Bluebeard ...and Blackbeard

I'm not sure how we managed to avoid it for so long.  Sure Joseph had been there, but that's Joseph and it wasn't in the "right" place anyway.  I guess it was just time and we'd avoided it long enough.

Two split chins, on two children, with two sets of stitches, in one month.

James slipped while climbing the couch, at the end of July.

Elena bounced off a bigger kid and into a pole at the splashpad, last week.

Remembering, With Love

Ten years ago we went from this:


to this:

Despite the pain and suffering, we found amazing things in the depths of our souls. All over the country, Americans gave everything they could. We served, we lifted, we donated, we consoled.

This week, my parents' home went from this:


to this:

This was my home for about five months. It's where my husband proposed to me. It's the only place my kids have ever known as Mima And Popa's House. More than 1,500 other families now have similar stories, similar losses.

Just as before, I've seen our community do amazing things. We've given money, clothing, toiletries, food, time, and shoulders to cry on. In the weeks to come, there will be lunches, rides, places to stay, furniture, and help cleaning up.

I wish that we could keep those moments with us forever--those times that prove our humanity--when we lay aside bitter differences, because they really don't matter in the end, and get on with the work of helping our neighbors, building a stronger, more peaceful and loving community.

I am my brothers' keeper. He deserves more true Charity than he's probably used to getting.

Fear and Shopping

What with needing an entirely new wardrobe for the kids, I made an exhaustive--and exhausting--list and hit the stores with kids and Grandma in tow. I think we're set. I have about two weeks' worth of clothes for each kid (no matter what you say, Joseph can not survive with only 4 pairs of pants/shorts--I'd be doing laundry every day) and while we don't have a full compliment of colors it's a good mix. Once I stare at their closets I might return one or two things, but if I know me at all I probably won't.

We took a break in the middle of shopping and dropped off Grandma so we could go meet our teachers at our new school. Both Ms. B (2nd) and Ms. W (Kinder) are young, attentive and organized. The library isn't quite as big as our old one, but the librarian is cheerful and enthusiastic and we (the parents) will still be able to check out our own books. We each got a popsicle for coming, too. James sported a blue mouth for the rest of the day.

After the school, we visited two other stores and I began to wonder if, between children with wandering attention and stagnant checkout lines, I'd get dinner ready on time. We pulled it off with time to spare, though. Despite the grueling schedule, I would have called the day a triumph but for one thing, a literal pain in the rear.

When I was pregnant with James, three years ago, I somehow twisted my right sacroiliac joint out of alignment. I was in pain for months on end. After birth, things settled down and I've been fine, but the joint never went back together. I can actually feel a good 1/4 inch of elevation change (for lack of a better metaphor) at the top of my pelvis. Then, almost exactly two weeks ago, I turned to look at something as we drove past it and I could feel my tail snap and scream out in pain. I don't think there was actual screaming involved, but it was a close thing. Ever since then, though, I've spent nearly every evening lying on my back and wishing I didn't have to move ever again.

I'm beginning to wonder if I'll survive school. My mornings are pretty good but every step I take grates and jars, and the oddest things can aggravate the problem. I consider the ability to feel and hear your pelvis click and pop to be A Bad Thing. I don't want to drive the three blocks to school, though, and I really don't want to wait in the torturously long pick-up line, wasting gas. But will I be able to walk it? And if I can, will I be able to do anything else, afterward?

Happily

Once upon a time, I had five pairs of glasses. "Five?" you say. Yes, five. I'm not counting the sunglasses, even though they're prescription, too. You see, I knew I had children and that personal belongings would suddenly get up and walk off, settling down in a whole new part of the house, usually in odd nooks and corners that are only visible to persons under 3' tall. I needed to be able to find some sort of glasses, even if they weren't the ones I'd just taken off. I also knew that accidents happen. For example, one of those five pairs of glasses vanished at the side of a rural highway as I stared at my flat tire mere hours before Joseph chipped his tooth. (Yeah, not one of my better days.) That's why I had five pairs, though.

