my son's room, and then I logged into blogger, where I now weep bitterly into the keyboard, using all my self-restraint to keep from screaming, "JUST POOP ON THE FRICKIN' POTTY! YOU SIT, YOU POOP! HOW HARD CAN IT BE?!!?!"

Ahem. Okay, I feel better. I shall now return to a morning of kind and patient parenting.

Crossing My Fingers . . . And Opening My Larynx

2006-07-06T22:39:00.000-04:00

In the boxes of treasure from my parents' basement I found two cassette tapes I thought we had lost forever. Both are tapes of my brother and me singing, talking, telling stories, and basically being silly. In the first of the tapes, I was two or three years old, and my brother was four or five. Tonight I forced my husband to listen with me to parts of those tapes. I had two basic reactions:

1) My brother's made-up stories and songs were always so much more entertaining than mine. Take, for example, my brother's classic song "God and Santa Claus Want You to Share Toys," and my pathetic follow-up about a mud puddle named Muddy Mud-Mud.

2) Boy, did we stutter. Both of us. My brother outgrew his stutter by second grade . . . which surprises me when I hear the severity of it on those tapes. Funny, I listened to those tapes when I was a kid and never noticed it. Wow, how did I miss it? We didn't really repeat many sounds, but the stuttering was right there under the surface. I could feel it even before it showed itself in a disfluency of some sort. It took me a few minutes to figure out what it was I was hearing, but finally I realized I was hearing the Valsalva maneuver. It was all over the place in our speech, even in the middle of otherwise perfectly fluent sentences. Our little throats closed all the time when we spoke. Weird.

I am so glad I found the tapes. Just yesterday I worried about my son's speech during a long, pause-laden story of his that seemed to take much more effort than it should have. I kept wondering, "Just how much disfluency is allowed in normal disfluency?" Now, however, I am encouraged. Yeah, sure, it took my son a while, and he threw in an uh and an um, but I didn't notice that sticky Valsalva quality in his throat. Maybe the kid will escape it yet.

House Whiff

2006-07-05T22:27:00.000-04:00

My house has a smell. It is not a good smell. It is not necessarily a bad smell, either, but it's certainly more bad than good. When I am home all day, I don't notice it, but then when we are out somewhere, I will catch a whiff of it on our clothes. Or when I come home after having been gone for a day or two, the smell irritates the hell out of me for the hour or two it takes for my nose to grow accustomed to it again. I go around sniffing -- sniffing walls, carpets, closets, ductwork, trying to find the source. I end up feeling discouraged . . . and just a little high from all the house huffing.

The smell does not belong to us. We did not create it; we just paid for it. It should have been listed as chattel on our sales contract along with the fridge and the broken ceiling fan.

When our realtor first showed us the house, she said, "I think you'll like this one. And smell it -- it's clean!" She sniffed deeply and appeared to be in ecstasy, as if she were smelling fresh-baked bread or her lover's pheromones.

Every house has a smell, of course. My husband calls it house whiff. I don't mind house whiff in other people's houses, and I don't mind my own house whiff in my own house. Everyone should have the right to create his or her own house whiff. Living in the whiff of strangers, on the other hand, is not so fun.

Just as with pheromones, the beauty of the house whiff is in the nose of the beholder. When the realtor bragged on the smell, I made a mental note that the smell I was smelling was from cleaning supplies and could be gotten rid of with alternative cleaning supplies.

Nothing has worked, however. What we are smelling here is not the smell of clean. It is the smell of whiff. Permanent whiff.

I hold out hope that replacing the carpet will help. However, we have two very small children right now, and new carpet would be an absolutely ridiculous investment. My nose is begging me to throw that money away. "Enough is enough!" my nostrils are crying.

I am practical, though. I am frugal. And yet I am not without empathy. So I shall appease my nose with an old trick. I found out not too long ago that one cannot smell while smiling.

I am breaking out the perma-grin. No, folks, this is not a grimace. This is happiness. Pure happiness.

Current Events Shopping

2006-07-04T13:18:00.000-04:00

Can I just say that I love shopping carts made for two kids? My kids are extra cute in them. These days there are different kinds -- the cart with the massive blue or red plastic attachment with seats, and the traditional shopping cart made wider and with not one but two seats in the place where you used to put the eggs and the bread until you became a parent. And did I mention I love these carts?

My kids are so happy while riding in them. They chatter and sing and recite their ABC's and 123's. Passersby note my children with either smiles or raised eyebrows, depending on what is coming out of their mouths at the moment. If they are singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," we get smiles. If they are shouting, "David Hasselhoff! David Hasselhoff!" we get the raised eyebrows.

I have to blame that one on my husband, who is a Simpsons fan. He says there is an episode in which Lisa Simpson is shown as a baby with a knack for speaking, and Bart teaches her to say David Hasselhoff. So my husband, testing our daughter's abilities against Lisa Simpson's in the ultimate toddler assessment, asked her to say it. And she did. And so did my son. And they both do it all the time now.

Sure, our kids are weird. But they come by it naturally.

Hey, it could be worse. Most people have heard about David Hasselhoff's recent shaving injury, so my children's bizarre shouts are at least topical.

Women Like Me

2006-07-03T20:48:00.000-04:00

It's weird baring my soul online for all to see. After my last post, I felt exposed. I went to bed early to escape the embarrassment. It's like all those gym class stories, in a way. Except only two people who know me in real life know about this blog, and only one reads it, so the embarrassment is at least mostly anonymous. Which is why I started this thing in the first place, I guess -- to have a place where I could whine about all the things that don't make me look so great, allowing anyone who wants to roll his or her eyes or curl a lip in disgust to do so without putting a friendship in jeopardy.

I can't figure it out -- should I be embarrassed? Am I ashamed for not being one hundred percent "over" the things my father said to hurt me, or am I embarrassed that I am/was the kind of person to whom such things could be said? I suppose it's both. And since this is the place where I can write the ugly stuff, I'm writing it. Because for better or worse, I am the kind of person to whom such things were said, and I am the kind of person who is still not completely "over it" all these years later despite having moved on and found happiness.

When I was no older than ten, I was riding home from a Boy Scout outing I had tagged along on since my mother was one of my brother's troop leaders. I heard on the radio some mention of the Equal Rights Amendment. I asked my mother what it was, and she gave me a very brief explanation: an amendment that would give women the same rights that men have. That evening at dinner I tried to prove that although I was the youngest and usually in the dark about politics and the like, I was now getting pretty smart indeed.

"I think the E.R.A. is a good idea!" I said with such childish enthusiasm.

My father whipped his head around and shot me a look of fury the likes of which I had never seen before. What he said next I never forgot, mostly because it was such a mystery to me.

"There are names," he sneered, "for women like you."

My first point of confusion was what I had done to anger my father, how political talk, which happened at our dinner table all the time, could upset him so much. My second point of confusion was that I was not a woman. I was just a kid. Maybe he wasn't talking to me? True, it is possible he was speaking to my mother in a passive-aggressive way since she was surely the one who had put such an idea in my head. But the glare was in my direction, no doubt about it. I remember trying to think up one name for "women like me," one insult bad enough to match the venom in his voice. I didn't know any names that bad.

What my father and I usually butted heads about was my body -- typically my weight, but occasionally a skirt that he deemed too short or the legs he wouldn't let me shave when I was in seventh grade. I always thought it was about my being fat and/or physically disgusting: I needed to lose weight and would not be worthy until I did so, and therefore my legs were different from the skinny girls' legs and did not merit being shaved or being visible. It was all because I was fat, you see.

When I think about the E.R.A. incident, however, I have to laugh because I realize the conflict wasn't only about my body -- in fact, I would dare to say that it wasn't even mostly about my body. The problem was always that he saw in me a feminine strength that threatened him. Why else would he think of such "names for women like you" when he looked at his pre-adolescent daughter? I scared him.

Someone pointed that out to me a long time ago, but I didn't see it. It took me a long time to realize it was true, that my dad, whom I had always seen as larger than life, was fallible, that he just didn't know what to do with me.

I still scare him.

Lately I have found myself in a position of power over him from time to time. It is strange. He screws up, and the natural consequences just knock him off his feet, and I find myself standing over him, looming larger than I meant to be. I nearly always feel sorry for him. I help him up, or I turn away and let him keep his dignity as he picks himself up.

I don't want to dishonor my father. But I don't want to protect him anymore. Just as I am angry with myself for speaking of all this, I am angry with myself for keeping silent. I couldn't find the words to say no when he wanted to weigh my children -- my husband was the one who spoke up. I couldn't even find the words to tell my father he was no longer going to be left alone with my children after this incident.

I am embarrassed that I dwell on past wrongs, and I am embarrassed that my father can still say and do such cruel things. I am embarrassed that I have not protected my father more, and I am embarrassed that I have not protected my children more. I am embarrassed because I can't forgive my father, and I am embarrassed because I can.

Purge

2006-06-30T14:10:00.000-04:00

My parents are cleaning out their basement. Suddenly all of my childhood things are taking up too much space in their downstairs landfill. My junk is therefore being transferred here box by box, and I have the job of going through it all and deciding what is worth keeping and what I need to throw out.

Really, very little of it is actually worth keeping. I mean, there's nothing of value. But there are things like my sticker albums from elementary school that are just difficult to let go -- an entire page of scratch-and-sniff stickers, and the pizza one still smells! There are things from high school and college as well -- prom pictures, class notes.

I came across some unfinished letters I'd written to my college roommates after they graduated and I was still in summer school wondering if my double major was such a good idea after all. The letters were all poignant for one reason or another -- I smiled through tears as I read a letter about the wedding of a roommate, for instance. But one of the letters particularly upset me. It contained a word-for-word account of a conversation I had had with my father -- one of the conversations in which I was told no man would ever want me.

I had forgotten just how painful it all was -- the intense anger and the feelings of worthlessness, the way I loved and hated each man I met, the way I assumed they were all as disgusted by me as my father was, the way I both dared and begged them to prove him wrong. As much as I loved college, as much fun as I had with my roommates, I am glad that time in my life is over. It was several years before I began to realize my father might be wrong, and even longer before I truly believed he was wrong.

And lately, when I think back, sometimes I wonder if it really happened at all. Maybe I imagined those cruel words coming from his mouth. How could the man who so totally adores my children and treats them with such tenderness, have said those things to me? I must have made it all up, right? Or provoked him? Or allowed the memory to become an unfair exaggeration of the truth?

Yet here is a letter I wrote only two days after an incident about which I had completely forgotten. I remember pieces of earlier conversations -- ones in high school and one in my freshman or sophomore year of college. But the one I wrote of in that unfinished letter I had allowed myself to forget totally.

It reminds me that I have exaggerated nothing, that in fact I have allowed myself some forgetting, choosing to forgive rather than hold on to every wrong. I am glad about the forgiveness, and in some ways the forgetting. Yet I don't want to forget completely -- I need to remember that it happened, that I shouldn't let my guard down completely, that I have a daughter to protect, that it wasn't my fault.

I hold it in my hand and can't let go of it, this yellowed piece of paper, my absolution.

Three Talk

2006-06-25T18:48:00.000-04:00

Oh, the things my son says now that he is three . . .

He loves to mix his languages -- English, Hebrew, and the Spanish he learns from Dora the Explorer. It's Spanheblish, if you will. The other day he said, "Okay, Dora, I'm going to count to ten and then it will be time to get out of the bathtub. Tres, mayo, dos . . . ." He also gets the "Aw, man!" that Swiper the Sneaky Fox says on Dora the Explorer, confused with the Amen we say at the end of prayers; his exclamation of disappointment sounds like, "Aw, mane!" But my favorite is his all-purpose made-up Spanheblish word cinco b'nai which can be used as almost any part of speech and whose true meaning remains a mystery. As in, "Oh, you are cinco b'nai!"

The kid loves cars. Or perhaps I should say he is obsessed with cars. He can name several makes/models by sight, including the Toyota Camry, the Ford Taurus, the Chevy Cavalier, and the Mercury Grand Marquis. Down the street from our house is parked a Hyundai that has been in a nasty crash. He talks about it all the time. Today as I gave him a nectarine that had gotten a little squashed on its way home from the supermarket, he said, "It's smooshed up like a Hyundai!" He has also nicknamed the Hyundai after his great-grandmother who has had several falls and broken bones -- because it's "all crashed up" the way she is.

He says a lot of grown-up words like pedestrian, kaput, and ignition, but he still has some endearing mispronunciations. A couple of my favorites: "I can't wait to go to preschool! I'm going to be so besided!" and "Hunk the horn, Daddy!"

He has a flair for the dramatic. (Wonder where he gets that?) Today, when asked why he hit his sister in the head, he responded, "Because my baby sister is not my friend and I won't let her in my room because I am a bad man and I might die some day!" Well, okay then. Sheesh. When he was two, he just said he didn't know.

Just Some Pathetic Squeaks From My Hamster Cage

2006-06-23T13:33:00.000-04:00

Even introverts need to go out into the world every once in a while. I am no exception. To say that I am feeling frustrated and isolated lately would be an understatement.

It's not that I haven't tried to meet people or find activities in which to get my kids and/or me involved. It's that either A) there is very little in this area that is not church-related, B) I'm just very bad at finding the stuff, or C) the activities are here but are all sort of like "easter eggs" on DVD's -- they're not on the main menu and instead are available only if you happen to stumble upon them or if you talk to someone who is in the know. I am not in the know, and I know nobody in the know.

Today I took both of my children to the library by myself. It was the first time I'd tried it alone at this particular library, which does not have parking very close by. The kids were really well-behaved. Even so, by the end of the trip -- which involved the way-too-complicated process of getting a new library card, asking a very surly librarian (surly librarians are hard to find, but I found one) for help in finding a potty-training video, keeping my children from pulling every video off the shelf while said surly librarian finally tracked down the one I was looking for, accidentally setting off the library I'm-stealing-a-book alarm, getting in the way of an angry man on his cellphone, and navigating crosswalks with two small children and an armful of books -- I was wet with sweat. Still, it was encouraging to know it could be done since I'm thinking of weekly storytime. And the change of scenery was worth it.

As soon as we got back home, the kids and I were itching to get out again. So, in frustration because it is too steamy and wet and stormy to play either in our yard or at the park, and in total desperation for something to do where other people are, I planned something new for us: McDonald's.

We went to the McDonald's with the indoor playground. Will I ever do this again by myself? It is doubtful. I'm not worried so much about the food -- the kids were too preoccupied with the play equipment to eat much of anything -- as I am about the play equipment.

