Normal?

It's possible I'm starting to function normally for the first time since last June.

Today, while I had a sitter for a few hours, I took Chebbles to swimming lessons, got a much-needed postpartum pedicure, made a Costco run, visited the chiropractor to unknot my sleeping-with-a-newborn lower back and even made it to the dentist.

I also didn't HAVE to sleep. I could have taken a nap, yes, and would have enjoyed it. But it wasn't a tragedy that I didn't sleep. While the sitter entertained Chebbles and Baby V, I mowed through a mound of pent-up paperwork, then jumped on the trampoline with La Cheb until dinnertime.

Perhaps it was just a spurt of manic energy, and tomorrow I'll return to the foggy yuckiness, self-doubt and strange paranoias, but it did seem that the sun shone sweetly on my face when I stepped outside the house and my body fit in my biggest non-maternity jeans, and that I might just feel normal again someday.

In other news, Granddad assembled Chebbles' big girl bike when he was here last week, and today she finally learned how to pedal it. I can see it won't be long before she's tearing up the streets around here. (Wistful tear...)

Idiocy compounds

I need to be stopped.

After the reunion.com debacle, I decided to e-mail everyone and let them know that I'd made this mistake, and NOT (for the love of all that is holy) to make the same mistake themselves.

And I thought I'd be courteous and hide everyone's e-mail addresses from each other. So I put all the thousand addresses in the "cc" box.

Then I went to lie down with Baby V for a nap.

About ten minutes later, my eyes popped open. I should have "bcc"'d everyone.

So now everyone I've ever corresponded with can now peruse the e-mail addresses of all the other people I've ever corresponded with.

Can someone tell me where the "rewind" button is?

Whereas Reunion.com makes me look like a lovelorn IDIOT

I am such an ass. And Reunion.com is kind of an ass too.

Can I blame sleep deprivation for what just happened? Some woman I used to work with, Robin, sent me an invitation to connect on "Reunion.com."

What the heck, I thought, I'll put my name up there, so Robin can connect with me.

So while bouncing Baby V in her bouncy seat next to me, I hastily typed in my relevant information and hit submit.

Then it asked for my e-mail password. GOD I'm an idiot. I typed that sucker right on in there and Reunion.com just sent an e-mail to EVERYONE I'VE EVER E-MAILED saying, "Mama wants to connect with YOU on Reunion.com!"

God, that looks so desperate and weird, when I think of the thousand (YES, thousand) people it's now going to... The people with whom I parted on BAD TERMS, like ex-boyfriends, and ex-friends for that matter. The bazillion vendors I've corresponded with. My husband. Old babysitters. Just... everyone. GOD I FEEL SO STUPID.

Maybe there will be a silver lining. Maybe someone will be touched and think I personally sought them out to connect with them and it will brighten their day.

But mostly I feel like the biggest, most hasty idiot in the world.

Tomorrow we're going to Washington State, and on a plane. When I told this to Chebbles over dinner tonight, she said, "Mama, you said it wrong. You said we're going on a plane. We're going on a TRAIN."

"No, Chebs, we're going to take a plane. It's faster that way," I said, and left it at that.

Not long after her prediction that our plane would "go too fast and go under a mountain," we found ourselves at a gumball machine. I asked her, "What color gumball are we going to get?"

"Yellow."

It came out blue. So we're going to Washington.

One major reason for going to Washington is so that I don't wring Chebbles' beautiful little neck. The regression she's exhibited -- acting like a baby -- ALL THE TIME -- has gotten so old. It's bad enough that I'm caring for a real baby, and that Hub-D and I are both suffering from something I'll call Stomach Flu Lite, but to have a two-and-a-half-year-old crapping on the floor is just TOO MUCH.

I'm hoping that contact with her beloved older cousins will innoculate her against too many more babyish outbursts. The whining alone is driving a spike through the side of my sleepless head.

In other news, as soon as we ALL got to sleep last night -- around, oh 5:30am, after Chebbles had been given her new cup of milk and then screamed for a half-hour for MAMA to come in her ROOM and hold her HAND. And after Baby V had woken up hollering and I shoved Hub-D out of his warm marital bed so that she could sleep with me instead. And after we'd all finally settled down -- and Baby V had stopped flailing and kicking my still-tender gut incision, THAT's when Prince and Otto brought the LIVE MOLE into the bedroom.

It's impressive that Prince (you might remember he's the one that killed the chicken) made it through the bathroom window with a live mole. But I wasn't inclined to be impressed when I heard the odd clicking noise coming from my bedroom closet at 5:30am.

Have you ever heard a mole saying, "Holy crap! Two cats are trying to kill me!" from beneath your shoe collection? It sounds like a bunch of panicky Aborigines.

So I sat upright in bed, covered Baby V's ear with my hand and SCREAMED for Hub-D (which is my wont in these situations). Shockingly, he did not respond to my distress calls. So instead, I crept into the guest room where he had only recently fallen asleep.

"Sweetie, I am SO SORRY to wake you up."

"Whu-- Whuu--t is it?"

"The cats are killing a mole in our bedroom."

"Can't you just close the bedroom door and come in here and let them finish it off?"

"NO!!! Oh my GOD!!!"

So he slowly, slowly rose from the bed, armed himself with the broom and headed into our bedroom. Several minutes of mysterious sounds followed.

"OK, the mole has a good head start outside," he said as he left the room. "If you want to guarantee its survival, that's up to you, but I'm going back to bed."

If you suspect that none of us got any more sleep after that incident, you would be correct. Baby V was sufficiently roused to resume her incision-kicking restlessness, and Chebbles was awake shortly thereafter. I took the baby and lay in Chebbles' big girl bed with her, moaning and feeling sorry for myself, for the baby, and for the mole, who may at that moment have been shuffling off this mortal coil.

Honker babies

If you and/or your husband are larger than the norm -- taller, or big-headed or wide-footed -- your children will inherit these traits. I know that sounds obvious but it's now surprised me twice.

You ARE going to have a honker baby, big people, so you are going to need different stuff than your friends get for their shrinky-dinky babies. (Who are just as beautiful, I might add, just in miniature.)

