Anderblog

The Start of a New Career

2011-09-07T11:31:00.003-04:00

I only cried a tiny bit after they drove away.

I know he's done the preschool thing for a couple years, but this... is REAL school. He's so excited. And I'm excited for him. I loved school, especially elementary school, and I can't wait to see how he thrives in this new phase of his life.

I'm proud of you, Soren!

Anderblog Unplugged

2011-09-01T20:02:00.003-04:00

So, as everyone already knows because I whine about it three times a day on Facebook, the hurricane knocked our power out on Sunday. While a sparking power line in the middle of the yard would usually be considered a bad thing, it would be preferable to what we have, which is a dead power line in the middle of our yard. It's hanging off our house, which means it isn't going to kill anyone and National Grid won't be interested in it until September 5th.

On the bright side, it isn't so bad in our case because our neighbors all have power. Not only do I get to fill up my daily jealousy quota super fast, I also get to daisy-chain a bunch of heavy-duty extension cords from an outlet in our SUPER AWESOME neighbors' basement through one of our first floor windows. So we get to power one to three things at a time, depending on the draw. Right now, it's the interwebs, a laptop with a busted battery, and a desk lamp. Later on, it will be the TV and a floor lamp and maybe the Wii. At bedtime, I'll plug the fridge back in. I'm a little sad because I want to use the toaster oven to bake some of the cookie dough I made this afternoon, but I won't be able to watch TV while the oven's going. So if I don't answer the phone tomorrow, it's because I contracted a horrible salmonella infection from eating raw cookie dough. Or I'm screening my calls and I don't like you.

Any Agricola fans out there? No? Oh well. You can stop reading now. Anyway, the extension cord situation totally reminds me of Agricola. I can choose to Check Email, After Bake Cookies also Eat Cookies, or Chill Perishables, but I can't do them all at once. I clearly should have chosen the Bake Cookies action earlier in the day, but I needed to Regain Sanity and/or Stop the Kids From Fighting, so I plugged the TV in instead. And now that the Feeding phase has begun, I'm screwed. I only hope that the Major Improvement I'm waiting for comes before the 5th.

The Gracious 5-Year-Old: By Way of Explanation

2011-06-30T15:37:00.005-04:00

Dear Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa Anderson,

Sorry this thank-you note is so late. Soren actually made it about 5 minutes after he opened your card, so the lateness is completely my fault. I've been putting off writing the explanatory note which I feel should accompany the card.

When Soren opened your birthday card and found a $100 bill inside, he was deliriously happy. I am thrilled to say that his second response (after "WOW! A HUNDRED DOLLARS!" was to try to figure out how to show his appreciation. First, he asked me if I had a hundred dollars, and when I replied in the affirmative, he suggested I send it to you.

I told him that you'd probably be even happier with a really nice thank-you card, especially if he made it himself. He thought that was a great idea, and set to work right away. Within minutes, he was ready to show off his masterpiece.

The interior featured his trademark card decoration: a whole bunch of hearts. He's a very loving boy.

The front of the card... well, he used the card you sent as inspiration. As you recall, you sent this one:

So, riffing off the "Five Years Fun" motif, he... wrote this.

After stifling some laughter and mild horror, I managed to ask him why he decided to write that on the front of your card. He replied "Because their card said they wanted me to have 5 years of fun, and they sent me a hundred dollars, so I want them to have a HUNDRED years of fun!"

Anyway, I decided to send his card along, just with a little note of explanation so you knew what exactly he was getting at. It really isn't that he thinks you're a hundred years old. Although I guess that might not be a big deal to you at this point. I don't really know.

So, thank you again for the very generous birthday gift! Soren is going to use it to buy a scooter. I talked him out of using it to get 100 one-dollar Matchbox cars.

Love,
Kirsten (and Soren)

I have a Fisher-Price Cam-er-a, I Like to Take Pho-to-graphs

2011-03-22T21:16:00.015-04:00

Ansel showed us his unique perspective on Yosemite with his Korona, and Soren is showing us his unique perspective with his Fisher-Price digital camera. Signed prints of his 640x480 images are available for purchase in sizes between 24"x36" to billboard size (3" pixels).

Offerings are available in several categories:

Favorite Remote Controls

Title: Samsung and Wii

Title: In Soviet Russia, Remote Control Car Control You!

Intimate Spaces

Title: Civil Disobedience: Time-out with a Transcendentalist [1]

Title: The Scullery Maid's Contempt

Portraits of the Artist

Title: Contentment with Pillowy

Title: Curious Quiet

Professional Models

Title: Don't Hate Me for Being Under Thirty Pounds [2]

Other

Title: Puppy with a Chance of Meatballs

[1] The picture on the wall is a portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe Mommy and Daddy should find a naughty spot without a view of Thoreau's inspiration.

[2] If a parent is behind the camera, Sigrid runs toward the photographer so she can look at the picture of herself, often before a picture is taken; only Soren can get these poses.

SoStoWriMo

2011-02-02T21:34:00.014-05:00

A Story
by Soren[1]

Me and Pillowy were in the wagon. I saw a [illegible]. I said, "Watch out! We [will] crash!" I said, "We are going to hurt ourselves!"

[Illustration: Residual from previous creative session.]

CRASH! Me and Pillowy came down into a cave. I said, "Where are we?" Pillowy said, "E!"[2] which means, "We are in a cave." I said, "Why are we in a cave? Please can we get out of this cave?"[3] We went out of the cave.

[Illustration: Pillowy (top) and Soren (middle) flying out of the wagon (bottom center), after it hits a rock (bottom left).]

Outside, the world was not right at all because the world was having bats and

[Illustration: Stellaluna.]

[Illustration: Stellaluna.]

I saw Stellaluna[4] alone. I said, "I will come with you, okay, Stellaluna? Oh, Hi Stellaluna's mom."

[Illustration: Stellaluna?]

THE END.

[1] Written and illustrated entirely by Soren, who requested help only in spelling parts of words (e.g., "Daddy, how do you spell 'cha'?"). Additional spelling corrections supplied for your reading enjoyment.

[2] This is Pillowy's only phoneme. In this instance, the author has provided a handy translation. Competing interpretations of other instances support vigorous debate among scholars; the first issue of the academic journal E! will be published Spring 2012.

[3] This plot element is loosely based on a recent episode of Peep in the Big Wide World.

[4] More on Stellaluna.

I Love You. Let's Play UNO, Please.

2011-01-04T22:55:00.006-05:00

First, he seduces you with this sweet message:

Then, he makes you Draw Four!

(Seriously, he's pretty good, and a pretty good sport.)

Santaphobia

2011-01-04T22:22:00.006-05:00

One rainy day shortly before Christmas, we went to the holiday event at the Botanic Center. Santa came to talk to the kids, and he set up shop on a bench in the tropical garden (naturally).

Soren was the first to go. He was mainly interested in the candy cane Santa gave him, and sat silently for some time when Santa asked him what he wanted for Christmas. When gently asked again, he replied, "I'm thinking." Eventually, he decided he wanted some new toy cars, to the surprise of all.

Then it was Sigrid's turn. She was feeling pro-Santa when he came through the doors into the greenhouse, but switched to anti-Santa by the time she and Soren got to the front of the line. She refused to sit on the bench with Santa and Soren, and sat stubbornly facing away from the whole scene, so Santa decided to come down to her level and give her a candy cane. Whereas you might expect Santa to merely come hunker down in front of her and hand her a candy cane, he chose instead to lie down on the floor behind her and tap her on the shoulder.

The look of despair on her face suggests she'd been having nightmares about being stalked by Kris Kringle for weeks, and that in her dreams Rudolph was outside chewing on Blankie, which was probably happening right then.

With some support, she did reluctantly stand up and turn around to accept the candy cane, and didn't cry or anything. Which, of course, is an important lesson in the Christmas spirit.

Boo!

2011-01-04T21:51:00.005-05:00

I think our blog has fallen stagnant because Kirsten is waiting for me to pay homage to the awesome Halloween costumes she made for the kids.

Soren began insisting he wanted to be "a spooooky convertible Corvette" in July. We asked him repeatedly, hoping he'd change his mind, because how would we make that? It's not just a car, it's a particular model, and a spooky version at that! Soren held his ground; it was the most stable preference of his life.

Kirsten thought hard, and came up with this classic design:

It even looks great in the driveway!

Soren and I were stopped by three different fathers who specifically complimented his Corvette. One even recognized it as a '57!

Sigrid didn't have many ideas for her costume, but the plumber who came to fix our water heater a few months ago thought she looked just like Cindy Lou Who. He was right.

When Sigrid tired of her props, Kirsten thought she'd try them herself to see if she could get some candy honestly, rather than just stealing from the kids.

It didn't work, but if the The Grinch had been walking down our block, he surely would have gone running back to his cave!

Fleef

2010-11-15T21:22:00.005-05:00

Fleef verb \'fleef\

1. To stroke or tickle with a corner of a plush security item, such as a pillow or blankie.

Usage
"Pillowy is fleefing you, Daddy." "Blankie fleef Momma" [sic]

Etymology
Written records of oral history reflect the term was coined by Soren in 2007. Similar secondary sources indicate newly-verbal Sigrid expanded usage to include non-pillow plush security items (specifically, "Blankie") in late 2010.