Here's how it went. My son, after having begged to get on the play equipment, was afraid to climb on anything. My daughter, on the other hand, was attempting acrobatic feats of which even the members of Circ du Soleil are fearful. I was pulling her down while encouraging my son to climb up. Finally, he climbed up the series of platforms to the beginning of the tunnel. Which is way up high. And very long and curvy. And twisty and maze-like. And opaque. After a few moments of having him out of my sight, I heard echoing through the tunnels, "MOMMY! HELP! MOMMY! GET ME DOWN! MOMMY!"

I looked overhead at the layers of twisting hamster tubing, hoping to catch a glimpse of his face in one of the small windows. Nothing. But the cries continued, "MOMMY! HELP! COME GET ME, MOMMY! I NEED YOU!"

I imagined his being stuck in the tube, unable to move, or worse yet, being held down by a bigger kid. I could feel my blood pressure rise. "It's okay, sweetie," I called, sounding very calm, "just turn around and come back." But all the while I was trying to think what I would tell my husband if I lost the kid in there. What if he never came out? What if he eventually stopped crying and I had no way to know if he was alive or dead? Surely this view, gazing up at a twisting intestine-like child trap, hearing a cacophony of shrieks smattered with the familiar cries of my child, is one of the lower circles of hell about which Dante wrote, I thought.

After several minutes, my son appeared above me at one of the openings of the tunnel. I called for him to come on out. "MOMMY! COME GET ME!" he replied and disappeared into the tunnel again.

The signs at the playground say parents are encouraged to play. There is no posted weight limit. Still, I worried. And even if it COULD hold me, there was the business of my daughter, with whom I am not coordinated enough to climb, and who is too small to be left alone. I began to scan the room for other adults who looked trustworthy. I was zeroing in on a couple possibilities, remembering the horrible dream I had last night about my daughter's falling and breaking her arm, wondering if it was an omen that she would be abducted in a McDonald's Playland, when lo and behold, who should appear at the bottom of the slide, but my son.

There he was with tear-stained cheeks and snot-covered upper lip, but otherwise intact. "You made it!" I cried.

"I want to do it again!" he shouted as he took off for the beginning of the tunnel.

His second adventure was a repeat of the first, except this time he went higher and cried louder. Just as before, when he emerged from the slide, he wanted to go again.

I, however, had had all I could take. I managed to get both kids and their Happy Meal toys out to the car. We made it home and into the house with both kids and one Happy Meal toy. Not such bad stats, really.

I'm telling you, I have to get out more. Really. I'm not kidding. Otherwise one day my husband is going to get a call from the McDonald's manager.

"Hello, sir, I'm calling from McDonald's. The one with the Playland."

"What? She took the kids there AGAIN? Are they okay?"

"Your kids are fine. They're romping in the ball pit right now. It's your wife I'm calling about. It seems she's in a fetal position in a secluded corner of the Playland hamster tubing."

"Is she hurt?"

"Oh, I don't know, sir. We have this happen from time to time. But you're going to need to find a way to get her out because several of the children are becoming upset; she's blocking their way to the slide."

C'mon, Just One Bite

2006-06-19T22:51:00.000-04:00

My mother was the one who lent me The Red Tent, so when I realized its author Anita Diamant is also the author of a book I tried to get my mom to read a few months ago but which she declined because she said she was too busy, I naturally saw the perfect opportunity to push the book on her again.

"Here's your book back, Mom," I said, handing her The Red Tent, "and here is another book of mine by Anita Diamant. It's the one you didn't have time to read a while back, but I figured you have time now and might like it since it's by the same author."

And so I handed her How to Be a Jewish Parent.

As my husband later put it, "She had the same look on her face that I have on my face when someone tries to give me broccoli."

So that didn't go over so well. Even though I explained that it has a great overview of the Jewish holidays, etc., and that it is written not only for Jewish parents but also for non-Jewish parents and grandparents.

I wouldn't have been so pushy about it except my mom is pretty hands-on with the religious stuff lately. She buys religious books for the kids and seems to think that if the books don't mention Jesus or anyone from the New Testament, then it's automatically okay for Jewish kids. You know, because Judaism is just Christianity minus Jesus.

She got my son a book last week that talks about getting down on our knees and praying to the heavenly father before bed. Hello? Does this sound like a Jewish book? She helps put the kids to bed and hears us sing them the Shema in non-kneeling position every time she comes over, so I guess I don't get why she doesn't get it. She later -- as in after she had read my son the book and played the accompanying CD a few times -- said, "This is okay, isn't it?"

At which point I said it was fine, partly because she asked in front of the kids while she had the CD playing, and partly because I'm just a big chicken. So after she left, I just sneaked the book into my closet with a few other inappropriate gifts the kids have been given by well-meaning relatives. She wasn't meaning to be pushy or underhanded. She was just so confident that the book would be Jew-approved that she didn't think to ask until later.

I'm going to have to have a talk with her about either letting us buy the religious stuff or asking before she buys. I'm thinking if she reads How to Be a Jewish Parent, she might learn something, though, and make the talk go a little smoother. It's a good book, really, and it might help her grasp the concept that there just might be more to Judaism than the absence of the J-man.

And yet I am not so hopeful, as I have never seen my husband eat broccoli, no matter how many creative ways I have served it.

From the Junk Drawer, Volume 2

2006-06-15T22:25:00.000-04:00

I've had company for the past three days and haven't had time to post. Especially since my house guest was unaware of my blog. (Sh!) One of these days I'll post something brilliant (cough) and coherent (cough cough) again, but for today, well, it's just this:

I discovered a toad while I was mowing the yard. I ran as fast as I could to get the kids. Showing them critters is a big thing with me. Our old house had almost no yard and very few critters, so each turtle, ladybug, spider, caterpillar, robin, and squirrel is special. To me. "Look!" I said. "A toad! You've never seen a toad before, have you?" "Toad!" said my daughter. "That's right, baby sister, it's a toad," my son said sweetly before turning back to me and asking, "Can I go ride my motorcycle now?"

I got new glasses. What, you say I look lovely, that the color of the frames brings out the natural highlights in my hair, that the shape of the lenses compliments the curve of my cheekbones? Oh, thank you for noticing. It's slightly pitiful when you get new glasses and realize that almost no one is going to see them. At least my daughter noticed. And keeps noticing. "New glasses!" she says, grinning and smudging them with her little pointer finger every time she looks at me. She's my sunshine, and I love every smudge she makes.

The kids had their check-ups today. My son was sweet and cooperative. My daughter threw the mother of all fits when the nurses tried to weigh and measure her. The doctor eventually popped his head in and said, "Do you need a stun gun?" She's feisty, that daughter of mine. Wonder where she gets it?

The basement leak problem has prompted me to spend much time on Gorilla Ladders inspecting gutters, and still more time on my knees peering into drains. Caulk is the answer, I believe. So I bought some. I felt powerful, tough, yet strangely feminine as I walked to the caulking section of Home Depot and read the labels, choosing two separate containers of caulk for two separate jobs. Do you know there is cement caulking, and also caulking for gutters? Oh, and there are more kinds, too, but I don't remember them. I was feeling proud and particularly sensual as I drove home dreaming of doing some down and dirty caulking. The euphoria might have lasted longer had I read the labels thoroughly enough to realize the application of caulk requires a caulking gun. Oh. I thought you just popped the cap and squeezed. You know, like Balmex.

Just a Quick Oil Change

2006-06-12T13:51:00.000-04:00

We should have aborted the mission. The omens were bad. The entrails of wild animals were fraught with all the things with which wild animal entrails should not be fraught. But we, confident in our parenting skills and desperate to get the oil changed in both cars, persisted. Will we never learn?

As soon as we arrived at the shop and got the kids out of the cars, the first omen appeared: my son had wet pants. He's not potty-trained yet (sigh) and had just been changed before we left the house ten minutes earlier, but now one leg was just soaked. Such a diaper leak is very rare. Still, I did not see the omens. "No problem," I said. "We'll just buy a new pair of pants at the shopping center and change him in the bathroom." We were planning to shop while the cars were being worked on anyway.

So just a few minutes later we had already found a suitable change of clothes. My husband headed to the check-out counter with my son while I took my daughter to get a cart to let the kids ride in -- there weren't any carts at the entrance we had used. As soon as I put my daughter into the cart, she began to scream. The kind of screaming that makes even the nicest customers lose their patience. The kind of scream at the exact frequency that triggers an involuntary contraction of the facial muscles into a scowl. And believe me, I was scowling as well.

I learned when my son was that age that giving in to the screaming is just asking for more screaming later, so I opted to let her scream it out. Of course, my son was never one to scream like that. I pushed the cart, its red-faced siren blaring, toward the check-out counter -- you know, to let my husband know where we were in case he had suffered sudden profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss since I last saw him. He was just finishing his purchase and glanced our way, then slumped his shoulders, shook his head, and said something to the cashier that made her laugh. He later told me he had said, "I'm going back to my own private hell now."

So then my husband headed to the restroom to change the boy, which I hear was no easy task. I, meanwhile, pushed the cart as quickly as I could, attempting to travel faster than the speed of sound so that no one else would hear the scream or scowl the scowl. It didn't work, and then I saw an exit. I rounded a corner with precision and headed for the open door, thinking her screams would be lost in the sounds of traffic in the parking lot and that she could finish her fit out there. But she saw the exit, guessed my plan, and popped her thumb into her mouth, silencing her fit and saving the rest for later.

As I headed back to the part of the store where the restroom is, sweet sounds like, "Apple, Mommy!" and "Balloon, Mommy!" issued from her angelic mouth -- that same mouth -- drawing smiles from strangers. Surely all was well now.

Before long, we were all shopping happily. We put some charcoal into the cart. My son, who was riding in the basket part of the cart, decided he wanted to use the bag of charcoal as a bed. He pushed and pulled and re-arranged the bag but just wasn't able to find a comfortable way to lie. On a bag of charcoal. This frustrated him. Before long he was screaming, "HOW DO I SLEEP ON IT?"

My husband shushed him while I quickly arranged the charcoal bag and explained he could use it as a cushion behind his back. This calmed him, but the attention we were giving him angered the teething one, and the hideous screams began again. We were ready to ignore her -- and the scowls -- when she, in her hysterical flailing, banged her chin on the cart. So of course, I had to take her out to comfort her and check out the boo-boo and kiss it and make sure it wasn't bleeding. Her chin was a bit red, but she wasn't seriously hurt and stopped crying almost instantly. And of course, you know that once a kid is out of the cart, there is no putting her back in. That's just the law of nature. It's like birth -- once they're born, they can't go back in. The exit has been completed.

So I carried her until I thought my arms might fall off. Then my husband suggested we do a little grocery shopping. Sure, I said, because I knew where there was a bench my daughter and I could sit on while the guys shopped. We sat for a good long while until my daughter decided she wanted to walk.

"Hold hand, Mommy," she was saying, struggling to get out of my arms and onto her feet. Fine, I thought. She can walk, and we can join the guys for the rest of the shopping trip. We found them before long. All we had to do was follow the sound of my son's yelling. He wasn't crying, just making annoying shrieking sounds that would have landed him in the car in a heartbeat if the car hadn't been in the shop getting its oil changed. But as I was saying, they were easy to find, and our shopping trip continued. As we headed up the frozen foods aisle, my daughter decided she wanted to stoop and pick up every piece of dirt on the floor. She alternated between the stooping and the running in front of me and yelling, "Pick up, Mommy!"

I muttered to my husband, "My patience is gone." He nodded sympathetically, reached into the freezer, and pulled out two containers of Ben and Jerry's, one of which I could see was Coffee Heath Bar Crunch. Oh, yeah. I just found my second wind.

So we found the endurance to check out and trudge back to the auto shop. As we were checking out our groceries, though, I noted with horror that the only fruit or vegetable in the entire purchase was the bag of cherries I had grabbed right as we were heading to the check-out. I was getting the "look what the fat lady's buying" glances from the other customers, and I wanted to scream, "But it was the THIN one who did the shopping! I was busy doing damage control!"

There is a rule, you know. If you're fat and you're going to the store, even if it's to pick up eggs for a birthday cake you're baking for an anorexic neighbor, you MUST purchase at least one vegetable. Fresh spinach is best. If you can afford organic, that's even better. If you do not follow this rule, you'll get the sneers and the evil eye. Or you could always go the opposite route and get on your cell phone (assuming you have one -- I don't) and pretend to call someone, saying, "Do you think a dozen eggs is enough to make myself that six-cheese omelet? I need an afternoon snack before my dinner of fried cheese and pork rinds." Either way, don't be caught shopping fat without a plan.

And whatever you do, if you have small children, don't change the oil in both your cars on the same day; there should always be a get-away vehicle. According to the stickers on our car windshields, we don't have to think about doing this again until September. That gives us three months to think this through, to make the plans, to examine the entrails, to do some potty-training. And to learn how to change our own oil.

How Is It That I'm Old Enough to Remember Twenty Years Ago As If It Were Yesterday?

2006-06-09T14:33:00.000-04:00

I stole this idea -- you know, sort of a self-tagging thing -- from Meredith at the Daily Kvetch.

20 years ago I . . .

was fourteen years old and had just finished eighth grade.
had a crush on a high school senior with whom I am quite lucky I didn't end up.
was relatively slim after months of living on seven hundred calories a day.
spent the summer helping my father put in hay and had quite the tractor tan.

10 years ago I . . .

was twenty-four and had just finished my first year of teaching at a residential school for the deaf.
had just made a vow to stop purging and was beginning another calorie-counting diet with a punishing exercise program.
I got my two cats, who were just tiny kittens at the time.

5 years ago I . . .

had been married for ten wonderful months to my soulmate and was planning a vacation to the beach withhim.
was was finishing my sixth year of teaching, my fourth year at a large public high school.
was just starting to try to get pregnant.

3 years ago I . . .

had a two-week-old son wand was trying to figure out breastfeeding. My son was nursing every hour and a half, my nipples were killing me, and I was severely sleep-deprived. I recall wondering if the difficulties we had had conceiving/carrying a baby had been a warning that I wasn't mother material.
was getting visits from my students who wanted to see the new baby. I felt totally overwhelmed by company, yet I was glad they were there since part of me was missing my job already.

1 year ago I . . .

was spending my mornings taking my two-year-old son and my six-month-old daughter outside into our tiny, treeless backyard, where my daughter would either sleep or scream/spit up while my son played on his slide or with his sand and water table.
was helping my husband send out resumes and applications for a new job. He had had some interviews but hadn't had any good offers yet.

So far this year I . . .

cuddled and snuggled and read to and played with my beautiful children.
spent a lot of evenings cuddling and watching Netflix movies with my husband.
realized I might like to become a Jew.
hosted my second Passover seder.
started this blog.

