I miss you

Blog!  I miss you.  I have many things to tell you, but can't seem to get all the way through a post lately.  I have a few half-posts, which maybe I'll just post and see if anyone can make sense of it!  At the moment, I'm stressing over whether my babysitter is going to come this afternoon when I have to go off and deliver all of my dinners on the porch.  If not, I'm screwed.  She super-secret texted me in the middle of the night asking if I still need her today!  Yes, I do.  That's why I said I need you every single Tuesday.  When I said that, I meant that I didn't want to have to confirm it every week.  Ay!  Will let you know how it all turns out!

When will September be over???

This is always such a crazy month for me, ever since the kids started "real" school.  I get totally overwhelmed with the volume of papers and sign-up sheets and new committees and all of the other stuff that comes my way at the beginning of the school year.  It starts to pile up in little corners and on table tops all over my house, and when I walk by and spy a pile that I know needs attention, it just makes me want to cram my whole self into a bag of peanut M&Ms.  I just finished writing apologetic emails to both of the boys' teachers for not returning the parent-teacher conference sign-up sheets on time, because I can't see any time listed that works for me, Matt, and the babysitter where we could do both conferences at the same general time.  Achieving this conference seems to be a logic puzzle that is going to defeat me, so I tire of trying to solve it and figure I'll update the blog.  With what?  Just my ranting about how busy I am.  And what better way to solve that problem than to spend some time telling people about it?  Perfect.
In other news, things are going well on most fronts.  All kids are healthy at the moment, and everyone - including Ruby - loves school.  She loves, loves it.  When I tell her it's time to go (2 mornings a week for 2.5 hours), she claps and says "yay yay yay" and rushes around gathering her shoes, her backpack and multiple sippy cups (she needs at least two with her at all times to prevent a major tantrum).  Very cute.  She is in a little class with mostly younger kids, since she has an October birthday, and she goes crazy over babies, so she thinks she is in heaven.  Adding to her advanced status, she has also decided to potty-train herself.  I'm going along with it, trying not to get my hopes up, but she's pretty determined.  We spend quite a bit of time each day on the potty, cleaning the potty, admiring pretty underwear and, occasionally, cleaning up accidents.  This is not the way I went about things with the boys, but I'm trying to be flexible and try new things if that's what Ruby desires.  So we'll see about that.  Her birthday is coming up in a month, and I'm trying to decide what to do - small party, big giant party, something in between?  I want to celebrate her and make a big deal, but there's a part of me that wants to keep everything just in our family too, so, typically, I'm not doing anything about it and will have to decide at the last minute, making whatever I do all the more stressful.  Anyway, life is good and I feel like I have many, many things to write about, but no time to do it yet.  Maybe when the kids are all in college I'll have a little time ...

Bird on a Wire

Y'all, this morning I went for a little jog - 3 miles - and it was really a grind.  Last January, my husband and I ran a marathon - that would be 26.2 miles, and now it's a struggle to move my butt 3 miles.  Not too cool. But I'm still doing it, because if I stop, I'll never start again.  Have you ever let yourself get totally out of shape and then tried to start again?  It's hell.

It's really hell after you turn 30, as I found out when I decided to get back into shape several years ago.  I had been pretty fit during my late 20s, and then the day I found out I was pregnant with Finn I decided that I didn't need to bother with exercise for a while.  That little honeymoon lasted 4 years, since after he was born I was breastfeeding (love the weight-loss, eat all the cookies you want bonus of that!), then pregnant again with Gus, then breastfeeding again, then just too busy to exercise.  When Gus was about 2, Matt and I noticed that we had become very, very slack and could not run a mile even if there was a wild bear coming for us, so we hit the pavement.  It was so, so miserable and painful to bring our bodies back from the brink like that, that we have tried to stay somewhat in shape (sometimes more than other times) ever since.  With 40 looming like an exam you don't want to study for, I know that the next hiatus I take from exercise will be a permanent one.