Related Words
Fleeftown The area beneath a plush security item. Example: A Matchbox car under a blankie is in Fleeftown.

Exceeding Expectations

2010-11-11T22:42:00.002-05:00

I finally figured something out. I actually figured it out a few weeks ago, but pretend I just figured it out today, because that makes this post seems much more timely.

So, and this is directed at moms in particular, you know how when a dad does something relating to the care of his own child and manages to pull it off without somehow putting the baby in the dishwasher or blinding himself with talcum powder, and this competence is witnessed by a woman, he is treated as some sort of wondrous miracle man, superior to all others in talent and capacity for caring? And then you think, Hey, I take TWO KIDS to the grocery store BY MYSELF every week and no one gives me a damn medal? And then you feel all misunderstood and taken for granted and gender inequity and male-dominated hegemony and yes I did go to Brown?

I think -- and correct me if I'm wrong, guys -- men might know how that feels. Just a little bit.

The answer: Pilot lights. And wiper blades.

There were several repairmen in and out of the house today responding to such fatal-sounding events such as a gas leak and a failure of our water heater and boiler to vent exhaust anywhere but back into the basement. Maybe they just all had a flair for the dramatic, but there was a gas smell and it did happen that the gas chimney was full of decroded flue tiles instead of not being full of anything, so their stories seem plausible. Anyway, when the chimney guy came, he did his thing and then asked whether I was going to call the gas company back to turn the appliances back on. Me: "No." He looks dubious. Me: "All they did was shut the gas valves and turn off the pilots. I know how to light the pilots."

And there it was. A look, a surprised noise. He was impressed. I was a true handywoman, with skills far surpassing any other female. Because I knew how to turn the little knob and push the button on the water heater according to the instructions which are written right there on the actual water heater. And if there had been another guy there, I bet it would have ticked him off. Maybe he would think, Dude, I can light a pilot with an actual MATCH while building a playset from scrap wood and jacking up the first floor of my house. * What I didn't tell the chimney cleaner was that I not only light pilots, I also replace faulty thermopile generators, with a soldering iron and everything. And I know THAT'S badass.

I got the same accolades a few months ago when I got some new wiper blades at Pep Boys and installed them myself in the parking lot. A random passerby told me how nice it was to see a woman installing her own wiper blades. But... they SNAP ON.

So there's the symmetry I'd been missing. Men are heroes for changing a diaper instead of doing something weird with duct tape, and women are heroes for igniting pilot lights instead of paying a plumber $60 to do it. But maybe that's because most of us are nervous about doing that stuff because an entire other gender will tell us we're doing it wrong. Well, some things are almost impossible to screw up. So! Men, get out there and change those nappies! Women, learn to push that switch on the water heater! COMPETENCE HO! You can do it. And someday, just maybe, no one will be impressed.

On the other hand, that doesn't sound like any fun.

*All things that my husband has done. But not simultaneously.

Theseus' Playset

2010-10-23T21:20:00.007-04:00

One of the great paradoxes of ancient philosophy of is that of Theseus' ship. So beloved was it by the Athenians that they preserved it, replacing planks as they decayed to keep it in excellent condition. However, the philosophers point out, at some point, no planks that sailed with Theseus remain. Is it still Theseus' ship? If someone were to find one of the discarded, decayed boards that actually sailed with Theseus and build a replica around it, would it not then have a greater claim to being Theseus' ship? Or are there now two ships of Theseus?

While neither Soren and Sigrid--nor their cousins--have yet founded great civilizations, one of my Summer construction projects has been the restoration and updating of a family playset: a wooden play structure rivaling the fun of the $1200 playsets advertised in venerable publications such as Skymall (with much sturdier build). Designed and built by my grandfather for my cousins, the set was passed on to us a couple years ago, when my older cousin began college and my younger cousin obtained his learner's permit. It has been sitting in the corner of our yard for a while, waiting for Sigrid to get enough judgement to not hurt herself, or me to get around to trying to put it together.

When I sorted the pieces to assess the project, I found the elevated platform and railings were still in stunning shape; a good powerwash and restaining would restore them well. However, the parts of the playset that sat on the ground were decayed; even cedar eventually rots out, apparently in less than two decades if it's stored on the ground in the shade. In addition, I wanted to add some additional playset appointments.

Here's the final product:

I replaced the vertical corner supports and ground-level braces, and added a swing and steering wheel.

Soren helped.

I purchased a slide, which is challenging because slides are expensive to ship, and most of the slides available locally are only sold in kits. The local unfinished furniture place assured me they didn't sell individual slides, unless there were "extras" from the kits. We then had a surreal conversation about a particular orphaned slide on their floor, which was clearly "extra": they felt it was important I understand they didn't sell slides, while I tried to get them to suggest a price. I walked out with a good deal.

Surprisingly, it fits in a Jetta.

One of the orignal ladders was badly decayed, and since Sigrid won't be able to climb ladders for some time anyhow, I decided to use the old vertical corner supports as a frame for a climbing wall. There are kid-sized grips for Soren.

And some steps for Sigrid to climb.

It even has the hallmark of a custom playset: it is stained the same color as the shingles on the upper level of our house!

Sound like something your child would enjoy? Fear not! I still have a few scraps and partially decayed planks from the original. I'm sure we can negotiate an appropriate price for one of these artifacts. Then you, too, can have Theseus' playset!

Soren's Memoirs, ibid.

2010-10-04T19:55:00.004-04:00

Hello. I'm Soren.

This morning, as I do every morning, I woke up, ran into Mommy and Daddy's room, and asked Mommy whether she had remembered to keep the TV plugged in and tuned to PBS Kids. She said yes. Then I asked whether she had put my appetizer on the kitchen table. She said yes. So I went downstairs, got my appetizer (Cheerios), turned on the TV, and wedged myself behind the couch cushions to watch cartoons. Then I remembered the rest of my morning routine, and went back upstairs to tell Mommy that when she came downstairs, she should pretend not to see me, and that she shouldn't look in the couch because there are mosquitoes. So she came down, looked around and couldn't find me, and then said mosquitoes didn't scare her and sat on the couch and smushed me (but only a little). And that's my morning routine.

I like fall because there are hay rides.

When we go places in the car, sometimes I like to rest, but I don't want to miss anything exciting. So I tell Mommy or Daddy to let me know if they see any Mustangs, Cadillacs, BMWs, Mercedes, Mini Coopers, Lincolns, or any other classic cars. Unless the cars are brown, in which case I don't want to look at them. Then I add more and more cars to the notification list until it would have been shorter to just tell Mommy or Daddy which cars I didn't want to know about.

I also like fall because there are corn mazes.

For Halloween, I have insisted that I want to dress as a Spooooooky convertible Corvette (said in a spooky voice). Mommy had better get cracking on that.

I am very helpful. I put the silverware away when Mommy unloads the dishwasher, and I put my own shoes on occasionally, and I love mopping (too bad Mommy only mops three times a year). I also like to help Daddy work on various home and yard improvement projects. I excel with the socket wrench.

That's it for now. I'm off to run around and around and around and around for a while. Let me know if you see any Mustangs, Cadillacs, BMWs, Mercedes, Mini Coopers, Lincolns, or any other classic cars.

Sigrid's Memoirs, Ghostwritten by Mommy

2010-10-04T14:16:00.004-04:00

Hi. My name is Sigrid.

Right now, I'm sitting in my crib, singing and occasionally applauding myself. I may be singing Old MacDonald. It's hard to tell.

We went to the Topsfield Fair yesterday, and since I didn't get to go on any rides, I got an insanely expensive inflatable Sponge Bob. I love him very much and hugged him for about an hour in the car on the way home. Mom hopes he will be my favorite toy for about 20 years so that the amortized cost of Sponge Bob will seem reasonable.

I went out to the vegetable garden the other day, picked a Serrano pepper, and took a bite out of it. I didn't cry, but I made a very amusing face. Then I went out the next day and did it again.

I get very enthusiastic about weird things. I had a request in the early afternoon one day last week: "Take. Baf. Take. Baf." Mommy asked disbelievingly, "You want to take a bath?" to which I responded "OOHHHHH! KAAAAYYYYYY!"

I'm in that phase of learning to take where everything comes out as a series of one-word statements. "Bunny. Ride. Car." "Bear. Swing. Whee!" "Sorry. Mess. Letters. Mommy." That last one was after my very first time-out, which happened after I dumped magnetic letters all over the floor and wouldn't help clean them up. I was told that if I didn't pick them up, I would get a time-out. I've seen Soren get lots of time-outs, so it seems like a very grown-up thing to do, and I have the proper technique memorized; I headed right for the time-out chair, sat nicely for 90 seconds, and gave the aforementioned apology. Then I did help pick up letters. It's a good thing I have a big brother to show me how to behave.

I take reading very seriously.

Soren is very nice to me sometimes...

...but sometimes I think he wants to ship me off to Abu Dhabi.

He can't afford the postage, though, so I'm here to stay. And that's the end of my cutesy blog post.