Yesterday I . . .

did laundry, fed the kids, changed countless diapers, took the kids for a walk, read Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus at least ten times, showed my children a bird's nest, and used those fun little bathtub coloring tablets to turn the kids' bathwater blue.
finished a great book called The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.
enjoyed letting my husband grill so I wouldn't have to cook dinner.
used our new, but already quite used, shop vac downstairs because, dammit, it's still leaking.

Today I . . .

spent the morning cleaning the house, which already looks messed up again.
am making challah for dinner tonight.
told my son, while rocking him and getting ready to sing to him before his nap, about how I love him even when I don't like his behavior -- hitting, pinching, etc. -- and about all the wonderful things he does that make me very proud, a list of which I was lovingly enumerating when he looked me in the eye and said, "Sing."

Tomorrow I will . . .

relax with my family.
probably read Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus at least twenty times.

In the next year I will . . .

begin my conversion process. (See, I'm being decisive today.)
find a pre-school for my son.
find a way to get out of the house at least one day a week, whether it's through membership in some kind of organization, a class, or a part-time job.
find a babysitter so that my husband and I can go out more.
go on our very first vacation as a family of four.
enjoy every minute of my children's silliness.

Hey, This Is Encouraging

2006-06-09T13:42:00.000-04:00

I took this idea from TikkunGer. Here are my Belief-O-Matic results. Well, it looks as if I'm on the right track! You know, according to an online quiz and a website about which I know nothing. But aren't quizzes fun when the results come out the way you want them to?

1. Reform Judaism (100%)
2. Bahá'í Faith (85%)
3. Sikhism (84%)
4. Orthodox Judaism (81%)
5. Unitarian Universalism (80%)
6. Liberal Quakers (79%)
7. Islam (77%)
8. Neo-Pagan (69%)
9. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (66%)
10. Jainism (61%)
11. New Age (54%)
12. Mahayana Buddhism (53%)
13. Hinduism (51%)
14. Scientology (51%)
15. New Thought (50%)
16. Secular Humanism (50%)
17. Orthodox Quaker (44%)
18. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (42%)
19. Theravada Buddhism (40%)
20. Taoism (34%)
21. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (33%)
22. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (33%)
23. Nontheist (33%)
24. Eastern Orthodox (29%)
25. Roman Catholic (29%)
26. Seventh Day Adventist (27%)
27. Jehovah's Witness (23%)

What Do You Mean They Don't Make Elmo Shoes With a Reinforced Steel Toe?

2006-06-08T21:40:00.000-04:00

Just look at these suckers!

Oh, I can hear it now: Tsk, tsk, tsk. Your poor child needs new shoes. You let him go out in those things? There are holes in the toes! His feet will get wet! What kind of a mother are you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But do you know these shoes are only two months old? That’s right. Two months.

Then explain the holes in the toes! Does your son walk on his tip-toes? And if so, why haven’t you gotten that checked out?

Oh, dear reader, when I saw the holes in the shoes, I was baffled myself at first. But then it dawned on me. He is not a tippy-toe walker, but a stunt man. He uses the toes of his shoes as brakes when he flies down our sloped driveway on his “motorcycle,” a modern version of the Big Wheel.

Everyone who visits nearly has a heart attack when they see him fly down that hill. They gasp and clutch their chests and then sigh in relief when my son stops just short of the brick wall or the garage door. I used to do the gasp/clutch thing myself. But he’s actually quite good at stopping himself.

I’ll just have to remember not to let him ride his motorcycle in his new Bob the Builder sandals.

You Won't Find This Route on Map Quest

2006-06-08T08:31:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking more about my post from Tuesday, specifically the part about the "daddy issues" and the Tori Amos lyrics. The more I think about it, the more I think maybe it's really okay, that those things are just part of my history but do not in any way sum me up.

When you get where you want to be, it doesn't matter how many dead-ends you bumped into along the way, or that if you hadn't hit that dead-end, you might have ended up somewhere else just as nice. This is where you are, and there is no going back to undo a wrong turn or a roadblock. The mistakes and rough parts in the journey are as much a part of the journey as the parts in which you were on the right road.

You know, back when I was teaching, I attended a workshop one summer in which the director, a good man overall but a guy who didn't always think before he spoke, heard me stutter severely as I read aloud a passage I had written, and he burst out laughing, saying, "You teach the deaf, right? So it doesn't matter that you stutter . . . because your students can't hear you!" And he laughed until he had tears in his eyes. I handled it with grace, partly out of pity for the fellow teachers who sat around the table looking horrified at the director's reaction, and partly because I am too stubborn to let someone so insensitive see how deeply I am hurt.

Part of what hurt me is that it's true, at least a little (although my job included a lot of speaking, including voice interpreting for deaf students). My stuttering surely had something to do with my major in deaf education. I didn't sit down and say, "Okay, I stutter. There's not much else I can do, so I guess I'll teach deaf kids." But the fact that I fell in love with American Sign Language at the age of twelve did have a lot to do with my stutter. I remember learning the manual alphabet and a few signs so that when I stuttered so badly in class that I could not speak, I could fingerspell the answers below my desk as a sort of rebellion, a way to prove to myself that I knew the answers. That led to more reading about ASL and Deaf Culture, and eventually I knew that was what I was supposed to do with my life. And as awesome as it is to know a second language in which I am completely fluent (um, as far as stuttering goes -- I'd say proficient is more accurate as far as my linguistic competency in ASL is concerned -- I still have that "hearing accent."), that has nothing to do with what I truly love about the Deaf Community and my (former) job. Does it really matter how I got here, a teacher of deaf students, as long as I'm staying for the right reasons? Does the fact that an imperfection led me to my vocation make me any less of a teacher? Of course not.

When you get where you want to be, it doesn't matter how many dead-ends you bumped into along the way, or that if you hadn't made that wrong turn, you might have ended up somewhere else just as nice. This is where you are, and there is no going back to undo a wrong turn or a roadblock. The mistakes and rough parts in the journey are as much a part of the journey as the parts in which you were on the right road.

So I could hide from the fact that I spent a lot of years being angry with my father, or that I had some issues with dating Christian guys, or that I had(have?) problems with male authority. But it was all just part of my journey. Why be ashamed of it, really? It's just part of how I came to be here, standing where I am, with a choice in front of me.

Conversion Confusion, Part 2

2006-06-06T18:29:00.000-04:00

About a week ago, greatly discouraged, I decided that conversion just wasn't for me. It wasn't that there was something about Judaism I didn't like, or that I had some revival of Christian faith or anything. It was more that I didn't think I could ever fit in somewhere else any better than (or even as well as) I already fit in where I am. I resigned myself to life as a misfit, wearing the wrong label, doing what feels right in my own home, while keeping silent about it with the rest of the world.

And then I picked up a copy of Reform Judaism, where I read Rabbi Eric Yoffie's "Dear Reader: We Need to Ask," in which he pretty much responds to this post without ever having read it. He said what I haven't heard before, that I'm welcome. I'm not saying anyone has been unwelcoming in the least, only that no one ever actually invited me to consider conversion. At first I considered it respectful that no one asked, but later, my insecurities getting the best of me, I began to wonder if I was seen as damaged goods, if maybe they didn't ask because they were hoping I wouldn't convert. So it was nice to have an invitation of sorts. I'm thinking now that being where I'm not sure I'm wanted is what's not for me, not so much conversion.

So am I ready to convert? I've been thinking about the psychology of religious conversion. I'm sure there have been studies, or at least some generalizations made, on the subject, but I haven't read any of that. I have wondered if a desire to convert from one's family's religion to another is some kind of character flaw. What is wrong with me that my ancestors' way of life is not good enough for me? Why does Judaism work better for me than Christianity?

Christians believe in a definite male deity, even one in human form, while Judaism talks of a deity neither male nor female and not really human. Is that part of what I like? I cannot ignore the possibility that I am going to have problems with any religion in which I am to worship a male anything. Not that I hate men -- don't get me wrong. But it should be obvious to anyone who has been reading my page that I have daddy issues. I love my father, and he loves me, but our relationship has always been a power struggle. And when I was in college, my anthem was Tori Amos's "Precious Things" with the lines (and please pardon the, ahem, strong lyrics),

"I want to smash the faces of all the beautiful boys, those Christian boys.
So you can make me cum, that doesn't make you Jesus. "

Eek. Yeah. So I think I need to thoroughly examine my motivations here. Really, honestly, I don't think I want to convert to escape Christianity or to assert my feminism or anything like that, any more than I think I married my husband solely because he wasn't one of "those Christian boys." If so, I would have converted a long time ago to something, anything, or called myself an atheist. I think I have really fallen in love with Judaism. But what if I'm wrong? What if this is just some emotional, knee-jerk thing that I'm doing for the wrong reasons? What are the right reasons? I don't think conversion for another person, even a husband or a child, is enough. So what are my reasons?

One of the many things that what I know so far of Judaism has done for me is to help me to step outside myself, and I want to say to make me less selfish, but I think it's at least partly self-consciousness I'm talking about instead of selfishness . . . although I'm beginning to see that the two are not so different. The emphasis on getting involved, not only with community, but with social change, is something I love. In Christianity, getting involved is great, but in Judaism, it is expected.

And so, when I, with my natural tendencies toward introversion and my extra added insecurities about too many things to count, tend to slink off into the shadows thinking I have nothing to offer, it is Judaism that helps me step outside of my own discomfort and use what I have been given to change the world in positive ways. Not that I'm very good at that stepping out thing right now, or in changing much of anything. But I'm working on it, and I see it all in such a different light now. It's not, "Be confident," but, "Be part of the world." In the former, the focus is on changing myself so that I will be ready/good enough to act, whereas in the latter, the focus is on the world itself and the changes needed and my obligation to act. When you're part of a larger whole, your little flaws and fears don't matter so much; instead, you just work alongside everyone else in whatever way you can to keep the big world turning.

Is that a good enough reason? I don't know. But I'll keep thinking about it. You know, now that I've been asked.

Passing Gold

2006-06-05T20:03:00.000-04:00

I think my kidneys are in cahoots with some no-good health insurance scammers. Last August I passed a kidney stone worth its weight -- er, a million times its weight -- in gold. We are still getting the bills for that dumbass little piece of calcification. I'm mad. I mean, come on. My urinary tract just happens to decide on the first day of my husband's new insurance plan, to squeeze out a golden egg, er, stone that leaves me vomiting and unable to walk? Oh, yeah, I think it was a set-up.

The best part is that my husband's new company dropped the insurance plan just before we had paid off the sky-high deductible (the exact amount of which, by the way, I still don't know because I was too busy packing up all our belongings, trying to keep our house in good enough shape to show to prospective buyers, and looking for a new house in another town . . . oh, yeah, and taking care of a toddler and an infant . . . to actually look through all the stacks of paperwork that insurance companies usually, but in this case maybe not, send listing a million things you don't need to know plus somewhere in small print your deductible), so we had to start all over just four months later with a new deductible with a new company. Which is why I have not gone to the optometrist or my gynecologist. Because damn, my parts just cost too much.

Thank goodness I didn't go to the ER for that stupid gold nugget. I said I didn't have time, and I just barfed and writhed until the pain finally subsided a bit. I happened to have a doctor appointment the next day -- pre-eclampsia follow-up -- and waited until then to tell her about my barfing and my, by then, just very sore side. She sent me for a CT scan or an MRI or whatever -- don't know what the difference is. Except I'm betting the one I got was the more expensive of the two. The only reason I agreed to take the time to go was that I was afraid it might, just might, have something to do with my reproductive organs, which are in cahoots with someone or other, too, because they cost me a lot but mostly just give me grief and pain.

When the CT/MRI results came back showing a small kidney stone remaining, it was the doc's best guess that that's what had caused the barfing and writhing episode. HOWEVER, and there is always a however when we are dealing with deceitful kidneys, there was a "large mass" on the right side. They couldn't identify it, but suspected it was my ovary, since they couldn't find it anywhere else. Okay, next time I will know that this is just doctor-speak for "everything is fine but we're covering our asses." But my doc recommended an ultrasound to find my ovary.

Now, how an ovary could go missing without my knowing it, I do not know. I can see it now: a postcard in the mail saying MISSING! with a pic of my right ovary, complete with age-enhanced endometrial adhesions. Last seen: November 2004. Last seen with: and a pic of the ob/gyn who performed my c-section.

But I digress. I let them look for the missing ovary because A)I had no idea what the deductible was on our new insurance, and B) the word ovary scares me because during my c-section from hell (which lasted way longer than scheduled because they couldn't close until they removed a large fibroid tumor that just happened to be sticking out of the incision, and for which I was given a spinal instead of an epidural so that there was limited time for them to work until the anesthesia wore off, so that, although it didn't really hurt, I definitely felt every single staple go into my body when they finally were able to close -- oh, yeah, and this was all before my blood pressure skyrocketed), I, drifting in and out of consciousness, clearly heard the doctor say, "Looks like ovarian cancer." Now, sure, he could have been talking about some other patient, or even the cauliflower in the salad he'd had for lunch that day, or whatever, but since he was standing over my splayed insides, with his hands inside said insides, I naturally figured he was talking about me. And so I thought I had cancer for the next two weeks, during which I told no one because I didn't want to upset them, and I just waited for the lab results to come back. I guess they were okay because no one told me I had cancer, and they did eventually let me leave the hospital. Still, still, when someone tells me my ovary went missing after a scare like that, I let them torture me with the magic trans-vaginal ultrasound wand.

Which apparently cost a fortune, according to our most recent bill.

You know, I think the ovary was in cahoots with the kidney, and that's why he was missing. I'm sure it's back now, lounging around in the vacant double lot left by the fibroid tumor, snacking on caviar -- little cannibal that it is -- bought with the pay-off from the insurance scam.

Well, I have three words to say to you, little bastards: EARLY ORGAN DONATION, that's what! How ya like them apples?

Blessing in Disguise

2006-06-03T20:24:00.000-04:00

Here's one of the gifts my son got for his birthday. I was not entirely enthusiastic about it until I realized A) we do have enough level room for it outside if we put it on the deck, B) it inflates or deflates in 30 seconds, C) it provides great exercise opportunities for my children, and D) it acts almost like a cage, allowing me to go for minutes at a time without being wallowed.

You have probably guessed that the anonymous little jumpers there are my son and daughter, but if you look closely, you will see my husband sitting there as well. He is being wallowed by my daughter in this particular shot. My husband, blessed with a high metabolism, a naturally small build, and an inability to eat when he is stressed, is able to get in there with both kids at the same time and still come in under the weight limit for the contraption. I alone, however, exceed the weight limit. The kids' favorite game right now is to throw balls at my husband so that he will yell, "Ow!" It's the kind of game I discourage, but hey, the cage, er, bouncer, is his domain; the hefty unwallowed one will just mind her own business this time.