Then came Sweet Little James, the Destroyer of Frames. He's utterly annihilated all but one pair in the last three months, and that one pair is five years old. I'd known I ought to get my prescription updated sometime soon, but now I needed new glasses.

I just got back, and I'm pretty darn happy. Everything looks healthy, my prescription is essentially the same (as the most most recent pair, not what I've been forced to wear for the last month), and I found some cool frames. I got a pale green pair at the optomitrist--they'll be done in a week or so--then wandered off to one of the Done In An Hour places for a 2-for-$ deal. The only pair of pairs I really liked--a simple black wire frame, and a black plastic with bright lime inside and earpiece sparklies--were a little pricier than I would have liked, but I'd budgeted high, anyway, so it was all good. And they're cute.

I won't be leaving them lying around, either.

Crawling Out

I crashed hard. A thousand little heartaches piled up, one on top of another, until I crumpled under the strain.

It gets harder as time goes on. I know a couple girls who are due the week I was. I'm thrilled for them and happily read their blogs, eager for more news on their growing bellies. It's still a reminder of what I lost, though. I would have been in maternity pants, by now. I would have been feeling little popcorn kicks and hiccups for a couple weeks, already. I would have been gearing up for my 20-week ultrasound. It bothers me that I don't even know if we'd have wanted to find out what we were having. We never got far enough to discuss it. The others are moving on, each new development a beautiful discovery, and I'm right were I was, empty and unchanging. Like a fly trapped in amber I feel lost in time, forever stuck just as I am now with no means of escape. Worst of all, I'm not sure that it's time to break free, yet. I want to climb back up on that horse, show it who's boss and that I control my life, but mine is not the only life that will be affected. As much as I hate it, I have to wait.

Still, I'm grateful for friends and a husband who will literally lift me up and get me going when I'm down. I don't know what I would do without you.

Falling

I've run out of Artemis Fowls (the 7th one's been checked out so I have to wait for it to be returned) and the How to Train Your Dragons are amusing but not engrossing. Books got me through last week, but now I hang at the edge of the pit. Not a deep one, thankfully, but enough to leave me scraped up as I try to climb back out. Hopefully I won't need to. I don't want to tip the balance by saying "...but it's only Friday," either. I can feel it, though. I make up excuses to go to stores, touching, feeling and wanting to buy something--anything!--to fill the void. I leave with an empty cart only because I know deep down that it won't help. Strangely enough, the one place I don't go is the grocery store. I would love to fill bags with apples and cucumbers, mushrooms and the last of the peaches. But I don't. I don't know why. Fresh produce is something I don't mind indulging in. It's healthy as well as being delightfully tasty. It's something the whole family can enjoy, too. So why do I stay away? I'd love to insert some witty and insightful remark here, but I've run out. I feel drained, like I've been running on empty for way too many miles. I need a good cry and a long nap, but don't have the playlist or spare time for either. If you have a moment, a hug and a shoulder will do.

Bumps in the Road

The hardest part isn't the loss of the pregnancy. The Lord made it abundantly clear that we'd be getting this one back. He's promised me certain things and he's going to deliver. Just not this time. It might not be this year, or this decade, or even in this life. And I'm OK with that. A promise is still a promise. No, the hard part is the loss of being pregnant. It's like being cut off in the middle of a thought, having the station fade out just as you find the song you were hoping for, or (perhaps most accurately) getting laid off. I feel incomplete, hanging in mid-air. There's no climax or denouement to this story.

It's the little things that get me the most. My ice crunching habit showed up right on time at the start of the second trimester, except that I was technically post-partum, by then. It drives me nuts, this compulsion to dip into the ice bucket and fish out chips when I don't have a "reason" to anymore. I was OK with having it all end until my mouse was hovering over the "unsubscribe" button for my Your Pregnancy This Week emails. Clicking meant admitting that it was over, done, and not coming back. I felt the same when I put my small handful of maternity shirts back in their box with all the others. All I could do was stare at it and cry a little. I pine for the missed experiences--Elena's speculations on the sex and number of babies (she tried to convince us I was having twins, at the end); James learning about babies when he's still so small, himself; being pregnant in winter (first time!) and new life with the spring. All our plans that had been thrown so far off are back to where they were--or are they?--but it feels so odd and off-balance, now. That Easter due date feels slightly bitter. Or maybe not. It's so hard to sort things out, and it keeps changing, day to day. I wonder if October will be hard for me, next year. There's no way of telling where my life will be by that time. I take things day by day, and if that doesn't help, minute by minute. It's the only way to get through.