Everything in the Whole World

2010-08-12T14:47:00.001-04:00

That's what I feel like I have to put into each post if I'm going to go so long between posts. Which makes me want to go even longer between posts, because I don't really have the patience to write about everything in the whole world. Well, and sometimes it's the opposite problem, I guess, because I often feel like I don't do anything interesting and have nothing to write about. So I really can't win.

So what have we been up to? Vacations! Chris and I got to go to Paris for a week while Grammy and Grampy (Chris's parents) stayed at our house with the kids. The grandparents held up remarkably well, and fled the house much more slowly and subtly when I got back than I might have done in their position. They report that the kids were very well-behaved and they all had a great time together. Meanwhile, Chris and I were also well-behaved and had a great time together, so it was a win-win-win situation! It was my first time in Paris, visited all the major attractions (the Louvre, Versailles, Arc d'Triomphe, Notre Dame, Musee d'Orsay, Eiffel Tower), and a couple that seemed like they'd be minor that turned out to actually be major (the Orangerie Museum and St. Denis cathedral). The Orangerie seemed like a blip on the Paris museum radar before we showed up -- I'd never heard of it, so I assumed no one else had either, but there turned out to be a huge line when we got there waiting for the museum to reopen because it had apparently filled up. The main awesomenesses within were two oval rooms encircled (enovaled?) by giant Monet water lily paintings. The scale and the colors were enthralling.

The other major minor attraction, St-Denis cathedral, was my favorite. Besides being the oldest dated Gothic cathedral in France (construction began in 1136), it is the burial site of all but three of the kings who ruled France between the 10th century and the revolution. I really only appreciate history if it's really old, and this counts. Some of the stained glass is original, which is crazy if you think about windows surviving for 900 years, and all of it is gorgeous. Since the cathedral is a longish Metro ride out of the city, the tourist count was low, and we were able to experience the space in peace. That made a huge difference, I think. Notre Dame might have been really interesting, but I wouldn't know, because there were 500000 people there and I wasn't interested in sticking around for long. So I highly recommend visiting St. Denis if you happen to be in the neighborhood.

And now the children are insisting that I pay attention to them. Au revoir.

Classic

2010-07-25T15:36:00.003-04:00

Scene: The classic car show at Goddard Park yesterday morning.

Soren: Mommy, what does 'classic' mean?

Mommy: Old. And nice. Kind of like 'antique'.

[pause]

Soren: Mommy, I think you're classic.

Soren's Rules for Cars

2010-06-28T09:39:00.002-04:00

Soren has four Rules for Cars, or so he says; I've only heard two. But here they are:

1. The smaller, the faster.

2. Fast is a blast; no wonder it passed.

Good rules, I'd say.

We were walking on Main Street the other day, and Soren pointed to a parked car and cried, "Is that a Bentley?!?!"

A man sitting on the adjacent restaurant patio said, "How does he know that? How old is that kid?" He and his wife were very impressed (it was their car). I think Bentley owners might like being openly recognized by people who have no preconceptions about what a Bentley owner might be like.

Hot and Bothered

2010-06-27T19:20:00.002-04:00

Summer. Bah humbug. Too hot for typing long sentences. At least there are farmers' markets. And air conditioning. And a quart+ of blackberries ripening in the yard. And lightness at 8 PM. And kids playing in the sprinkler. And watermelon. And Zyrtec.

I got my hair cut really super short yesterday, so now it's completely off my neck, and that helps with the heat. Plus people claim it looks cute. Also I have new glasses. I like them. And my toenails are painted silver.

Many things have happened in June. Soren is four. There was celebrating. He wants four more parties, he says. He also claims that he is now almost five. I made a carrot cake, and a chocolate one. I did this even though it required turning on the oven. I must really love that boy.

Oh, and sangria. Add that to the list of pros.

Add air conditioning again. It deserves to be listed twice.

Soren also graduated from preschool, except not really, because next year he's going to... preschool. But a different one. They sang cute songs at graduation and Soren used his diploma like a telescope. There was a slideshow of the kids in class and on various field trips. They're so cute. I got all teary. Motherhood. Seriously.

We got a giant bubble maker and now giant patches of the lawn are dead. Worth it.

Sigrid likes to get naked and run around the yard. I guess I can't post a picture of that because this is the internet. But it's cute. She has a narrow little butt and a giant belly and she barely bends her knees when she runs. She squirts the hose in her own face and gets all mad and then laughs. Silly.

It's all good.

Bye-Bye Baby

2010-05-26T15:47:00.003-04:00

Hello toddler.

Sorry the video is so dark. On the plus side, it makes it a little harder to see the dirt all over the kids' faces.

Quirks of the Moment

2010-05-15T13:30:00.005-04:00

Sigrid:

Insists on carrying a dandelion in each hand when out walking.
Yells "YEAH!!!!" when I come into her bedroom in the morning.
Says "Melmo," even though she's never seen Elmo on TV and only knows him from the picture on her diapers. Elmo is made of special baby crack.
Sings "Yah-Yo" when we get to the e-i-e-i-o part of Old MacDonald.
Adores dogs, and buries her face in their fur whenever the opportunity arises.
Picks up her blankie and runs for the gate at the bottom of the stairs when we say it's bedtime. She loves bedtime. Yes, I know I'm really lucky.
Has a particular fondness for crossing footbridges. Over and over and over.
Still wears size 4 shoes. How did I make such a tiny person?

Soren:

Insists on carrying five dandelions in each hand when out walking.
Has finally learned to pedal his tricycle.
Writes me messages on his magnet board, such as "NOT U GD WA TO TOK" ("Not a good way to talk") when I scolded him for unwinding the toilet paper roll.
Can identify pretty much every make of automobile in the country, which you already know if you've ever spent any time with him in the past year.
Claims stegosaurus had spikes to protect it from creditors.
Likes to read "The Monster at the End of This Book" with me because he knows it's my favorite.
Would like a red Lincoln pickup truck.
Is about to turn 4. How is that possible?

Fancy Things

2010-04-24T18:10:00.005-04:00

The other day, I was dressing Soren in one of his rugby shirts, and he decided he wanted all the buttons to be done up, including the top one. I explained that the top one is generally left unbuttoned.

Soren: Why is it a button instead of nothing?

Me: To be fancy, I guess.

Soren [exasperated]: Well, then why don't they just put a GOLDEN CAR on there? Or a TROPHY?

Giving Away my Secrets

2010-04-11T10:33:00.003-04:00

I got this recipe from somewhere that I can't find now, and I'm glad I wrote it down, because it rules. And now I'm going to put it on the interwebs so others may share in my high cholesterol. Sorry, I can't give the true author credit, so just pretend it was me.

Cinnamon rolls (makes 6 - 8 enormous rolls)

Dough:
1 pkg (2 1/4 tsp) instant/active dry yeast
1/2c warm water
1/3 c + 1/2 tsp granulated sugar, divided
1/2 c warmed milk
1/3 c butter, melted
1 tsp salt
1 egg, slightly beaten
3.5 - 4 c flour

Filling:
1/2 c melted butter, divided in half
3/4 c + 2 tbsp granulated sugar, divided
1 1/2 tbsp cinnamon
3/4 c chopped walnuts (optional)
3/4 c raisins (optional)

Glaze:
1/3 c melted butter
2 c powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2-4 tbsp hot water

In a small bowl, mix warm water, yeast, and 1/2 tsp sugar. In a large bowl, mix milk, 1/3 c sugar, butter, salt and egg. Stir well and add yeast mixture. Add half the flour and beat until smooth. Stir in enough of remaining flour to make dough slightly stiff (dough will be sticky).

Knead dough 5-10 minutes on floured board (or in stand mixer). Place in well-buttered glass or plastic bowl, cover and let rise in warm place until doubled (1 – 1 1/2 hours). When doubled, punch down dough and let rest 5 minutes. Roll out on floured surface into a 10 x 15 inch rectangle.

Filling: spread dough with 1/4 c melted butter. Mix 3/4 cup sugar with cinnamon; sprinkle over dough. Sprinkle with walnuts and raisins, if using.

Roll up dough (along the long edge, to make a 15” cylinder) and pinch edge together to seal. Cut into 6-8 slices. Coat bottom of 9” x 13” pan with remaining melted butter, then sprinkle with remaining 2 tbsp sugar. Place slices close together and let rise until doubled, 45 minutes.

[I usually do all the preceding work, up until the beginning of the second rise, the night before and place the covered pan in the fridge, then let the pan sit on the counter while the oven heats up and bake them right away. They don’t rise in the fridge, but will still puff up in the oven]

Bake in a 350 degree oven 25-30 minutes or until browned.

For the glaze: Mix butter, sugar and vanilla; stir in hot water 1 tbsp at a time until it reaches spreading consistency. Spread over slightly cooled rolls.

Breaking the Law

2010-04-07T14:09:00.003-04:00

My Colorforms flowers (left), posted in direct violation of Soren's "No Flowers Allowed" sign (right):

Easter photos to follow when I have sorted through all 6000000 of them.

