boy

I took Miles and one of his buddies to the park today. They ran right past the playground, and headed for the creek. Once they got there, they commenced with the boyfest. Sticks were found. Puddles were stomped through. Swordfights were had.

I watched it all, and held my tongue, all my be-carefuls and don't-get-your-shoes-wet and slow-downs. They were thrilled with the drainage pipe ("there is an alligator in there!" and "it leads to the real underground!"). The bushes were bad guys that had to be fought into submission with giant stick-claws.

Sometimes I have a hard time just letting them play. Not making suggestions about what to do next. Not trying to keep them civilized. As long as they are not hurting each other, shouldn't they shout and whoop and race around, whacking leaves off the trees?

It was fun, watching them revel in their boy-ness. It will, I suppose, always be somewhat foreign to me. But charming too. So charming.

oh happy day

Marv

Last December a black and white cat showed up at our back door, late at night, on one of Houston's rare cold nights. I felt sorry for him, and decided to set him up in the bathroom with some food and water and towels for a bed. In the morning, I let him back out. A few days later he showed up again. And then it became a regular thing. Anytime it got cold outside at night, he would show up asking for a room for the night.

A couple of months later, on a night that wasn't so cold, he came limping up to our door. He had a terrible bite on his front paw, very infected, and he couldn't put much weight on it. So I put him up for the night, and took him to our vet in the morning. We spent a couple hundred dollars getting him fixed up (and fixed), and then filled his prescription for antibiotics.

The only way to make sure he took his medicine was to keep him in the bathroom for a week. And at some point during that week, it became clear that we were keeping the cat. He is a very sweet cat. The kids can poke him and pull his tail and he doesn't mind at all. Brian named him Marvin.


When we moved, we did all the things you are supposed to do to adjust the cats to the new house. We kept them inside for two weeks. We fed them butter (according to my mother, if you feed a cat butter it will never leave; maybe this is an english old wives tale?). And it seemed to work.

But then, a month later, Marvin went out and didn't come back. We spent a stressful week looking for him everywhere, visiting the shelter, posting signs. And seven days later I got a call that he was in someone's back yard. I was out looking for him, riding my bike around the neighborhood with both kids in the trailer. We raced over to the woman's house, which is located about halfway between our old house and our new house (three blocks from the old, five blocks from the new) and sure enough, there he was, looking fine.

We thought about making him an inside cat after that, but he just isn't the type. He spent too much of his youth roaming. When he is trapped inside he makes life hell for the other cats. So we let him out again a few day later. Same thing - he didn't come home. At least we knew where to look for him now.

Since then, we have developed a very weird routine. Every morning, we let Marvin outside. He hangs around for a bit, and then he jumps onto the fence, surveys the neighborhood, and disappears for the day.



Every evening, after the kids are in bed, either Brian or I go out in the car to pick up Marvin. He is always in the same three-block radius of where we found him that first time he disappeared.

We roll down the windows, call his name, and after a few minutes he appears. We pull over, open the car door and he runs to the car and jumps in. And then we drive him home.

It is completely ridiculous. The damn cat could just walk back the five blocks to the house. But he won't. If we don't go pick him up, he doesn't come home. Every night that I go to pick him up, as I am circling the block calling "Marv!" out the window, I think to myself, "What the hell am I doing?" But I keep doing it.

Like I said, ridiculous.

Uncooperative

We had the big ultrasound this morning (I am somewhere between 18 and 19 weeks) and everything is fine. Everything that they could see, that is.

Apparently the baby is face down with his/her back pressed up against the top of my uterus. Since there isn't any space between the spine and my uterus, the tech couldn't get a good enough look to definitively say that everything looks good (i.e. no spina bifida, etc).

Also, the face-down position apparently casts some shadows on the chambers of the heart, so while the tech could mostly see that the heart looks fine, again, she couldn't get a good enough look to definitively say so.

Oh, and the baby's face was turned in such a way that the tech couldn't see clearly enough the space between the lips and nose, so AGAIN, she couldn't get a good enough look to definitively say that everything looks good (i.e. no cleft palate, etc).