Squooshy

2006-06-03T06:45:00.000-04:00

"Mommy, your tummy is fat," my son says as he hugs me and snuggles on me in the bed this morning. It is not an insult, just an observation about the body of a person he loves. "You're squooshy. I love to squoosh you."

I'm a little unsure how to deal with the F-word -- fat, I mean. This is the first time he has called me fat. I don't mind his saying my tummy is fat . . . because it is. He says it with the same love with which he says, "Daddy, you're bald." My husband is balding, technically, but I am, technically or otherwise, just plain fat. But my husband doesn't take offense. And I don't either.

At some point, we need to explain that most people don't like to be called fat, even lovingly . . . and that lots of times, if I'm perfectly honest, I don't either. But that will be his first lesson in fat phobia, and it's a lesson I don't want him to learn yet. At the same time, if he has to learn it, I'd rather he learn it from me so that I can teach him my values: 1) Fat is just another physical characteristic, 2) Bodies come in different shapes and sizes, and everyone is beautiful in his or her own way, 3) Anyone and everyone can try to be healthy, regardless of physical characteristics such as weight. 3) We don't say things that will hurt people's feelings.

How much sense does all that make, though? If fat is okay, why does being called fat hurt people's feelings? Similarly, if short is okay, why does being called short hurt people's feelings? If bald is okay, why does being called bald hurt people's feelings? Ah, for now, we'll have to keep it simple. Maybe, "It's not polite to make comments to people about their bodies."

Sigh. I like it that he says I'm squooshy. He says sometimes, "Mommy, you are so lovable." I like it that my son loves me as I am, that my softness is just another lovable part of me. One day he'll learn to look at me differently, but I love that, for now, he loves my squooshability.

Dusting Off My Marilyn Shoes

2006-05-31T12:55:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I know disfluency is perfectly normal for a three-year-old. I already talked about that here, where I told you how fine I was with it all and how I wasn't going to freak out.

And I'm not freaking out exactly. I'm just concerned. See, my son isn't just doing the normal repetitions. He's exhibiting secondary behaviors -- specifically, my secondary behaviors. Now, I'm just smart enough to suspect this is more imitation than a severe case of adult-like stuttering manifesting itself in a toddler. So when he says, "Uuuum, uuuum, uuuuum," before starting a sentence, he's just doing what Mommy does. And when someone mocks him for doing it, although I am incensed and ready to punch the mocker, I remain patient bite my tongue. So far.

Since there's no real consensus on the cause of stuttering, and since its being a learned behavior hasn't been entirely ruled out by science, I'm worried about this imitation turning into the real thing eventually. If I give stuttering to my kids genetically, that's one thing. But if I "give it to them" through modeling, well, that's something else entirely.

I am, therefore, trying to get rid of the "ums." I don't "um" all that much just around the house; it's usually when talking to a stranger or talking on the phone -- when on some level I guess I'd prefer to sound absent-minded or a little slow than to just out-and-out stutter. I have no choice but to go for the out-and-out stutter now, though.

Which means I'm falling back on my old therapy techniques. I don't know exactly what kind of therapy I had -- my last visit to a speech pathologist was over ten years ago, so while the gist of what I learned is still with me, the proper names of things escape me. It wasn't the intensive Precision Fluency Shaping discussed on some of the stuttering blogs to which I link, but there were elements of that kind of therapy in it. I believe, based on some quick Internet research, that it was some combination of fluency shaping therapy and stuttering modification therapy. When I am using my therapy techniques, which I typically use only when reading aloud because that is when I often find myself otherwise completely and totally unable to speak, I use a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice (which, by the way, Marilyn herself used because she stuttered) with a measured rate and exaggerated prosody with sounds very softly articulated . . . and with "easy stuttering"/"easy bounce" when a block or repetition is unavoidable. Talking that way sounds a bit strange, yet a whole lot less strange than the ums and uhs and total silences that occur otherwise.

So now that I've pulled the old therapy techniques out of the closet and dusted them off, I'm using them around the house some, especially when reading aloud to my kids (which, somehow, I can usually do absolutely fluently -- it's just reading aloud elsewhere that gets me) or when I notice my son is stuttering or imitating my secondary behaviors. Hey, if he imitates the bad stuff, maybe he'll imitate my therapy talk. And if that will help his chances of staying fluent, then I'll gladly do it.

And besides, this is the closest I'll ever get to being confused with Marilyn Monroe. Now, if you'll excuse me, this sex goddess must go do some laundry.

Partied Out

2006-05-30T13:28:00.000-04:00

My son's birthday party is over, and we are all catching up on our sleep. I always seem to forget just how exhausting the party preparations can be. And my son was so excited this year that he was having trouble sleeping at night . . . which means we were all having trouble sleeping at night.

The party was a success, and we had plenty of room for both of our families since the weather was nice enough to put the tables out on the deck. We had a Very Hungry Caterpillar theme and made our own cake that was supposed to look like like the caterpillar and ended up not too far off. My husband and I totally get into the cake decorating thing, even though we are both amateurs at it. And I cut out construction paper foods with holes in them for the decorations. Oh, and the party favors? Well, the three kids (my two and one cousin) got little goody bags, but the grown-ups each got a cheap, er, nice little plant (with a hole in a leaf, of course) planted in a colorful plastic cup decorated with a cute Very Hungry Caterpillar quote and a thank-you. Ah, I have become quite the frugal party planner. Oh, and did I mention I put pipe cleaners on cheap plastic headbands so everyone could wear antennae? Yeah, I'm sure they love me for that, but they were good sports about it. My son had a wonderful time being the center of attention, eating cake, and opening presents. And we had a wonderful time watching him have so much fun.

Now, however, I am very tired. I think I need a nap before I'm up for another round of putting batteries in new birthday toys.

Magic Pills

2006-05-25T13:04:00.000-04:00

Tom of The Stuttering Brain has posted some information about a new drug called Pagaclone which is going to be used to treat stuttering. Hm. Very interesting stuff. I remember the grand question in every stuttering therapy or support group of which I have been a member: "If you could take a magic pill that would stop your stuttering, would you do it?" And there was always someone who claimed to be so self-accepting that he would say oh no, stuttering is part of who I am, etc., etc. Stupid. I mean, the pill is magic. Who the hell says no to a magic pill?

However, Pagaclone is not magic, but a real drug manufactured by a pharmaceutical company. Therefore, Tom wisely has reservations about it, which he lists. Naturally, he is concerned with side effects. He says he would not want to gain weight in exchange for fluency.

And that, of course, got me thinking. About fat, and stuttering, and magic pills.

At first, I thought, "What?!?! A few pounds of extra weight is a small price to pay for fluency!" But then when I thought about it, I wondered if I would really say the same thing. Can I really afford to gain any more weight? I guess it would depend on how much extra weight we're talking about. Five pounds? Yeah, I'd do it. Thirty? Oh, boy. I think I've reached my limit, thanks. I can't afford new clothes, and since the health/fat relationship does exist, regardless of inconclusive evidence and exaggerated media reports about cause and effect (Read The Obesity Myth / The Diet Myth before you decide I'm off my rocker.), I'll keep stuttering along, thanks. As they always say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know.

But another related question is if I could give up one or the other, fat or stuttering, which would it be? I think I would say stuttering. I mean, it is a disorder, whereas the majority of fat-related problems are just prejudice. Sure, I'd love to be thin -- saying I wouldn't prefer a more socially acceptable body is just nuts. But I'd really love to be fluent -- there are lots of things I'd love to do that stuttering prevents me from doing (ASL interpreting in a courtroom or hospital, for instance -- I don't trust my speech in such important settings; some public speaking gigs; leaving voice mail messages that say more than, "Hi, this is -- this is -- is -- this is -- Mmmmm-- This -- is -- iiiiiiis -- iiiiiis -- th -- th -- this is --SHIT!").

At the same time, I can pass sometimes as fluent, lots of times even, if I'm in a fairly fluent period of my life as I am now. While those nasty blocks can be downright crippling, during a fluent period, stuttering is nothing more than an occasional nuisance. Fat, on the other hand, isn't something I can pretend I'm not when I go out. Everyone who sees me knows I'm fat. The only place I could "pass" as thin would be on the Internet . . . unless I were stupid enough to admit to being fat on my blog. Hey, wait a minute. Dammit. And I told you I stuttered, too, didn't I? What the hell is wrong with me? That's it. I'm starting a new blog right now in which I talk about nothing but my enormous boobs, my knack for creating really cool birthday party invitations, and my impeccable (Ha! Get it?) chicken imitation.

But I digress. I think what I was talking about was that I'm fat and I stutter, and somehow it mostly doesn't bother me all that much, even though I keep talking about it, like all the time. The stuttering bothers me less than the fat, really, because I accepted being a stutterer a very, very long time ago. Sure, it doesn't always make things easy, but I don't have any grand illusions of becoming a fluent person. It was much more recently, however, that I gave up the dream of being thin and decided I'd settle for as healthy as I can be instead.

If I were shown two little magic pills, one to cure fat, one to cure stuttering, and told I could choose one and only one, what would I say? I'd open my mouth wide, stick out my tongue, and say, "Ah ga ca!"

Then I'd close my mouth and repeat myself so it didn't sound like dentist-office talk. And I'd say, "Surprise me!"

The Big Three

2006-05-24T15:40:00.000-04:00

Today is my son's third birthday. It's hard to believe it has already been three years since I lay on the operating table and listened for his first tiny cry. "He sounds like a kitten!" I said to my husband, and then we both started laughing and crying all at the same time.

We're having our families over this weekend for a party, so today's celebration is fairly low-key. My husband came home for lunch, and we let our son open his gifts then. We ate some store-bought cupcakes that my husband picked up on the way home. I'm making a big cake for the party, so I figured I'd go the easy route for today. And my son hasn't even noticed that his cupcakes have mortar boards on them.

"Hey, they're graduation cupcakes," I said to my husband. Didn't they have anything else?"

He looked at the cupcakes, allowing his surprise to show for only a second. "My mission," he shrugged, "was to get chocolate cupcakes. I got chocolate cupcakes."

I suppose we could say my son is graduating from babyhood to boyhood. But that would just make me too sad.

Jewish Persecution and Gentile Oblivion

2006-05-23T13:23:00.000-04:00

Jack left the following comment below on my Selfishly Intermarried post:

Part of the challenge is that we are all dealing with the impact of thousands of years of persecution. There was so much for so long it has impacted us in ways that are not always so positive.

He makes an excellent point. Funny how I didn't really think about that until he mentioned it. I mean, it's so obvious, and yet . . . . I'll be the first to admit that we non-Jews in general don't really get the persecution thing, even when we think we do. I thought I got it until I read the first chapter of the Intermarriage Handbook by Judy Petsonk and Jim Remson. The chapter, entitled "Jewish-Christian History: A Legacy of Pain" was such an eye-opener for me that when I got to the end of those thirteen little pages, I knew deep down that my future children had to be Jewish. I knew I had come to an understanding that would change my life. I've asked myself a hundred times, "How did I not know all that before?" And I'm just smart enough to suspect that there's a lot I still don't get.

And it's not as if my husband was the first Jew I ever met. In fact, in a strange twist of events that I believe to be destiny, in the two summers before I met him, almost everyone I became close to during graduate school in D.C. was Jewish (and deaf -- I was attending Gallaudet University). I met them at different times, in different classes, and many of them didn't even know one another, yet somehow I "clicked" with all these people who I kept later finding out were Jewish. And there was even a woman I met from Tajikistan who barely escaped with her life; it was so dangerous for her family that her parents hadn't dared to tell her she was a Jew until she was old enough to accept the responsibility of keeping such an important secret. She had had to leave in a hurry, her parents pushing her sister and her onto a plane whose destination they didn't even know at the time; they had been given forty-eight hours to convert to Islam or be killed.

I thought I understood after I watched the terrifying stories she told with her hands. Yet the chapter in that book I read two years later deepened my understanding. So even when we non-Jews think we get it, we still don't, do we?

When people I knew were dumbfounded by the Jewish reaction to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, at first I couldn't get why they didn't get it, but then I remembered my way of thinking before reading The Intermarriage Handbook. Several years earlier, I might have been equally baffled, although I like to think I would have tried to understand. I wanted to copy that chapter and just pass it out. In the end, it was this speech by Abraham Foxman that I sent to people instead.

To end on a lighter note, here's a perfect illustration of the conflict. In this excerpt from Stars of David, playwright Tony Kushner retells a family story of his life partner Mark Harris.

"The first year that Mark's parents were married, his Catholic
mother, Harriet, wanted to impress his Jewish dad's mother, Minnie
Moskowitz. So Harriet made this huge seder meal, and at the conclusion of
the meal, Minnie made a toast, saying, 'I'm deeply moved that my new
daughter-in-law, the enemy of my people, has made such a beautiful seder
meal.'"

Every time I read that, I laugh so hard I almost pee my pants.

He Finds a Button and He Keeps On Pushing It

2006-05-21T22:27:00.000-04:00

I mean that both figuratively and literally.

My son was talking to my mother-in-law on the phone today and told her how his sister bumped her mouth last week and cut the inside of her lip. The injury was minor, and so we hadn't seen the need to mention it to my husband's mother, who tends to worry about these things.

So as my son relayed the story for the third or fourth time, my husband and I were cringing, waiting for the aftermath. Soon my son got the order to give the phone to his daddy, who then had to answer several questions about the incident to reassure his mother.

Then my son asked to talk to his grandma again. This time, he totally made up two stories, one about his sister standing up in a chair and falling out on her neck, and another about her falling off the fireplace. He did it just for the reaction. That little stinker. It took my husband five minutes to convince his mother that neither incident really happened. I have to give the kid credit -- he found his grandma's button and learned quickly how to make her freak out.

And speaking of pushing buttons, my son is still, at 10:30 P.M. pushing the button on his little battery-operated singing pig. He started sleeping with it a few nights ago, and it has already needed a battery change. It sings "My Girl," which my son calls "Sunshine Cloudy Day." We've been hearing sunshine cloudy day off and on for the last two hours. Every time he wakes up in the night, he cries out, "I can't find my piggy!" And then he finds it and yells, "I can't find the button on my piggy!" And then he finds and we hear sunshine cloudy day yet again.

Quite frankly, I think the song should have been altered. The pig should be singing "My Curl" in reference to his tail. You know, which curls. Because maybe that would be a little funnier at 2 A.M.