Several Boring Things and One Interesting Thing

2010-03-27T11:59:00.004-04:00

Well, our little 16-month-old decided to step up her shock-and-awe campaign this morning by climbing out of her crib. There was some amount of goading from her big brother, who was entertaining her in her room before Chris and I got up, but I don't think he provided any mechanical help. So now, even though J. K. Rowling has lobbied against the inhumanity of cage beds for several years now, we are shopping for a crib tent. Sadly, there is only one maker of crib tents, and their product is widely panned as flimsy (although its ratings do average out to four stars on Amazon), but there aren't any other good options that we can find. There are those who say, "If you need a crib tent, you need a toddler bed!" But I laugh at those people, and invite them to come over and deal with teaching a 16-month-old to stay in a bed.

Other things have happened since I last posted. It rained a lot. Each house in our neighborhood is a lakeside resort now. I dropped my iPod in the loo and got a new one from Apple for half price, because they are nice. Chris and I hung a really attractive wire by the thermostat so we can jump the boiler whenever it gets cold, because the thermostat doesn't seem to work any more. There's something really rugged about jumping the boiler, let me tell you.

Oh, here's a trippy story. Someone sent me an email a few weeks back with the subject header "inquiry". Although, as one friend put it, emails with this title tend to be from exiled Nigerian princes, I chose to read it. Turns out it was from someone in Santa Barbara who wanted to know if I was a certain Kirsten Munson who graduated from San Marcos High School in 1994, because if I was, she had found some of my stuff in her attic. (I am, by the way.) Through further email exchanges, I learned that she'd found some of my paintings from AP Studio Art, and got my graduation year off the back of one that I'd apparently entered in a contest. OK, so here's the weird part. She found these paintings in the attic of a house on Valerio St, where my family moved after I graduated. In high school, I'd lived in a house on Crescent Drive, so that was the address on the back of the contest entry, and the person contacting me had also previously lived in the same house! So we'd shared two addresses in Santa Barbara. Cosmic!

She and her fiancé apparently want to keep a couple of the paintings, which is fine by me. Today, I tend to find my creative work from high school a bit... cringe-worthy, but if they think it's deep and meaningful, my high school self is grateful. That's pretty much what I was going for at the time.

The Soundtrack to my Résumé

2010-02-12T18:43:00.011-05:00

I always have a song in my head, so the music I listen to is very important to me, because it determines what I will be listening to when the music is turned off. Sometimes it is good, like Life on Mars? or Don't Look Back in Anger or Magnet and Steel. Sometimes it is bad, like Radar Love, or the little pre-commercial NFL fanfare, or the Sid the Science Kid theme song.

Right now, I have Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind in my head, and I'm not happy about it. It came on while I was driving back from the Children's Museum. WBRU, I expect better from you. Anyway, I freaking hate that song, not on its aesthetic merits, but because I was forced to listen to it eight times a day during the summer of 1997.

Ah, 1997. Ryan Seacrest was just a smarmy DJ on L.A.'s Star 98.7. It was the summer after I transferred out of Brown, the summer before I started classes at Art Center College of Design. The summer I had to make some money. The summer I signed on with a temp agency. I landed a six-week assignment with an insurance company, which was great, because it was a nice long stint of guaranteed income. When it became clear that it was basically going to be six weeks of stuffing envelopes, I wasn't thrilled, but I was sure I could find a way to survive the drudgery. When the workplace turned out to be an office full of catty women whose main pastime was gossiping about whichever coworker had just left the room, I vowed to tune them out and carry on. But there was a conspiracy afoot. A sinister plot devised to make me crazy. A scheme that could only have been perpetrated by the likes of Ryan Seacrest and Third Eye Blind. And the person in charge of choosing the radio station at work.

You know how a lot of soft-rock stations advertise their no-repeat workday? Yeah, Star 98.7 didn't have one of those. They were interested in playing the Top 40 Adult Contemporary Hits of the Summer of 1997, and that's all. The thing about Top 40 hits is that there are forty of them, pretty much exactly. And if you hear them over and over, every day, for eight hours, five days a week, for six weeks, the math comes out to... let's see. I have the equation here somewhere. Oh yeah. It's:

[(2x/3)*240t] = whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

I still get twitchy when I hear Sunny Came Home. Oh god. I'm getting all PTSD right now, even thinking about it.

And then the six weeks was over, and I started school and listened to whatever the hell I wanted while working my ass off to get my degree so I could eventually work at a place that played cool music. I'm still kind of waiting to see how that works out. At my first real job, I could often hear Radiohead coming from one guy's office, so that was cool. And then I think they started piping in classical to see if it would make everyone swear less. My next job had no music, maybe because if you don't play music on the office, you can classify everyone as independent contractors and not give them any benefits. Then I had a job doing decorative furniture painting, and that really had its ups and downs. Usually, we could listen to whatever we wanted to, which included the soundtrack to Hair, all the awesome stuff on my iPod, and a CD of college fight songs. Huh. But these were vetoed during the holiday season by the back office manager -- I'll call her Pat, since that's her name -- in favor of a radio station devoted to playing all Christmas songs all the time starting the first week of November and ending after you go clinically insane. It really gave Star 98.7 a run for its money, repetition-wise. Also, Pat really enhanced the experience for all of us by humming along to every song, very loudly and badly. I pointed the humming out to a coworker who somehow hadn't theretofore noticed it, and she never liked me much after that, but I was glad to have some company in my misery.

The job after that had OK music. Turns out Muzak actually plays songs you've heard of now, with words, in their original recorded form. There was 80's music occasionally, but too much Coldplay in the Adult Contemporary playlist. And John Mayer McCheese. Oh, and You're Beautiful by James Blunt. Man UP, Jim. I'm sorry if you like any of these things. Reallllllllly sorry.

And now, my current job. Chauffeur To and From the Children's Museum. I was somehow transfixed by Semi-Charmed Life, and listened to the whole thing, but then turned the radio off and listened to my usual soundtrack these days, which is two people in the back seat saying Mommmmmmeeeeeeeeeeee over and over in weird voices for no apparent reason. So the repetition thing hasn't really been resolved, but at least now I can join in and start saying Mommmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeee as well (much to the delight of my deejays, or office managers, or whatever their titles are) and mix things up a bit by making everyone laugh.

Car Show!

2010-01-24T21:46:00.003-05:00

(written by Chris)

Soren has been fascinated by cars for longer than he has been able to articulate that fascination. He had a lengthy phase of pointing out that a car or truck was passing by, then asking what each car he saw was, and then learning the logos of all the car companies and naming all the cars he saw (and he can identify the make of virtually all late model cars by sight). Today, I was able to provide him an all-access pass to more cars than he could imagine by taking him to the New England 2010 Auto Show, at the RI convention center. Kids' Day meant he was free with my admission, and no one could complain I was there following the orders of a three-year old.

As we approached the ticket booth, Soren spotted the banner with the roughly 20 participating automakers on it. "Hey, there's a lot of logos here," he shouts, and begins naming them, "Honda. Toyota. GMC! Lincoln...." I merely shrug to the ticket taker.

In the course of a little under three hours (we had to dash over to the Westin to score some apple juice at the two hour mark), we evaluated (i.e., sat in) a wide spectrum of vehicles, ranging in price from roughly $18,000 to roughly $75,000:

3 GMCs
6 Chevrolets
2 Buicks
8 Toyotas
4 Fords
4 Lincolns
4 accessible Toyotas
3 Mazdas
6 Subarus
3 Audis
4 Acuras

I briefly ogled a couple Lamborghinis and a couple Rolls Royces, but Soren had no interest because he could not sit in them. "Come onnnn, Daddy...."

Visiting a car show with Soren is different from visiting as car buyer in several key ways:

Price does not matter. Soren doesn't really yet understand money or status or quality distinctions. Therefore, he was absolutely as enthusiastic about the most basic Chevy Cobalt and Ford Focus as he was about the much more expensive cars we sat in. Importantly, he is indifferent to size (when you're 39 inches tall, being an expensive sports car is the biggest threat to adequate leg room and view), so the cars vary less to him than they would to someone who is, for example, not three.

The back seat does matter; the front seat does not. In fact, I was only permitted to sit in the front seat of three cars, and of those, two did not have back seats (one was a Corvette, so...). Otherwise, our experience of each car emphasized the back seat: we would approach a vehicle that was deemed worth our time--primarily by being next to the vehicle out of which we just climbed; I opened the passenger side door for Soren, who climbed in (and climbed is often the best descriptor); I would be instructed to close his door and come around the other side; I would enter through the driver's side rear door, and close it; I would be instructed to lock it; after a brief pause, we'd note something about the upholstery; we would decide to move on.

It's always his turn. When looking at popular cars at car shows, I've often had to wait to get into the driver's seat. People aren't generally looking at the back seats, but when they are, they're standing and peering in in a way that allows room for an eager three-year old to slip in front and climb in. Soren was entirely polite about it, complete with "Excuse me," but he'd slip right up to the front to scramble into the back seats.

Basic car features are interesting. During the car show, Soren learned about the different designs of door locks, levers (including the all electronic system on the Corvette) and regular seatbelts. Once he learned about a feature, it had to be examined on subsequent vehicles. We had to try the seatbelts in most of the latter half of cars we tried, but fortunately he grew to understand they all work in the same way (and are uncomfortable).