Pieces

The day of our final ultrasound we sat in the car outside our house for such a long time after driving home. I couldn't go back in, couldn't just be Mom and pretend that everything was normal. The kids were so excited for this baby, how could I tell them it was gone? My beautiful visiting teacher hustled my boys away so we could have time alone. Jonathan had been up late with me (remember: works nights, sleeps days) so he immediately crawled into bed. I curled up with him, drained and directionless, and slept most of the day. The previous week had been so intensely spiritual, I'd been absolutely sure something survived. I'd even daydreamed scenarios of telling people about my miracle baby--"I had a miscarriage, but this little one pulled through." No dice. I dragged myself to school to pick up Elena, but I was quiet, subdued, wrapped in sun hat and sunglasses so she couldn't see my red eyes.

It's so easy to hide, to not let others see our pain because we don't want to explain or make excuses. It's especially easy for me, already turned inward by nature. I pull a cloak of solitude around me, unwilling to share because I don't want to hurt any more. This one is too big, though. I need to probe and lay bare this splinter in my soul. If I leave it to its own devices it'll just fester and poison all around it.

Despite how lonely I feel--or perhaps because of it--I crave the society of other people. I need someone to talk to, or just stand next to. After a while, though, it's starts to feel a little... forced. Do they understand? Do I want them to? I don't want to explain it again, but if I don't, well, maybe I should just find somewhere else to be. The spiral downward and crash when I'm alone at night hits me the worst. I don't sleep well, I'm always tired. I've started falling asleep at odd moments, the last few days.

That's not to say that there aren't bright spots. We really have been blessed. This could have been so soul-shattering, but wasn't. Even so, while we may not be broken, there's a lot of bruises. Some of them refuse to come to the surface, too. There's still so far to go.

So Many Changes

I'm going to take a stab at Marin's Blog Posting Thing. I know it's the 3rd and I've already missed my first two shots at posting every day, but it's hard to get my thoughts organized, these days. I've had so many things to say, so many things to share, and then...

Let me start from the beginning. Jonathan got a new job, in July. He works all night long on 12 hour shifts making chips for memory sticks. It's hard, but he sees our kids every afternoon, we get to eat dinner together as a family, he gets Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights off so we can do family things, and we're finally self-sufficient. About the same time, I got called to the Young Women. He's been beautifully supportive, especially since he's the designated sick-child-watcher because I teach lessons most weeks and he therefore misses more Church than he'd like. Also in that same week, I got pregnant.

If you know me well enough, you know I have a really weird thing with planning my kids. I want them at a certain time, for certain reasons, and the Lord lets me have that, give or take His tweaking to get it just right. This one was unexpected, though. It moved our plans up an entire year. We scrambled to make adjustments, but things were working out pretty well. For the first time, I had healthy cravings--salad! water!--and even started showing at 7 weeks. I'd managed to get nearly everyone called by the time I had to pull out a couple of my favorite maternity tops.

A few of you more clever readers may have noticed my verb tense in that last paragraph. Four days before my first OB visit I started bleeding. The following week saw an ER visit, three doctor's visits, three blood draws, two ultrasounds, and one good long cry. I never did get that OB appointment. I miscarried at 11 weeks. I was due on Easter Sunday.

This is not a cry for help. It's not a Pity Party, either. The Lord has been exceedingly gracious with us, easing the blow as much as He possibly could. The only reason I'm talking about it is that I feel it needs to be talked about. It's not a dark, shameful secret. It's not something to be locked away and never talked about again. It's part of who I am, now. The next month, I'll be looking to share my thoughts as I come to terms with this new state of being.

