Moved

So we moved over the weekend, four weeks ago. And then into the week, pretty much like, forever. That was fun. And then we all got sick! The good times, they just keep coming, I tell you.

But we're completely out of the old house and slowing shoveling our way through the new. I am no longer at the stage where I begin to wonder if a box of matches might be a better solution. Mind you, looking at our garage still gives me heart palpitations, but hey! We have a garage to shove our shit into again! That's almost worth moving for in and of itself.

****

So I've been working on the above opus for two weeks now. And then poor James got sick and threw up for an entire week, and then our sadistic bastard government took an hour away from us. And I have several posts I want to write, but none of them seem to append well to what I've written out so far. So let's see, here are a couple random tidbits before I finally shoot this post and put it out of its misery:

- We did our annual corned beef and cabbage dinner Sunday, but this year we roasted the vegetables. Wow, what a difference. I've had various roasted vegetables for years, but they've never seemed worth the time it took to do all of that chopping and then the two lifetimes you go through waiting for them to be done just to get slightly crunchy potatoes anyway. But recently, I discovered the joys of cruciferous vegetables roasted at high heat until they blacken around the edges and caramelize. Bonus if you roast them with some garlic and put on some parmesan cheese in the last five or ten minutes. Doing that to brussels sprouts recently had Katherine and I standing over the pan filching sprouts to eat with our fingers because it seemed like putting them on plates would take too long.

- I'm not sure why, but after nearly four years of sewing, I'm getting the urge to knit again. This isn't a problem, except that I have a bunch of sewing projects in the hopper that I also really want to do. Fortunately, we're getting into the stage of advanced babyhood where I have both more time for projects again AND the brainpower to accomplish them. I think maybe I'll try making each of the kids a new sweater for next winter. Child-sized sweaters are small and quick, so they're not too much of a commitment. Now I just need to do things like try to remember the password to my Ravelry account and reassemble my modular knitting needle kit, since it has proven to be irresistible to small children who like to pop the needles out of their spaces and scatter them about the room.

- And finally, I will leave you with what Katherine told me yesterday: "You know my dance teacher? He doesn't know anything about undersea volcanoes! That's a little bit upsetting." Why yes it is. Why are we paying for dance lessons if we can't even find a dance teacher with an adequate knowledge of oceanography?

Updates, part 1

So here's something hysterical - at the beginning of the year, I was contemplating trying to write here every day for the entire year. Heh. That's one of the problems with going to Michigan at the turn of every year - I put off New Year's resolutions until we get home, then we're all tired and discombobulated when we get home, and then suddenly it's February. That, of course, isn't why I flaked on any semblance of writing regularly - it has a lot more to do with my falling asleep on the couch every evening - but it doesn't help.

Anyway, lots of stuff is happening. For starters, we're moving. There are two main reasons: 1, we hate our landlord and 2, I do an insane amount of driving between Alec's preschool and Katherine's homeschool program. It's looking like Katherine is going back to summer camp this summer, so I'll be driving the same distance five days a week instead of two. And we managed to find a house that would take three miles off of a 9 mile drive, which is significant when it comes to city driving.

I also like the way the house is set up better, even if it's a bit smaller than our current house. Our current house is three stories with living room, dining room and kitchen on the first floor, bedrooms on the second and a family room and extra bedroom where the garage used to be on the ground floor. The drawback of this is that there's very little storage space, and while there's lots of living space on the ground floor, it's cut up in a way that makes it inconvenient to use. So instead, we shove all of junk down there and live on the upper two floors. I liked it a lot better in our last house, which was all of the significant rooms on the first floor and then a large family room in the basement, along with a utility hallway and the garage, which is where we shoved all of our junk, keeping it nicely out of sight (see, I don't care so much what we do with our crap so long as I don't have to look at it). We spent our most of our time in the family room, but the living room was there as a nice place to sit without toys all over the place.

The new house is a similar configuration, but larger. It has a large family room downstairs, along with an extra little room that I think would be a good place to set up school stuff, and a very large utility hallway big enough to serve as overflow toy storage and a place to set up messy art projects or ride tricycles on rainy days. The kitchen and our bedroom will be smaller than our current house, but I can live with that if the places where we spend the majority of our time is larger and if we have more storage space, which it does in spades. Another advantage is that we'd like to move James in with Alec, but currently Alec is in the smallest bedroom. It wouldn't be feasible or fair to have two kids in there when Katherine is alone in a bigger bedroom. Moving gives us an organic way of shifting her to the smallest bedroom (and she, in fact, highly conveniently declared entirely on her own that she wanted the bedroom we would have chosen for her).