Salespeople go the other way. These car shows are, after all, sales tools. A couple of times, as I rounded the back of a car to get in the driver's side, I was intercepted by salespeople who wanted to tell me about the car I was circling. (Despite my bicentimillenial Jetta, I'm not in the market.) When Soren pops around the corner, or shouts that I need to get in the car, I just don't get bothered anymore.

Child locks suck. At more than one point, my tour of back seats left me in the embarrassing position of needing either to climb out the far side (to Soren's protests) or to beg fellow patrons to let me out because some previous attendee had triggered the child lock on the door I entered.

Overall, I will say that I'm impressed with the ground that American car companies have made on foreign automakers over the last few years: touch and feel quality was definitely comparable within price point in the cars I saw today. Of course, that's just the perspective of a back seat driver.

RIP 110 Film

2010-01-11T11:12:00.003-05:00

Remember that first camera? The slab of a thing that took 110 film and flash cubes, or maybe one of those weird disc cameras, or the Kodak Polaroid-clone which you only had for ten months before Kodak got sued and had to take it off the market? It was so cool to get to take photos of anything you wanted, and you probably didn't even notice the aggrieved looks on your parents' faces every time they had to shell out for another roll of film or another set of crappy prints.

Well, now Soren has his very first camera. A slab of a thing with an LED flash and 50-cent software. It's fabulous.

Digital photography is a wonderful thing, my friends. Not only does Soren get to take a billion pictures of anything he wants, the only thing I have to shell out for is another set of AAA batteries every once in a while. He even has his very own Flickr account, so he can share his weird pictures with the three other people in the world who would like to see them. I am proud to be one of those three people.

Need for Speed

2010-01-02T18:53:00.003-05:00

I just wanted to state for the record that I love sledding, and I am so glad that Soren finally likes sledding. It snowed all day today, and we went out to the hill down the street and spent about an hour going up and down and dodging all the kids who choose for some reason to climb back up the middle of the hill where everyone else is trying to sled instead of going off to the side. It was sweeeet!

Also sweet was the sledding Chris and I got to enjoy at the Proctors' house in New Hampshire. They have a perfectly good sledding hill right in the backyard, with a nice steep part at the beginning and a long slope that can lead you right to the back door on your last run if you happen to be as talented as I am. Sure, it feels a little disrespectful to stand in front of the old cemetery at the top of the hill and yell "FIRE IN THE HOOOOOLE" as you charge onto your sled, but no actual hauntings have been reported yet. There's even a bonus feature where you get to shoot between a couple trees at the fastest point, but without the actual risk that you will run into a tree trunk and get a bruise on your leg that somehow seems to exceed the size of your leg. Which may have happened at some point on a different, perhaps ill-advised, trail on the property which was roughly hewn from a former logging road in 2004. I've tried a few times to share a photo of the bruise in question, but iPhoto crashes every time I try to export the picture. I guess iPhoto has better judgement about these things than I do.

A bunch of the New Hampshire crowd, including Chris and me, coincidentally got LED headlamps for Christmas, and we discovered that there can be no higher purpose for headlamps than sledding in the dark. It'll be a few years until the kids are ready for that kind of thing, but I'm really looking forward to it!

December Blog Post

2009-12-31T10:13:00.002-05:00

I think it's so pathetic that I'm down to only one blog post a month. I still think it's because the laptops are busted, but I do occasionally sit down at my desktop or put the less-broken laptop on that one place on the dining room table where it can get a wireless signal, and I still don't blog. I play Bejeweled Blitz. I might be over that now, though. Now that I have an iPod Touch and can play Bejeweled any time I want, it's really lost its appeal.

Speaking of the iPod, I have finally realized my dream of having the app I've been wanting since I learned there was such a thing as an app, or maybe since Soren turned two: Time-Out. Enter age of child, press the "Start Time-Out" button, and it's on. When the child gets up or hits you as you walk by, you press the "Restart Time-Out" button. The app includes support for up to four children, so when Sigrid turns two, she can, and will, be added to the disciplinary system.

Maybe I've just been too busy to blog. The holidays have been great -- lots of time with family, playing games, eating good food (Christmas goose!), sledding, and relaxing. The relaxing equation may be a little lopsided right now, since Mom, Richard and Kelly Ann are currently taking care of Soren and Sigrid while Chris and I sit in a house in New Hampshire with our friends quoting the internet and pondering cake and eggs for our second breakfast. Thanks, Mom, Richard, and Kelly Ann! I hope the kids aren't screaming too much!

Nah, the kids are really good and fun. In fact, in a cruel twist of fate, Soren hasn't required a time-out since I downloaded the Tine-Out app. Don't think I'm not sitting with my finger on the button, waiting for him to ignore a warning, though. Anyway, Soren has been a lot of fun lately, and really enjoyed last week's snow, especially sledding at the park down the street. He's been way too chicken to enjoy sledding until this year, so it's a nice change. On one run, he even got some vertical going over a jump, then slid into a mesh barrier and fell over; we waited for the crying and demands to go home, but he surprised all of us by jumping up and yelling, "That was AWESOME!!!!!"

Sigrid is proto-walking and proto-talking, meanwhile. She says "MAAAAA-MEEEEE!" in a demanding tone, "Daaaaa-deeee!" in an adorable, loving tone, and "nom nom nom" when she sees food. And "ohhhhhh-ohhhh-ohhhhh BEEEEE!" when she wants to read So Big.

It's been an increasingly good 2009; here's to a uniformly great 2010!

Travels With Children

2009-11-25T17:23:00.007-05:00

This is a post about how things go when you have small children. Just precisely this way. I'm letting you know so you'll be prepared.

First of all, Soren, Sigrid and I went to visit our friends Ian and Renee (4-year-old and mom of 4-year-old, respectively). Sigrid napped for a while out in the car (in the driveway, far removed from the road, visible from the window, plus it was National Kidnappers Take the Day Off Day); Soren and Ian occasionally fought but mostly played, as they do; and Renee and I took on the kind of parenting responsibility that we usually adopt in this kind of situation, by which I mean we played Scrabble and told the boys to work out their own disagreements and popped up every few minutes to look out the window and make sure Sigrid was still a) in the car b) sleeping.

Eventually, I had taken a commanding enough lead in Scrabble that Renee wanted to quit, Sigrid had woken up and eaten trace amounts of lunch, Soren had refused lunch, and the boys had started doing more fighting than playing. We then decided it was time to go to an awesome indoor gym for little kids, about 20 minutes away, so the young ones could jump around on large foam things. We checked the gym's web site to make sure they were open, crammed all three car seats in the back of my car, and set off! Merrily!

Shortly thereafter began the screaming. It is not for me to speak of the screaming of the child of another, plus Ian wasn't doing that much of it anyway, so I will speak only of the screaming of my own progeny. There was a lot of screaming, mainly regarding the hunger one can only experience when one has refused to eat lunch. There was also the wordless rage and/or sadness of one who has spent too much time in the car already, or who has eaten only trace amounts of lunch, or who the hell knows because she's only one and can't talk yet. The back seat was a vortex of screaming.

I started playing a Beatles CD to try to distract Soren from screaming. What happened instead was that he screamed a bit, heard what was playing, and then started screaming about how he wanted me to start the song over again because he'd missed the beginning of the song because he'd been screaming.

Renee and I kept our cool. The promise of kids jumping on foam gym equipment stuff was our prize, and we kept our eyes on it.

And finally! We arrived! At the gym! We piled out of the car and ran to the door! And read the sign! Which said, "Closed for the day! See you soon!"

Moms throw tantrums, too, as it turns out. There's less screaming, but just as much pouting, and a lot more brainstorming regarding composition of angry emails to the proprietor of the gym.

Quick thinker that she is, Renee decided we should go to the Kettle Pond Nature Center, which has a bunch of fun stuff for kids to do, and which is also free, so that's a bonus. Perhaps there was less screaming on this leg of the trip, or perhaps I have repressed it. Either way, we arrived, and it was open, and there was fun stuff for kids to do. We colored a bit, and then Soren, Ian, and I did some puzzles while Sigrid and Renee kept coloring. At one point, I thought I smelled a suspicious smell, but discreet butt-sniffing failed to reveal any of our kids as a source; Renee said the one other kid who was also coloring seemed to have had beans for lunch, and we left it at that.

We then moved on to a different room, which featured displays of various local flora and fauna and an aquarium full of frogs and tadpoles. Soren and Ian were very interested in the frogs, and both stood up on a little step-stool to watch them; Renee and I started going through drawers and found fun things to play with, like some little devices that seemed to serve as bird song quizzes. I bragged enough about Scrabble earlier, so I don't think I need to talk about how hard I rocked the bird song quiz. Common Nighthawk BOOYAH.

Then Soren came over and asked, very innocently, "Why is there poop on this stool?" Ignoring the "stool/stool" pun potential, I looked at the step-stool in question and was very disappointed to find that there was, in fact, a little turd sitting neatly on the top step.

