{my topography}

hi-tech

This is a test from a fancy-schmancy i-Pod Touch Dh just got for our trip. Clearly we are tech obsessed.

UPDATED:
Oh yeah, and I’m officially done with school today. So thrilled. My toes are pretty. My bags are packed. We leave tomorrow.

I’m pretty much just muttering now

Am packing for our trip to Spain. In the process I’ve discovered: dear god in a housedress, I live under a rock. I haven’t gone “out” in oh, over a year I imagine. I no longer know how to wear lipstick. My feet, my barefoot garden loving feet, are in desperate need of a pedicure. And I threw a load of whites in the wash with a delicate, silky PINK wrap. And now everything is pink. Everything. I have never, ever done that before. Love how I saved that up for right now.

So I’m a bit muddled. Thank you all for your love from my last post. Some days parenting just knocks my socks off. Today, Bean was still sleeping when I was getting ready to leave–so I smooched him and sort of nudged him awake and he opened his eyes, reached out and climbed into my arms for the world’s most perfect snuggle ever. I’m gonna miss him like crazy. Even though we’ll be soaking in Old World charm, and having drinks with some of our best friends ever, and generally having a blast.

I’ll try to update when I’m there, but I can’t be sure of the Internet connection I will have. Don’t think I’ve forgotten you. I’ll be taking lots and lots of pictures.

Heat dumb

So my sister has shamed me into blogging, telling me I suck at updating and that I’m basically a miserable failure in the regular posting department. Yeah. Well. Not much to update about due to the fact that I’m MELTING. It’s suddenly summer here. The grass is knee high and I seem to have allergies. It is 90 degrees and humid and my brain feels too large for my skull.

See aren’t you glad I’m updating?

At night when Bean invariably crawls into bed he very much resembles a cross between a hot water bottle and a colt: all legs and heat. Typically I take a knee or a foot to the eye at least once a night. He seems to think sleeping perpendicular to me is fun.

Other than heat and sleep deprivation, I’m limping my way through my last full week of school. We’re doing everything we can to keep cool, but thanks to 1970s inspired public school architecture, my classroom is south facing and flat roofed. By mid-afternoon the classroom thermomiter read 92 degrees. Yeah. So. Where was I? Melting brain? How can anyone possibly expect anyone to accomplish anything in such conditions? Much less seven year olds who are hankering to be outdoors. They look at me with hot cheeks and sweat on their upper lips, and I can tell that all the words I’m saying about place value are just floating somewhere between us in litte clouds of moisture and heat. They nod, but they don’t hear me.

I’m still crossing my fingers; trying to remember that everything is good right now. Spain in a week. A gorgeous dress. Pretty shoes. Friends I haven’t seen in so long. INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL. Then graduate school. Life is good. But still, I can’t help wanting what I don’t have. More on that when I’m feeling like being less mysterious. And less melty-brain like.

Oh, and does anyone have any recommendations for making sleep more tolorable in the heat? We have a fan, but being all prissy and noise sensitive, it basically is sound torture all night long for me to listen to it whirr back and forth. I try sleeping with a pillow over my head, but then the heat, well. You get the idea. Anyone know some really good earplugs?

Enough. Hope everyone is happy and well and lovely and possibly less heat-stupored than I.

glimmer

In the cool dark of the bedroom, afternoon, after work, after many hours awake and fragmented by the needs of the day, push-pull, ache in the throat, thirsty for quiet, and now I’m face down among the bedclothes and the cat comes up and brushes against my foot. Just this. Fur on skin. I take a breath.

Right now, right here

At school, the days are spiraling down. We make space mud and go outside for extra recess where I sit on the grass and they crowd around me, suddenly towering tall, every single one yelling for my attention. “Teacher! Teacher! Look at this!” “Teacher can we race?” “Teacher! Watch me!”

I close my eyes and feel the sun on my eyelids and my pulse in my chest. The backs of my eyelids are sunbursts of red and shade. The world is simpler this way, eyes closed. Immediately I turn inward, feel my breath, remember to breathe. Eventually they stop yelling. One persistent voice keeps at it, softer now, “Teacher, teacher!”

Above us there is a sun dog in the sky. I tell them the weather will change. I tell them rain is coming, and later it does.

