MamaSite

Three and a half months since I updated this blog.  About time I wrote about some of the non-school things in my life.

Hard stuff first.  A little over a month ago, I decided to determinedly google for Debbie to see if I could find out what had happened.  I found her obituary; she died last April.  No cause of death was listed, but the family requested donations to Dana Farber's brain cancer research.  She left her parents, three brothers, a sister, and her siblings' families.  At least her kids and her husband will have them.  It's not enough, of course; but they are not alone.

I have lost grandparents.  A few kids I went to school with.  Nobody I was this close to, who was so close to my own age.  I had wished for it to go differently for Debbie, and I'm sure I'm way down a long list of people on that one.  She gave me my whole life, and I never had a chance to thank her.  We donated to Dana Farber this year; that's as close as I'll get.

Onward to happier, Mommier stuff.  Em is changing so much every day.  I've decided I'm going to write her a letter every year, telling her what I remember of what she's done.  Amazing she potty trained this year.  She still has the occasional accident overnight; but she's done amazingly well.  Her sleep patterns are starting to settle as well; although I'm conscious I've made that declaration before!  She generally gets up around 5:30 or 6:00.  At this point she comes into our room to get me.  "Mommy," she will say in a loud stage whisper, "I want you to come lie down."  Or sometimes "I want to go downstairs."  One morning she was quite funny - instead of coming into our room, she stood in the hallway in front of her room and whispered "Mommy!" as loudly as she could.  She didn't want any arguments about going downstairs, I guess!

I have also managed to completely spoil her.  We went to Barnes and Noble last weekend, and I got her a book.  She kept saying she wanted a present; I told her the present was the book.  She said "No, I want a toy."  Argh.  I told her books were better, but she sulked.  She was so awful about it in the car that I took it away - for a while.  Long enough to make the point!  I am making a trial run to Target tomorrow, where I will not buy her a toy for the first time...ever, maybe.  I am going to talk to her about it ahead of time, which will hopefully head off any tantrums.  It's going to be hard - I love getting her something, even just stickers; but last weekend convinced me I need to teach her not to assume.  It's not fair to her, or to anybody who has to deal with her.

It's just that I want to buy her everything.  All the cute toys, all the cute clothes.  Everything she could ever want.  I know things are not love.  I just love her so, and sometimes it's overwhelming.  Apparently overflowing love drives me to purchase My Little Pony paraphernalia.

She kisses and hugs now.  She does something Steve and I are calling "chicken kisses": when she says goodbye in the morning, she'll bob her head and make kissing noises toward the floor - just like a chicken pecking!  She thinks it's hysterical, probably because she gets such a good reaction from us.

She counts to twenty, only skipping a few numbers.  She knows "her" letter - capital E - and can recognize her written name, even if she can't spell it herself.  She can sing the alphabet, and most of "This Is Halloween" from "The Nightmare Before Christmas."  She can say "pterodactyl."  She cannot do a somersault - she always ends up rolling sideways - but physically she is fearless, and has amazingly good balance for a child her age.  One of her friends had a birthday party at a gymnasium, and she had a wonderful time.  We are going to look for a weekend program for her - something geared toward fun, not toward competition.  I'm guessing she'll pick up somersaults pretty fast.

Sometimes, when I catch a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye, Rosie looks like Sabella.

As proud as I am of Emily, not a single day goes by when Something doesn't happen that makes me second-guess every bit of parenting I've ever done.

Sometimes I wish I'd started having babies when I was 21, so I could have had a dozen or so.  And sometimes I realize that I'd just be obsessing over twelve kids instead of just one.

It's hard to find a way to apologize for something that happened a long time ago, especially when you don't really want to remind the person to whom you did it about the incident.  (Or incidents.)

Friendships are worth working on.

How the heck am I ending up with double dates in this thing?

It's easy to say "It's just a job," but it's really impossible not to be affected by the atmosphere of a place you're in 40 hours a week.

No matter how tired I am in the morning, I never manage to go to sleep earlier at night.  I do this OCD thing with puzzles - lately I've been doing two Anagram Magic Squares, and then two Places Please.  I cannot make myself turn off the light until I've finished.

Wi-Max Internet beats satellite.  But not by much.