Whereupon began the process of figuring out who left stool on the stool: a delicate dance comprising gentle accusations; leading suggestions; point-blank interrogation; none-too-subtle smelling of the butt region; a voyage to the restroom to perform a thorough hand-washing, since he claimed to have touched the poo; and, at last, a visual inspection. Results: Soren was clean, and I felt bad for thinking it was him. On the other hand, I couldn't exactly go around accusing other people's children of pooping on the furniture.

Renee also determined that it wasn't her kid, so we were left with the unsavory task of telling the nature center docent about the poop which was not the fault of either of our children and must have been left by the other kid who had since departed. I offered the docent a handful of paper towels and gave her a look which clearly said Sorry to make you do this, but there's no way I, a mere visitor, am cleaning up some stranger's poo. We approached the stool. And the stool. She reached down with the paper towels. Picked up the turd. And laughed.

"It's scat," she said.

I then gave her a look which clearly said Well -- yeah, I guess, although they don't usually call it that unless it's animal doodie, and what's so funny anyway, and wait, did an animal really come in here and do its business? When? Huh?

"It's a model of animal scat. To help with identification. There are a bunch of different ones - we keep them in the drawers over there."

A fake piece of animal poop. Very realistic, I must add. We laughed, and took our leave.

It would be great to end the story with a hearty laugh about plastic muskrat scat, and singing of Beatles songs all the way home, but all the kids remembered they were hungry as soon as they got in the car, and OH GOD. THE SCREAMING.

Birthday Girl

2009-11-23T18:40:00.003-05:00

Sigrid turned one on November 20th, but it's been a Birthday Gala Month full of celebration and pomp.

There was family: Chris's parents came out a few weeks ago to throw Party #1; and a whole passel of my family (my dad, stepmom, mom, sister, and brother-in-law) came for impromptu Party #2.

There were cakes: one a delicious white cake from Providence's best bakery, impeccably decorated with amazing buttercream; and one made by Ichabod House's best baker and decorated sloppily with pretty purple and black icing to try to disguise the messed-up part. But it was also delicious, if I do say so myself.

And there was the birthday girl herself, full of joy and smiles (unless I left the room or tried to cook dinner). It's been an exciting year from the start, in good ways and bad, and we're enjoying her more and more every day as she enters year number two, which frankly I hope is a lot less exciting.

TRICK A TREEEEEAT

2009-10-30T11:42:00.003-04:00

I feel slightly ridiculous for dumping photos and a blog post online fifteen minutes after we get back from Soren's preschool Halloween party, but I'm trying to stay on top of things.

Soren, light of my heart, announced some time ago that he wanted to dress as a leaf pile for Halloween, and that made me love him even more than before. Dressing as a leaf pile is creative, pretty funny, and, best of all, requires no particular sewing skill on my part. Maybe it's weird that someone who's as addicted to knitting and other artistic pursuits as I am doesn't like sewing, but I don't. It's tedious. And I suck at precise measurement because I'm impatient. And sewing machines scare me because they make too much noise, so I have to sew everything by hand.

Oh, so how's this for a backhanded compliment? At the preschool today, one of the Pre-K teachers walked by and said to me, "I love his costume! It's just my kind of costume! When my kids were growing up they were always complaining, 'Mom, why do I have to wear this? You're so bad at sewing!'" Uh. Thanks? Is there even a compliment in there? Maybe it was just a big ol' backhand.

Anyway, judge for yourselves, and then keep it to yourselves unless it's an actual compliment. I think he looks pretty cute, myself.

Blast From the Past

2009-10-24T10:07:00.003-04:00

Okay, so I've been wasting time looking at files I archived in 1996. To celebrate, I will now share with you a poem I wrote about my work environment in the dining hall at Brown. Enjoy.

Dishroom: a complaint

As we slump in the dishroom in the morning,
We can imagine the most frigid landscape to be idyllic.
There must be birds chirping out there,
There must be cars honking or people walking,
Breezes blowing or laughter or fun or even sleep --
Something better than the monotony of conveyor belts,
The steam rising from the diabolical dishmachine,
The defective beeping of the soap dispensers.
O you mess makers, you half-eaters of food,
You pourers of excessive syrup,
Takers of a thousand juice glasses --
Who scrapes the soggy pancakes from your saccharine plates?
Who pries apart your bowls stuck together with Cheez Whiz?
Who feeds your soup cups into the infinite, rumbling dishmachine
And retrieves them at the other end when they emerge, bone-white and
hotter than suns?
When you send your silverware through with your tray, who screams in
frustration at your trespass?
We, we few, we miserable few,
Denizens of the humming room, the stagnant, humid room,
We who watch the milk curdle as we mix it with orange juice,
We who sweat and scrape at 8:45 when all of you leave at once to make your
9:00 classes,
We struggle to keep the conveyor belt from stopping.
There is no fun, no laughter in the dishroom --
There are only the conveyor belts.
I would like to write on the conveyor belt
An endless message to travel around and around,
An enduring inspiration for future prisoners --
I would like to write this thing, this monument,
But the conveyor belt runs the wrong way.
My hands are covered with syrup
And they won't even give us a radio.

Little Victories

2009-10-14T13:38:00.003-04:00

It's not all failed DMV trips, rotten gutters and busted Hondas around here. Good things happen, too. This week has had lots of little bright spots, which I will now list so that I have something to look back on next time all my tomato plants get completely fungified and have to be destroyed.

Not only has my tiny orchid NOT died, it has even successfully bloomed and is now gracing the kitchen windowsill with a 1" spike of 1/4" white flowers.
I tried making Cook's Illustrated's quick puff pastry recipe for homemade apple turnovers, and even though I totally didn't bring my A-game to the dough shaping, they turned out AWESOME. And then I ate three of them, so I am no longer suffering from a saturated fat deficiency!
My much-anticipated root saw arrived yesterday, and I used it to finally remove the 11" arborvitae stump from the front yard. My mystical quest to remove all existing bushes from the entire yard is now underway, and my weapon is called Yewbane.
I cleaned the bedroom.
Sigrid looks really cute in the dark teal hooded sweater I made for her.
I scored a big play rug (printed with roads, of course) for Soren for $10 at Job Lot. This was especially amazing because I went to Job Lot looking for that specific item.
Soren got to participate in a child-development research project with a Brown student yesterday (at the Children's Museum). It was pretty cute to watch, and yay for science!

Soren's Friend Cheerios

2009-10-05T20:50:00.002-04:00

Soren's been composing lots of songs lately, and although they seem impromptu, he clearly puts some work into composing (or at least remembering) them, because the lyrics are mostly the same from day to day. Chris managed to transcribe one the other day; it's about one of Soren's matchbox race cars which is apparently sponsored by Cheerios. And now, without further ado:

My Friend Cheerios

My friend Cheerios
He's the best
My friend Cheerios
He's the best
My friend Cheerios
He can split Cheerios into a bowl
My friend Cheerios
He can string Cheerios on a necklace, as cars do
My friend Cheerios
He can make space on the couch for all his friends to sing
My friend Cheerios
He can have a birthday cake -- but only one

A Penny Saved is a Penny Spent on Something Else

2009-09-18T14:53:00.003-04:00

I just thought that up, but I like it.

We're just saving money all over the place this year! The gutters did NOT cost $28,000! The car is still under warranty, so we won't be spending $3800 on a new engine, unless Honda goes through some major contortions to avoid paying out, like declaring that the engine is no longer part of the powertrain! I love the word "powertrain"! And the word "harbormaster"! But that's neither here nor there.

On the other hand, who knew that it would cost so much to have a big pile of branches taken to the dump? And who could have guessed that we would end up paying someone to paint the new (wooden) gutters because we didn't feel like doing it ourselves? Actually, I guessed that last part.

In all, though, if you operate under the "a penny saved is a penny earned" philosophy, we made some decent money this summer, and we should totally spend our windfall on a huge TV and a pony.

Cleaning Conundrums

2009-09-11T14:42:00.003-04:00

Paradoxes? Perhaps! Dilemmas? Definitely! Cleaning Conundrum Quiz!

1. What do you do when you want to declutter your old house because you want to reduce the number of potential spider lurking spots, but then you're thwarted by spiders perched on the stuff you're trying to put away?

2. When the baby gets hold of a BJ's bottle of liquid soap and dumps a quarter of it on the floor and starts smushing it around with her hands and feet, is it funny that you then have to mop the floor and give the baby a bath? Or is that just annoying?

3. If you really need to vacuum the baby's room, but only get a chance to clean while she's napping in said room, can you find someone to spin dust bunnies into yarn and then knit it into a sweater while the baby's napping?

When the Laptop Breaks, it's the Blog that Suffers

2009-09-07T10:13:00.002-04:00

We have, shall we say, a flight of broken laptops right now: one from the 2004 G4 Powerbook vintage, which crashes every time you even slightly nudge it; one 2007 Macbook Pro, which only gets a wireless signal if it's sitting on top of the router; and one month-old Macbook Pro which is no longer on speaking terms with its own keyboard and trackpad. This is not to say that Apple does not offer a high-quality product. Leave Apple out of this. This is merely to say that my desktop (a delightful '06 Mac Mini) is the only functioning computer in the house at the moment, and it's all the way upstairs in my office where it was really really hot for a couple weeks there, and then we went on vacation to Santa Barbara, and then my older sister came to visit, and that's why I haven't been blogging. I am mainly making excuses for the benefit of the various grandparents who follow this blog. The rest of you probably didn't even NOTICE that there was only one post in all of August, and I think I'll go eat worms.

