Month: July 2005

Staying up until 1 am is NOT smart when an earlybird toddler lives in the house. It’s 6:30 am and Patches is chipper and wide awake. I’ve GOT to get to bed earlier no matter how much I’m enjoying time with Howard sans kids.

Today has been really strange. Howard began the day loopy and spent most of it sleeping or wandering around in a zombified state. He needed me a lot. Mostly he just needed me to be with him, which was kind of nice. I like being needed by Howard, he’s grateful and considerate, unlike the mostly gratitudeless kids. Oh, occasionally I get hugs, kisses, and ‘love you’s from kids but they’re generally significantly detached from the demands. Howard not only needed me, he also took care of me by placing a call to our local relief society to arrange for dinner. He did it during one of his lucid moments which is probably fortunate considering the amusing wierd things he said during less lucid moments. I’m lucky to have him and I’m sad he’s hurt.

At one point Howard was so sick of being housebound that he wandered out the front door. About 20 minutes later I got a phone call from a neighbor letting me know that Howard had just left her house and was continueing to wander the neighborhood. I had an amusing mental picture of a string of phone calls from neighbors all telling me where my drugged-up husband was. It didn’t happen that way, Howard wandered home all by himself which was good. I really didn’t want him collapsing somewhere or getting confused and lost. (I was pretty sure he’d be fine, but the thought crossed my mind.)

Gleek got bored and picked fights with Patches. I was really tired, but managed to sneak a nap by making the kids watch too many videos. (I couldn’t send them outside in 100 degree heat.) In all it wasn’t really a day that I care to repeat, but I’m not sorry to have had it.

At 6 am this morning Howard woke me up because he was in pain. I helped him to the kitchen and doled out a muscle relaxant and two loritab tablets. The loritab dosage was a mistake because 30 minutes later Howard about fell over out of his office chair. Since then he has been alternately loopy and asleep. There have been some very funny moments when Howard tried to overcome loopiness with sheer will power. He sat at the kitchen table looking like death-warmed-over and giving me a list of things he needed me to do. Normally he’s very precise and articulate, but during the conversation he fell asleep no less than 3 times and didn’t even know he had done it. At one point he asked confusedly:
“What’s that noise?”
“That would be my pencil writing the list.”
He then looked at me in wide eyed wonder “It’s so fast!”

I’ve put him to bed to sleep off the drugs. Hopefully coherence will return sometime this afternoon. The really good news is that he does seem to have a full range of motion with his arm. Any movement hurts, but all movements are possible which is reassuring. I don’t know when he’ll be fit to draw again. Certainly not today, but I have hopes that a haitus will not be necessary.

Howard hurt his shoulder today. He’ll probably put all the details into the journal entry that he is currently writing. His pain has been my stress. He hurts and I can’t fix it. Unfortunately it is his drawing arm and until it stops hurting he won’t be able to draw. Best case, that’s two days from now. Worst case involves surgery. Since drawing is both our livelihood and his joy, today has been fearful and uneasy. I would love it if there was some big effort that I could make that would resolve the problem. Unfortunately there isn’t. I can’t fix his shoulder. I can’t draw the comic for him. I can’t earn significant amounts of money without abandoning my post as full-time care-giver to my kids. All I can do is help Howard do all those pesky tasks which require two hands, be there for him, take care of the children, and try to be upbeat about it all. That last one has been the hardest today. Howard is suffering and could really use big doses of cheerful optimism which I’ve been unable to supply. I want to make a heroic effort, but what is needed is steady work at my everyday tasks.

Long exhausting day full of work I don’t want to do and stressful thoughts I don’t want to think.

I usually open this journal with a fairly clear idea of what I want to write and how I want to write it. But this past week my head has been so jumbled with thoughts and experiences that I don’t seem to be able to sort properly.