Humidity saps absolutely all the energy out of me.  Small tasks that are usually easy leave me feeling drained, achy, and a little nauseous.  And yeah, I know it's not all that humid around here.

Apropos of high humidity - I must admit, a huge chunk of the fun of going to DisneyWorld is buying all the cool guidebooks ahead of time.

Emily has an awful lot of toys, especially considering how strongly we felt about not spoiling her.

I do not understand people who expend so much energy resenting the possibility that the guy next door might have more money than they do.  You either have enough, or you don't.  And everybody has to make tradeoffs.

Speaking of enough money - if I had so much money I really didn't have to think about what I spent, I wouldn't start with a new car.  I'd get a MacPro and a 30-inch Apple monitor and every piece of software Adobe has ever shipped.  And then I'd buy a Prius.

Getting old is unfair.

Part of me still wants to be a redhead, and I'm worried I'm getting too old for that sort of thing.  If I could do a dark strawberry blonde thing, that'd be fun; of course, the reddish hair colors don't hold all that well.  Still, it's coming in largely gray now - what do I care if I abuse it a little?

I really like that my hair got curlier after Em was born.

I have loved Emily all her life, and then some; but the older she gets, the more specific my affection becomes.  She's sweet and mischievous and stubborn and unreasonable and strong and self-possessed.  She is a constant fascination, and a constant mystery.

She's also beautiful.  It's not important, not in the grand scheme of things; but she is.  Right now it's wonderful.  When she gets older, it'll probably dredge up some emotional rubbish for me to deal with.  And it's also a little bit terrifying - being beautiful generally means that some people will want things from you just because of how you look.

I think I'm a pretty good mommy.  I also think I won the kid lottery.  I don't know how much is nature and how much nurture.  Wouldn't it be funny if Emily's wit and charm was a result of a third trimester full of Burger King Big Fish sandwiches?

Marriage is cool.  Wish I'd tried that earlier in life, too - I think I'd have grown up more quickly.  Of course, I'd have had to have been married to someone else, which completely defeats the purpose of the wish.

I used to think I wanted to live forever.  Now I know I only want to live forever if everybody can live forever with me.

I'm enjoying my extra-curricular computer studies, but sometimes even geeks need a night off.

It's been AGES.  Things have been massively stressful, mostly due to things outside of my control.  For now...all is well at Dragonfly Farm.

Somewhere in the gap Miss Em turned three.  Her Royal Threeness.  Suddenly she knows how old she is - before her birthday, if you asked how old she was, she'd look at you blankly and then say "I'm Emily!"  Now she tells everybody who will listen how old she is.  AND she's willful, and opinionated, and often hypersensitive. She's also starting to make jokes, and to goof on us, which is lovely beyond my ability to describe.

She's still in diapers at night.  She's occasionally dry in the morning; but what's more interesting to me than those spotty successes is that her diaper is slowly becoming less wet overnight.  (Tonight will be different.  Tonight she REFUSED to go before bedtime - I think she was cold, and wanted to get under the covers.)  Slowly but surely she's reaching that physiological stage.  She's still a bit cranky when I put her diaper on at night - but sometimes I think that's just because she knows it means "bedtime," and at this time of year she's trying to sell me on the idea that if it's light outside it can't POSSIBLY be bedtime.  Con artist.  What am I going to do when she's 14 and so much better at it?

In other news, I've decided to shift my career focus a bit.  Just as I once grudgingly caved in to the fact that I enjoyed computer programming and had an aptitude for it, I am now grudgingly admitting that I enjoy user interface and web design.  So I'm working on finding some formal education to that effect - not a bachelor's program, but something I could put on my resumé to mitigate as much as possible the miniscule amount of experience I have in this area.  The trouble is, the most promising place I've found - they offer online certificate programs in both web design and graphic design - doesn't offer college credit classes, and my employer will only pay for college credit classes (even if you're not working toward a degree). So that means we'd have to foot the bill.  You can do it month-to-month; but still, I feel like I have to be Absolutely Certain before I commit my family to something like that.

But it sure does look like fun.