So I anticipate we'll be pretty happy in the new house once we're in. Of course, we have to survive to that point, which is a dicey proposition. I'm theoretically looking forward to packing as a chance to do some purging, but mostly I dread the entire moving process. It's likely we'll be able to get some people from church to help this time, which is such a lovely prospect. I even have a friend from church that's going to come over and help pack, for which I'm so grateful. That still doesn't change the fact that moving is hell.

At the movies

We saw The Hobbit when 's parents were visiting for Christmas. I was both looking forward to it, because it was my favorite Tolkien book, and a little afraid to see it, because it was my favorite Tolkien book. I had a hard time figuring out how they were going to stretch it to three movies and was very afraid of what violence they might do to the plot to achieve that end.

Well! First, it's been years and years since I've read it, so I had a comfortable vagueness about the actual event of the book going, which I think helped a great deal. Periodically, a scene would pop up that I remembered from the book and they always went about how I thought they should. A lot of the extra stuff is showing what Tolkien was telling, which is just fine with me because it makes no sense not to take advantage of a visual storytelling medium. I'm told the rest of the additions were from other Tolkien, and they all seemed to fit the movie pretty well.

I can see all the reasons that people didn't like The Hobbit - too long, boring, shifts in tone (well, except for the accusations of making extra plot up out of whole cloth because all of the additions were drug up from some portion of Tolkien) - but I loved it anyway. I wasn't bored, I thought they did a great job of capturing the humor of the book, yet giving the plot and the character development a great deal more weight than the book does.

So did anyone else wonder if Radagast the Brown started out brown, or if he just became that after too many centuries of not bathing?

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Speaking of movies, I've mentioned more than once Katherine's sensitivity to scary things, and my indecision on how much to push her on the issue. I finally decided to leave her alone, both because I don't remember seeing scary things as a child doing anything other than give me something new to terrify me in the middle of the night (I still have nightmares where I'm stuck in a theatre and Sweeney Todd is about to start) and because I decided her life will not be any poorer for not being able to watch horror movies.

And in one of those rare moments, my parenting strategy has proven to be the right one! Over Christmas, Katherine asked to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas and the first two Harry Potter movies. We gave her space and lo and behold, she matured enough on her own to be able to handle more scary stuff, probably much faster because we didn't make her watch anything traumatizing.

We're so excited. This might be the year we can introduce Star Wars!

Filking

Every baby we've had has had different songs sung to them. Katherine heard a lot of Lydia the Tattooed Lady. Alec heard Union Maid, Alice's Restaurant turned into Alec's Restaurant, and Alouette, sung as Alexander. Nothing says love to your baby like singing about plucking them. For James, rather than something pedestrian and cliched like Sweet Baby James (mostly because I don't really know the lyrics well), lately he's been hearing variations on the Harvey the Wonder Hamster theme song from the short-lived Weird Al tv show:

Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the Wonder Hamster,
He doesn't bite and
He doesn't squeal,
He just runs around on his hamster wheel,
Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the Wonder Hamster!
Hey, James!

It's a big hit, plus The Wonder Hamster is a good baby nickname. Then Katherine came up with the dog variation:

Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the wonder doggie,
He doesn't bite and
He doesn't bark,
He just runs around all day in the park,
Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the wonder doggie!
Hey, James!

Finally, to avoid species confusion, I came up with a proper human baby version:

Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the wonder baby,
He doesn't bite and
He doesn't poo,
He just jumps around in his jumperoo,
Jamesy, Jamesy, Jamesy the wonder baby!
Hey, James!

Katherine would like to point out that he does in fact poo, copiously. To which I can only respond that he bites too, but I've included the biting line in every version to try and get him to take a hint.

James at 8 months

So we have this baby, and he keeps growing. And then he develops more physical skills. The nerve, I tell you. Doesn't he know he's supposed to be my tiny baby?

This is such a gross motor age. James can: stand at a table, go from lying down to sitting up, creep across the floor, occasionally in the direction he wants to go in and has pulled himself up nearly to standing at least once. I think he will be crawling next month.

In fine motor skills, he can: pick things up in a fine pincher grip, wave and is working hard on clapping. He uses his pincher grip on the two or so solid meals a day he's eating now. I had to laugh - we were so careful about introducing solid foods to Katherine (although there were food allergy issues there, to be fair). And after a month or so of lackadaisically trying different baby foods to indifferent success, we found James eating Cheerios off of the floor and started giving him Cheerios. As it turns out, the boy just doesn't like mushes. He's also thrilled with apple and pear slices, orange slices cut up small, broccoli*, buttered toast, graham crackers and corn flakes.

