Random Updates

I had such good intentions last week of posting more. And then the puking started. First K, who was quite ill for two days and not terribly energetic for a third. Then Alec, who threw up twice one evening and played quite cheerfully in between. He napped more than usual yesterday and today, but it goes to show how much easier it is to kick a virus when you're not perpetually fighting the infection in your bladder.

Anyway, among other news:

- We saw Arrietty last Monday. It was just so fantastic. The pacing was slow, but the animation was so gorgeous that we didn't mind in the least because we just sat and took in all of the details. K loved it too, and we've started reading The Borrowers to her at bedtime. That's significant because it's the first chapter book she's shown this much sustained interest in. I think she inherited my difficulty with absorbing things through just listening without anything visual to back it up. I can read until the end of time, but I have real difficulty absorbing the same book if I hear it. Similarly, being told how to do something isn't nearly as helpful to me as a nice diagram or set of written instructions. Auditory processing is not my strong suit. Up to this point, K has only wanted books with pictures for her to look at as we read, I suspect because the pictures helped her keep up with the story. But we're up to chapter 5 of The Borrowers, so she can listen to longer texts without pictures if she tries.

- We took K to a new urologist a month ago. He was quite nice and K even liked him enough not to dive under the table upon seeing him, so that's an improvement. We're now on a regimen of frequent water drinking and cranberry pills, which seem to be working pretty well. We have a standing antibiotic prescription if we need it, but we haven't needed it so far. I'm really hoping this is a sign we're making progress.

- Our infant carseat picked up some mold on the straps while being stored in our last garage. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to decide if it was possible to clean it off without damaging the strength of the straps. Finally, last weekend was the last opportunity for Babies R Us's baby equipment trade in, so I sent B out to get the car seat out of the shed so we could look at it again and decide once and for all if it was salvageable.

As it turns out, all of my indecision was rendered moot when we discovered that a squirrel had been chewing on it. Not to mention pooping in it. And at some point, apparently ran off with the cover.

Well, that certainly made the decision a lot easier. So now we have a new infant carseat. I haven't done any other baby prep, but Godric can now show up and we can at least take him home from the hospital.

I think I'm in a bit of denial about the fact that I'm 31 weeks pregnant and will most likely have a baby two months from now. Part of it is that having had two babies at the end of June, my internal pregnancy clock is two months off. Mentally, I feel like I should only be five months along. My body, however, is acutely aware that I'm 7 months and is letting me know it doesn't appreciate it with the joyously traditional pelvic pain of the third trimester. So I really do need to start thinking about baby planning.

*We're getting baby clothes back from the nephew who wore them last summer, although we need to buy at least a few 0-3 month clothes with long sleeves and pants, since a late April baby needs warmer clothes than a late June baby.
*We have plenty of small diapers, although I should probably order some more one size covers because unless a potty miracle occurs, we're going to have two in diapers for at least a while. Eventually, I'll have to decide what to do about the larger cloth diapers, which are getting decidedly ragged, but we have at least six months for that.
*We gave away some baby equipment, so we should decide what we want to replace. Do we really need a baby swing? A double stroller would be really nice. We can look through some consignment stores for those.
*We also really need to decide what to do about the bed situation. We currently have a queen sized bed, which hosts both of our children on a fairly regular basis, leaving and I desperately hugging the edges of the bed. Adding another child to the already overstuffed bed will require an advanced degree in Tetris. When Alec was born, we put K's old toddler bed next to ours for extra room, but he's using it now. So do we get a king sized bed? Buy a twin to shove next to our current bed which will eventually get used by one of the older children?

Two months is starting to seem awfully close, all of a sudden.

Triad

1. Since we're in the rare position this summer of nobody having to work on the weekend, we've been trying to get back in the habit of going to church. A large part of why we drifted away from our last church was the lack of childcare, since for some reason I find it difficult to develop my spiritual life with a bored toddler using me as a jungle gym. While K is now old enough for Sunday School, Alec is going to be starting up the pew wrestling matches soon enough so we decided to look farther afield. I found a nearby church that just recently declared itself Open and Affirming, offers a nursery and seems like a nice compromise of being large enough to offer good religious education and programs, yet not so large that you feel lost in the crowd, and we've successfully gone there three times in the past six weeks, which isn't bad given that we have two pint-size insomniacs who live to keep us up at night.

