Memory

I am alarmed by how little of Luke's infancy I remember. I don't remember what he played with and what noises he made. I know he didn't babble much, but what was the sound of his baby voice??

Courtney has started babbling in earnest - dadadada over and over, in conversation. A few weeks ago she used 'mamama' with her upper lip over her lower lip, but now she's focused on dada.

She sits in front of the activity table and spins a toy to make the music start and then bops her arms up and down to the music. Over and over again, spin to start the music, bop your arms. Spin and bop. I know Luke never did anything like that.

She's started crawling, if you can call it that. She pushes with her legs straight, foisting her rear end into the air as she stretches her arms to reach whatever has piqued her interest. And that's pretty much anything that is NOT a baby toy. I do remember Luke's army style crawl as he dragged himself across the floor with his arms, and then later had one leg up.

Right now Luke has the second fever of his life that I remember, and I always think he has a fever so I'm always checking with the ear thermometer. It's never a fever, until now. He's laying on the floor wrapped in his blankie and even this is a memory I want to hold, and tell him about how you get to be sick - laying on the couch wrapped up, mom waiting on you had and foot... sick days are great memory days from my childhood, I don't remember the sick part...

No Hot Firemen? Dang it.

So today I am watching my friend's daughter, who is the same age as Luke... last week I asked the teacher of the class we're taking if I could bring her and she said yes - great!

It was looking to be a crappy day, so I thought I'd have to drive the half mile, but it turned out to be nice, so we walked.

I strapped Courtney in her carrier and put the toddlers in the double stroller. We had a great time at class and Courtney started nodding off on the way home.

And then I couldn't find my keys.

So I called the park district building and asked if they had my keys. No.

So I walked back the route we had taken. No keys.

So I'm locked out of the house with two toddlers (who are behaving wonderfully, Thank GOD!) and a now sleeping infant.

So I called the non emergency police line.

Who transferred me to 9-1-1. At this point I'm not AT my house, but down the street at the park district.

They sent the fire department to meet me at my house.

So as I'm walking home I'm thinking about how we're going to break into my house...

And I remember that the back door to the garage is open.

And now I see the fire truck (no lights, thank goodness) driving by, I wave to them and point to my house (where I am not yet).

And when I get there I have to say, um, well, I think the back door is open. (it was). (and they were sadly, not hot. But nice.) (And a cop showed up too)

To make losing my keys extra special, I have NO SPARE KEY for my car. But I called Subaru and they should be able to make me some.

The children are rotting their brains in front of the TV now and I keep looking in the stroller for my keys, hoping they'll magically appear.

A Life Recorded

Famous people have never held much pull for me. I had a few childhood crushes on various young actors, and I liked some bands, but I was never like the screaming, crying girls you saw filmed at New Kids on the Block concerts. I'm fairly proud that I was anti NKOTB even in seventh grade...

I never wanted to BE famous either. Mixing and mingling with hundreds of people, cameras recording your bad hair days (read: everyday for me), criticism, nothing about it appealed to me.

And certainly now, looking back at my college years, I'm really glad that wasn't recorded. Every time I hear a quote from a famous teenager I wince, I want their parents to drag them away from the microphone because surely that will come back to haunt them.

I just read that Paris Hilton wants to change her life and stop partying. She's only 23 years old, and your twenties are all about reinventing yourself, so I think it's fabulous that she's trying to do something good. I'd certainly rather hear her trying than saying "That's hot." Of course, people are still aiming hateful spew in her direction (read the comments on the article), because why would they let her change?

Books

I stole this meme from Zoot who stole it from Average Jane...

In college, I took one (1) English course, and it was on Arthurian Legends, so all of this was on my own, besides high school. And I don't discuss books. Discussing books is an anathema to me. One experiences books, one does not dissect.

I friggin' hate Ayn Rand. Her and her 'people are all sucky' themes. I ONLY read Atlas Shrugged because someone I knew (who's life view I completely disagreed with) counted it as her top book. So it was like a psychological investigation. I also hate psychology.

I don't know where my underline function is. And in general, I don't reread.

Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your TBR list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I so wanted this one to be good. It was not.)
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Tom Jones (added by me because I had to read this 900 page dragging plodding torture my second semester senior year of high school. 900 pages. We had a quote test. 1 guy got a C. Someone else got a D. EVERYONE ELSE FAILED. This was AP English. Book suuuuuuucked.)

After a long bad bad bad week with teething and no sleeping, Courtney's first tooth broke through on Saturday and she has been sleeping a lot to make up for all she lost. I finally got more sleep and have been digging out from under a weeks worth of bad housekeeping, which creates a lot more mess than you would think...

Last night I actually made dinner, with three parts and everything, your meat, your starch, your vegetable. Just like mom taught me. While I was cooking, Luke was upstairs in his room playing quietly.

Or not.

After I got everything set up to cook or simmer or boil, I went upstairs to check on the boy. I found him with a cut on his eye and soaked from head to toe.

"Luke, what did you do!"
"I take a shower!"
"Did you fall? How did you hurt yourself?"
(blank stare)
"Did you take a shower in mommy and daddy's room?"
"uhhuh"
(drag him down there to see if something is broken, but all is well)
"Luke, what happened to your eye?"
"The cat scratched me. He does have claws."
(The cat is the most docile creature EVER, so I start looking for reasons...)
"Where were you when the cat scratched you, Luke?"
"In mommy daddy's room"
"Was the cat in the shower when you turned it on?"
"Uh-huh"

Natural consequences learning for the day: Cats don't like showers.

Mommy

It's one of those surprises of motherhood that you don't always feel sympathetic to your child's plight. This week Courtney broke a tooth, and I think the next one is planning on showing up soon. She's one of those kids who gets a low grade fever that is not, according to doctors, caused by teething. No no no, not casued by teething at all.

Infancy and childhood is the area where I frequently believe the old-wives tales over the doctors, because getting conclusive results on a subject as varied as children is pretty difficult. And moms know. Moms pay attention to their kids.

But anyway, after several days of screaming and not sleeping and fussing and whining, I lost a lot of sympathy for Courtney. It didn't help that I was dealing with a heaping serving of insomnia, too. So the time I spent in bed was time spent NOT SLEEPING. It combined to make one very bad mommy.

Yesterday, finally, Courtney took her normal amount of nap time throughout the day (about 3.5 hours) and then slept about 11 hours at night. She woke up twice, but I got her back to sleep (Esposo is away finishing the basement at the lake house). She is a much much happier baby - you know, the baby I'd come to know over the past seven months (oh! Happy seven months baby!)

And after a week of nighttime nursing which was actually being used as, er, COUNTERPRESSURE for teething gums, I'm feeling very very done with nursing. Unfortunately, unlike cloth diapers, I can't take a break for a week and then get back on the horse, I kind of have to decide YAY or NAY.

Not sleepy

It's far too late for me to be up, but for some reason I'm not sleepy... that reason could be that the cat caught and killed another mouse tonight, though he did not leave it in our bed. Instead he was in the front hall chirping over his prize. We gave him treats and Esposo swished away the dead mouse. My question is, do I get an exterminator or traps or do I just seal up points of entry and deep clean the kitchen and let Moxy kill the interlopers? He seems to be good at it.

I'm still trying to be green. We haven't made any tremendous progress lately, just doing the same old things I have been. I keep trying to figure out what my next big change will be, as a family it may be adding insulation to the attic. But I AM still nursing, almost seven months now! I can't even believe that. I'm also loving making food for Courtney, because it's so customizable. Lentils on their own are pretty gross but one lentil cube plus three applesauce cubes are gobbled down happily. An applesauce cube in with three green bean cubes cuts the green beanness back a little. I'm willing to taste all the food I make for Courtney, but open up one of those baby food containers and I'm gagging away.

I'm refinishing a cabinet my great grandfather made for my mother and quite enjoying the process. It's got me crazy enough to think about building a dress up storage cabinet for the kids. To store the zero dress up clothes we have. Crazy woman wants to try BUILDING something.