Flashback

Our old computer died right before Conference and the new one came with Windows. We decided to try it out, having been using Linux for the last 8? 9? years, and while it is useful for many things (mostly watching Netflix) it's a pain to use because I can't find anything. I'm also not too sure I want to put my pictures on here and because of that all the pictures I've taken in the last month and a half are still firmly on the camera card. I've decided to bypass Windows, though, and just stick them straight on here because I'm tired of not being able to post stuff.

~Easter~

We pulled out the colors and dippers and aprons for egg dying, but this year we got to try out a cool kit for putting metallic foil on your eggs. It was super sticky but the kids had a great time. The eggs turned out really pretty, too. (As a note of warning, when peeling the eggs, afterward, you have to be sure to rinse everything, including your hands, or you'll end up eating foil.)

James did a great job finding eggs, he just didn't want any. We managed to convince him to put the first one in his bucket, but he'd get upset if you tried to give him any more.


The bigger kids were expert egg hunters, though, and had a great time looking around for new additions to their growing hoards.


As a side-note, I am amazed by how small my tomato plants are in this picture. They've reached jungle proportions, by now.

~Playing with Doorknobs~

I tried to get one with his hand on the knob, but he was being too sneaky to get caught with photographic evidence.

~The End of Kindergarten~

(round one)

The school year is winding down. Elena has made a ton of friends, discovered that boys can be really weird, become one of the librarian's best customers, fallen in love with Magic Treehouse books, rocked the Read-a-Thon with 1204 pages in just 12 days, become a Marathon Kids finisher, studied the anatomy and life cycles of ladybugs and butterflies, learned some basic Spanish, and figured out multiplication. She's getting ready for next week's field day(s), right now, so be on the lookout for more on that.

~Look, Ma! No Fingers!~

There's no picture here because, well, there's nothing to see. And that makes me very happy, indeed. About a month ago, we realized that we hadn't seen Joseph sucking his fingers in a while. He wasn't nodding off with fingers in his mouth, he wasn't sucking them at random moments in the day, and he wasn't using them to feel better after some injury or disappointment. Even better, the skin had dried up and wasn't peeling off, anymore. Hooray!

Ode to a Harvest Gold Ice Tray

My parents bought that old GE fridge long before I entered the picture. It had seen better days by the time I realized its existence, but it still had years to go. It was the fridge of my childhood, the magic repository of popsicles and watermelon. I remember the summer that I ate nothing but carrots, diving into the crisper for my preferred snack over and over. Time went by, a great parade of leftovers and milk jugs, and the old fridge finally breathed its last gasp of freon. We kept the ice trays, though, even though the new fridge had an ice maker. I gave one of those to my boyfriend, when he got his first apartment, and it become a source of mild amusement during the early days our marriage. It wasn't a fashionable color by a long shot and didn't match anything in the house, but it did its job with a minimum of fuss. Each of my pregnancies produced massive cravings for ice and that old ice tray saw plenty of action, cranking out ice cubes by the (double) dozen. A year or two ago, though, we noticed a crack that had started to develop down the center spine. The crack has grown over time, each batch of ice leaving it more vulnerable to the damage wrought from the twist needed to free its load. The crack has now traveled down into one of the cups and the tray is starting to leak. I'm sorry, good tray, but your life is now spent. We will miss you and I'm sure your replacements won't last a fraction of the years you put in.