This Sunday was the first where we heard the minister preach, since she was on vacation the first two times we came. The sermon favorably impressed me in two ways. The first is that she was preaching on the armor of God, a topic heavily favored by Evangelical types* and nervously avoided by we hippy-dippy liberal progressive types because the literal interpretation of that particular scripture is that the armor is protection against Satan. However, this minister delivered a quite excellent interpretation for a progressive liberal Christian context. And she did it by referencing Star Wars, the Mirror Mirror episode of Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and specifically enough that it was clear that she was very personally acquainted with all of these things, not just drawing from popular culture.

A challenge we've had in finding churches is that while everyone is always very nice, we never seem to find anyone we have anything in common with. A church with a minister geeky enough to be able to preach in detail on the opening scenes of book 7 of Harry Potter seems very promising on that front. Another good sign is that even though it was August and therefore sparsely attended, there were two other families there with babies - not having young families is another issue we've encountered while church-shopping.

So I'm hopeful we'll be able to keep up with attending as we move into the fall and I start working again.

2. We went to see Ponyo this afternoon. Oh my, it was a cute movie. The animation was gorgeous, as usual. The plot didn't bear close examination, but it was enjoyable and didn't even hit us with the 2 x 4 of environmental awareness. It was K's first Miyazaki in the theatre ex utero, since we saw Howl's Moving Castle when I was a week overdue with her. She absolutely loved it, and while she said it was scary afterwards, she didn't need to leave the theatre, which we've had to do in the past. So if you're the parent of a very sensitive small child that you would like to take to the movies, while it's not completely free of scariness, it's pretty mild and a good movie for the young scaredy-cat.

3. After months of frustration trying to figure out how to take good pictures on my camera without using the flash, I discovered quite accidentally last month that my camera has a specific setting for that right there in a place that should be obvious for anyone to see. The combination of discovering that, the fact that Alec's changing table is one of the few places that gets natural light in the house and Alec starting to smile has meant that I now have a lot of portrait shots of him on his changing table. But it's hard not to keep taking pictures when you have a model like this:





* Here's the story of how I became acquainted with the theology of the armor of God: when I was a teenager, the church I grew up in decided to purchase a Sunday School curriculum that consisted of a scripted series of shows using puppets and humans in a combination of skits and singing to teach concepts. It was called Caraway Street, and any slight resemblance to certain shows on PBS is a COMPLETE coincidence. I always felt it was kind of outrageous how concerned the creator of Caraway Street was with protecting his copyright considering that he was stretching the concept of fair use until it was practically doughnut-shaped.

Anyway, the creator of Caraway Street was some sort of Evangelical Baptist-type, and my church was UCC, which made for some incompatible theology issues. This particular church was not at all liberal**, but we still didn't traffic much in Devil talk or go in for heavy evangelism. So when the creator came to train us and showed us the pamphlet we could give the children so they could convert all of their friends on the playground,*** we nodded politely and somehow never remembered to pass them out after he left. And initially the scripts seemed fine. The emphasis on memorizing the books of the Bible seemed a bit inane, but harmless.

But through a complicated series of events, I wound up in charge of the program****, which meant I was in charge of making up cue cards, and found myself progressively editing the lines more heavily every week as more fire and brimstone kept creeping into the skits. And this is when I first encountered the armor of God: the week I had to start completely eliminating skits because Satan was starting to take on a speaking role. And the damn thing kept coming up again and again. I suppose I can understand why, since it lends itself to easy slogan-y chanting (the breastplate of righteousness! The sword of demon slaying! The tinfoil hat of alien-mindray repelling!). But I started to hate it very quickly, as I kept having to make the singing portions longer and longer to cover the fact that the scripts were starting to get quite anemic after I was done editing for hellfire.

** In fact, I believe they later left the UCC. The fact that many people didn't have nearly as many issues with the scripts as I did is a good indicator of why my family left the church later that year.

*** This being a heavily religious area (my home town had literally a church per every square mile, and a common question was "What church do you go to?" not, "Do you attend church?"), I think they would have been forced to convert the local squirrels due to a general lack of young heathens among their classmates.

**** The fact that a 16-year-old was in charge of the church's Sunday School program for a good six months is an excellent indicator of why we left the church later that year.