At home the road is slick with mud. The chickens come out from the coop and ruffle their feathers. The sky is the color of paper. Lilacs lean towards the ground, heavy with rain. Bean wakes up from his late nap grouchy, and grouchy by three year old standards seems to mean nonstop howling in indignation for a half an hour. No he doesn’t want a snack, or a snuggle, or a walk, or some milk. But then two seconds later he’ll maybe change his mind.

When he’s asleep, he looks little to me still. I see in his face the tiny baby’s face I stared at for hours, when he still made dolphin noises and his whole body could rest snuggly against my torso. But then he awakens and the turbulence childhood is there like a weather map, hovering. He looks boyish, lanky, bright-eyed, determined.

When he was two, I could distract him. “Look at the moon!” I’d say eagerly, or “Let’s go get some mango for snack,” and any consternation would melt like a popsicle on a warm day. “Okay,” he’d nod agreeably, smudging tears with the back of his hand. But three? Three is entirely different. He holds on to things. Dwells on them. And his emotions sweep over him like waves.

I remember going to the beach when I was a kid, growing up in Los Angeles. The sand was often oil specked, and the waves hit hard. If you turned your back when you were building sand castles, you’d get smacked down, spun under, your t-shirt or bathing suit twisted and wrung out. Bean’s moods hit him like that now. Everything is full throttle. Urgent delight. Intense frustration. Utter grief.

On walks I’ve started sharing my big Cannon EOS 20-D with him. It’s probably not advisable. I’m likely courting disaster, a broken lens, worse. But he has an eye for framing the most beautiful shots. He takes the camera so earnestly, the strap slung over his shoulder. And I love the way his pictures are—kid level, slightly askew.

It is hard to resist the urge to tell him how to do things. “Take a picture of this, point the lens this way, no that’s too dark,” and just see what he comes up with. But I realize right away that I’m pushing the river when I do. The kid’s got his own eye.

On a different note: I’m on the brink of something. Tilting. Can’t say yet what, but things are afoot. Possibly. Maybe. Good things. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Hating the way I feel right now

It’s completely kicking my butt, this parenting thing. Right now, I feel like a crappy mom. I wonder how on earth I could ever, really, be the parent to two kids when this one is driving me bananas.

He’s three, and that has made everything more complicated. And tonight bedtime was a crappy overblown push-pull of him wanting more of me, and me wanting to give less. One of those nights where I’m beyond tired and the laundry is everywhere (in the drier, in the washing machine, on the chair in the bedroom in heaps, in the hallway in heaps) and my last nerve has already been used up. And then he starts.

“I need milk, mommy!” he starts to whine. We’ve already done stories and we’re past the step where warm milk was an option, but it’s only been recently that he’s been forgoing it at bedtime, and really, I should have offered it to him at the appropriate time. And I didn’t. So here we are.

I’m lying on his bed with him watching how the shadows make the yellow of his walls almost gray. The light out the window is dusk. The last of the robins are singing from the tops of the trees, but the sun has already sunk below the horizon and the sky is the pale afterthought pink of post-sunset. I want to cry.

I’m not sure why I want to cry except I feel like I’ve been giving everything all day long to other people’s kids and now here I am with my own, the kid I love more than anything, and I don’t have an ounce of wiggle room left to give him.

“Fine,” I say. “But if I get you milk then I am not going to lie here and snuggle with you. You can have the milk but then it’s a hug and a kiss and we’re done tonight. Got it.”

“Noo!” He whimpers indignantly. His lower lip is protruding and he sounds particularly pathetic because he’s just getting over a cold. This makes matters worse. The fact that I know he’s been sick. That his behavior has always been worse when he’s sick: more erratic with bouts of energy and lulls.

But damn, I just want to be sitting on the couch with the cat wedged up against me, without anyone needing anything for eight point five seconds. That would be really great.

But somehow there is never enough time, at the end of the day. I crave energy and time and have neither by 8 p.m. So I go downstairs and get milk and bring it up to him and he’s already bawling.

“I want snuggles Mommy, I just want you to snuggle with me.”