First of all, here is what you don't need: newborn clothes, newborn diapers, newborn socks, crap like that. OK, maybe you need one cute newborn outfit to stuff your baby into as you leave the hospital. But other than that, you can snag a few of the shirts from the hospital for your Baby Huey to sustain you through the first couple of weeks, when your child will graduate to 3-6 month sized clothes.

I completely forgot that this would happen before Baby V was born. I stocked up on newborn duds and relished the teeny tiny newborn diapers (the whole CASE) I bought, crowing, "I can't believe I'm going to have a baby this small!"

Hey dope! No, you're not.

Anyway, the other products that come in handy for honker babies are big car seats. When Chebbles was nine weeks old, she graduated from her Britax Companion into the Britax Marathon she uses now. That was nine whole weeks of bucket seat action, during which she screamed most of the time. It was too small for her. Even on the biggest settings, it wasn't designed for children with long torsos.

For Baby V, I found the Chicco KeyFit 30 instead. This was designed to fit kids up to 30 pounds, but I can't imagine how that's possible. Chebbles isn't yet 30 pounds, and when she gets into Baby V's carseat (on a daily basis) she has to scrunch her long crazy body in. And I am NOT carrying a 30 pound baby around in a bucket seat. She can carry ME at that size. The point of this carseat is that it fits Baby V's freakishly long torso and her outsized bowlegs quite nicely. Perhaps we'll make it to 12 weeks with this one.

And let me also introduce you to Susie's Swaddlers. Susie is a nice lady who must have had honker babies because she created extra large stretchy receiving blankets. At $20 each, they aren't cheap, but we bought three of them before Baby V came home, because the "normal" receiving blankets work for about two seconds after we come home from the hospital. We needed longer ones that can wrap around massive baby bellies and bodies throughout the "fourth trimester" of swaddling fun.

Finally, if you've got a kid with wide feet like Chebbles, don't dick around with the local shoe store. I have learned, after hundreds of dollars in shoes that they PROMISED fit just fine, and then killed her feet after a few weeks, to go directly to Zappos.com, and to read the comments there from other parents of wide-footed children. You can search for shoes designed specifically for your Sasquatch, then she can wear the shoes around the house for a while, and we can determine if they really are comfortable.

Oh, and Converse. Converse shoes fit the honkers too.

Anyway, please don't waste all the money and time I did, start out with one package of Size One diapers, and a CASE of Size Two, exercise your arm muscles as much as possible and prepare for the big-headed marvels that issue forth!

I can't help it

I make cute people.

I hauled Baby V along with Chebbles and Granddad over to our local Clix studio on Saturday. This involved multiple nursing sessions, one stoic grandfather, and a tantruming toddler who could not be coerced into participating. Oh, and a little white hair barrette that sat backwards within the lush locks of my second-born child.

Due to Chebbles' mood, we had to leave the photo studio in a hurry, but not before having a crazy meeting with their toilet, which involved raisin-inspired poop and about 5,000 baby wipes. But Baby V's cuteness PREVAILED, wouldn't you say?

In other news, I need some advice from my more musical readers as to what to do with Chebbles' bizarre musical abilities. To whit...

You know how there is a little chime when you turn on the car, which is ostensibly meant to remind the driver to put on her seat belt? (Too bad it doesn't remind her to fasten her child's seatbelt, as in my postpartum haze I recently drove a half-mile before realizing Chebbles remained in her carseat only because she chose to...) But anyway, you know that chime? When I turned the car on today, Chebbles toned along with it -- singing that exact tone, then a second tone, about a third lower than the Toyota Camry chime.

She kept singing these precise two tones as we drove down the road (belted in, rest assured), over and over. Then she said, "Mama, can you play the song that does that?"

"Chebbles, what song are you talking about?"

And then she proceeded to sing the two tones repeatedly and more insistently. "Mama, the song that does that."

"What are the WORDS to the song?" I said.

"No words, Mama, it's the overshirt."

....
....
....

"Holy crap, Chebs, do you mean the overture to 'South Pacific?'"

So I turned on the CD and put it on Track 1, and lo and behold, the second and third initial notes of the "South Pacific" overture are precisely that of the Toyota Camry's seat belt reminder system.

What... the... heck.


(For those of you who are familiar with "South Pacific," I'll explain this so you might hear the same tones in your own Toyotas. The overture starts with "Bali Hai" and it's the second and third notes, the "-li Hai" that Chebbles correctly identified as matching with the car's seat belt reminder chime.)

Chebbles vs. the Gymini

Chebbles has several different kinds of tantrums...

* There are the needy tantrums, which tend to occur precisely when I'm nursing Baby V, and Chebbles decides just at that moment that she needs me (and only me) to open a box for her or something impossible with a baby on the boob.

* There are the tired tantrums, in which all of life takes on a tragic "Anna Karenina"-like tone, and it's All Mama's Fault. I feel partially responsible for these tantrums, as it's usually when I've stretched her waking hours beyond tenability, but it's usually because she got to go to Pixieland or on an airplane or something fun, so why doesn't she suck it up?

* And of course, the "Mine" tantrums, which still rear their ugly heads when she's faced with an influx of visitors, or a particularly juicy toy at a friend's house. Those are heartily embarrassing, as they usually involve another traumatized toddler who drops a toy in horror as Chebbles' tears flow freely.

* Finally, and most commonly, we have Chebbles' frustration tantrums. This morning she exhibited one of these as she attempted to set up Baby V's Gymini. My father and I, instead of assisting her in her endeavors (all she had to do was ask nicely), videotaped her:



But what was especially hilarious about this whole scene was Chebbles' desire to WATCH this video. She watched it repeatedly, and laughed the whole way through. "Oh, Mama! (hahahaha) I can't see my face, oh there it is! (hahahaha) I'm so FUNNY!"

Well, I'm glad she agrees with us. Ultimately, her tantrums are pretty funny.

Mermaids

Just so you know, we're all mermaids around here.

We cannot pass a body of water without contemplating the mermaids that must be lurking below the surface. And Ariel's "Singing to Ursula" theme song is hollered in our home at least five times a day.

Bathtime, I've learned, is essential to the potty-training toddler, whose wiping skills, even when augmented by a mother's efforts, are not 100%. And around here, that also means it's MERMAID time. Chebbles holds her legs together and squirms around, pretending to have grown a fin.