And here's my thinking about all of that: the more I work with (and on) graphical applications, the more I'm becoming convinced that everything is eventually going to live in a web browser - probably pretty damn soon, too.  (Yes, I know I'm not the first person to have made that observation.)  I've been studying Swing (a Java GUI toolkit) for about a week, and I'm amazed at how much of it I could do with HTML and CSS (which I know a lot better than I know Swing, but still don't know in depth).  I think rich clients will become more and more boutique or niche applications, and will eventually suffer the fate of the dinosaur.  Maybe not in my career lifetime; but it wouldn't surprise me.

Right now web designers don't get paid much - at least the storefront/shopping cart-type web designers.  And I suspect it'll never pay what software engineering did in its heyday.  But I think this area of programming has a longer shelf-life, and I have to think my experience with applications - even non-GUI applications - and programming languages will lend me some credibility. 

Hence my desire not to pick some fly-by-night certificate program.  (I can't find much about these guys out there; but they did win an award back in 2001.)  There just isn't much out there available as on-line self-paced courses; and realistically that's all I'm going to be able to do until Em is quite a bit older.  (Well, okay, I probably could manage - I've got a colleague whose son is about a year older, and she's almost done with her masters in computer science - but y'all know me, and you know I'd blow it off too much.)  If it was less money - even half the price - I might chance it.  I might chance it anyway.  I mean, really, what I NEED to do is stop dithering.

It would be awfully nice to have fun at work again.

I shouldn't have skipped a day, because today was so dramatically better than Thursday it's going to seem a disjointed tale.

Today: No accidents.  The only reason she wore two different pairs of panties today is because we had a little overflow while sitting on the toilet, and her pink kitty panties got wet.  This caused brief hysteria, until I produced the Meow Meow Meow panties, which are almost as popular.

She even used the toilet without being asked once.  Just turned in the middle of playing and said "I need to use the potty" as she trundled down the stairs to the bathroom. 

This is a big deal; yesterday she didn't go even once without some form of coercion.  Some times were easy - it was easy to tell her that everybody had to go before we went out, and have all of us take turns so she didn't feel singled out.  Other times bribery was required.  Once I bribed her with Raisinettes, and immediately felt like a bad Mommy - but then I discovered she liked changing panties, and when I wanted her to go I just pulled out a few new pairs and asked her which ones she wanted to change into.  Telling her she needed to use the potty to get new panties worked like a charm.

Today even that wasn't necessary.  We didn't push it as much - we pushed first thing in the morning, and about an hour after she got up, because she's always been pretty regular about those times - and otherwise just played the "everybody goes before we leave" game.  I took her shopping and she stayed dry.  We walked for an hour (she was in the stroller, which is a good workout for Daddy on the hills, but probably ought to end soon), and she stayed dry.  She made it through the whole day and back into diapers (the diapers-at-nighttime thing seems to be working beautifully for now) without so much as a drop out of place.

I'm thinking now of going back to work on Monday instead of taking the vacation day, and sending her back to day care in undies.  I asked her tonight if she wanted to wear her kitty panties to school on Monday, and she lit up like a Christmas tree.

Tomorrow will mock my optimism, I'm sure.  Tomorrow will likely be a disaster.  But today - today she did just beautifully, and I'm so proud of her.

It's April 16, 2007, nearly a solid month into spring.

Yesterday, it snowed.  Heavy, wet stuff, coming down at quite an impressive clip.  At one point the individual flakes joined forces, dropping from the sky in flat clumps the size of my palm.  Every time I looked at the weather report - in those little moments when we actually had Internet - AccuWeather claimed it was raining.

Of course, it did change to rain later.  Drenching rain.  Which came down ALL NIGHT, and managed to wash out our driveway in three places.  Thank God we've got a tractor, and more dirt and rocks on our property than we're likely to need.  (I hope.)

We're only 1200 feet above sea level.  This is insanity.  Or, more likely, global warming.  Either way, the Patriot's Day that was going to be just me and Em and maybe some errands turned into all three of us, hanging out in our cozy little house.  Which...is actually really nice, so I can't be too bothered by it, even if my husband would've rather not burned a vacation day today.

I did have to smile, though, at the headline on Boston.com this morning, proclaiming no reports of flooding after the storm.  I suppose it's all in your perspective.

Okay, okay, okay, I admit it: I was wrong about Em's preschool teacher.