Cognitively, he's babbling away like a little brook (the small body of flowing water, that is, not his father). And while visiting my mother, several of us heard him say something that sounded quite a bit like "Hi" in response to people greeting him. I'm pretty sure I've heard "Mama" and "Dada" a couple times, but they don't seem to be repeated too often. Separation anxiety has started to take hold, which means he's not quite so happy to go to other people any more if I'm there.

No matter how big he gets, he's still my sweet little love muffin. He's such a happy, happy baby, who smiles all the time and rarely gets upset. My happy little lovey.




*It's bizarre - I have three children who all love broccoli. Goodness knows I haven't done a thing to deserve such good eaters. They get plenty of junk and sweets. And yet last night, out of a meal of chicken, roasted potatoes and broccoli, the only thing either of my older children ate was the broccoli.

Well, that was a ...memorable trip

We are home! My mother is home as well, as of Monday. We left last Sunday, because it was clear she was on the mend and while I hate to abandon her on her sickbed, she needs to be a lot sicker for us to justify missing work. We went through Lafayette and had dinner with friends there, stayed in Columbus for a day and saw various friends and family. We made it home without incident on Tuesday and got to spend a couple more days off before getting back into the work grind.

That said, there was a point driving to Columbus when Katherine was absolutely sick of the car and starting moaning, "Worst trip ever." And I had to think, well, I've had worse trips. Going to South Dakota after my mother's accident, or home for my father's funeral, or to B's grandfather's funeral, where we arrived to discover his great-uncle and cousin had been killed in a car accident all come to mind. But this trip is starting to rank right up there in the top (bottom?) five. I had to give up our plan of a long weekend in Columbus seeing my best friend for two entire days in favor of visiting my mother in the hospital while she had unpleasant things done and only being able to see my best friend for an evening. And as a bonus, we got to go through the colossal hassle of getting James to a doctor in a strange city because he was running a fever and deeply unhappy, and we didn't think it was a good idea to take him on a 9-hour car ride over the mountains if he might have an ear infection (he didn't). It wasn't all bad, of course. We did get to see everyone we wanted to see. But the level of stress involved, and the knowledge that my mother's body is continuing to malfunction, made it a bad trip indeed.

Some progress, little news

I spent much of the day at the hospital today. They did a cat scan on my mother today, so tomorrow we should have an answer as to whether the blockage is caused by either a physical blockage, requiring surgery, or an ileus, which is when a portion of the intestines decides to poop out, or rather not poop out, which basically takes time for the intestines to start working again. An ileus is pretty common with quadriplegics, so it seems likely that's it. It's certainly what we're hoping for. Meanwhile, they're doing some grody things that are helping to relieve the pressure in her rather hard, distended abdomen, which is making her feel better.

So most likely, this is something that won't kill her but is yet another part of her body not working well.

****

We just watched Brave again on dvd, for the first time since seeing it in the theatre last June. Much as I remember, the animation was exquisite and the story bugged me. Not that it was bad, per se, just that it was full of tired stereotypes, ones that were particularly disappointing in Pixar's first movie with a female protagonist. Basically, it wasn't a movie with a female protagonist, it was a movie about being a girl. And how girl stuff sucks. Until the very end, when being a woman is what's needed to save the kingdom from the idiot man-children who pretend to run it. As far as I can tell, all of the male characters are just ids running around, while Merida would like to be that (and why wouldn't she?) until she finally sees the benefit of being an actual mature person with some semblance of self-control. Really, Pixar? This is really the best you can do? It's like the video game companies that think they should try to capture the girl market and put out a game about dating or makeup, because that's the nerdy guy idea of what girls are like.

Maybe the next time they decide to make a movie starring a girl (some time in the next decade, one hopes), they can resist the urge to simply have the plot stamp "girl" on her forehead and just do a movie about a person who is female.

(Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the movie. It was funny and absolutely beautiful. But only by firmly tamping down my inner feminist)

New Year

I had an upbeat post planned yesterday, about my plans for the new year and the things I thought we could pretty realistically get accomplished. And instead, my mother is in the ER tonight with a bowel obstruction (her oh-so-useful doctor this morning phoned in a medication for gas. When I have more time, I have a doozy of a rant about the various stories of my mother's medical care make me suspect that people see an elderly woman in a wheelchair and don't try as hard as they might otherwise). Her aide is with her; I am not because I am James's main food source, and a baby in the ER is not a good idea. If it had been something that could have been resolved in an evening, I wouldn't have been needed. Since she's being admitted, we will go over tomorrow morning once she's in a hospital room, away from the ER germs. This all makes perfect sense and does absolutely nothing to assuage my crippling guilt, but the fact remains, a baby in the ER is a bad idea, so here I am.