Anyway, it's been a busy month. The gutters done been fixed, which is great, although now they need to be painted, which I frankly don't plan on ever getting around to, so we'll probably hire someone. A bunch of gross overgrown bushes were cut down during the gutter project, and now the carcasses are sitting in the side yard waiting to be 1) chopped up and stuffed into countless yard waste bags; or 2) dragged across the street in the middle of the night and thrown into the woods, hopefully without any cops noticing; neither of which I plan on ever getting around to, so we'll probably hire someone. To chip everything, that is, not drag it across the street.

Meanwhile, we all went to Santa Barbara and enjoyed lounging around with Gramma and Grampa Richie and Kelly Ann. We experimented for the very first time with sharing a room (i.e. Chris, me, and both kids), and it went well until the last couple nights, when both children took turns crying and keeping each other awake. It's a good thing that didn't happen the first night, or we would have spent a lot of money on some enormous hotel suite for the remainder of the trip. When the room-sharing was good, though, it was very good; Soren and Sigrid seemed to enjoy waking up in the same room, and Soren even sang a few songs to his baby sister. The only one I can recall went something like "The dark night is oooooverrrr, and the sun came up! Yes, the sun came up! Oh, the sun came up!" It was very sweet. When we weren't sharing a room, we were doing all kinds of things like walking to Shoreline Park, driving R/C boats in the pool, going to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, visiting with friends, buying tiny orchids for each other, and waiting for the batteries in Soren's new toy train to wear out. We had a wonderful time, and I'd love to write in more detail, but it would be so much quicker just to post pictures.

Don't B A Tom8o H8er

2009-08-03T20:55:00.003-04:00

The post title doesn't really mean anything. I just wanted to write "tom8o h8er". Since you asked, though, one of our garden tomatoes is starting to get ripe, which means that the tomato avalanche is beginning. 9 plants X 35+ tomatoes per plant = I am a tomato farmer. Expect lots of pictures of gorgeous heirloom tomatoes soon. In case you hadn't noticed, I <3 tom8oz, and gardening in general.

You will be pleased to know that we have chosen a carpenter, one who did not quote us $28,000, but I'm not going to jinx things by claiming that it will actually cost less than $28,000. The water stain inside my office tells me that there's more than just a gutter that's going to need replacing. And that really worries me, because water stains definitely shouldn't be speaking.

And now, for the grandparents in the audience, stories about the kids. First of all, if you haven't been in Soren's company in the past month, you might not be aware that he can now identify every make of car in the US, or at least the ones we see in our daily travels, by its logo. We were driving on the freeway today, and I could hear him in the back seat saying, "That's a Nissan. That's a Lexus. That's a Bokeswagen." Etc. Some people ask, "Why are you teaching him all the kinds of cars?" Like I'm grooming him to become the world's foremost expert in automotive field identification or something. The kid wants to know what the different cars are called, so I tell him. And now he knows all of them. He also owns half of them, in the form of Matchbox cars. You'd think that with a collection of 9800000 cars, a few might get ignored, but he cherishes each and every one. Very sweet.

Sigrid, meanwhile, cherishes Soren's toys as well, and has been working on getting within grabbing range of them. She can scoot around on her belly with some speed at this point, and is now getting interested in pulling up. Soren's not a huge fan of this, but he still seems to like her. Don't tell him that when he's not around, I plop Sigrid down in the middle of his play rug and let her stick all his cars in her mouth. I wonder what my mom used to let my sister do my stuff when I wasn't around. Parenthood really makes you think.

Gutter Bawl

2009-07-18T11:07:00.003-04:00

We have an old, old house with old, old wooden trough gutters which need replacing. To this end, I've been getting, or trying to get, estimates from a number of carpenters. I'm sure you'll be interested to hear my results so far.

Carpenter 1: Can't fit us in until mid-winter and also said that if I happen to know any carpenters looking for work, I should let him know. Good for him, I guess.

Carpenter 2: Won't take the job because it's a historic home and there's too much paperwork involved. Rough life.

Carpenter 3: Gave me a reasonable quote a long time ago and then disappeared off the face of the earth.

Carpenter 4: Tried to convince me that the preservation society probably wouldn't mind if we replaced the wooden troughs with seamless aluminum.

Carpenter 5: Very nice, professional, clearly knows what he's doing, wants the job done right, has plenty of experience with historic homes. I got his quote yesterday. For roughly 120 feet of wooden gutter, with related scaffolding, teardown, flashing, etc., he wants:

Wait for it:

Twenty-eight thousand dollars.

The estimate also specifies that the job will require about 530 man-hours of work.

I am still a little speechless about this, so I will just point out that Chris and I, an economist and a graphic designer, basically built an entire room on our previous house, and while we were lazy about it and took more than a year to get around to finishing the job, I don't think there's any way it took us 530 man-hours.

Here's the main thing. I'd rather spend four thousand dollars every ten years on the gutters than twenty-eight thousand dollars for gutters that will last seventy years. Because I will be dead by then. Also, I do not have twenty-eight thousand dollars to spend on gutters.

Luckily, I have at least one reasonable estimate from a guy who seems like he can handle the job, and a couple more quotes on the way. Wish me luck.

OMGWTFDMV

2009-07-16T15:31:00.002-04:00

HOW TO TRANSFER AN OUT-OF-STATE AUTOMOBILE REGISTRATION IN RHODE ISLAND

1. Ensure that you have the correct documents: VIN inspection report; TR-1 Application; Form T-333-1; proof of residency; and vehicle title.

2. Have a full sippy cup and two kinds of snacks ready when you pick your toddler up from day camp, as well as a backpack which unzips to reveal a road playmat; fill backpack with Matchbox cars. This will keep your toddler entertained at the DMV.

3. Set off merrily to the West Warwick DMV, thankful that you don't have to go to the Seventh Circle of Pawtucket.

4. Resist the urge to listen to that voice in your head that starts up every time you try to go somewhere new in Rhode Island. This voice likes to wait until you're pretty sure you've missed your unmarked turn and then start screaming "BAIL BAIL BAIL OH GOD TURN AROUND NOW," and you used to obey, only to find that you hadn't driven far enough yet originally and so you had to turn around again, and lo, there was your turn about 500 feet beyond the point where the voice had started yelling at you. Anyway, resist the urge to bail, and bask in the glory of persistence, finding Rt. 33 East, and not being bossed around by crazy voices in your head.

5. Pull into a vacant spot right in front of the DMV building. Get a bad feeling.

6. Hop out and find that the West Warwick branch of the DMV appears to have been closed for some time, and maybe that's why it wasn't on the DMV web site even though you found it listed on other web sites. Wonder why you had thought there might be some secret ninja DMV branch that no one knows about. These things don't happen.

7. Refuse to dial Information on your cell phone because it costs a dollar, and try Google's phone thingy even though you know it only has commercial listings. Get the result you figured you would get.

8. Decide for some reason that you'd rather go to Pawtucket than spend a dollar dialing Information to find out where the Wakefield DMV branch is.

9. Attempt to be fancy about finding your way to the interstate, while in the process needing to turn around because you ONCE AGAIN mixed up east and west. For the love of all that is good and holy, you have three-quarters of an Ivy League education, so WHY can't you JUST ONCE get that right the first time?

10. Find interstate. Drive north. Stop at Whole Foods to pick up some coffee and a couple cookies -- one for you, and one for the so-far angelic toddler.

11. Make the requisite number of wrong turns in downtown Pawtucket before finally getting to the DMV.

12. See the number of cars in the parking lot. Ask yourself that timeless question that humans have been asking themselves since they became self-aware: Why am I here? Except, in this case, by "here" you mean "Pawtucket".

13. Sigh a mighty sigh and gather up all your children and supplies and head in to the DMV.

14. Where's the thing where you take the number?

15. Well, here's a long line for registrations. This must be where I'm supposed to go.

16. But what if this isn't right? What if I get to the front of the line and they tell me I should have taken a number somewhere and then I have to start waiting all over again some where else?

17. BAIL BAIL BAIL BAIL

18. See that there is really nobody to ask re: the take-a-number thing or the long line. Get back in line.

19. Give the kid a cookie.

20. When he finishes the cookie, open up his backpack and give him some cars, but not as many cars as he thinks you should give him, and then get down on the floor and play cars with him for a little while so he won't start screaming.

21. Bask in the admiration of some women who appreciate that you're down on the floor playing cars with a three-year-old. It's nice to have your good work appreciated.

22. Continue this for, oh, 45 minutes.

23. Finally get to the front of the line and present your complete and thorough folder of documents to the nice lady, who makes some chit-chat about how cool it is that your car is from Alaska and what you think about Sarah Palin.