I loved having my parents here. I loved the chance to see my kids through their eyes. I loved watching the relationships continue to flourish. I loved having someone else to tell stories at bedtime. My parents are so kind and thoughtful. They are constantly doing nice things for me, for my kids, for their friends, for total strangers. I’m a little in awe of that and I need to emulate it more.

Now my parents have gone home, but things aren’t quite normal. My sister-in-law came through town and traded one of her boys for Kiki. Now Link has a cousin his own age to play with and Kiki is having an away-from-home adventure with her same-age cousin. I’ve been a little startled at how much I miss Kiki. I expected to miss her, but I’m almost constantly watching situations and thinking “if Kiki were here, then…” The dynamics of family life are quite a bit different this week.

One of the things my mom said while she was here was “It’s not everyone who could handle Gleek the way you do.” She said it to compliment my parenting and to give me a boost on a day that had been a little rough. But now I find myself watching Gleek and wondering Is she really that hard to handle? I don’t want to think of her or anyone else to think of her as a problem child. She is a delight. She is full of life and energy and mischeviousness. Sometimes that directly clashes with how I want things done and she doesn’t yet have the mental capacity to comprehend why it is so important to negotiate verbally. Just yesterday she and I had and Incident. I really had to get in her face and be mad in order to make her understand why it is important for her to come home from the neighbor’s house when I tell her to rather than running away down the street giggling. I hate having to sit on the floor with a small, sad child and be stern for long enough to be sure that the message has sunken in. Unfortunately Gleek’s native spriteliness often means that instructions or scoldings bounce right off unless I do exactly that.

I know that Gleek requires managing. But don’t all kids? Right now all of mine do. And unfortunately I’m not being able to manage them all well because I’m too exhausted. Kiki needs more snuggling and loving, but she’s the oldest and I get so tired of being climbed on by my littler ones that the last thing I really want is to snuggle a great big 10 year old. But I need to be snuggling her because I’ve only got a couple of years left before she’ll stop seeking connection and start seeking independence. Link doesn’t like transitions and needs me to pay attention enough to smooth them out. Instead of walking up and announcing bedtime, he needs me to walk up, sit, talk to him about his game, help him bring it to a close, read him stories and tuck him into bed. Unfortunately by the time I reach bedtime I’m just ready to shove all the kids in their beds so I can have time off. I’m so busy managing other kids that quiet/mellow Link gets ignored until I need him to do something, then I demand and he stubbornly shouts “No!” and I’m in the middle of a fight I didn’t want or have energy for. Gleek is 4 and I’ve already talked about her. Patches is adorable and amazing. Every day he is saying new things and thinking new thoughts. He’s also just entered the “Do it self!” phaze, which means I suddenly have to negotiate for co-operation rather than just picking him up and going. The time necessary to get him dressed, diapered, or into his carseat has doubled or quadrupled depending on the day. It is adorable when Patches imitates Link’s scowl and shouted “No!” but it is also frustrating.

Right now it is 8:30 am. I’ve already been up for and hour and a half. I’ve already put in a load of peed-on laundry. I haven’t yet had to break up a fight. I fed the kids cheerios for breakfast which means they’ll be hungry again in an hour. Oh wait, there’s the screaming. sigh. Got to go.

After complaining of having no time to myself, I’ve suddenly had a deluge of time off. My parents came into town. They’ve showered my children with grandparently attention and thus allowed me all kinds of space to rest and recoup. They’ve also taken over my office, so I don’t get much online time to write about stuff, but I figure I’m better off for the trade. In addition to my parents, Howard has started taking Gleek with him to the gym. Childcare is included in his membership and she loves “the gym playplace.” I love knowing for certain when I’m going to have an extended period of time off. I’ll happily work all morning if I know I’ll get a break in the afternoon.

It’s been a good few days. I get to have a few more before my parents head back home.

My backyard neighbors own a small pink car which a toddler can ride on and push with foot power. This is Patches favorite backyard activity. He’ll sit on that car and push it around their patio for hours vigorously defending it against any incursions from their one-year-old toddler.