Selfishly Intermarried

2006-05-20T21:46:00.000-04:00

I've been reading various blog entries about Jewish intermarriage. What I'm reading is, in general, discouraging. No, I'm not talking about the appalling intermarriage rate. I'm talking about how discouraging it is to read about marriages like mine as if they were created for the purpose of destroying Judaism, or that they are the union of two incredibly selfish beings who have no regard for their parents' feelings, values, or history. Beyond discouraging is the Holocaust analogy, comparing intermarried couples to Hitler; such a comparison is both offensive and juvenile and does not merit even this brief mention.

On the topic of intermarriage and selfishness, I've been doing some thinking about whether my own marriage was a selfish one. True, my husband's parents would have preferred he find a Jewish wife. He looked for a long time, but we live in a place where the Jewish population is miniscule. His choices were to A) move elsewhere to find a larger Jewish population, B) remain a bachelor, or C) widen his search a bit for the likes of me. Obviously, he chose C and, in my opinion at least, didn't do half bad.

Let's just consider choice A, though, for the sake of argument. He could have quit a good job that it took him a while to find and moved to a big city, leaving his mother all alone. Instead, my husband chose to stay close by and lend her support in the years following his father's death. That wasn't a selfish choice. And let's look at B. He could have chosen not to marry. But marriage is an important aspect of Judaism. Continuing his father's legacy was important to him, too; he always said he didn't care if our children were boys or girls, but at the same time, he was so pleased to have a son so that he could give him his father's name. Is that selfishness?

How about me? Am I selfish because I don't have enough respect for the Jewish tradition to declare a Jewish man off-limits when I'm dating? Or am I selfish because of the disrespect I have for my own family's tradition? I'm assuming it's the latter. Now, I understand to some extent that there's just a cultural difference here. Marrying "out" is much more of a taboo in the Jewish community than it is in the culture in which I was raised. And I realize that Judaism/Jewishness is unique in that there are issues of peoplehood and religion and history all mixed together. Still, the culture and religion in which I was raised are important to its followers, too, and naturally my parents almost surely would have chosen someone of their own faith for me if they had been in a position to choose. I don't have any excuses about a small dating pool. In my case, the man I fell in love with was Jewish, and I chose to marry him.

Okay, so if anyone was selfish, it was I, not my husband. Even more selfish of me, then, is the fact that I am considering conversion to Judaism. It is selfish, I suppose, that I would want to distance myself even further from my heritage. And so, it follows logically that every convert to Judaism is/was also selfish. All of them chose to leave behind a tradition their parents surely valued, right? Each and every one must have been thinking only about him- or herself, not about carrying on a tradition.

Hm. I bet those who call the intermarried selfish would stop short of calling Jews-by-choice selfish. Yeah, good thing. But that's where their logic leads.

When my husband and I take our children to synagogue, we are, almost without exception, warmly welcomed. However, when I read arguments like the ones I've been reading, I now can't help but wonder if the people I am getting to know at synagogue might really wish we weren't there. Are they judging us? Do they take one look at my kids' eye color and secretly wish them gone? Do they trying to guess whether my children have been converted or not, and by a rabbi of what affiliation? Do the people with whom we worship assume we are selfish? Do they compare us with Hitler?

Are we selfish for assuming we have anything to offer?

Iranian Dress Code Update

2006-05-19T19:37:00.000-04:00

It seems that the article to which I linked earlier might not be accurate. Here's an ADL link on the subject.

Time to Take Action

2006-05-19T09:42:00.000-04:00

All right, folks. We can't ignore Iran any longer. If Ahmadinejad's comments about wiping Israel off the map and his denial of the Holocaust weren't enough, I'd say this is. What is the world waiting for?

Gullible's Travels, or, Why I'm Reading About Lip Gloss

2006-05-17T13:03:00.000-04:00

I hate magazines. Okay, not all magazines. I just hate the kind you find in every waiting room in the world -- the kind with a cover picturing a cake containing 27 grams of saturated fat per serving and "Get Slim Fast!" in large letters. I'm at a point in my life where these topics -- diets and what to eat when you want to cheat on them -- bore me.

And when I am reminded that I, in a moment of weakness and utter gullibility, subscribed to that exact kind of magazine over a year ago because the woman selling them said her father was also the father of her twin boys, then I am likely to be downright disgusted with said magazine every month when it arrives.

Now, in all fairness, the woman who came to my door probably was a survivor of incest. Whatever her background, she certainly deserved a break. She had her sales pitch down. I'm not sure if she actually ever wrote out the whole thing complete with bracketed stage directions such as [pause for lip quiver] or [weep uncontrollably until customer offers a tissue], but I'd bet money it was planned in some form. I hate to turn people away when they are in need. Especially people who have mothered their fathers' children. Especially when they are really good at guilt trips. So I said I would buy one magazine I didn't want. Unfortunately, buying just one wasn't an option because of something or other I couldn't understand through the cracking voice and the sniffling into the tissue I had provided. And that's how I subscribed to two, the second of which was for my children . . . and might be appropriate for them in about six years. I think I'll just save them in a box until 2012. If I'm lucky, maybe the kids will want the clothes and shoes featured in the magazine; by that time, they should be far less expensive than whatever is in style.

But back to the actual purchase of the magazines. I paid entirely too much for them because of some stupid survivors-of-incest-selling-overpriced-crappy-magazines-door-to-door state fee. After the lady left with my check, I scoured the Internet for the name of the organization for which she was selling. There was no such organization. I did, however, find much about these door-to-door magazine salespeople. The consensus is that they are being exploited by whatever company it is that hires them. Wise people throughout Cyberspace warned, "DO NOT BUY!" Yet, trying to be kind, I had bought and helped perpetuate a system that was taking advantage of the poor. So, well, yea me.

Nearly a year later, I had forgotten about the magazines, and if I had in fact thought of them, I would have been glad they hadn't arrived; I didn't want to profit in the least (and it is, believe me, the least) from someone else's life of near-slavery. When they arrived last month, it took me a moment to remember, and then it all came back to me -- the lip quivering, the hand to the chest, the sobbing and the frequent calling out to Jesus.

So, saddled with the reminder of my gullibility and middle-class whatever-ity (you know, the thing that makes you do things against your better judgment because you feel guilty for having what you have even though there are lots and lots of people who have a lot more than you have), I use my new magazine for toilet reading.

It's okay for the crapper. So far I've learned that walking is not beneficial in any way unless it really hurts and you move your arms in such a way that your thumb makes some kind of arc in the air at the level of something or other. And I've learned that even though I answered all "nos" on the bipolar questionnaire, I should still, just to be safe, share the results with my doctor. And I've learned that an innocent phrase like "what to toss in your salad" makes me a little uncomfortable these days. I've learned that the "grills for every budget" all cost at least three times what we paid for our grill last week. I've learned that I am in the minority when I say that I would rather visit the dentist than go on a diet, because three out of four women would rather do just the opposite. And who the hell cares?

But it's my fault I'm reading this stuff. Eh, too bad it's not flushable.

Remarkable

2006-05-16T13:40:00.000-04:00

"Cows! On!" my daughter yells.

And so I push the play button on the CD player. The Seldom Herd begin singing "Remarkable Cows," the second track on Sandra Boynton's CD Philadelphia Chickens, and both of my children begin bouncing on their knees on my son's toddler bed. The moment they detect the song is beginning to wind down, one or the other yells, "More cows!"

But I just stay put. The CD player is on repeat play. The song will start again automatically. The children never tire of it. Thank goodness, it's a good song. Otherwise I might have thrown the CD player out the window already. It takes a lot of repeats for it to get ultra-annoying. Not that I haven't been there. I'm just saying that, for a kids' song, it's pretty tolerable.

I have some pajamas that have cows on them. My son says they are remarkable cows. I am sure they are.

The other evening, my husband was reading an interesting article and, after telling me about part of it, called in to me, "Hey, honey, and you know what's remarkable?"

"Cows," I said.

Because they are.

A turn of the head, a swish of the tail, and a tippity-tap of the
toes. / What a glorious sight in black and white with a touch of pink at
the nose.

I can't get it out of my head. I don't want to be the only one with that song running through my head.

So please, click on the link above, scroll down, and take a listen.

Come on. Do it.

"Cows! On!"

An Argument for Nanny Cams

2006-05-15T21:37:00.000-04:00

We're short on babysitters. Okay, we were always short on babysitters. But now we're one shorter than usual. See, we're picky and afraid of leaving our kids with people we don't know inside and out. So we have approximately three. Er, two now. Because last week there was an incident.

Not quite a nanny-cam video of an au pair beating a child in the head with a wooden spoon, but it was still troubling enough to make us decide that our children will be with this person alone no more. I'm not going to get into specifics, except to say that the caretaker flew into a rage, and that although what happened next was relatively minor, it was clearly, by any standards, inappropriate.

Our son told us about the incident the next day. Sort of. In a toddler-speak kind of way. While the exact chain of events was not clear, I knew instantly that something troubling had indeed occurred -- it wasn't the kind of thing the child would make up, and certainly not about a person whom he loves so much. I'm glad I believed him.

In fact, I'm glad I decided not to go on a road trip I very much wanted to take late last week. Whatever regrets I have about not having gone, I know I made the right decision because the only sitter available was the person with the temper. And while at the time I still didn't know just what had happened, I had a bad feeling about leaving my children there for an entire day.

Today I confronted the person about it. In a very nice way. I know my kids can be tough at times -- they're only eighteen months apart, they're both in diapers, and they are as resourceful as they are small. So as protective as I feel of my kids, part of me also felt sorry for the sitter, who I knew was stressed out that day, who admitted everything and more, and who has been plagued with guilt since the incident. A sincere apology was offered -- both to my son and me -- and accepted.

We have, in the most age-appropriate and casual way we know how, discussed the incident with our son. Now that the truth is out in the open, now that he has been assured that, even though his behavior wasn't great, the incident itself wasn't his fault, that the person watching him made a mistake, he acts as if a weight has been lifted and seems fine.

The difficult part is that the person who did this is still important to my children and to my family. There will be no severing of ties. But, as sad as we are about it, my husband and I agree that our children can never be left alone again with the individual either. I didn't come right out and say that today, though. I just couldn't.

Word Verification

2006-05-15T13:14:00.000-04:00

I don't get it. I'm good at lots of things, like word games and puzzles, and usually spelling, and even typing, so I thought. But I screw up the word verification all the time when I'm leaving comments on Blogger. Why can't I get this right?

"Type the characters you see in the picture above," it says. Well, crap, how hard can that be?

And it says something like lkkwqp, except with fancy-schmancy font. I type it, double check it, and it gives me the next message with red letters and an exclamation mark, as if to say, "What?! You got that wrong?!?!" And it doesn't even give me a second chance with the original "word." Oh, no, I get a whole new one to screw up.

My self-esteem can't handle much more of this commenting business.

Oh, and the last comment I left . . . I'm not entirely sure, but I think the word verification characters were an anagram for loser.

Miscellaneous Mother's Day Thoughts

2006-05-14T10:14:00.000-04:00

I am lucky. My mother, my maternal grandmother, my mother-in-law, and numerous aunts are living. I have two beautiful, healthy children. I am simultaneously thankful for what I have, sadly aware of those who aren't as lucky, and terrified of losing what I have.
I spent the first part of Mother's Day making my husband's birthday cake with my son. It turned out pretty well, despite the finger prints and the inevitable mixed-in kid spit.
Today is the twenty-sixth anniversary of my first stuttering block. I was standing with some other children in front of my church congregation attempting to read a sappy Mother's Day poem from Ideals magazine. I opened my mouth to read the title, and not a sound came out. After several unsuccessful tries, I was terrified and ran to the front pew to sit down. I remember how the eighty-year-old minister patted me on the back and told me everyone gets stage fright, and how I cried harder, adamantly shaking my head no, my ponytails whipping my wet face, because I knew this was not stage fright. The good news was that the congregation was spared at least one of those sappy poems.
I am not going to win any Mother of the Year awards. Yesterday my son exclaimed, "I love my frickin' sister!" Maybe next year.

You-Know-Who

2006-05-12T13:10:00.000-04:00

I haven't been much in the mood to post lately. There's something about coming here and talking about trivial stuff that makes the stillbirth of my friends' baby even worse. If I don't post, if I don't visit anyone, if I don't make any phone calls, if I dig in my heels deep enough, maybe the world will stop for a second or at least slow down. But it hasn't slowed.

This morning they laid their tiny boy to rest on the same hill where their other son, who was stillborn a year ago yesterday, is buried. Talk about getting kicked when you're down. I wish my friends hadn't had to learn just how strong they are.

I'm having trouble with little things lately -- things like saying Hamotzi, things like taking my two living children to Tot Shabbat tonight where we will all get to sing about how great God is.

Don't get me wrong. I am incredibly thankful for my healthy children and my wonderful marriage and the roof over my head and the abundance of food we have to eat. I'm just having a little trouble with thanking God for it. So maybe I am being blasphemous -- but it's just the truth.

Here's my problem: If God is responsible for the good things in my life, he must also be responsible for the bad things in my friend's life. I don't get how we thank God when the good things happen and then curse our luck when bad things happen. It has to be one way or the other -- all random, or all by design. If God has blessed me with the good life I have right now, then that means God has protected my family and me from the dangers in the world, right? And so that means God did not protect my friends. And if that is the case, do I want to associate myself with this being who protects me with one hand while killing babies, either through action or deliberate inaction, with the other? Thanking God in such a case seems like kissing up to a playground bully in an effort to keep from being picked on oneself. And that, my friends, is not my style.

Or, do I say that God has nothing to do with babies' deaths? Perhaps God created the world and then just stepped out, washing his hands of it. If so, then God also had nothing to do with the births of my children, the food on my table, the roof over my head. And in that case, why pray to God at all? Perhaps I can see thanking God for creating the world in the first place, a world in which joy and happiness are possible for at least limited amounts of time. Then what do we say about the part where death and hatred and violence and illness are possible in the same world?

I don't know. I'd say approaching the rabbi tonight might not be wise. "Rabbi, I am interested in converting to Judaism, but at the moment I'm really mad at God. So, please, let's just not talk about You-Know-Who. The rest of the conversion stuff, though, is open for discussion."

Weekend Reading

2006-05-08T13:31:00.000-04:00

I'm having trouble getting started writing today. I keep wondering how my friends are doing. And so, as I try to distract myself with talk of my own thoughts and my petty problems, every second thought is of them and their pre-schooler who will have to try to understand why he has yet another little brother with whom he will never get to play.

And on with my trivial blathering.

I got two new books this weekend. I'm reading both at the same time as I sometimes do with nonfiction, and both are turning out to be good purchases. I'll talk about the second one in a subsequent post, but the first book is about kids and eating.