So, to summarize: baby looks good, but we weren't really able to definitely rule out ANYTHING. I guess we do know that he or she has all her parts (head, torso, arms, legs) but we knew that already from the ultrascreen test. I go back in a month for another ultrasound. I guess the hope is the baby will have shifted positions by then and the tech will be able to get a better look at these things.

My midwife was very clear that there was nothing there that should cause us to worry. They just couldn't see what they want to see. But what they want to see is most likely there. So no need to worry.

But I am a pregnant woman after all. Am pregnant, will worry.

Project closet

So it looks like complaining about the upstairs closet overflowing with boxes of crap has motivated me to do something about it. Yesterday I pulled out a small stack of papers and put them on the couch. Many hours later I forced myself to sort through the pile.

Now, generally speaking, I am pretty good at not letting papers pile up around me. The junk mail never lingers. Old magazines get recycled with regularity. The kids uninspired scribbles, gone. Where I get hung-up is on the stuff that I need to keep temporarily.

In the pile of random papers that I pulled out of the closet were things like the receipt from the movers (which was six months ago), the cable hook-up work order from when we moved in, and the listing contract with our agent from our old house. These are thing that arguable should be kept for some matter of time. In case we found something broken in a box, or had trouble with the cable. But now they are just collecting dust and weighing me down. My inbox might as well be called my bury-it-with-me box.

I am thinking maybe I need a new system: two boxes! Revolutionary. One will be the keep-maybe-forever box, where things like social security cards and awesome drawings of cowboys go.


The other will be the three-month box, or something like that. Maybe just the as-soon-as-it-is-full-must-be-thinned-out box.

This afternoon I brought an entire box from the closet downstairs and stuck it next to the couch. It has been sitting there untouched all afternoon, but I am still patting myself on the back for just bringing it down. Maybe the closet will be organized before the baby comes. That would be nice...

And afterward I vacuumed for hours

What? You don't like to eat uncooked quinoa?

(This NaBloPoMo thing is hard this year...)

I spend so much time feeling like I will never get it all done. My days are spent repeating the same tasks over and over - clean up breakfast dishes, clean up toys, laundry, grocery store, make lunch, clean up lunch dishes, clean up toys, laundry, open mail, read sunday paper on thursday, make dinner, clean up dinner dishes, bathe children, read books to children, put children to bed, sit and stare at the t.v. (I am bored just typing this list) - that I often feel like all the other things I want to get done will just never happen. That closet upstairs that is overflowing with stacks of papers and boxes of crap? Never going to get to it. Movie of photos and clips from Clara's first year? Yeah right. Make a budget? I am already asleep.

It is frustrating sometimes. The repetition. I never felt like law was that soul-satisfying, but at least it gave me the illusion of forward movement. Deadlines passed, briefs were written and filed, cases settled and went away. Being an at-home parent can be so groundhog-day-ish. The kids have to eat, play, have diapers changed, be disciplined, be cleaned and be loved in the same way every day. The house has to be cleaned and organized in the same way every day. There is very little variation. And while there are different parts of every day, I still always find myself emptying the dishwasher AGAIN and wondering how many times in a day we can go through every piece of silverware we own.

I try to be zen about it. While chopping vegetables focus only on chopping vegetables. Don't think about the things on my to-do list that I didn't get to today, the fact that I miss our old house at Halloween, how to get Miles to sleep later in the morning, what having three children is going to be like, where we should live next year, that I wish it was colder outside, should I get a swine flu shot?

After I run through all these things, I usually stop and have a Moment of guilt/gratitude. We are very lucky, I got to spend the day with Clara, our rental house is perfectly fine, Brian gets up with Miles every morning, plenty of people have three children, it will all work out, it could be worse, I don't know...

Some days it is hard to remember that I chose this. That I could still be working and we could be living in our old house and we could have just decided to send Miles to private school so that our zoned school wasn't an issue. That I could have all those other worries that come with being a working parent (and I remember them well) instead of these at-home parent worries. It is particularly hard on the days when the toilets need to be cleaned. When I am working, we always pay someone else to do that job.

Sometimes I fear that I am unsatisfiable. That even when life is going well, I will always be looking ahead to what needs to be done next, what I want to happen next, what needs to be worried about next. That trap of thinking "I just want to get through [fill in the blank] and then..." Then what?

Just being happy in this moment. Seems like the hardest thing of all.