So now I'm looking at two different years: the one where my mother remains relatively stable and I keep on with my plans, and the other one, where she isn't and I need to figure out how to manage our family while possibly having to be in Michigan often. I'm rapidly starting to think that planning for crisis management is going to have to be the way to go, although I will do my best to not live as if we're in crisis mode when we're at home in Philadelphia. Non-crisis mode involves things like more exercise (B recently got a hefty raise that we're deeply unhappy about (that's another doozy of a post all on its own), which mean we should be able to afford joining the Y), keeping up with our improved cooking habits, continuing to be more involved at church and keeping a better school schedule. Crisis mode preparations, on the other hand, involve making sure bills can get paid and the house kept together if I'm not there, coming up with child care plans, and quite probably looking for a school for Katherine. We haven't been accomplishing more than the minimum since James was born, and the "She's in first grade, it doesn't matter so much if we don't get a lot done this year" starts to wear thin as it stretches throughout second grade as well. I had plans for getting lot more done starting next week. But now I'm not sure if we're getting home next week. I think she needs a teacher less distracted and stressed than I am, and we need to be able to continue her education throughout any upheaval. I was commenting last month that we need some sort of groovy experimental school that gives her a lot of autonomy and fun projects, but is still academically rigorous. We'll see if that's possible.

Last week was...quite a week, all right. I got a sinus infection (with bonus exciting lump that confused the doctor, who threw antibiotics at it!), Mr. Blinky the laptop with the exciting fainting screen finally turned up its toes and died, and then I got the call that my mother was in the hospital, had probably had a mild heart attack recently and (best of all!), probably hasn't been getting enough oxygen for a while. So when I finally saw the news on Friday, I was just done. I had no more grace for dealing with any more crap life might care to throw my way.

Now of course, life's crap isn't so bad considering that I can still hug all of my still-breathing children, but knowing that doesn't reduce the stress much. But this week has been a bit better. My sinuses are feeling better (although the lump hasn't entirely gone away, so I suppose I should trundle myself back to the doctor at some point). Although I'm pretty sure Mr. Blinky's graphics card is kaput given that we can't even get it to display to an external monitor, I was able to restore the achingly slow older laptop to a new speedy glory with a squeaky clean hard drive.

My mother is home from the hospital, but on oxygen. She was treated for several days for congestive heart failure, getting a bunch of fluid taken off of her heart. She's okay, for the moment.

I was never that worried, this time around. My stress was more that this is the third hospitalization in 8 months, and while congestive heart failure is something one can live with for a long time, hers is clearly not under control. It's about what this means for the future, and how much more future there might be, and what sort of decisions we might have to make. When I was talking to Lisa, her main aide, she said that she thought my mother has been slipping mentally, which is something I had been noticing as well. It will be worth seeing how much she improves now that she's getting enough oxygen, but it still presents a new set of issues to worry about. Somehow I hadn't worried about her not being able to handle her own affairs, since both of her parents were sharp as a tack until the end. What do I do if that's not the case anymore? I can't fly out to Michigan frequently enough to handle things. Moving her out here is something I only want to do as an absolute last resort, since the loss of her entire social life and everything familiar, not to mention Lisa, is something that would drastically reduce her quality of life.

To make everything more difficult, she's lost her voice, so it's very hard to talk to her over the phone. And since she has a hard time typing, she normally uses voice-controlled software, which means we can't really e-mail or chat online either.

Sigh. Things are okay again for the moment. We'll focus on that, and on the fact that we'll be there in a little over a week.

Argh. I was all set to attempt to limp across the finish line of NaBloPoMo after Thanksgiving, and my laptop decided to develop a fun habit of turning its screen off. Our other laptop, which we gave to Katherine, is currently doing its best impression of a snail with low blood pressure, and while I was able to use it to do things like read e-mail, it was unuseably slow for anything else. So I was without a computer for the end of November. Then just as Mr Blinky developed a spontaneous semi-remission wherein it would only decide to go staticky and blink out every day or two and otherwise work fine, the sinus infection arrived, and with it, the need to sleep 22 hours a day.

Anyway, here I am again! I have antibiotics and the hope my splitting sinus headache will soon be gone, along with the weird, worrying lump on one of my sinuses. The doctor was perplexed but threw some antibiotics at it. Mr. Blinky is being well-behaved today (and one of these days, we're going to do something about the slooooow laptop so it will be a viable backup). Unfortunately, there's no solution to it being obscenely late, so more anon.