It was recommended to me about a year ago by a psychologist whom I was seeing then and who specializes in eating disorders. One day, in a weepy panic, I spewed forth to her all my insecurities about feeding my kids, all my fears that I would make the same mistakes my parents made or, worse, make brand new, more hideous mistakes since I sort of knew what not to do but had no idea what I should be doing instead. She asked me what I was doing, how I was feeding my kids. I confessed that I was following the book Preventing Childhood Eating Problems by Hirschmann and Zaphiropoulos, expecting that she would gasp and call Child Protective Services since the methods suggested by the authors go against current Food Police "wisdom." Instead, she was pleased, saying that book is one of the two that people in her field most often recommend. The other one, she said, might be worth looking into as well.

The basic difference, she said, was that Preventing Childhood Eating Problems says children should control what, when, and how much they eat, which is a great philosophy and works just fine except that it often makes parents feel like short-order cooks. She said the other one, How to Get Your Kid to Eat . . . But Not Too Much by Ellyn Satter, says basically that parents should control what and when their children eat, but that children should control whether or how much.

At the time, I felt very defensive about the "not too much" part of the title. I was afraid it would be a starvation diet disguised as a parenting book. So I didn't read it. Recently, however, now that my kids are both old enough to express their food preferences, I have indeed felt like a short-order cook and fear that I might not be organized and motivated enough to take the steps suggested in Preventing Childhood Eating Problems to alleviate the food preparation pressure I'm feeling. So I got a copy of How to Get Your Kid to Eat. The verdict is that both books are excellent.

Both books -- and listen up, all you fat-phobic, food policing people out there who give judgmental stares to the parents who dare to allow their chubby kid seconds or thirds -- both books agree that it is a very bad idea to restrict the amount of food a child eats, even if the child is "obese." The authors of both books truly understand what happens when children are put on diets or even when they are made to feel ashamed of their eating and/or desire to eat. They understand that the consequences of doing those things are far worse than some excess weight.

And so, I breathe a sigh of relief. I got up the courage to read both books and haven't found one ounce of fat-bashing in either one.

My fear, however, is for all the children out there today whose parents are terrified of making fat kids and who will, as a result, withhold food and pass judgment. It is my prediction that eating disorders will be much more prevalent, and will begin in much younger children, in the years to come until this fat hysteria is finally over.

Stunned and Sad

2006-05-07T23:20:00.000-04:00

As I write this, some dear friends are experiencing a nightmare that is all too familiar to them. They have just lost their baby boy at twenty weeks, and it is only days before the first anniversary of their son Alex's stillbirth.

I don't understand. I will never understand how the universe could be so cruel.

Still, because I love my friends and because I feel so helpless, I pray these useless prayers.

So Maybe the Fat Chick Isn't As Bad Off As You Thought

2006-05-04T14:36:00.000-04:00

I got my perofluorooctanoic acid blood test reports back. Wow. That is some thorough blood work, indeed. I now know everything from my bilirubin level to my testosterone level (and I didn't even know I had one of the latter). I do have some C8 in my blood, as I expected, but I don't have a clue how much is really dangerous. It seems nobody else does either and that's why the testing is being done. My level was a pretty low number, and my mother, who is still drinking the water, had a C8 level that was more than thirteen times mine. Still, who knows how high "high" really is; it doesn't necessarily mean I'm safe or that my mother is in danger.

In other blood test news, I was quite pleased to note that my cholesterol level is significantly lower than it was six months ago. Finally, finally, some real evidence that what I'm doing is not crazy. Finally, some proof that I can improve my health without dieting or even losing weight "accidentally."

I have a check-up coming up next week. Now that I know my cholesterol levels, I have much less anxiety about it. My doctor had said my cholesterol was a little high but that my HDL/LDL ratio was good, so she didn't see any need to put me on medication. I had been afraid, though, that my cholesterol was going to be worse this time and that she would transform before my very eyes from the level-headed, HAES doctor she is to the diet-pushing kind. Now, however, it will be clear to her that, big though I may still be, I am taking good care of myself.

Look away if you must, for I shall now do the Fat Girl Dance.

In My Father-in-Law's Study

2006-05-04T14:07:00.000-04:00

My father-in-law introduced me to Yehuda Amichai.

I have never met him, my father-in-law, the man for whom my son is named. He died two years before my husband and I went on our first date. His study is almost exactly as he left it -- the desk, the computer, the music in the CD changer. It is understood that nothing is to be touched -- except for the books, which we may borrow. He was a librarian; he would have wanted it that way.

When I leafed through the yellowed copy of Yehuda Amichai's Poems, translated by Assia Gutmann, my mother-in-law was quick to say, "Take it. Keep it." So, at least for now, it is on my shelf. I have read it and reread it.

Another of his books, too, is on my shelf. When I started college, e.e. cummings was one of my favorite poets. I knew he had written one novel, but I was never able to get my hands on a copy. And then, years later, in my father-in-law's study, I saw it: The Enormous Room.

On their first date, my father-in-law read poetry to my mother-in-law.

. . . Not a sign will remain that we were in this place. / The world closes behind us, / The sand straightens itself.
(From Yehuda Amichai's "Like Our Bodies' Imprint")

I've never met the man who read these books. But when I sit on the leather couch in his study, my fingers touching the pages he turned, I wish that I had.

Yet Another Fuzz Ball Update

2006-05-03T17:59:00.000-04:00

In a telephone conversation yesterday, my father gave me a little more information about the galls.

Dad: I know exactly what you're talking about, but I didn't know they were called galls. You usually find those on white oak trees. I've never seen them on other oaks, just white oaks. And those things -- they . . . they have kind of a sour taste.

Me: You ate one of them?

Dad: Well, yeah, a long time ago. I thought it might be something good to eat, so, I tried it.

Me: And was it good to eat?

Dad: No. No, it wasn't.

Steering Into the Skid

2006-05-03T13:17:00.000-04:00

This morning I noticed I was eating when I wasn't really hungry and that the things I was eating were not my typical fare -- in other words, I was eating lots of junk food.

If I still had Diet Head, I would have chastised myself harshly, thrown away or declared off-limits any and all of the junk food I was craving, as well as a host of other foods for good measure. Then one of two things would have happened: I might have starved myself or exercised excessively for a good while to make up for my transgression until finally I could take it no more and binged, or I might have been unable to resist the cravings right from the start and then binged even more to deal with the guilt and the feelings of failure.

But a wise woman suggested a while back that it is far better to "steer into the skid" when facing the urge to overeat. Believe me -- it's scary to give yourself permission to do something when you're afraid you might never stop. Once I got up the courage to try her advice, though, I quickly understood the wisdom of it.

So today, steering into the skid, I said to myself, "Hm. Your eating pattern is really different today. Is something going on?" And I immediately realized the answer: I am exhausted, having gotten only four hours of sleep last night. (The kids still aren't sleeping well.) I have been coping by eating.

And then I said, "Oh, my, you must be so worn out. Here, have some more of that if that's what you need. You know, you could have yelled at the kids, or hit them, or gone to bed and left them to fend for themselves, or popped pills, or collapsed into a blubbering heap in front of the children, but all you did was eat. Hmm. Not half bad when you look at it that way, huh? Maybe you're not such a terrible person after all."

And so I ate what I really wanted for lunch today: nachos. They were good. I hadn't had them in a long while. And now the urge to eat is, at least temporarily, gone. What great advice -- steering into the skid.

And now, in following some more age-old advice, I am going to "sleep while the baby sleeps."

Fuzz Ball Mystery Solved

2006-05-03T03:23:00.000-04:00

During a bout of insomnia, I was able to find the answer to my oak tree fuzz ball question. The puffy thing in question is called a gall. It seems there are many kinds of galls, some of them caused by insects, but this particular kind is apparently harmless and quite common on white oak trees. So, for all you folks for whom my puff balls have caused worry and insomnia, it's okay -- you may sleep now, for the mystery is solved.

Fashion and Fuzz Balls

2006-05-02T14:33:00.000-04:00

I got to wear a new outfit today! Aren't you excited for me? You see, I had a playdate today that I had forgotten about. Er, ahem, I mean my kids had a playdate today. One of the few friends I have within driving distance had us over this morning. Her daughter and my kids had a great time, and my friend and I got to talk grown-up -- with occasional spelling and Pig Latin thrown in, of course, since there's that little pitcher/big ear business.

And on to other business. Do you know what this little thing is?
The little white puffy thing with the red dots? There are probably a half dozen of them on our oak trees. Hmm. Are they supposed to be there? If so, why aren't there more of them? I found one on the ground, and it looks as if it has little seeds or something inside it. So much for my chrysalis theory. For a farm girl, I guess I don't know much about nature. I'd email the picture to my dad, but he hasn't even made the transition from manual to electric typewriter yet, so that's out of the question.

Perhaps I'll do a little more Internet research. Yesterday I was googling for cocoon pictures, but I was way off on that one, so maybe I'll try again with the search term . . .um . . . puff ball? Oak puff? Little red and white polka dotted puffy thing on oak tree? Oak fuzzy wuzzies? Sigh. I guess there are some things the Internet still can't do.

A Confused Non-Jewish Spouse Rambles About the New Conversion Initiatives . . . And Then, Predictably, Rambles Even More About Herself

2006-05-01T14:11:00.000-04:00

The Reform and Conservative movements of Judaism have recently unveiled initiatives to encourage conversion of non-Jewish spouses in intermarriages. I've read a lot of non-Jewish partners' negative reactions to the new initiatives. I don't personally find any of it offensive. Of course, I am considering conversion, so why would I find it offensive? I think back to when my husband and I first met, though, and wonder how I might have felt back then if I had been pressured to convert the first time I entered a synagogue with him. I was not ready back then to consider it. I wish I had been ready, but I just wasn't.

One of the many things I like about Judaism is that it's not an evangelical religion; I have very little patience for folks who try to force their beliefs down my throat, and the recent surge in Christian evangelism is one of the things that has turned me off to the faith of my childhood. However, there is a difference between pressuring and saying, "If you would like to join us, you are welcome." Finding that balance, however, is surely tricky.

I've never been approached about becoming a Jew. It's respectful distance, I guess, that keeps anyone from asking me. I don't know whether to mention to the rabbi my desire to convert or whether I should wait . . . until I'm absolutely certain, or until I've been so absolutely certain for so long that there's no way I would ever change my mind. I keep meaning to talk to the rabbi, but I'm introverted by nature, and so I put it off again and again.

And, okay, more to the point, if I talk to him and start the process officially, that means I'm going to feel obligated to tell my family about all this. That's the part I'm dreading. I like to think neither of my parents would be too surprised or upset; my mom probably knows it intuitively already, and my dad isn't very religious at all and doesn't care too much one way or another. My mom will probably be a little hurt, but I can't imagine she would be as upset or hurt as she was when she found out her grandchildren would not be Christian. (She wasn't happy about it, but she was very respectful.) I hope that she will see my conversion as the next logical step in our creation of a Jewish home. Perhaps I'm being too optimistic.

I'm really, really dreading telling my grandmother. She's in her eighties, and she's just not as healthy as she used to be. I don't want to do anything to hurt her or harm our relationship, but I also can't stand the thought of keeping something from her or being so cowardly as to wait until she has passed away to proceed with conversion. The older she has gotten, the more religious she has become. All the books I see on her night table now are Christian ones. She will not take this well.

She was without a doubt our harshest critic about our children's upbringing. She said, "I'm sorry to hear you're going to that Jewish church. The best way to raise children is Christian. That's how I was raised." Not exactly a tongue lashing, but by far the harshest thing Grandma has ever said to me, and perhaps the harshest thing I've ever heard her say to anyone. It hurt me deeply. And even though we just agreed to disagree that day and have ever since had a close relationship, I haven't really gotten over her disapproval. I feel sad and guilty that I've let her down, while I also feel angry with her for not being more open- minded. I remind myself that my grandmother lived her whole life (until very recently when she had to move in with relatives) in a very, very small town where she had never seen a person of another faith. My husband was the first Jew she had ever met. I need to give her a break. I had high hopes when we married, because she told my mother to tell me that she approved as long as we raised our kids "one way or the other" -- she just wanted them to be religious. I guess her change of heart caught me off guard.

I don't know. Maybe no one will care at all if I convert. After all, I'm an adult and can make an informed decision. I mean, kids are one thing, but me, well, they probably think I've already turned out to be a dud, so what would they care now? And if they do care, what of it? They're not the sort to disown me. I wish I didn't need my family's approval so much.

And then there are my kids. On occasion my son will ask me if I'm Jewish. He doesn't understand how I'm not, since I do all the Jewish "stuff" with him. I can't tell him that I want to be Jewish, because it will get back to my family. So I just tell him I'm Christian because I grew up in a Christian home.

I feel conflicted. Do I do what I want to do, or do I just maintain the status quo (which really isn't so bad since I'm essentially practicing Judaism anyway) to keep from hurting my extended family? And then, what of my children? I feel paralyzed -- afraid to act. I'm unable to move in one direction of the other. You know, I almost wish the folks at the synagogue would get a move on with this new conversion agenda. Maybe if someone would ask me if I wanted to convert, it would push me in the direction of finding the answer.

A Super Duper, Fan-Packed Weekend. Seriously.

2006-04-30T20:18:00.000-04:00

My husband just said he thinks this is the best weekend we have had since we moved here last fall. I agree. The only thing that could have made it better would have been a "date night" for my husband and me. But we can't be greedy.

On Saturday we took the kids to the park for a romp on the playground and a picnic in the grass. There happened to be a walk-a-thon for autism going on at the park, so there were a lot more kids on the playground than usual. My favorite part of the playground experience was that there were autistic kids and "typical" kids, and for the most part, no one could tell who was who. With all the other kids on the playground, my kids learned a little about taking turns, too -- we don't get out much, so at first my son didn't get the concept of getting in line and waiting his turn for the slide, but by the time we left, he was much more confident.

I love this particular park. The play equipment is built into the landscape. There aren't ladders to the slides; the slides are built right into the hillside so you walk right up to them and sit down. That also means they're fully supported underneath so that fat mamas like me can slide down with their little ones without having to worry about weight restrictions. Yea! I had forgotten how much fun it was to slide! I admit to being a little disappointed when my daughter started sliding down by herself.

She is as much a daredevil as my son is cautious. He is the sort who will stand at the edge of the playground until we coax him first onto the sand, then up to the slide . . . where he sits and sits and then has to move over and let other kids slide and then he sits and sits some more until at last he gets the courage to go down, and then onto the swings . . . where he screams if he goes too high. My daughter, on the other hand, giggles like mad the higher she goes, and she loves the slides (although my husband and I nearly have a heart attack every time she flies down, her tiny body wobbling from side to side).