Sunshine and Clouds

It's been a long and really weird day, today. It started at 5:30, when I got up to get Elena ready for school, because I'd forgotten that James reset my alarm clock, yesterday. Going back to bed was no longer an option, once I'd realized what had happened, so we rolled with it. We hunted mittens (only found 1 of 4), ambled to school, waited a couple of minutes for the office staff to unlock the front door, then grabbed a hot breakfast. It was a great morning. Back at home, I watched the weather report and realized that if we were getting snow on Friday, I needed to get over to our storage unit to pull out the kids' serious winter gear. Out the door I went, then right back in for a bucket of water and a scrub brush because my car had been egged. Thank goodness it's winter, not summer, and it came right off. Once I got to the storage place, I realized I couldn't remember the code to get into our hallway (it's an inside unit on a secured hallway). I tried a ton of stuff but was just stumped. I went to the office and get the guy in there to come help me. Ah ha! I had the code backward! I ran inside, real quick, to see if they'd slapped an extra lock on since I'd had problems, earlier, getting it to lock right and management had asked us to fix it or they'd lock us out. Great! No new lock (and no follow-up letters, at home) so we must have secured it fine. The first thing I saw when I pulled up the door was an empty envelope from a letter I had sent Jonathan while he was in Spain--it was on the floor, partway under a box. "That's odd. Something must have shifted." I got the door all the way up and gasped in horror at the huge gaping hole in our stuff. Then I noticed that the rest of it was *not* in the same place (or condition) it had been, the last time I'd been in there. I slammed the lock back on, zipped back to the office, and called home in a panic. No, he hadn't taken anything out. The office guy and I went back out, I got Jonathan over, we took pictures and filed a police report. But a third of our stuff is gone. The kids' vintage-style pedal-car is gone, for sure. I'm not sure what else is missing but my flute was in there, as was my china, my porcelain dolls, a whole box of Jonathan's collectibles and my favorite leather boots. I need to go through everything and assess the damage. If anyone can watch my boys while I do this, tomorrow morning, that'd be awesome.

New and Freaky With a Side of Hope

My mouse broke. It actually broke several months ago and I glued the piece back into place, but I really don't want to keep gluing it, now that it's loose again. So I got a new mouse, tonight. It's optical. It's also so much more sensitive than the old one that I can't get my arrow onto anything to click.

The mouse is awesome, but the real reason for going to the store was to test car seats. Again. This was Target, though, and not BabiesRUs. They don't let you test the seats in your car at Target. Even so, I think I might have found a winning combination.

Here's the infant seat we've got our eye on. It's the Baby Trend Flex-Loc and it's only 16" wide.
This is the most promising car seat. It's the Cosco "high-backed booster" and is 17" wide.

The reason the car seat looks so promising is that there is a ~1" overlap where the lip of the infant seat slides over the edge of the car seat's seat, effectively making all of the car seats 16" wide. The back seat of my car is ~48" wide. Follow the math and you'll see the light begin to dawn.

Target also sells this, the Cosco Pronto booster, but it wasn't in our store so I didn't get to test (or measure) it tonight. It's main bonus feature is that it starts at 30lbs and 34" (it fits Elena) but I don't know if the arm rests will flip up to make room for the infant seat.
We're going to see if we can have a discussion with a store manager to test the car seats out. If the manager lets us, and they fit, that's a $200 sale and a very grateful customer. Frances, you know people, right? Can you help?

So Not Cool!

I went out to my mailbox, this afternoon, and found this:


With dawning horror and suspicion, I opened the nearest edge of the envelope.


That's right: it's a book. A hard-bound book, at that, which my local postal employee bent in half in order to cram it into my tiny mailbox. A normal person would have left it in the office, or possibly on my door step (where the last hard-bound book mailed to me was placed), but no, he was absolutely determined to fit it in the box. Now, those of you familiar with the modern metal cluster boxes will remember that there is a lip at the front of the box, around the door, to keep strange people from slipping random papers into someone else's box. It also makes the front of the mailbox smaller than the back, where the postal worker puts things in. Right again: I can't get it out.

I have called the USPS and lodged an official complaint, since someone will have to come and unlock the back of it to get the thing out, but I, unfortunately, doubt that they're going to repair, replace, or make restitution for the valuable piece of property that one of their employees willfully mangled.

This Is Broken

Since I can't seem to be able to wrap my brain around a post about us, I will share one of our favorite websites. Its called thisisbroken.com and it's a place to share things that aren't thought out too well, poorly executed, or just plain wrong. One of my favorites is the cement pillar planted firmly in the middle of--and completely obstructs--an exterior stairwell. Jonathan prefers the white pavement stripe that goes around a branch that has fallen on the edge of a street. It's great.