I hand him the milk. I sit in the rocking chair near his bed. In my head I can see myself and I can see that I’m being stubborn and unreasonable and in general totally suck as a mom. I even think to myself why the hell can’t you just go cuddle with him, what’s the big deal? But the big deal is that since he’s turned three he has started to make bedtime into something momentous again, every night more negotiations, more extra steps and little details as he tries to control more and more of his world. And I picked tonight of all effing nights to curtail this trend.

What was I thinking?

So now he’s balling into his milk and snuffeling and needs a tissue. “I just love you Mommy. I love you Mommy. I love you Mommy. Are you happy Mommy?”

Damn it. Is parenting this hard for anyone else?

We somehow muddled through. I explained that I wasn’t happy with his behavior but that I loved him and loved him some more. And now he’s tucked into his beanbag ‘nest’ in our room where he has very contentedly slept for the past few weeks. And the cat is by my shoulder, and outside the trees look like the outlines of giants huddled together having tea, and the house is quiet.

But I hate not having patience. I hate feeling like I’m totally not cut out for this. ARGH.

A fun weekend

New baby chicks & new bantam chickens from a neighbor (we named the rooster Guisseppe!)

A new bike for Bean.

New plants in the garden.

Sore muscles.

A night with just DH.

And only four three weeks left of school.

I know I promised I’d write more

But it’s been sunny and I’ve been outdoors in the garden. I’ve decided I want to keep a garden journal here–but I’m afraid if I say so, I’ll surely sabatoge my entire attempt. Everything I seem to say I want to do I immediately lose all interest in following through on. Why is that? Anway, I’ve double dug three long beds–and am currently in the midst of digging mounds for squash, watermellons and pumpkins. My legs itch from using the weed-wacker to cut down tall grass at the edges of the garden, and I’m wearing a big floppy white hat.

Why am I posting then, when I claim to be in the midst of gardening? Bean is taking a poop. And dear lord, I still can’t figure out how to teach the boy to wipe himself. So I was summoned from the garden with yells echoing from the bathroom. “Mama! I need to be wiped.” I am sure the neighbors love that.

How do you wear this?

So, in a month we’ll be heading to Spain for a friend’s wedding. Have I told you that? I’m so excited. It will be my first time since 1997 being overseas. Holy shit. I was 19 when I left, after having spent a year in Germany (also the year I set my hair on fire on my birthday.)

Anyhoo, I’m trying to find a dress for a very formal, large, Spanish wedding. I like dresses like these, that are halter tops–like this one. But I can never figure out how the hell I’m supposed to wear them, really. I mean come on, only perky 19 year olds, can go without support in such a dress. And if you beg to differ, let me just say one word: breastfeeding.

Okay, so now that we’re on the same page, how does one go about wearing such a dress? What secret undergarments actually work with an open backed sheer-fabric dress?

I know, not my typical post. But see, I promised, I’m going to try to post more, so this is what you get. Run-ons and random clothing questions.

Also, on an entirely other note:

Bean is cureently asleep on one of those giant beanbags in our bedroom (which, by the way, are way flatter and less poufy than they appear in the picture.) I’m trying to get him to stop sneaking into our room the minute we say goodnight and come downstairs–because, though I don’t mind him coming into our room in the middle of the night, I do rather mind not being able to go to sleep spooning with DH. So my newest plan is to get him to at least sleep in his own space–in our room. He seems happy as a clam. Sound asleep, tucked under a comforter, and snoring away.

Weekend snapshots

(Bean took this one.)

The world has turned green. Less than a month left of school. The morning sun is waking me up, and I’ve been heading out to run more. Still not feeling totally in harmony with myself yet: still too much on my plate. But more days and more moments where the the orbit of things aligns with my own twirling self.

(Btw: The Cure was a wild, loud adventure that included getting lost when leaving Montreal–4o miles east, before we realized we were supposed to be going south. Oy. And the next day was a blur of tiredness.)

I am hoping to update here every day this week. I have a thing with perfection. I don’t like writing here unless I have long moments to spend, delving into the deeper fabric of my thoughts. But I miss the daily practice. The flawed jotting of notes, of small moments, of daily life. When I first wrote here, I wrote all the time… but somehow I seem to have upped the standard on myself, and now I’m dragging my feet, feeling like if I can’t post a brilliant post, I should’nt post anything at all. What is with that?