This evening bedtime loomed near and I advanced on Patches to begin the exhausting process of removing Small Boy from Beloved Car. As I walked toward Patches I noticed some odd-looking spots on the pavement. Lots of odd-looking spots. I leaned closer to figure out what they were, because on first glance my brain was telling me they were blood. I dismissed this impression as the influence of watching too much CSI and because there were so many of them. If a child had done that much bleeding, there would surely have been screaming as well. A closer look revealed that they weren’t so much spots as smears. I tried to picture kids throwing berries to make smears like these, but there were no available berries. Then I realized that the smears were in a pattern. They followed exactly the same around-the-picnic-table path that Patches uses for driving the pink car.

In my head I flashed back to several days ago when Patches had a mysteriously bloody toe which I only discovered because he’d tracked blood through the kitchen. I turned to look at Patches and sure enough, both of his big toes had been scraped bloody. The quantity of smears sugguested that the toes had been bleeding for the past 20 minutes or more. I picked up Patches and began carrying him home. The moment he noticed the state of his toes he imediately began crying in fear: “I bweeding!” This distress cry quickly drew the interested attention of Gleek who always finds blood fascinating and frightening. The actual scrapes were quite small. Only by continual abrasion was Patches able to spread his blood so far. After bandaging the toes and tucking the boy into bed, I wandered back to my neighbors to advise them what the splotches on their patio were and to help wash them off before the splotches became sun-bakedly permanent.

Watching CSI has definitely changed the way I think about some things. Even though the patio came relatively clean, I can now picture a CSI team with their special lights out there finding all that blood and spinning theories about spatter, and smear, and directions of dropplets. As for me, I feel oddly pleased with myself for sorting out this little evidentiary puzzle. Mommy: Child Scene Investigator.

Like so many other things in our life this past year, our 4th of July traditions are in flux. Last year we finally ditched a 10 year long tradition of huge picnic and watching overhead fireworks because it simply wasn’t working for our family anymore. Last year’s celebration was kind of small, so this year I wanted to make sure that the kids got to do something memorable. I took them to the local parade.

Most of the impetus for the Parade attendance came from Kiki. She really wanted to go. Howard really didn’t. He hates parades. Kiki agreed to help me watch the littler kids and so I packed them all into the car and we trundled off to the parade. The Provo Freedom Festival Parade is a fairly large one I think. This year it had over 100 entries. This means that it is extremely crowded. We had to park about 6 blocks away and walk in. We found ourselves a little spot that had been left bare because it was concrete instead of grass. For us this turned out to be a good thing because when Patches got a little bored he had a place to drive the toy cars I brought for him. I think we were also fortunate in our choice of neighbors. The three groups surrounding us were all extremely tolerant of my kids. The young couple next to us were particularly entertained by their antics.

The group in front of us not only allowed my kids to have space on the curb, but they also fed my kids from their copious supply of donuts. Gleek was the first one to score a donut. She did it by walking up, looking cute and asking for one. I couldn’t have her return it because she’d already taken bites, but I did require her to share with Patches, Link, and Kiki. She shared and then she showed them where she’d gotten it. The grandparently people noticed the longing looks and started handing out donuts like water. I tried to appologize, but the assured me that they couldn’t think of a better use for unwanted donuts. I’m really not sure how many donuts my kids consumed, but every so often Gleek or Patches would wander up with a half-eaten donut and hand it to me. Then a few minutes later I’d see them with a fresh donut. When I packed up to leave I found that I’d collected 6 half-eaten donuts. Add to that the licorice whip that Patches acquired from somewhere and the powerade I bought to keep kids hydrated and the dirt from the street and grass: they were all sticky and dirty in layers before the parade was over.