Midwestward ho!

So did I mention we were going to be travelling this week? I meant to leave a more formal "We will be on the road and away from the Internet for the next two weeks" message up last Saturday, but I was too preoccupied with freaking out over our slowly dissolving carseat.

So yes, we're no longer on the East Coast, but instead back in the Land of Corn. At Acen as a matter of fact. We've fallen into the old familiar Video room groove, which makes it feel like I never took a two-year maternity leave from working here. Lots of work, not enough sleep, lots of anime, all while surrounded by hordes of exotically dressed anime geeks.* The main difference is that when we went over to the dealers' room, we spent most of our time looking for presents for K instead of things for ourselves.**

K is apparently doing pretty well without us, being thoroughly entertained by all three of her grandparants. I have enjoyed my first nights away from her in her life, but I'll be happy to see her tomorrow. She's been behaving pretty well this trip, despite or perhaps because of the frequent stops. We only went as far as Columbus last Sunday, and stayed until Tuesday to visit with as well as B's cousin and her 10 month old. Then we had lunch in Yellow Springs with B's uncle, dinner in Indianapolis with more college friends and were at my mother's in Michigan by 11 on Tuesday. It's almost restful to be here despite, since we get to stay for a whole three and a half days before we have to drive anywhere again.

Must go - due back on shift soon.



*When we arrived Thursday afternoon, we sat in the atrium before dinner, amusing ourselves by watching the crowd slowly turn from businesspeople in suits to people lugging swords, catgirl ears and Mountain Dew, obviously here for an anime convention.

**There's a tragic lack of Miyazaki things this year, which is annoying because K is a huge fan of Kiki's Delivery Service.

On the road again

We went to Center City today to have lunch with a friend. The company was good and the food was sublime - a neat little Ethiopian place. It always amuses me watching K eat Ethiopian - she took to it like a natural, grabbing her injera and dipping it in the nearest pile of stew.

Every time we venture into Center City, we keep saying we need to do it more, that we live in a big city with lots of stuff to do and we need to take advantage of it. Then we go back home and get caught up in our routine for another couple months. In our defense, it's really hard these days to make plans when both of us work alternating days on the weekends. January has been pretty easy in that regard, but next month B has a couple Sunday shifts in addition to the two Saturdays he always works. So I think there will be only two weekend days next month where one of us isn't working. This doesn't lend itself to a devil-may-care, fancy-free museum-visiting lifestyle.

I realized last week that it's been a year since we moved to Philadelphia. Last year at this time, we were sitting in a new house, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes. And this year, we're, um, sitting in a new house, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes. Look how far we've come! If I move next December though, it will only be at gunpoint, so we will have made progress. And there certainly are signs that we've acclimated - we own Wawa travel mugs, we refer to Roosevelt Boulevard as "The Boulevard" and don't worry for a second that people won't understand us, we know to expect that as soon as the light turns green, someone will whip around and make a left turn in front of oncoming traffic. We haven't started saying "youse" yet though, so we haven't gone completely native.

We may have been here for a year, but most of our thoughts lately are plotting how often we can leave. Currently, our only firm vacation plans for the year are working at Acen again after a two-year absence. The current plan is to drive out to Michigan, drop K off to get thoroughly spoilerspend the weekend with her grandparents, drive down to Chicago for the convention, drive back to Michigan to pick up our spawn and drive home. It occasionally seems a bit masochistic of us to use a large amount of vacation time and drive 1000 miles for the privilege of working in the volunteering salt mines of an anime convention, but we've really missed it. And more importantly, all of our friends that will be there.

Other potential trips: I have a cousin getting married in Colorado this year, so my mother would like to go to the wedding and has suggested that K, my brother and I come along. We had discussed spreading Dad's ashes in Colorado, so this would be our opportunity. But we don't know when the wedding is yet, so that's largely up in the air. The other completely up in the air possibility is that my library is closed Easter weekend and B has Good Friday off (way to go with the separation of church and state, city of Philadelphia!). Since I've already established that we won't have another weekend off together until the end of time, let alone a long weekend, I absolutely refuse to stay home and do nothing. Boston is a definite possibility, or even just Connecticut to visit my aunt and uncle. Or even just drive over the bridge to scenic New Jersey. Just so long as we don't waste the opportunity, dammit.