In the afternoon, we took the kids for ice cream. My son had never been to an ice cream parlor before, but I have to hand it to him: the kid knows how to order his food. He said he wanted strawberry ice cream (which he's never tried before, and which he didn't even know they had). My husband asked if he wanted anything mixed in with it, and I was just opening my mouth to list some examples for my son, when he shouted, "Oreos!" So strawberry ice cream it was, with Oreos mixed in.

The kids had their fun yesterday. Today, however, was my day. I did something I haven't done since before the kids were born: I went shopping by myself, for myself. I walked at a leisurely pace, didn't have to worry about strollers or sippy cups or getting finished before nap time. I wasted time looking at things I didn't need. I tried on lots and lots of clothes and bought a few things for the summer.

Have you ever noticed that in department stores, the plus size women's clothing is usually on a separate floor from the other clothing? I think it's funny. I pass by all these pretty skirts and trendy tops until I come to the escalator. "See ya!" I call to all the thin shoppers, "I'm heading up to the Fat Racks!" And there, at the top of the escalator, is a lovely muumuu made just for me. No, seriously, fat clothes have gotten a lot better. I found some stuff I actually liked, stuff that makes me feel young. Uh-oh, does that say more about the current state of plus size clothing, or my old lady taste?

Anyway, I came home refreshed and rejuvenated, and now I'm ready to face the world in something other than spit-up stained t-shirts and worn-out jeans. Um, except tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, I have nowhere to go. Hm.

But the weekend, I'm telling you, was great.

Teething

2006-04-28T14:53:00.000-04:00

We're teething. The little one is the one getting the new teeth, but we're all feeling the pain. Nobody's getting much sleep, and we're all a little grumpy.

Yesterday morning, after my daughter finished a very long screaming session, she finally decided she would sit in her chair and eat breakfast. We enjoyed about two minutes of calm before my son ran over and took her bowl away from her. She began screaming all over again, very loudly, her fists clenched, her body shaking, even after the bowl was returned, even after I offered to feed her, even after we were all offering her our own breakfasts. As my frustrated husband was putting my son in time-out, he asked, "Do you like to hear her scream?" My son, wide-eyed, whispered, "No. Turn it off."

Last night my daughter, all screamed out, slept very well. However, as I said, we're all teething, so my son, used to waking to his sister's wails at 5:00 A.M., began wailing himself around that time. "It's still nighttime, sweetie. Go back to sleep," I called.

He continued to scream. We tried to ignore him and tried to get back to sleep. I thought the screams were getting louder, and I was just pulling the cover over my head to drown them out when a little face appeared at my bedside.

"Mommy!" my son wailed, "I want you to come in my room and get me out of bed!"

"That doesn't even make sense," I muttered.

"MOMMY! I NEED YOU!" he shrieked in my ear.

Cursing about Skinner's rats and intermittent reinforcement, I reluctantly got up.

I guess I figure the kid means business when he braves the dark hallway alone. When I was a kid, I would yell for my parents, but I would never, and I mean NEVER, venture through the dark house to their room. From my bed, I could see a green, coffin-shaped storage trunk in the living room, and I knew that Frankenstein would come out of it and grab me and bite me if I were to walk past in the dark. Yeah, Frankenstein. I didn't quite have that whole vampire/regenerated tissue thing worked out in my mind back then.

We don't have a coffin-shaped trunk in our house. In fact, there's not much scary in between the kids' rooms and ours. It's a straight shot. Lucky little dogs. You know, I'm calling my mom right now to see if that green trunk is still in her basement. I bet it would fit nicely right outside our bedroom door. That ought to buy us some sleep.

Thoughts on Giving Up Dieting

2006-04-27T13:34:00.000-04:00

It's been more than two years since I officially gave up dieting. They've been the most freeing two years of my life (um, okay, except for the part where I'm not allowed to go to the bathroom without at least one diapered escort -- but that has nothing to do with dieting).

Why, you might ask, would I do something so crazy as to give up dieting? Why would I decide to just "let myself go"? Here's why.

There is a ton of evidence that yo-yo dieting, and perhaps even weight loss in general, is worse for one's health than is just being fat. (See this post on Alas (a Blog) for just a taste of the truth.)
Diet after diet after diet after diet after diet, and the results were always the same: temporary weight loss followed by out-of-control binge-ing and horrible guilt and sometimes purging and eventually the regaining of the weight I had lost plus a good bit more. It was making me bigger.
The most unhealthy relationship I have ever had with food was when I was the closest I have ever been to my "ideal" weight. Yes, I was able maintain, at least for a few months, a weight of only five pounds above my "ideal" weight, but only if I a) restricted myself to a 1000 calorie a day diet, and b)exercised vigorously (high impact aerobics, jogging) for sixty to ninety minutes a day six days a week. The feelings of desperation I had when near a piece of cake back then are enough to remind me that what I was doing was NOT normal.

How has giving up dieting, America's favorite pastime, changed my life?

Now that I have given up dieting and legalized all foods, I no longer feel those out-of-control cravings for cake, donuts, etc. I have actually had to throw away sweets that went bad because I don't feel the need to eat them. That NEVER would have happened before.
Two years since giving up dieting, I am now able to enjoy salads without having flashbacks of starvation. I eat things like cucumbers and broccoli and black beans (You knew that was coming, didn't you?) because I love them, not because they are required diet fare.
I now eat when I am hungry, not when the diet book says I can eat, and not when I have some extra calories/points/fat grams/carbs to which I am entitled.
I am learning to recognize when I am full. I am learning to stop when my body says I've had enough, not when Weight Watchers/Dr. Phil/my father/the carb police say I have used up all my calories/points/fat grams/carbs.
I am finally able to separate issues of health from issues of weight and to choose fruits and veggies and whole grains because they taste good and are good for my body -- not because they might make me smaller.
My children are learning things that I didn't learn (or that I knew and forgot years ago?) until my thirties. At dinner the other day, my son said, "I'm not going to finish this strawberry because I'm full. My body is saying I had enough." He can stop mid-strawberry! One day I want to be that in tune with my body.
I move my body because it feels good to do so and because it's good for my health, not because it burns calories. I now know that I love to walk, practice yoga, play tennis, swim, dance, mow the yard, and garden. I used to do many of those things as a way to punish myself, not for fun.

Sure, I have a long way to go to undo the damage I've done to myself in a ridiculous quest to be something I'm not. I'm getting there. Despite being big and looking the farthest from "normal" I've ever looked, this is without a doubt the most normal I have ever been.

My Gutters Have Been Cleaned!

2006-04-26T15:05:00.000-04:00

And not by my husband.

(Ahem. Okay. Promising to behave myself now.)

We finally found some home repair folks to fix our water problems. A team of one loud guy and one quiet guy arrived yesterday while the kids and I were on the front porch watching the rain.

Loud Guy asked if I had a water hose, so I plucked my daughter from her precarious perch on the porch glider and took her with me the short distance to enter the code on the garage door opener. Loud Guy said, "Hey, let me hold 'er. She's gonna get wet!"

"Thank goodness," I said, handing my child over to the almost complete stranger, "because, well, she's never been wet before. We've always had her dry cleaned."

Okay, okay.

What I really said was, "She'll be all right. It'll just take me a second," and I took her with me. It was only sprinkling, and the kid had been climbing down from the porch and darting out into the yard just to make me chase her, so she had already proven she wouldn't melt, and I was worried she might turn the glider over since she did turn a rocking chair over last week.

Loud Guy followed us, trying to hold his jacket over her head and breathing right in her face as he told her he wouldn't want her to get sick.

Once Loud Guy found the water hose, the kids and I went inside so we wouldn't be in the way (read: so the kids wouldn't try to climb the ladder). Then it was time for an afternoon snack, which my children ate happily at the picture window, sippy cups resting on the window sill, heads tilted back and eyes peering up at Quiet Guy's feet on the ladder, gazes occasionally following a small clump of leaves as it was tossed to the ground.

Loud Guy followed their gaze, looked at the leaves on the front lawn, and yelled up, "Hey, put them leaves in a bag! I got a bag right here!"

Then Loud Guy announced he'd found the source of our basement leak: a crack in the concrete drain in front of the garage. He fixed it with some concrete caulking maybe.

Maybe. We've already had to mop up several gallons of water downstairs, but it did rain quite a bit before Loud Guy and Quiet guy got everything fixed. We'll have to wait until the next rain to find out if our money was well spent.

After they left, I looked out the window at the back yard and saw that Quiet Guy had gone back to dumping leaves into the yard when Loud Guy wasn't looking. So after my husband got home, I raked them up in the rain . . . which only proves how desperate I was to get out of the house for a while.

Yea, Me-Time.

Stuttering at Work

2006-04-25T13:32:00.000-04:00

Results of a survey by Professor Marshall Rice of the Schulich School of Business at York University, Toronto, indicate that more than half of stutterers believe their stuttering has been an obstacle in their employment. Furthermore,

. . . 42 percent felt a job interview was "cut short." Fourteen percent said an employer told them directly that they would not be hired for a position because of their stuttering.

Shortened interviews? Yeah, that's definitely happened to me. I'm pretty close to being among the fourteen percent, as well. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, though, so perhaps the rejection letter I received from an employer accusing me of lacking "honesty and forthrightness" for not having specifically told her that I stuttered meant that my failure to state the obvious, not the stuttering itself, cost me the job.

I truly believe that when I go into an interview, or most any other situation, I have an obligation to make my listeners feel as comfortable as possible and to educate them about my speech when necessary and appropriate. I also know that it is incredibly difficult to know just how to carry out those obligations during a job interview. I've tried numerous techniques, and they all failed at one time or another.

Before I was to graduate with my undergrad degree, I approached a professor who frequently sat on interview panels and asked his opinion about how I should deal with my stuttering, since it would no doubt show itself during an interview. Should I raise the issue to put the interviewers at ease, or should I just let them figure it out? He thought about it for a while and got back to me the next day. His suggestion: mention it if I was comfortable doing so.

So I did. During the first interview, I was frank and told the employer that, as he had most certainly noticed, I did stutter, and that, as it should be clear from my transcript, my student teaching evaluations and my letters of reference, I had never allowed my speech to interfere with my work. The employer looked me square in the eye and said, "Lady, you need to lower your paranoia level."

That went well, now, didn't it?

In my second interview, once I mentioned my stutter, the employer refused to look me in the eye at all.

Oh, brother.

In my third interview, I was frank about my speech, and then promptly and rudely was told that I was not allowed to talk about it because of the ADA. The interview ended shortly thereafter.

What the . . . ?

So for my fourth interview, in an effort to avoid "breaking the law," scaring people, or being "paranoid," I changed my game plan. That's when I just stuttered my way through without mentioning it . . . and received the "honesty and forthrightness" letter.

ARGH!

The truth of the matter, though, is that I eventually got the kind of job I really wanted: a job teaching at a residential school for the deaf. I can't remember now what was said about my stuttering in that interview, but I know for a fact that the employer was much more interested in how I signed than in how I spoke. (Would you believe it was the only interview in which signing was even a component? But that's another post for another day.)

As for me, once I was employed (in my first teaching job and my subsequent one), I don't think I was overlooked or underestimated because of my stuttering. I'm one of the lucky ones, though. I have a feeling there are many less forgiving professions than the field of special education.

Remembering the Six Million

2006-04-24T14:53:00.000-04:00

Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

To read or listen to the stories of a few survivors, click here.

"The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference." -- Eli Wiesel

Normal Disfluency

2006-04-23T13:40:00.000-04:00

Shortly after the release of the why questions, my son's brain also declared, "Prepare to enter stage of normal disfluency! All systems go!" That's right. He's entered the land of normal developmental stuttering. My son is definitely repeating sounds, words, and entire phrases. It's all "easy" stuttering, with none of the tension, frustration, or blocks, that a real, live adult stutterer would exhibit.

Actually, I noticed it a couple weeks ago, but no one else did, and rather than chalk it up to my super sensitive stuttering radar, I decided maybe I was imagining things. But yesterday my husband and parents both noticed it.

I knew this developmental stage was coming. I spent a lot of time wondering how I would deal with it. And of course, I wonder at what point we will know if the disfluency is temporary or if it will hang around and intensify the way mine did. The odds in favor of fluency for my son aren't the greatest. Stuttering runs in my family. Four of my father's six brothers stutter(ed), as do at least three of my first cousins.

To make the statistics a little more interesting, I am a woman and the only female in my family to stutter. Stuttering is a sex-linked disorder; the vast majority of stutterers are males. A college acquaintance who was a speech pathology student and who stuttered himself, gave me some statistics way back when about the likelihood of a stutterer having children who stutter. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I do know that the sons of female stutterers were the group most likely to stutter themselves.

I have moments when I worry about how well I would do at parenting a child who stutters. I hope my own experience would be an asset, not a liability. I know what it's like. I know what my kids will need to deal with obstacles -- you know, those little obstacles like introducing themselves.

Just a few months ago, for example, when we went to the synagogue in our new town for the first time, I was having some difficulty introducing myself to all the people we were meeting. Not everyone recognized as stuttering all of my blocking and my technique of starting my voice with a neutral "uh" before I set the first sound of my name on it (as in "UhhhhhhhhhhhMmmy name"), so they often made jokes about how I'd forgotten my own name, ha ha. I have developed a pretty thick skin about it and usually just laugh along, but sometimes frustration creeps in.

For me, the most awkward moment to block on my name is when someone is shaking my hand. I try to spit out my name, it takes a very long time, and the whole time the confused person holds onto me. It becomes this intimate hand-holding session when all either of us wanted was a quick shake -- yet the other person is almost always too polite to let go until I've finally finished. At the end of the evening at the synagogue, I was in the midst of just such a hand-holding session with a very nice gentleman when I became frustrated and embarrassed, and said, "Agh! I'm sorry. I stutter, and it's sometimes really hard for me to say my name." The man didn't flinch. He gestured to the elderly man beside him and said, "Oh, so does my father." His father, a stooped and gentle man in his late eighties or early nineties, whose mind was very sharp, took my hand gingerly, smiled into my eyes, and said, "I know. I know. All my life. All my life."

That simple act of kindness and acceptance touched me deeply (I made it to the car before I cried) and comforted me in a way no non-stutterer's kind words ever could. If my son never "outgrows" this period of disfluency, I hope I will be able to look him in the eye and repeat with kindness those same words: "I know. I know. All my life. All my life."

Profit

2006-04-23T12:48:00.000-04:00

For the second weekend in a row, I traveled to my parents' house. This time, however, the trip was not for pleasure. I had an appointment to answer a ton of health questions and to give a blood sample (for "$1,000 worth of blood tests," according to the nurse) in connection with a health project to see what effect the community's contaminated drinking water has had on our health. For my trouble, I got $400, my main motivation for participating.