Anyway, so I drag my body around, pushing Ruby in the stroller or, very occasionally, on my own, and I actually like it now, so that's a plus.  Today, I was alone - Ruby is starting at a little preschool and I had ONE free hour (!), so I got out my Ipod and hit it.  Where am I going with this?  Well, one of the songs that came up was Aaron Neville's version of Bird on a Wire, and it reminded me of an entry that I wrote on the blog that I kept while Matt and I were training for the marathon last winter.  You can read it right here.  That was before we had Ruby, and I remember having a very emotional breakdown on the run as I listened to the lyrics of that song.  I was thinking so much of my dad, who has lived with Parkinson's for 30 years and for whom we were running the marathon.  But it was January, and we had just passed our court date and knew that Ruby was our daughter, but we still had to wait 6 more weeks to go and get her.  It was so hard, knowing that she was there, not being loved by us, even though I knew she was being cared for and loved.  And I also felt (and still feel) brokenhearted for her to have lost so much already.  That's a loss that she will always carry in her life, no matter what we do or how happy and perfect the rest of her life turns out to be.  At the time, before knowing her like we do now could balance out the facts of her life up to that point, I think I was more focused on that sad year when she lost her family and suffered so much.  I had a lot of trouble with the fact that I could not protect one of my own children from sorrow, even though, obviously, without that sorrow she would never have been mine.  The lines of the song where he talks about things having been paid for always choke me up, because, as I wrote then about my dad, that's what we want to do for the people we love.  And sometimes we can, and sometimes we can't, but either way, you try and hope, fingers and toes crossed, that it's the effort that counts.
(Now go grab a kleenex and listen to some Aaron Neville!  Don't even get me started on "I Bid You Goodnight.")

Football Season Is Finally Here!

Not that I really care about football at all, but it's a good season for me nonetheless.  Matt is a fanatical Philadelphia Eagles fan.  When I say fanatical, I mean that he spends vast amounts of time reading information about the team online (does this help the team?), he cannot watch games with other people (in case he has a little baby tantrum if the Eagles are not playing well), and he will do almost anything in order to be allowed the sizable chunk of time it takes to watch an entire football game.

Some women would let an opportunity like this pass them by.  They might think, my husband works so hard, surely he deserves to watch a few hours of football on the weekend without having to pay for it.  Not me.  While I agree that Matt works hard and is a good father, provider, husband, etc, I do not think it is reasonable to spend what actually amounts to one-fourth of the weekend watching car and erectile dysfunction commercials interspersed with a few moments of football.  I'm not even anti-football.  I think it's fine, and I'll watch a few minutes here and there.  I get the team loyalty and the interest in the backstories of the players and all that.  But I'm not one to let a golden opportunity pass me by.  Several years ago, when Finn was a baby and Matt and I realized that any free time either one of us wanted would have to be negotiated and paid for, I made a deal with Matt that has eternally paid great dividends.  The deal is that he can watch the game, or games, if games other than ones the Eagles are playing in are "important" to the Eagles (meaning that their standing in the division might possibly depend on the outcome of said other game), so long as he is dealing with the child(ren) during the hours of play.  That means I have at least half of the day, and often the whole day, to do as I please.  Sadly, "as I please" today meant dealing with the house, but I was actually very pleased to be able to do it in peace.

Over the years, Matt has become a master at entertaining the children without actually having to engage his brain, which is, of course, otherwise occupied.  We think the person who invented Candyland (was Milton Bradley a person?) was either an idiot or a genius, because if you play a whole game and you do actually engage your brain, you might throw yourself out a window before you round into Peppermint Paradise.  For a while, puzzles were Matt's tool of choice, and I would come home from a long walk with a friend to find 17 puzzles laid out on the floor, the children clamoring for me to admire each one while Matt sprawled happily on the couch.  Now the boys create giant lego things with a little guidance from the father figure, or they bring every stuffed animal they own into the living room and make a practically life-sized zoo for them with blocks and pillows.  It's literally the only time I see Matt truly working on his multi-tasking skills, as he keeps up a stream of encouraging murmurs to direct the children in their activity while he keeps track of the main event.  Ruby has thrown a bit of a wrench into the situation, but Matt is handling it well.  It turns out he can read books without actually looking at them, and it's not like Ruby cares, she's just happy to be part of the football party.  So we're all happy on football Sundays, win or lose, because we all have a few hours to do exactly what we want.