Kiki and Gleek loved every minute of the parade. They watched every entry, waved at every person who waved, and cheered for all they were worth. They loved the huge floats with beautiful girls in them. They loved seeing the huge balloons carefully limboed under the street banner. The loved seeing all the horses, and bands, and dancing. Gleek especially loved the entries with music. She began dancing around anytime there was music nearby. I’ve got some adorable video of her doing a little jig-like dance to marching bagpipers. The longer the parade went on, the more energetic Gleek became. All the sugar might have been a causative effect there. Link got tired and bored after awhile. He doesn’t like loud noises much and the parade kept being very loud. He was hot and sweaty and kept trying to crawl into my lap. Since I was hot and sweaty too, this wasn’t comfortable. Besides Link is 7 and not really lap-sized anymore. Fortunately getting his hair all wet helped and he perked right up when he was given a donut. Patches loved all the machines. There were cars and tractors and no less than three fly-overs by military aircraft. Hours after we came home Patches expressed an interest in going back to the parade to see more cars. That was the consensus from all the kids. They loved the parade and want to go back again. Even Link said he liked it even though he got hot and occasionally bored.

Predictably, the rest of the day the kids were really cranky and hard to manage. Then in the evening we went out into our cul de sac and lit off a dazzling array of fireworks. It was subsidized by one neighbor who’d spent pantloads of money on huge boxes of fireworks. His teenage son, another neighbor’s teenage daughter, and Howard were the firelighters. The rest of us all got to sit on my neighbor’s lawn and watch the show. The show was made even more impressive by illegal fireworks shot into the sky from a street or two over. I loved getting to sit with my neighbors and visit. The kids loved getting to run around in the dark and see all the fireworks. Howard enjoyed lighting off the fireworks. It was a happy hour or two. Then we herded the children inside and tumbled them all into bed.

Today is going to be a deliberately calm day. We had enough excitement yesterday to last for a week.

I haven’t been writing in this journal as much as I used to. I keep reading my friends page and wondering why I just don’t feel motivated to write. Today I spent some time surfing my journal archives in search of motivation. I discovered lots of entries that I really enjoyed reading. Some were valuable realizations that I’d forgotten about. It proved to me that having the record is extremely valuable to me and so discovering the reason for my lack of writing became a front-of-my-brain pursuit instead of simmering in the back.

I think it is a combination of reasons. One is that events have conspired against journal writing. I went on vacation and being away from my house always puts a damper on journaling. Then I got back with sick kids. Right about the time everyone was well and I was getting on top of housework I was hit with a 10 days delayed effect from forgetting to take my daily medication while on vacation. There were five moody, grouchy, non-journaly days in there. I recovered from that several days ago, and yet days still went by with no writing.

The weird thing was that I miss writing in my journal. I miss finding things to say and saying them well. I miss having people comment on my thoughts. All of that is valuable to me, but when I sat down in front of the screen nothing in my head seemed worth writing about.

Today I have thoughts to write about and I think the major difference is that today I had lots of contemplative time. I had two hours during church while my children were in the care of others. Then this afternoon the children played peacefully together for hours. It seems my brain requires that quiet time to sort thoughts into meaninful shapes. The summer schedule with all the kids at home just doesn’t leave me much time for staring at the walls and thinking. Every time I pick up a book or sit at the computer in order to soothe my brain and make space for contemplation, I get interrupted. I’ll sit down just wanting 10 minutes to myself and everyone in the house will walk up with things they need me to do. Hiding would work I suppose, but it is hard to properly supervise children if you’re hiding from them.

I don’t really have an answer for this, but it is yet another element for me to consider as I try to figure out how to shape my days this summer. The plan of taking a morning outing each day has worked well so far. I’ve already planned all the little outings for this next week. We all still get cranky in the afternoons, but at least we don’t feel house-bound and cranky. Tomorrow I’m taking the kids to a Fourth of July parade. Howard will be staying home to stuff the buffer and because he absolutely hates parades. I’m just hoping that all the horses and parade floats will be interesting enough to induce Gleek and Patches to sit still.