I conned her into eating a bunch of seaweed soup by telling her it was Mermaid Soup. Jackpot! And swimming lessons are Mermaid Time.

I've also learned to lip-synch "Part of Your World" REALLY WELL. I fantasized today about performing it at Chebbles' third birthday. I'm not sure under what auspices, but talent like this must be shared with the public at large.

Anyway, in the meantime, we're mermaids, mermaids with legs, it seems.

Germans want cash

If, in the US, one were renting a (third floor! what are we thinking!) apartment for a month, we would probably send a check or use a credit card to secure our reservation. And if someone asked for CASH in that situation, we'd run away, certain we'd nearly done business with a scheister.

But in Germany, you just say that you'll be arriving in four months, on a certain flight on a certain day, and the person who owns the apartment says, "Great! See you then! And bring cash for the rent!" And this is not shady.

What's odder is the German landlord's blind faith that we will just magically arrive on that day. It seems remarkably naive from a US perspective, although I'm not sure what my motive would be to lie to the landlord.

For us, there would be nonrefundable deposits and a great deal of entrenched mistrust throughout the transaction. But in all of my hundreds of financial dealings with Germans, this has been the case -- everything is done just by chatting about it, then putting down cash on the day of the deal.

This is so different from my experiences in California, where the option to flake out on plans or deals is always possible, and it always continue to surprise me. When someone says, "Yes, let's get together this weekend!" it sometimes doesn't mean "Let's get together this weekend," it means, "I like you, and I'm not sure how to end this conversation."

So I'm looking forward to the German way of doing things. It's straightforward. It's sometimes rather blunt, but it will be fairly refreshing after the mushy and unreliable world of California. Oh, and it will be cold, hard cash.

Noch einmal, jetzt mit zwei!

We're going to do it. We're going to spend several weeks this summer in Munich. Don't try to stop us.

It's true that we ought to be stopped. We'll have a five-month-old and an almost-three-year-old. The number and weight of the baby gear ALONE should deter us from this adventure. But we've found a rental apartment on the third floor of a house in Schwabing, and it has started sounding like a great idea to our sleep-deprived brains. (I'll give you a moment to stop laughing about the whole third floor element of our trip. No, there's no elevator. Weeee, we're insane.)

But I've got all kinds of justifications built up to defend this trip...

First of all, if we're going to be sleep deprived, we might do it in Europe. We haven't slept through the night for a year, so jet lag can't impress us.

Second, no one can argue that Europe is bad for our fertility. We've had positive pregnancy tests shortly after both of our last trips abroad.

Speaking of those trips, we've almost recovered from them! The French rental apartment that was built for dwarves and sought to kill our entire family? The Italian baby food made from rabbits? We're almost entirely over those experiences, such that we've idealized them as repeatable.

Also, I used to live in Munich, so it doesn't feel as stressful as Rome, Paris, or, say, Istanbul might. It's a perfect home base for some smaller trips around Germany and into Italy, and my German family can come visit us while we're camped out there.

And you really can't argue with Biergartens with playgrounds -- Prost! (That's Chebbles in a Wurzburg Biergarten playground last June.)

Plus, once September rolls around, Chebbles' academic career will be in full swing. OK, that's a pretty crazy way to view preschool, but they will be going through the letters one by one, and I don't want to be responsible for her missing out on the letter "G."

G is for Germany, my little friend.

It's also for "Go crazy," "Got diapers?" and "Guess who pooped on the upholstery?"

OK, I'm going to book this trip before I get any more rational about it, or before anyone tries to talk me out of it.

Sneezing Panda

Chebbles and I have watched this about 5,000 times today.

Awkward

Now that I'm "out and about" once more, I find I'm having a lot of trouble socializing like a normal person.

I've been isolated for so long that I don't know how to have normal adult conversations -- ones that include grown-up topics like, uh, hm, what do normal people talk about? Today I tried to talk with our Music Together teacher about cholera. He was nice about it, but... cholera? I joked that the "Wet Box" (where spit-upon toys await disinfectant) had cholera.

Hahaha, oh, what? That was only funny to me.

I'm pretty sure this blog is partly to blame. During my isolation, I turned this forum into my sole social interaction. Now I don't understand why, at parties or in casual interactions, people don't want me to barrel on for paragraph after paragraph about my own inner demons.

When they start to talk before I'm done with my soliloquy, I get confused, thinking, "Please reserve your comments for the bottom of this post!" or... "This ain't Wikipedia, sister!"

My most interesting story, if people care to ask, is about Baby V's calamitous birth. But, I need to be repeatedly reminded... NOT OK TO TELL PREGNANT WOMEN THAT STORY. You're better off with the cholera stories there, I suppose.

My back-up topic was always "Lost," but it's still a few weeks from resuming, so I'm truly floundering.

I want to make friends, and I'd really like to keep the ones I have. But these days I get all nervous and middle-school-ish, blurting out boneheaded things rather than enduring a moment of awkward silence.

I'll just have to lean upon the cuteness of my children as a conversation topic. Because that NEVER gets old.

OAK to PDX

We're planning a trip to Washington State. The only potential snafu in that plan is that Chebbles is convinced our plane will crash.

"Hey Chebs, we're going to visit your cousins in Washington!"

"OK, but not on a plane, because the plane will go too fast and too far and will fall under a mountain."

"Uuhhh, how about a train?"

"No, we're taking the bus."

We went back and forth on this subject, and she was adamant that our plane will go too fast and fall down.

She was also convinced that we couldn't take the train.

Because I am only psychic about one thing, unless I've recently undergone major surgery, I have to rely on the psychic powers of Hub-D and Chebbles in this house.

So I checked the Amtrak schedule, and, guess what? You've got to take a bus. There were mudslides along the Oregon coast which have shut down the northbound train for the forseeable future. The only way through is by bus.

But the Amtrak bus takes 13 hours (Greyhound is 15). With a toddler and an infant? No way!

(But points to Chebbles for knowing that the train wasn't an option.)

So we're back to the airplane option. Southwest has never had an accident (knock on wood). Chebbles has said that the plane BACK from Washington isn't a problem, it's the plane THERE that will go under the mountain.