Now if only the Eagles could make it to the post-season this year ...

Zen and the Art of Housekeeping

So, the boys are back in school and happy as can be, and you would think I would have more time on my hands to get organized, update the blog, keep the house clean, and all of that.  But, instead, I find myself in a constant state of chaos, with fifteen minutes here and there between dropping off at school, trips to Target to pick up soccer gear, parent meetings, and on and on and on.  Plus, now it's just me and Ruby at home, so whenever we are here, I have a little shadow following me around the house getting into trouble.  Right now she's sitting on the floor beside me with my coffee cup, eating ice from the bottom (since I can never finish a cup of coffee, I have to convert it to iced coffee halfway through, and as soon as Ruby sees me do that, she starts demanding "i-ee" until it's all gone).  So nothing is really getting done, but I'm trying to be at peace with it.  This morning in carpool I discussed with the boys (Finn, Gus and our carpool buddy Owen) the concept of Zen.  I told them that if we could achieve zen in the morning carpool (rather than the usual mayhem of shoes being thrown about, hair being pulled, threats being made (by me)), we would all enjoy a happier day.  They didn't know what zen was, and I admit I'm a little fuzzy on the actual concept, but I suggested that we could only achieve it through quiet, and it actually worked, at least until we arrived at school and all three boys wanted to be first out of the car, meaning they had to pile onto one another to get out.  Oh well.

As for me, I don't know if zen would help me not be anxious when I look out into our back yard and see weeds and massive shrub overgrowth taking over everywhere.  Or when I walk through the playroom to get something out of the downstairs freezer and see every single lego we own covering the floor in a sea of disorganization.  Is this discomfort with disorganization something that just comes on as women age?  I know that in college I was a big slob, letting my half of a tiny dorm room go native until either parents' weekend or the end of school was approaching.  I'm thinking it must be an evolutionary urge, making women - especially mother-women - crazy at the sight of something out of control the way our playroom or shoe area seems to always be.  As if I could finally "get everything organized and keep it that way"(my ultimate desire), then everything would be perfect.  I think I like car trips for this very reason - I can get everything packed and organized in the back of the car and, because it's such a small little universe, I can maintain that order by tidying everything each day.  Plus, in the case of a car trip, the children are literally restrained in car seats and cannot disrupt the order I have imposed in the car.  Ahem.  Controlling much?  I know, it's true.  But I'm just saying that I would like life to be like that, not that I actually achieve it or even try very hard.  Instead of cleaning and organizing, Ruby and I spend our mornings on walks, doing errands, making cupcakes or playing with little friends.  And then I have a little moment of panic when I think of all the tasks I didn't get done all day, but by that time it's usually too late to do anything about it, so a nice glass of red wine takes care of it.  Zen or wine, whatever works.

Labor Day Weekend

always seems to wear me out.  Why do I seem to take the name literally?  Anyway, we're tired but had a good weekend, and now I'm going to bed.  More tomorrow!

Healthy Baby Dance

Okay everybody (and self), everything is fine.  Ruby is fine (although I did have to rush her to the weekend peds clinic on Sunday when she was gasping for air, but that was a bad case of croup, so unrelated to our near-death experience).  I now need to convince myself that danger is not lurking around every corner and move on.  I have been having unsettling flashbacks to the whole event, and I keep thinking about what I would be doing right now if something really awful had happened.