When I was growing up, we all knew that the cancer rate for our community was higher than normal. We always blamed the nearby power plants. It wasn't until recently, however, that a chemical company upriver admitted to years of dumping perfluorooctanoic acid into our water supply. Hence the mass testing.

After I had given my answers and my blood, I sat waiting for the receptionist to print my check. I couldn't help but notice a family with three children. The oldest child, who couldn't have been older than ten or eleven, was particularly striking. She had a very short and trendy haircut, dark little waves lying close to her head. She stood out, perhaps because the rest of the family, and most of the rest of the community for that matter, didn't look nearly so trendy. I wondered if she had asked for that haircut.

The girl's father was shuffling through a pile of documents trying to prove that he and his family had been residents of the area during at least one full year in which contamination occurred. The only problem was with his eldest daughter's documents; somehow the name of the elementary school had been left off her report card. The father, although polite, was becoming a little flustered. All the while, though, the girl looked on with the calmest eyes I have ever seen -- wide, brown, and deeply calm. I thought again how stunning she was. The receptionist was trying hard to find them a loophole so that testing could be done. Finally, she suggested a bank statement from the girl's savings account -- that, she said, would provide an address and tell the date the account was opened. The family stepped outside the cramped trailer to make a cell phone call.

As the receptionist printed my check, she said to her coworker, "We have to find a way to get that little girl tested."

"Why?" the other woman asked.

"You didn't know?" the receptionist continued. "She has cancer."

Suddenly I understood the "trendy" hair style and those eyes. I felt a lump in my throat. The receptionist handed me my check. I was disgusted by my profit.

What the Intermarried Talk About

2006-04-21T07:34:00.000-04:00

(The following is a conversation my husband and I had early in our marriage.)

She: Have you ever wondered why you never hear of people today having the last names of certain people from history? For example --

He: You mean like Christ?

She: (Laughs) What?

He: Seriously. I've never seen the name Christ in a phone book.

She: You do know that Christ wasn't Jesus's last name, right?

He: What? Wasn't it? Then why are people always calling him Jesus Christ.

She: Christ is a title, not a name. It means anointed or savior or something. It's not a last name.
He: Are you sure?

She: Yeah. I mean, it wasn't like "Mary and Joseph Christ."

He: It wasn't?

She: No!

He: Oh, that's right! Mary's last name was Magdalene.

She: No, no, no. That was a different Mary.

He: Then what was his last name?

She: He didn't have one.

He: What do you mean he didn't have one?

She: Well, I don't think people had last names back then.

He: Are you sure?

She: Pretty sure.

He: Hmm.

She: I mean, it's like Moses. Moses didn't have a last name.

He: (frowns skeptically)

(A few moments of silence)

He: Well, what about Judas Priest?

A-Z Meme

2006-04-20T18:36:00.000-04:00

I wanted an easy post for today, so I took this meme from Jack.

A-Z Meme

Accent: A bit of an Appalachian accent when speaking. A bit of a "hearing accent" when using American Sign Language

Booze: Not much of a drinker. Do wine coolers count?

Chore I Hate: Putting away the folded laundry

Dogs/Cats: 2 cats, but I love dogs, too

Essential Electronics: Computer with Internet access

Favorite Perfume/Cologne: Anything other than baby spit-up

Gold & Silver: Whatever. Silver, I guess.

Hometown: Teeny tiny town in the hills of Appalachia

Insomnia: Rarely

Job Title: MOMMY!

Kids: A son and a daughter, ages almost 3 and 17 months respectively

Living Arrangements: In a house, with hubby and kids

Most Admired Trait: Admired by whom? If you ask my kids, it's my ability to make sandwiches and cut up fruit. If you ask my husband, it's . . . well, something else entirely.

Number of Sexual Partners: Sorry, but I am NOT giving out his number.

Overnight Hospital Stays: Four in all, the last of which, for a c-section from hell with a side of pre-eclampsia, lasted for thirteen days.

Phobia: Blood and spiders . . . but not so much bloody spiders.

Quote: Books are for reading, not for eating. (Sigh. I must say this twenty times a day.)

Religion: Raised Methodist, baptised because I was afraid of the demons from the sewer in Ghost, married to a Jew, raising Jewish children, considering conversion.

Siblings: One

Time I Usually Wake Up: When the little people make me.

Unusual Talent: I do a damn good chicken imitation.

Vegetable I Refuse To Eat: Refuse is a strong word, but I tend to avoid celery.

Worst Habit: Being indecisive. Well, no, no, wait. Maybe it's . . . oh, I'll have to think about it.

X-Rays: Yeah, I've had some of those.

Yummy Foods I Make: black bean soup, pasta with pomodora sauce, chocolate almond cake

Zodiac Sign: Capricorn

HTM-Hell

2006-04-19T20:40:00.000-04:00

Dude. I don't know what I did to my sidebar. It's messed up. The headings are somehow included in the previous links. I've looked at the template. I've forced my husband to look at the template. I even looked at the template while standing on my Gorilla Ladder. All to no avail. Any ideas?

Gotta Get My Mind Outta the Gutter

2006-04-19T13:27:00.000-04:00

Our midnight mopping sessions have continued. The day before yesterday I mopped up two giant Fresh Step kitty litter buckets full of basement water, and then my husband mopped up another half bucket when he got home. The good news is that we think we have figured out the source of the problem: our gutters.

The gutter above the spot where the basement leaks seems to be leaking. There's a slow, two-day drip after every little rain, and during a major rainstorm, the water just pours out over the edges of the gutter. We cleaned the leaves out late last fall, but apparently something still isn't right. We decided the downspout must be clogged.

So I added "call gutter people" to Monday's to-do list. I found the number for a handyman service that does gutters. When I called, I spoke with a very sincere-sounding man who, I immediately detected, stuttered. I have a stuttering radar. I can detect a person's stutter before he or she so much as repeats one syllable. It sounds mysterious, but after reading the book Blink, I am convinced that I am just "thin-slicing" and recognizing in other speakers the same teeny tiny stuttering (or trying-not-to-stutter) behaviors that I myself exhibit.

I don't remember the journal or the article or anything else, so feel free to accuse me of making this crap up, but when I was in college, I read about research in which brain activity was scanned for stutters and non-stutterers. During speech, the brain activity of the two groups was drastically different. The fascinating part, however, was that even during non-speech activities such as wiggling the fingers, the brain activity of the two groups was very different. So if stutterers do lots of stuff just a tad differently from other folks, it does seem logical that I might subconsciously find some other stutterer's actions familiar. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm off on a tangent. I know.

Anyway, the sincere stuttering guy, who didn't actually stutter until very late in the conversation, and then only enough for most people to think he was "just nervous" (a pet peeve of mine and another blog entry entirely), quoted me a fair price, promised a free estimate, said he could get gutter covers for me for 10-15% less than the price at Lowe's, and told me one of his workers would be here Tuesday morning. Um, Tuesday was yesterday. I'm still waiting. Wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt, I called back late Tuesday afternoon and asked if there had been a mix-up, and sincere stuttering guy's wife assured me that the guy who was supposed to give me the estimate would call with an explanation "as soon as he comes in the door." That was yesterday afternoon. It's Wednesday now. I guess he's still not back.

So, highly irritated that I couldn't give sincere stuttering guy my business, I did the next best thing and called a "handylady" who was advertised in the phone book. She charged fifteen dollars more per hour and said I would have to buy the gutter covers myself. I told her I would think about it.

Grumbling and frustrated, I put the kids to bed this afternoon, got out the Gorilla Ladder, which I have to admit makes me feel all-powerful, the water hose, a straightened wire hanger, and a pair of rubber gloves, and went to work. The downspout had a few leaves in it, but not many, and when I put the water hose in, I saw the water come out the bottom. That was a good sign. I checked the gutter right over the basement leak, the place where the drip occurs, and it also seemed mostly clean except for a think layer of silt. Then I squirted some water in . . . and it flowed the wrong way . . . as in away from the downspout. Uh-oh. What causes that? I do not know. Even with the awesome power bestowed upon me by the Gorilla Ladder, I cannot answer that question.

Am I going to have to call in the Big Guns, the gutter salespeople? I'm sure they'll tell me the whole thing needs to be replaced, even if it's a minor problem. Grumble, grumble, grumble. I'm stumped.

Oh, and I was wrong. Those aren't calla lilies after all. That's gotta be a baaaaaad omen.

Why Oh Why

2006-04-18T13:59:00.000-04:00

I noticed about a month ago that my son was asking "why" questions but was not yet using the word why. He created some rather convoluted syntax in order to ask his questions. Instead of asking, "Why did you say that to her?" he would ask, "What did she do that you said that?" I'm fascinated by language development and felt downright giddy every time he came up with something like that.

But then, of course, I started to wonder if he was on track or whether he should already know how to use why. I kept meaning to look up the age at which children begin to use why, but before I got around to it, I heard him use it for the first time. He'd been using it every now and again since.

And then last night during his sleep, his brain must have sounded the trumpet and called out to his mouth, "Release the WHY questions!" Today the whys have been endless. For the first couple hours, I found this new stage of development fascinating.

And then it just became annoying.

Spring Surprises

2006-04-17T08:55:00.000-04:00

Do you ever get the feeling the universe is telling you you are just where you are supposed to be? This spring is giving me that feeling.

Shortly after we moved last fall, I remembered the lilacs I left in our old yard. My father had dug them up from my parents' yard, and I had transplanted them. They were tiny, but each year they got bigger and even started blooming two years ago. I wished I had brought them. I realized I would miss my pink hyacinths, my tulips, and all my lilies, too.

Then early this spring, when the tree at the corner of our new house began to bud, I realized it was a lilac, more than three times the size of the ones I had left behind. I then spotted hyacinths and tulips coming up in the back yard. And last week I figured out that the familiar-looking flowers coming up at the side of the house were calla lilies, some of my favorites and the last bulbs I had planted at our old house.

I told my mom last week that the only thing I needed to add would be some peonies. I hadn't gotten around to planting them at our old house, but they were next on my list. During our visit to my parents' house this weekend, though, I took one look at my parents' peonies and realized that they looked exactly like the two little bushes coming up on our backyard.

A coincidence? Probably. But I can't help feeling this house was meant for us.

Now if I can just figure out where the previous owners planted that dishwasher . . .

Dai, Dayenu . . . I'll, I'll Weigh You

2006-04-16T19:14:00.000-04:00

Our Seder went well. My husband did a great job leading it, and the kids loved singing the songs and looking for the afikomen. Grandma didn't seem offended at all by the real wine (it's grape juice all the way at her church), perhaps partly because my uncle, a minister himself and my grandma's favorite son-in-law, chose to drink all four glasses of wine. He has always been wonderful to us, setting an excellent example for the rest of my family when it comes to dealing with our intermarriage. He even brought his own yarmulke. I was touched, as I know my husband was. My mother-in-law also had nothing but wonderful things to say about him after the Seder.

The only negative part of the evening was that my father did not show up. His not coming would not have surprised or bothered me nearly as much if he had not promised my son repeatedly that he would attend. When my mother arrived alone, my son began to wail. I asked my mother why my father hadn't come, and she said he didn't say. The poor kid wailed louder. After he had calmed down a bit, I excused myself, went to another room, and called my dad. Long story short: my father, in his typical passive-aggressive manner, was punishing my mother because of some argument they had had, and my little boy was the one who got hurt. My father has broken his promises to me a hundred times, but somehow I hoped my children would never know that part of his personality. At the very least, I hoped they wouldn't have to know it until they were out of diapers.

Saturday morning we were to go to my parents' house. My husband was not thrilled about going there after my father's childish behavior, but we piled into the car and went anyway.

And here's the really fun part. When we walked into my parents' house, my dad immediately picked up my son and said, "You're really growing! Let's go see how much you weigh!" This has become a habit of his -- weigh the kids before we're even all in the door. I realize weighing toddlers isn't unheard of, but this is the man who taught me that my weight is inversely proportional to my value, and I'm not letting him teach my children that lesson. I've had enough. Now, I don't think quickly on my feet, and I was trying to plan what I was going to say to keep the great weigh-in from happening while avoiding World War III. Well, let's just say that while I was searching for the right words, my husband found some of his own that got the point across quite nicely, and neither of my children was weighed.

Have I mentioned how much I love my husband?

From the Junk Drawer

2006-04-12T14:51:00.000-04:00

Some miscellaneous ramblings . . .

I'm totally on a black bean kick lately. Last night I made black bean and carrot quesadillas, and today I had a black bean burger for breakfast and another for lunch. Yummy.

Being a grown-up almost made me forget that dandelions can stain your hands and that the best place to find bugs is under a big rock.

We're hosting a big (well, big for our small house, anyway) Passover Seder in a few days and have invited some of my family members, including my grandmother who knows very little about Judaism and who has probably never been in the same room with an open bottle of wine in her life. My husband said, "Is your grandma going to think less of me when I drink four glasses of wine?" I replied, "Well, you'll get lots of extra points for leading us in all the religious readings and prayers. Yeah, sure, she'll think you're a lush, but a religious lush, so it'll all even out."

I'm allergic to something. I pulled weeds yesterday and now have bumpy, itchy hands. I've never gotten poison ivy in my life, and goodness knows I've been exposed to lots of it before, so I doubt that's what it is. Hmm. If I find out it's a reaction to black beans, I'm going to be seriously upset.

Vocational Testing for the Pre-Schooler

2006-04-11T13:39:00.001-04:00

My son will be three next month. Already there are some clues about his future vocation. Judging from his words, I see several career paths emerging as potential fits for my son. For example:

Spin Doctor/Politician -- When his little sister tries to join him for a round of "jumping" (bouncing on his knees) on his toddler bed, my son rudely tells her to go away. I remind him that we are nice to each other in this house and that we share. He pauses to think. Finally, gesturing earnestly, he says to his sister, "I don't want you to fell and hurt your head. I sorry, but I just don't think it's an idea." He convinces her.
Horticulturist -- Taking his toy lawn mower out into the yard, he says, "Bye, Mommy. I'm going to make some dandelions."
Therapist -- "Daddy, are you sad because your daddy died? Do you miss him? Here, I give you a hug."
Jewish Farmer -- "Old McDonald had a farm, E-I-E-mayim!"
Attorney -- My son sees me give his sister, who has just received a vaccination, some Tylenol, and he asks me for some. I explain that Tylenol is just for people who are sick or who are hurting from, say, a shot. He asks, "If I don't get a shot and I take Tylenol, will it make me sick?" I answer that it might. "Then can I take Tylenol because I'm sick?"
Doctor -- In the middle of Shabbat dinner, my son blurts out, "Grandma, do you have a 'bagina'?"