What do I do? Do we NOT visit our cousins because Chebbles continues to take a hard line about the fate of the airplane?

I've started quizzing her about this, but she maintains the same story every day...

I'm inclined to just book this flight and go have fun, as we have so many times before, with our Washington State cousins.

But what if she's... RIGHT?

And we STILL didn't get the key to the church

Today, Lannae posted a thoughtful summary of her trip to Burgundy, and yet again, it reminds me of some asinine adventures I had within the same setting...

My sister E. and I found ourselves in France in the summer of 1997. Every two years, our family has a reunion, usually in Germany. We had flown into Madrid, and made our way slowly across Spain and France before the familial festivities began in stodgy Deutschland.

We stayed in Dijon, because we fancied ourselves wine-aficionados, or, maybe just winos. We quickly fell in with a crowd of students. A few of them were North African dudes studying at the university, and they bought us drinks and politely asked us how we liked Dijon.

I should point out that, when drinking, my sister and I have an exaggerated notion of our foreign language skills, so we replied (en Francais), "Because we are WIVES! And we would like the key to the church."

We asked several people, as "wives," for the "key to the church" before someone pointed out our error.

Nevertheless, the guys bought us dinner and put up with our super-crap French before endlessly haranguing us for a date the next night.

We finally agreed, just so they would leave us alone, but secretly planned to ditch them.

The next morning, we went to Beaune for a daytrip. It was exceedingly beautiful country. There were flowers among the vineyards, little rocky hills and gorgeous old trees. The city of Beaune was picturesque. Having no idea what to do, we wandered around until we found a playground and rode on the see-saw and took pictures of each other.

After dicking around in the vineyards, and making up a song called "Everything in Europe is a Bloodstain" (referring to the intense history of this region, and our own extreme ignorance of that history), and laughing so hard that we both peed our pants, we found a little restaurant on a side street that served us the Best Lunch I Will Ever Eat.

No, I don't know the name of the restaurant, I could never find it again and I'm not even clear what we ate, but there were so many courses, and so many sauces and cheeses and tender cuts of meat, I can't imagine any meal will ever compete with the casually perfect nature of that feast. We were the only patrons the whole time we were there. Maybe the pee-smell warded off others.

We then wandered into one of the many wine cellars in the center of town, and were immediately ushered into a wine tasting tour.

The tour leader gave us cute little books in which to take notes about these wines.

The first thing we noticed were the tureens into which people who tasted the wines would spit after they sloshed it around in their mouths for awhile. WHY, people? What is the POINT? You would get wine into your mouth, and then spit it out? Weirdos.

We determined to swallow every ounce of wine we could get our mitts on in that cool cellar filled with history and beverage. AND we would keep a record of our impressions, for sure.

Things degraded rather quickly, as our impressions of the wines show:

"Smooth, oak-y taste. Kind of nice."
"Good. But not so good we'd pay that much for it."
"Dangerous, but safety conscious"
"Popular, yet unattractive"
"Sexy in an obvious way/Saxophone player"
"Unassuming, but well-hung"
"Like the black cougar from that one episode of 'Fantasy Island'"
"Afraid of clowns"


You get the picture. Other people started copying off our our notes, we were that good. So if you see a wine tasting guide to that region with suspiciously similar notes, you know they were ours.

Of course we don't remember catching the train home, but we must have, as my next recollection is waiting for our dates to arrive...

We had struggled all day with the guilt -- those guys were so nice, they bought us dinner, they didn't mind that we were wives and we wanted the key to the church. We owed it to them to go on another date with them. So we half-heartedly cleaned up and dressed up and waited outside our pension. For an hour.

They blew us off! Les Scoundrels!

So E. and I retired to the gyro place around the corner. It had a glass-fronted window, so we could see if those guys happened to materialize.

The next scene will forever play in excruciating slow motion in my head...

Me: Je... uh... voudrais deux gyros.
Gyro guy: Avec mayo?
Me: Huh? Oh, uh, oui.

By the next morning, I wanted to die. The mayonnaise had been spoiled. My vomiting sessions had already clogged the fragile toilet in our pension.

But we had already pre-paid for reservations to Munich that morning. We also preferred to get out of that barf-filled pension before the proprietors realized what their neighbor's rotten mayo had done.

E. was miraculously unaffected by the mayo, so she let me lean on her all the long walk to the train station. We sat on the platform in Dijon, waiting for the train, while I continued to barf all over the pavement.

E. repeatedly refilled our water bottle and attempted to clean up the vomit from the platform. We were trying to be nice about our gastric difficulties. But all the French people in the station gravitated TOWARD me. People started sitting on the bench with me, they were standing within a yard of me, and inching slowly closer to the Danger Zone. Why?

Mercifully, the train arrived, my stomach was fully empty, and we found our own air-conditioned cabin bound for Germany.

And that's when my sister's bowels began to rumble...

Cockeyed Optimist

To celebrate its new opening on Broadway, Chebbles and I have been listening to a lot of "South Pacific." This is to the chagrin of Hub-D, who feels our children should be exposed to more classical music. To my mind, classical music lacks things like Mitzi Gaynor's hootin' and hollerin' to "Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair."

Anyway, lately, I've been thinking the lyrics, "I'm stuck like a dope, with a thing called hope, and I can't get it out of my heart!"

Because something new has been brewing for me. I have started to feel a kind of (dangerous) certainty that we can and will have a third child. I feel it will just somehow magically issue forth from my loins with little or no Sturm und Drang. I imagine boring and sporadic doctor's appointments. I imagine ultrasounds fraught with high-fives and grins instead of paralyzing fear.

What if that just happened. What if I got pregnant after a few months of trying, that I sailed right on through to the second trimester? What if I became one of those moms who says, "Oh, what month am I on? I always forget."

Then I get to have a marvy VBAC with a required epidural and I get to use all or some of these baby clothes and toys one more time... it could happen.

And I'm thinking, as the days march on here and Baby V tracks and grows and smiles, that I just may be capable of adding to my family. It's just possible.

The Synchronicity of Stick and Red

Did I ever tell you what happened to Stella and me?

No, not the time we decided to drive through a blizzard on I-5 and almost DIED of being morons, with one pair of thin leather gloves between us.