I still suspect she's not the brightest creature on earth; but I'm rather ashamed of myself that I still tend to assume not-bright people aren't terribly perceptive.  I know plenty of near-geniuses who are completely tone-deaf to non-verbal cues; why should I be surprised that someone who's maybe never going to be Einstein gets the more important things just fine?

One day last week she asked me to pronounce Em's last name (it's pretty easy to figure out if you've had any German, but an awful lot of people haven't).  I pronounced it for her; she repeated it back a few times, making sure she had it right.  The next day at drop-off she repeated it, just to verify she'd remembered properly (she had).

The following day we got there late - everyone was already lining up for breakfast.  Em wanted to go to the cafeteria with them, but she wanted me to carry her.  Her teacher had the other students wait, and when I couldn't easily detach Em, she said "Emily, do you want to lead the line with me?"  And Em went to her right away.

So maybe she knows a thing or two about shy kids after all.  And maybe, eventually, I'll learn not to judge so quickly.

One of the other teachers (I don't know which one - there are four altogether in the room all day, in overlapping shifts) sent her home in a pull-up.  Oh, dear.  She's not quite there; and of course when the thing got wet I had to throw it out.  What an ogre that made me!  But I did discover the amazing power of Princesses, and promptly ordered her some real Princess underwear on-line.  We also picked her up one pair of Princess underwear and three pairs of Thomas the Tank Engine underwear at Target, so she could see them and have something to think about when considering whether or not to use the potty.

She did once, on Friday when my mom was with her.  Just a little.  Very exciting, of course!  Although she wasn't in the slightest bit interested in discussing it afterward.  It's SO hard not to push when she's got all the pieces in her hands...but I don't.  I ask her every once in a while if she wants to use the potty.  Sometimes she'll take her diaper off and sit for a minute, then wash her hands; but nothing has come of it since Friday.  So I'll just keep asking, mentioning her underwear, and trying not to make it a Big Deal.

But HOW WONDERFUL WOULD IT BE DO HAVE HER OUT OF DIAPERS???

We were all home today for a snow day.  Em was frolicking in her nightgown; I noticed her diaper was a bit laden. 

I said "Let's change your diaper," and she ignored me.

(This in itself is not an unusual occurrence; but lately she's been getting better about telling me when she needs changing instead of just pretending nothing is going on.)

I gave her a few minutes, then said "Come on, Em, I need to give you a new diaper."

"No!" she shouted.  "I don't need a new diaper!  Stop teasing me!"

And with that i suddenly had a vision of what might happen to a kid who looks closer to 4 than 3 who is suddenly put in a room full of older kids, most of whom don't wear diapers anymore.

"Do the kids tease you because you wear a diaper?"

"Yeah," she said.

Now, I know that's not necessarily true.  She's at an age where just asking her a question is leading.  It's just as likely she was responding to the sympathy in my voice as anything else.  But it's sure not out of the realm of possibilities.

I tried for the rest of the day to be normal; but really, I'm pretty much beside myself.  I can't figure out what to do about it.  Talk to day care?  They'll tell me yes, sometimes this happens, and of course they can't watch every kid every minute.  They'll tell me the kids get past it.  They may even tell me it'll help her potty train - which they'd be wrong about, actually; she's far more likely to dig her heels in and keep on doing what she's doing, which is another (less important) reason this possibility distresses me.

They can't stop it.  I know that.  As a practical matter, there will always be kids who tease and kids who get teased.  And Em, by virtue of her height, does look a lot older than she is - adults get it wrong, why shouldn't other children?

But all I can do is think back to my own experience in kindergarten 38 years ago.  38 years, and they still haven't figured out what to do about it.  So what would be the purpose of talking to the teachers?  Just to let them know?  38 years ago that sort of thing made you even more of a target, and good intentions notwithstanding I don't believe things have changed much.

I don't know what to tell her.  I told her anyone who said that was being naughty, and that she could use a diaper or not as she wished.  I told her she was a good girl and I loved her, and I tried to act normally for the rest of the day.  Not so easy, and my kid is no fool; we got into kind of a feedback loop tonight, which I'm hoping is being broken by Daddy who is obligingly doing his bedtime shift.

I need to deal with this.  I will never be able to help her deal unless I can deal myself.