Helping with the whole moving-on process is that Ruby is such a funny little doll.  We've been out and about so much these last few days with back to school stuff, sports for the boys, birthday parties, and she is such a little socialite.  She can be throwing a no-holds barred tantrum in the car, but the minute we get into a crowd, she's all shy smiles and coy glances.  After a few minutes of that, she moves on to walking around, checking out new people, and, of course, looking for snacks.  I will say that Ruby's interest in food has definitely calmed down quite a bit (and this whole low iron finding has made me rethink the compulsive eating in the first place - could it be that she was like pregnant women who eat dirt and other oddities in an effort to get enough iron - pica?).  Now when we're at home she often chews up a bite of something and then chucks it on the ground if it's not tasty enough, so I would say she is your basic American toddler.  In new settings, however, she definitely appeases anxiety by trying to eat.  Or by trying to drink any juicebox within a ten mile radius.  When I had her at the pediatrician with the croup, and she was tossing around ideas of where Ruby might have picked it up, I had a distinct memory of a recent playground party during which I saw Ruby on the make with at least 10 different juiceboxes.  I didn't mention that to the doctor, but I think Ruby and I both knew the score.  But overall I am so happy that she seems to have replaced her food attachment with her family.

On another note, Ruby seems to have kicked out all of her uninvited gastrointestinal guests, and with the extra iron she's taking, we're down to very few diapers over here.  Major plus.  She has actually been pretty healthy in that regard for a while, but people keep asking me how she is doing, so I didn't want people to think that she is still having diarrhea constantly - not a very lovely image.

As Ruby's general health has improved, her hair has been growing like crazy.  When we wash it, the curls hang down to her shoulders - so cute!  I have so many thoughts about the whole hair issue, and I find it interesting that people are so curious about it - as I was.  I will write more on that topic soon, but for now I will just say that I feel like her growing hair is such a good sign of a healthy baby.

So, as you can see, I'm ticking off all of these things to reassure myself that "everything is fine."  Ruby is okay, better than okay, and we're great.  It's just been a long week, and after six months where things happened pretty slowly, a trip to the ER and an acute case of croup within three days of each other was a lot to deal with.  I think we're making up for all of the months she wasn't with us, though, and I've been thinking that nursing a sick little baby is definitely a bonding experience.  Finn was sick all the time when he was a baby, so there were so many nights of worry and trying to comfort him when he was burning up with fever and couldn't breathe.  It was awful, and we were always exhausted, but we also were putting into action the bottomless love we felt for him.  When we heard the first lovely croup cough issue out of Ruby's mouth, we realized that we were going to be in for a few sleepless nights, and Matt's comment was, typically, very patient.  He said he guessed that we owe her a few nights, since we missed so many.  And it was good, because on Sunday night, sleeping on the floor next to Ruby's crib, listening for her to breathe in and out for hours, I realized that we really were "there" with her in ways that I hadn't realized.  All of that stuff about adjusting and her hair and language skills and every other little detail that I've thought about in the last six months are these objective things that I can think and talk about, but now, to me, she is really just my child, and I love that.  That love you have as a parent is so amazing, because you can see certain things about your child - they are good at sports, or introverted or pretty or not as pretty as the others or they struggle with math or can't ever remember where their shoes are or may have to be held back in school, or whatever, but none of it has any impact on how much you love them.  You just do, and all of that other stuff is separate (even though it can sometimes drive you crazy).  So it was good to realize that I just do love Ruby like that now, since when someone plops a 16 month old baby in your arms, the details are what you (or at least I) tend to focus on.  You know you will love this child, but at first she's a little mystery that you're trying to unlock so you can figure out how to love this child and how to make her love you.  Anyway, as with most things, it all happened while I wasn't paying attention to it, so a night or two on the floor or a few hours at the ER is not the highest price to pay for the realization.  And now that I've had it, we can all stay healthy for a while, right?

First meeting, six months ago.

Now, just one of the gang, looking for frogs.