No, not the time sat together on a newly installed hammock on her porch, toasting Corona bottles, overlooking the skyline of San Francisco and then the thing suddenly broke under our (considerable) weight, severely bruising both our asses and our egos.

No, the thing that happened 10 years ago, with Stick and Red...

I was living in Boston at the time. Stella had abandoned me to get married (even though I told her not to) and move to San Francisco, where, like everyone else she worked for a burgeoning dot-com.

I took frequent trips to Seattle, Washington and Eugene, Oregon as part of my job. On one of these trips, one of my co-workers (upon whom, it must be admitted, although it is irrelevant to this story, I had a searing crush) introduced me to his brother, Stick, who lived in Portland, Oregon.

We got along like gangbusters, Stick and I did. He is the one who introduced me to improv (which, in turn, introduced me to the dashing father of my children), to gourmet martinis at the restaurant where he worked, and to chord progressions that were considered evil in medieval times.

In retrospect, Stick had a serious drug problem, but that's beside the point.

So he became my pal. Every time I came to Oregon, I'd pop by old Stick's house and we'd have fun around town. My sister and I even made a pilgrimage from Boston just to hang out with Stick (I was hoping his brother would show up too, which he didn't).

Stick and I would go through his old photo albums together. I was scouting for cute childhood pictures of his brother, and he was proud to show off his past road trips. And he'd had some great ones! Most of them were with a pretty lady named Red. He'd dated her for years, things hadn't worked out, he said.

One night, of course, I smooched old Stick and we started a surprising little relationship. We went hiking together, exploring the southern shores of Washington, we drank wine and went to Open Mike poetry readings, where I had a good time trotting out my best little poems and he swooned and applauded the loudest.

But I always had to return to Boston. We talked on the phone, I sent him little paintings I made, and mix tapes, and he wrote me such lovely poetry I wish I'd kept it.

Soon thereafter, I was dicking around with my new cell phone. They were a novelty then.

I called Stella in San Francisco, at work. And she sounded unusually dodgy.

"Hey, what's the name of that guy you're dating in Portland?"

"You mean Stick?"

"Yeah, my new office mate says she's also his girlfriend."

Her new office mate was RED! The woman from the pictures, with whom he had allegedly broken up. But he HADN'T.

What (in the hell) are the odds that Stick's (other) girlfriend had become the office mate of my best friend?

The fact we all lived in completely different cities just exacerbates the coincidence.

"Stick, do you have another girlfriend? Red in San Francisco?"

"I don't...think...so."

"Well, could you CHECK?"

I still want to know how that happened, that crazy moment of synchronicity, with Red moving into Stella's office and talking about Stick. I think we all do.

Please help cure my cynicism

I have been inundated with requests for donations lately, from dear friends who are running or walking or biking for one cause or another.

I too used to do these events -- I did the March of Dimes Walkathon when I was in middle school (it almost killed my mother and me, in the freezing rain on the hills of Pittsburgh), and I repeatedly performed an exceedingly long walk through Boston for which I can no longer remember the cause.

However, what I'm struck by now is a cynicism regarding many charity organizations.

Don't get me wrong, our family donates to charity -- we just stick to the ones I know most about. I donate the most to my study abroad program, JYM, so fools like me can obtain geography lessons.

And I also feel good about the use of my dollars at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary and our local Community Concern for Cats. My family has personally witnessed how our donated money keeps pets out of the pound and into loving homes, so I get their causes.

And I DO want to stomp out breast cancer and leukemia and infertility and everything that plagues humans. I just don't understand how my dollars work to do this through these organizations. The route of the money is too labyrinthine, and when I DO donate to these organizations, I end up getting so much damn MAIL about it, I feel they've wasted my whole donation by slowly mailing it all back to me with wasted paper and postage.

So help me please, help me see my way through to donating to these causes. Would a $50 donation to the Avon Breast Cancer Walk really help find a cure? Aren't there enough financial incentives in the private sector to spur on the very best cancer research?

I would like to feel in control of these things, and I have in the past, but how can the March of Dimes really prevent premature birth? Isn't the medical community sufficiently spurred on to prevent this tragedy by their own passions and the financial support of large medical organizations and pharmaceutical companies?

So PLEASE talk me out of my tree on this one, bring back the idealistic twinkle in my eye. If you have a charity you really love, and you're walking the walk for it, tell me that I can actually make the difference, and WHY additional dollars for the cause make sense, and tell me how I can desist from receiving mail in perpetuity about it.

Anyway, I love these walks, but my cynicism has me paralyzed at the sidelines...

Swingin' good times

Baby V enjoys her swing, and has conversations with the little birds and bugs that rotate at the top of it.

I'm posting this for a few reasons... so you can see she's a TRACKING FOOL -- no one tracks as well as MY KID. And so you can see her hair has gotten bushier and crazier.

We're not going to keep the swing set up much longer. Baby V doesn't snooze in it like other babies, and it's only good for short bursts of time (read: going to the bathroom).

What I didn't realize with a second kid is that you don't really need the Gymini or the swing because you have a (germy) toddler up in your infant's grill all the time, hollering loving greetings to them, showing them butcher knives, and otherwise making it MUCH more entertaining than any store-bought devices.

Ill

We've been struck by some gastroenteritis again -- that is, the "norovirus" or "uncontrollable puking."

Chebbles acquired it from our neighbors, who guiltily delivered their remaining stash of Pedialyte late last night, along with heartfelt apologies.

At these times, a mother plays a nightmarish montage in her head of ALL the children her barfing kid made out with while secretly contagious. There were many potential victims, and we pray for their families.

You'd think that a disease that required specific "fecal-oral" contact wouldn't wreak such havoc, except when you're dealing with a community of a thousand potty training toddlers.

Anyway, Chebbles is feeling much better, and so far, Hub-D, Baby V and I are symptom free.

I was also struck by how completely impossible it is to fully sanitize one's house and one's six-week-old baby from a virus-shedding contagious sister. Baby V's pacifier would just make its way into Chebbles' germy mouth, and Chebbles spat directly into mine and Baby V's mouth at some point in the last 24 hours.

She just touches everything I own with those fecal-oral hands, it turns out. But whatever. I did my best with the detergent and Lysol wipes, and the rest is up to the Lord God who I hope will take it into consideration that we would like to not be sick anymore.

Baby V remains congested, and after a marathon search for just the right "Little Noses Spray with Decongestant" she gets one hour breathing breaks. Then the snot marches right back into her tiny nasal passages. It's been five days of congestion and I feel just terrible for her, sleeping propped up on my arm or in her carseat. But Baby V just rocks it, like she does everything.

I have awesome... germy... but AWESOME kids.

Damn the Delicates

My college roommate and I were doing laundry together many years ago. To my amazement, she was shoving all of the clothes into the washer, without regard for their color or their need for hand-washing, etc.

"Dude, what are you doing? You're going to ruin those clothes!" I said.

"Any piece of clothing that can't handle my style of laundry has no business being in my wardrobe," she replied.

Which brings me to today.

I have felt paralyzed. I have wanted to write about dozens of subjects, but I've shared my blog address with so many people now, I am stuck not wanting to offend anyone.

My family and friends and many acquaintances read this blog. Basically everyone I know reads this blog, and I like that -- it's supportive and wonderful.

But I have felt like so many subjects had become taboo -- I would sit here at the computer, my fingers dithering over the keyboard, and I think, "Nooo, definitely not that," and "Whoops, probably not that either."

In order to cure this problem, some people might opt to make a purely anonymous blog. But I know I'm kind of into exhibitionism, and I'd share that address with everyone within a week.

So instead, I've hardened my heart.

For example, the Yugoslavian underpants story below -- that's gross. Would I ever choose to bring up that story with most of my friends and family? NO.

But I posted it anyway. Because I've decided to take the same approach my old roommate did -- if anyone gets worked up by or offended by any of the content on my blog, they have no business being my friend.

If you're not smart enough to filter out the content for yourself (as in, "Whoops, looks like this one's about soiled lingerie, better skip it!") or to understand that everything is NOT ABOUT YOU and not take offense during my emotional lowpoints, then you are a "delicate" and we probably shouldn't be friends anyway.

I'd rather keep writing what I'd like to write, about whatever I'm remembering or emoting at that moment. I plan to continue share the blog address with anyone who's interested. I'm not going to sort and edit in order to avoid offending a few pantywaists.

See, you knew I'd get around to mentioning panties again, and you kept reading. That's why I love you guys.

Yugoslavian Idiocy

I studied abroad in college, with a program called Junior Year in Munich (JYM). It was cold, it was embittering, it was amazing and a huge pain in the neck at the same time.

Today I received our alumni newsletter, and it included a marvelous story about a man who attended JYM in the 1950's -- he had purchased a motorcycle for $200 and explored Europe during the two-month spring break.

As I rocked Baby V to sleep this afternoon, I realized that my best European spring break story will never appear in the JYM newsletter. It should never appear in print. I should probably NOT ever tell this story at all, but it's too ridiculous.

Julie and I were idiots.

She was studying in England, and met me down in Munich to go adventuring together during our spring breaks. We had very little money and very little by way of European sophistocation or geographical knowledge.

Our goal was to go to Cyprus, because Julie was dating a Cypriot guy up in England (where, I am told 90% of the young men of Cyprus go to become accountants), and Cyprus was a tropical, interesting destination.

We got a ride to Prague with a guy I knew from SUUSI and a buddy of his. We got ourselves safely to Prague, and let the guys buy us some dinners before we were ready to head south.

Julie and I traipsed into the Prague train station and bought two tickets to Athens. We had a vague notion of the geography involved, and that it might take a few days to get there on the train, but whatever! We were cute and young and it would all work out, right? All aboard!

We changed trains in Budapest. Julie and I lurked around the station, bought some paprika-flavored potato chips, pretzels, water and orange Fanta. My memory of those four items is perfectly crystallized.

About five hours south of Budapest, Julie headed out of our little sleeping compartment to get us some dinner from the dining car. She came back with some startling information: there was (a) no dining car, and (b) no one else but the conductor on this train.

There was no snack cart, no fellow passengers -- no one, it seemed but the train engineer and a conductor. It was just Julie, me, a bag of paprika-flavored potato chips, pretzels, water and orange Fanta.

"Maybe it's just until we get out of Hungary, and we'll hook up with the REST of the train," we told ourselves.

We fell asleep, having rationed a few potato chips and pretzels for our dinner.

At about three o'clock in the morning, the train stopped and a Yugoslavian border patrollman slammed open our compartment door. "VISAS NOW," he declared.

This was the first we realized that we were going to go through Yugoslavia. I told you we were idiots. And apparently, in order to enter the country, people need visas. Whoopsie!

"We don't have visas!" we chirped, smiling and looking as goofy and harmless as possible.

"Not good. Get off the train."

OK, what the crap? Two greater airheads had never entered this country before, and now we realized we were going to be executed. For sure.

We stared at each other in the dim compartment. What should we do? Ultimately, Julie seriously took one for the team. "I'll go."

"No, oh my god, where do they even want us to GO? It's abandoned out there."

"They aren't letting us into the country unless we go with them, but someone has to stay with our stuff. I'll go."

And like all good bimbos in horror movies, we split up.

She was gone for a very long time. It was more than an hour while I envisioned her being kidnapped or assaulted or god only knows what. I stared out the window at what looked like a shack by the rails. There was a little light coming from behind the blinds. What was going on? Was Julie in there?

I concocted a whole plan to save her life. If the train started moving without her, I was going to pull that emergency exit cord, god love me, I was going to PULL IT, and I was going to start screaming for my friend. Maybe in German?

But she finally hopped back on the train with our visas in her hand. They were in Cyrillic. Oh, Yugoslavians use Cyrillic? Cool.

The train chugged on through the night. At about five AM, our compartment filled with crazy white steam. We couldn't see our noses on our own faces, it was so thick. We debated whether it was some criminal with a hose gassing our compartment, but I braved the hallway and discovered that the whole train had filled up with soupy white steam.

"I think I got my period."

"Julie, seriously."

"No, I think I got my period right now."

That is precisely where a person would get one's period, yes? In the middle of the night on a mostly-abandoned passenger train hustling through a crumbling and defunct republic with shady visas. Oh, and the train is filled with white steam.

We woke up later to discover that all of our stuff was still in the compartment (Who would have stolen it? The engineer and/or the conductor?) and it was daylight. And Julie HAD gotten her period, for sure.

"What am I going to do with these underpants?" she asked.

"God, don't SHOW them to me, I don't know!"

"But I'm not going to pack them back in my bag!"

There was a tiny little garbage container in our compartment, already stuffed with the empty pretzel and chip bags.

"I'm going to throw them out the window," she said.

"You are not."

There were cows. There was a soft spring Adriatic sunrise out the window. There was long green grass and farmhouses at intervals as our train clunked ever southward.

And then suddenly, in a flash of red and white, Julie's underpants joined the tableau.

"I believe we've just added to this country's problems," I said.


We sipped at the Fanta and the water for the next day as the train moved haltingly toward Greece.

At the next sunrise, we arrived in the Athens train station, greeted by a friend of Julie's Cypriot boyfriend, who tried to take us on a goddamn tour of the city right away.

"Alexandros, thank you so much," I interrupted. "But we are starving to death. We are actually starving. To death. Can you please help us find food?"

Julie was so embarrassed. But we ate (I was filled up after two bites, my stomach having shrunken to the size of a walnut), we saw the Parthenon and booked flights to Nicosia for the next day.

Our visit to Cyprus was filled with its own flavors of adventure, scandal and moronic behavior (including but not limited to the purchase and display of pink striped hot pants and the acquisition of a second Cypriot boyfriend), but that is enough for one JYM newsletter.

See, there is no way they want my stories. They've got underpants in them.

Not posed

I swear.

What the hey, bees?

What is it about our wisteria that's not appealing? It's not purple enough? It's not lush enough? It doesn't fill your bee sensors with pollen-locating ecstasy?

Something is up with the bees. Maybe you guys have noticed this too. It's a phenomenon across the US, as far as I understand it. The bees are not showing up this year. Holy Rachel Carson!

We've had about 25% of the bees we had last year at this time. I LOVED the bees last year, and I hoisted Chebbles up into our own bee-loud arbor to witness the buzzing glory of bumblebees, honeybees and a range of mystery bees.

My friend K. sent me a link to the Sunflower Project, and Chebbles and I are going to participate. Basically, you sign up (anyone in the US, as far as I understand it), they send you free seeds appropriate to your location, and when your sunflower blooms, you mark the amount of time it takes for five bees to come visit one of your sunflowers.

It's pretty cool, and a small way to feel in control of our environment. Maybe we can help them find out how to make our backyard buzz again.

Have you ever seen a lonelier wisteria?

I don't know

There is a particular way that moms in Pittsburgh would say "I don't know" that made it perfectly clear you were NOT to ask them any more questions. With the accent it was something like "OYI doe-n't knoe-w," with an unmistakable air of annoyance.

I keep saying this over and over again, my miffed mother mantra. Listen, I don't know.

Baby V wants more milk than my breasts produce in the evenings. She is sitting here next to me (see photo) working on her pacifier while I bounce her bouncy chair with my foot and try to reason this whole thing out.

See, if she drinks formula, she gets stopped up -- she didn't poop for three days after I started giving her formula. Now that I've put her on breastmilk only, she's pooped NINE TIMES in the last two days. During the big poop strike, none of us got any sleep. She was drastically uncomfortable and we don't need to mess with that scene again.

However, now she's hungry. My boobs have let down more times than, I don't know the joke here -- my science grades, the Star Wars prequels, Frasier's ex-wife Lilith's hair? -- anyway, they've let down (milk, in this case) more than any time in their nursing career.

PLEASE don't suggest teas or pills or any of that to me. I'm not looking for a pharmaceutical solution to milk production. And TEA? Don't screw with me during the precious hours that Chebbles is sleeping and Baby V won't freaking sleep also. You know what you can do with your tea.

What I want is something Baby V can drink so that she can relax and sleep, best off in her own bed, but won't make her constipated until summertime. Hm, maybe there is some kind of baby brandy? And perhaps I'll partake in a nip as well. I'm getting so uptight, my boobs are getting all tense and curdly.

I don't know.

Do not begrudge me this. I have a postpartum doula here tonight from 10pm until 6am. I am going to sleep. OK, no, I'm going to go lie in bed and read "Duma Key" by Stephen King.

But it sure beats staying up almost all night last night with a congested infant. A break! Well, Chebbles is still my responsibility, but Baby V is in the arms of another.

So I sleep.

H-Bomb

Yesterday I got a letter from our cord blood banking company that stated, "Please do not be alarmed by this letter."

If there had been a red PANIC button next to our mailbox, I would have hit it right then and there. Don't these people KNOW who they're dealing with at this point? Whenever Baby V gets the sniffles, all my pregnancy loss hypervigilance gets agitated. So... "Please do not be alarmed by this letter." Too late.

The letter went on to state that my blood tested positive for Cytomegalovirus (CMV) when it arrived in their lab. Then they started throwing around the word "herpes," as in, "The virus that causes CMV is part of the herpes virus family and like other herpes viruses, may become dormant for a period of time and then be reactivated.

After learning more about CMV, I must say screw them for being so liberal with the term herpes. Didn't they know I went to Michigan, the STD Champion of the West? I could hear the distant strains of an evil minor-key "Hail to the Victors" playing in my head before I learned there was no reason to worry.

CMV is not the herpes, but basically it's a distant cousin, a kind of mono that 50 percent of the population has had.

I did call our pediatrician, for fear that I'd spread CMV to Baby V. And Dr. M said, "OK, I'm going to tell you a bunch of scary things and then I'm going to tell you not to worry. Congenital CMV in pregnant mothers can cause infant blindness, mental retardation, and pneumonia. But you and your daughter don't have it. She's not going to get it. You're all fine, and I want you to forget you ever heard of it."

Then, because I'm an idiot, I googled it. That's when I learned that the blindness element of congenital CMV might be dormant for awhile, and THEN strike and blind your child.

And even though no one in this house has congenital CMV, I amused myself for the rest of the afternoon by hovering over Baby V and saying, "Are you blind? Are you BLIND!???"

Honestly, cord blood people, do you get some sort of sick thrill out of dropping the H-bomb on new moms?

Ursula was robbed

When I started my PR agency, some wise colleagues told me, "The hardest part about running an agency is getting your clients to pay."

Well, I thought, they don't know my clients. My clients are nice. They would never do that to me.

$77,000 in unpaid bills later (from one company alone, the nicest of the bunch), I was inclined to agree. Some people just sign contracts and then HOPE they can live up to the terms.

Which brings me to The Little Mermaid. What the heck, Ariel? What kind of role model are you?

The girl wants to have legs. I get that. Then she goes to Ursula the Sea Witch, where she signs a contract, fully knowing the price thereto (her voice, plus her soul if the prince doesn't kiss her).

She reneges on the contract because it's just so unfair, and then everyone makes Ursula out to be the bad guy. My heart goes out to the octopus/sea witch, after all, she was absolutely clear as to the price of her witchcraft.

It pisses me off even further at the end of "The Little Mermaid," when King Triton just waves his big fork in his daughter's direction and gives her legs. So if they'd just sat down and had a rational conversation at the START of this whole affair, a lot of trouble, not to mention sunken ships, could have been saved.

But no, Ariel's in a hurry. She doesn't want another confrontation with her grotto-destroying dad, so she signs a contract agreeing to give up her voice, and maybe her soul, in exchange for legs.

She hastily signs the contract, then gets whiny about the terms. Gosh, how many times have I experienced that? Everyone's glad to get great service (and you can't deny Ursula held up her end of the bargain), but they get whiny when it's time for them to provide what they promised in return.

When it gets inconvenient, they try to weasel out of the contract in any way they can. Hey! It used to mean something when people (or mermaids, I guess) signed contracts.

And now? Whatever. You just get Prince Eric to off the other party in the contract. That's totally not fair, but we PR agency people (and/or sea witches) are used to it, I guess.

Miracle

This is unbelievable.

Tonight, at 7:30pm, both of my daughters fell asleep.

Baby V's sleep is as precarious as always -- somewhat dependent on her pacifier not falling out of her mouth.

But DAMN, people, I'm so excited. I stood in the middle of the house and couldn't think of one thing to do. What does one do when there are vestiges of sunlight left in the sky and one's children are sound asleep?

Take off all my clothes and have a one-woman nude disco? Well, possibly, but I don't have that much energy.

Instead, I made some tea. I opened a new package of Red Rose decaf black tea bags. As any tea aficianado can tell you, Red Rose tea packages contain juicy little ceramic animals . So there I was, clutching a little green parrot and singing the end line of the Depeche Mode song to myself, creepily in the dark kitchen:

"Enjoy the Silence."

Big Girl to Baby and Back Again

I just can't keep track of The Chebs.

First, she has fully and suddenly potty trained herself. I haven't cleaned a poopy diaper in a week, and aside from a few leaks here and there, she's using plumbing like the rest of us bipeds.

BUT she wants me to CARRY her everywhere. I used to crave physical contact with my otherwise stand-offish child, but if I hear the whiny words, "CAAAWWY ME!" one more time, I'm going to blow a gasket. She says it in a deliberately babyish voice, too, and it can happen any time:

"OK, Chebbles, it's time for dinner!"
"Caaaaaawy me!"
"But dude, Chebs, you're three feet away from the dinner table."
(Bursts into tears) "Caaa-aaaa-aaaaaiwy me!"

And she's also transitioned into a Big Girl Bed really well. She's a little confused (as am I) as to whether she's allowed to get up and use the bathroom in the middle of the night. She wakes up and wants to go to the potty, but then she starts having all of these "pretend" visits to the potty because it's fun and exciting to wake up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

But in general, she's ensconced happily in her big girl bed. She has never come into our bedroom in the middle of the night or had any other adventures outside of her room, so that's cool.

So now she's sleeping in this huge double bed that she'll likely use until she leaves for college, and I had a lump in my throat when I watched her clamber up into it and snuggle down into the sheets for the first time.

"Chebbles, what song do you want me to sing to you tonight?"
"No song, Mama."
"Oh sweetie, you don't want any song?"
"Not anything, just close the door, Mama."

OK... boohoo.

But as she's evolved into a champion potty-pisser and big-bed-sleeper, she is also completely obsessed with Baby V's bottles and pacifiers. Hooooo boy do I wish we had no need for those baby accoutrements here, but we do, and Chebbles gets extremely weird and golem-ish about them.

She's relocated full bottles into back pantries so she can find them later, most notably offering Baby V a bottle that had been festering in a cabinet for several days (which was nice of her, but still...). And I do NOT use the word "binky" but she does, all the time, as in, "Mama, where is Baby V's binky? Can I touch her binky? Can I carry her binky?" And if I cave even once, if I let her pick up a stray pacifier from the floor or carelessly leave it on a counter, it will be in Chebbles' mouth within seconds.

The vexing thing is that she never wanted a pacifier or even a bottle when she was an infant. Life would have been easier if she'd been into them. No, it wasn't until she was abou 18 months old that she started wanting "binkies" all of the time, posing in mirrors with them and getting super-weird about them, shrieking with grief if she couldn't find one particular pacifier in the middle of the night.

So whenever we have to make Baby V a bottle, we have to be hypervigilant for The Chebs, who will sneak up behind a person and take elements of the bottle -- the inner mechanisms or the nipple -- and hoard them elsewhere, or hang them jauntily from her mouth.

"Would it work if we just gave her a bunch to play with and let her get tired of them?" asked her sitter. Ahahahahaha. No. See: Golem. The longer she has them, the stranger she gets. (See photo)

And in the meantime, she's becoming more charming than ever. She adores her sister, showering her with love and little presents. While Baby V was napping today, Chebbles gathered a bunch of money for her. I'm not sure what Baby V is going to buy with these assembled coins, but it was sure nice of her.

And she can't wait for the day that Baby V is allowed to sleep in the big girl bed with her. It's not going to be for about, umm, two years, but she's already jazzed about cuddling with her sister all "Little House on the Prairie" style.

So that's the story on La Chebbelle these days -- you never know if you're encountering BABY child or BIG GIRL child, so you've got to be on your toes!