24. At this juncture, the woman will see that you have everything you need.

25. Except you didn't get the signature of the second owner of the car notarized.

26. Come on, you knew something like this was going to happen.

27. And WHY THE @#&$^%^@# do you even have a second owner on the damn car? Isn't it enough that YOU own it? Why does your husband have to own it too??????? MOTHER$#*&%^&!@#&^&@#&$&&^&$#%^()*@#^&$&%^#

28. Think entirely in swears for about seven minutes.

29. Load everyone back in the car and go home.

30. Blow up your car. That way, you don't have to get it registered.

31. Be thankful for your two wonderful children who didn't throw any major fits. They are the best.

Bum Rap

2009-07-05T11:44:00.002-04:00

On a recent walk, Soren informed Chris and me that he needed "a big big big big big big stick to measure your bums." THANKS.

East Greenwich Music and Wildlife 2009

2009-06-27T19:17:00.003-04:00

Last year, it was bagpipes and owls and foxes; this year, it's brass bands and hummingbirds and deer. The bagpipers seem to have moved on to another venue, or maybe demand for bagpipe artistry is another victim of this economy, or else they all got some kind of brain infection that caused them to actually hear the instruments they were playing; in any case, Wednesday night is no longer Bagpipe Night at Ichabod House. Bummer. I guess.

I haven't seen any owls so far this summer, but I also haven't been looking for them. On the other hand, I also wasn't looking for a teeny tiny hummingbird nest in our ash tree, and I found that, so I guess I'm doing something right.

Have you ever found yourself in a position where you have to ask someone if they did something that only an idiot would do, and you know that person isn't an idiot, but the thing happened, and you can't think of a good alternate explanation, so you go ahead and ask the person anyway and make it seem like you think he's an idiot? No? Well, anyway, on a related note, I asked Chris last week whether he had happened to swerve wildly the last time he'd mowed the lawn, thus shearing off the tops of all the hostas along the edge of the backyard. With a look that said My God, what kind of idiot do you take me for? he replied that no, he had not shaved all the hostas with the lawnmower. In fact, we have been visited by a deer. I've seen her eating the shrubbery across the road every day for the past week, and the neighbor's hostas have been clipped as well, and I don't think Chris ran next door with the lawnmower just to destroy the landscaping, so all signs point to the deer.

As for the brass band, there was a small brass ensemble playing at the church ice cream social up the street. I don't have a witty story about that. We enjoyed hearing it.

Potty Mouth

2009-06-13T12:31:00.002-04:00

I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that this post actually has nothing to do with the potty.

Since Soren learned to talk about five years ago, I've been pretty good about watching my language in front of him. In fact, he's only picked up one curse from me, and it isn't one of the really bad ones, so I consider that a victory. He was taking a bath a few months ago (he's had a couple more since then), and I remembered that I'd forgotten to bring my library books back or something like that and said "Dammit!" Of course, as soon as it left my mouth, I knew it would come back to haunt me, because kids and parrots love to repeat words spoken with a lot of emotion. Leland never did learn any curses that we could decipher, but now "dammit" has entered Soren's vocabulary. He's only said it a couple times, and only busts it out when our friend Bryn is around, for some reason. She must be a bad influence. (I kid)

So yesterday, Bryn and her boys were visiting, and Soren dropped the D-bomb. I calmly called him over and let him know that it wasn't a nice word, and that if he said it again, he would get a time-out. A couple minutes later, whaddya know, I had to give him a time-out.

He sat out his three minutes without much trouble, and when the timer went off, he came down for his usual hug and non-specific apology, which prompts me to ask for a little more detail because I want to make sure he remembers what he got in trouble for in the first place:

"Sorry, Mama."

"Sorry for what?"

You know what's coming, right? Because I did.

"Sorry for saying 'dammit'."

So I sent his butt straight back into time-out.

Awww, no, not really. I just let him know that maybe next time (not that there will be one, right?) he could say "Sorry for saying a bad word" instead.

Blogging is Hard

2009-06-09T21:58:00.002-04:00

It involves typing so many WORDS all right after each other. Lots of things have been happening lately, too, which means even more words need to be typed to communicate all the happenings.

Our little boy turned THREE on June 2nd! We went to the Children's Museum with our friends Bryn, Xavi and Maxi the morning of Soren's birthday, so he got to run around and play and get all tuckered out, and then he took a three-hour nap, and then he woke up on the wrong side of the big-boy bed and whined the whole time he was opening his presents from Grammy and Grampy. Besides that, it was a very lovely day. We have since abolished naptime, since it seems to be doing more harm than good lately.

We had a little party on Sunday and invited Soren's friends Ian and Xavi (as well as their associated parents, since they needed rides, and Xavi's baby brother, since he couldn't very well stay home alone). I baked a red velvet cake (Soren had asked for a red cake after I suggested that his original request, a white cake with white frosting, might need a little color), which was well-received even though it wasn't red enough, and the boys played in the yard while the grown-ups ate oysters and grilled pizza and drank sweet sweet sangria. Your typical third birthday party. Hey, we sang Happy Birthday and ate cake, and he got presents and had fun and felt special, so we got the job done. I'll upload the (very cute) pictures soon.

As proof that he is officially a big boy, Soren is fully potty trained! He is completely diaper-free -- even at night, which blows my mind. I'm very proud, and so is he. I still can't convince him to use anything but his potty chair, though, so we'll have to work on introducing him to the full-size toilet unless we want to start carting the potty around everywhere we go. I'm not sure how to go about making that transition -- he's really resistant to it so far. At this point, though, I'm way too happy about his progress to worry about it much.

Schkernky is also doing well, and is working on rolling all over the place and sitting independently. She's also working on making my life miserable by waking up several times a night and being unwilling to fall asleep anywhere but the swing or the car. The potty training success has left me feeling like I can do anything with my crazy parenting skillz, so I am now picking a fight with Sigrid about sleep. She will learn to fall asleep in her crib. This is my mission. It is a mission fraught with much crying and wasting money on expensive Fisher Price Aquarium Bubble And Light Action Crib Soothers That Don't Seem To Be Working. But I will not back down, and I will face these obstacles with back-patting and shushing at intervals of increasing length over the course of each night, as well as a thorough review of Babies 'R Us's return policy. In the end, I will emerge victorious, with a self-soothing baby in her crib and $44.99 credited to my Visa. It will be beautiful. You just wait.

Have I Ever Told You...

2009-05-29T15:14:00.002-04:00

... my racy letterpress limerick? You won't get it, but I feel like showing it off anyway. There are a total of 9 letterpress/printing references, including some homophones.

A gal fair of form and of face
You should strive to impress, just in case
She may someday be led
To be tied up in bed
But her type likes the thrill of the chase.

Mainly I'm just posting this so that someone can get a good result if they Google "racy letterpress limerick".

In other news, if it were sunny and twenty degrees warmer, the weather would be perfect.

Go Potty Go Potty Go Potty Go

2009-05-25T17:28:00.003-04:00

We've been working on Soren's potty training for the past week, which is a little hard to sustain at the moment because I don't feel like sitting around the house all day for a week, which is what it seems to require. But we'll have to deal with it eventually, so i figure I'll start off with a half-assed effort and see how that works out. So far, it's OK -- he seems to have the necessary control and awareness of the relevant processes, so he has used the potty successfully a number of times, and yet he does not have the ability to put his diaper back on, so there's nothing he can do about his (short-lived) antipathy toward Potty Time. Grammy sent us a couple potty training videos which are purported to be successful, and Soren certainly does enjoy watching them and singing along with the songs and claiming that, like Paige and Parker Panda, he wears big kid underwear every day. That last item is a lie. We bought him some Cars underwear, but he hasn't put it on yet.

Sigrid, meanwhile, is working on the essential skills of eating, sleeping, and not eating when she's supposed to be sleeping. She's being a little difficult about these things (I'd say she's being very difficult, but I know she's being easy on us in the grand scheme of things). I haven't even tried giving her a bottle lately, since I really seem to be getting nowhere with that, and have instead been giving her some solid food. You know, the basics -- rice cereal, mashed bananas, guacamole, that kind of thing. She digs it in theory, but is not very good at keeping the food in her mouth or swallowing it. She usually gets so excited about the food you put in her mouth that she screeches and sends it oozing into her neck folds. We should probably bathe her more often than we do.

She's also being a pill about going to sleep in her crib. She'll do it 5% of the time, although she'll sleep fine in there if she's already snoozing when you put her down. The rest of the time, she will only fall asleep in the swing. For whatever reason, I really want to pick a fight with her about this, so I keep putting her in the crib, and she keeps yelling for extended periods of time with no sign of stopping until we finally cave and put her in the swing. Chris thinks it's more important to get her used to sleeping 7-hour stretches at night than it is to get her to accept the crib, and I know he's right, but it still bugs me. Why don't children just do as they're told????? Punks.

Luckily, they're cute.

I'm excited because Soren has been writing letters and a couple names ("Soren" and "Ian")! It's so cool! He even drew a picture the other day, of "a cake and an animal that wants to eat the cake". He claims to have drawn the picture for his birthday. I scanned his renditions of his and Ian's names:

"Ian" reads from right to left.

"Soren" is written kind of in a circle; the S is sideways, middle right, and the rest of the letters read clockwise from there (the "N" went off the paper a bit).

I'm so proud!

One for the Grandmothers

2009-05-10T10:01:00.000-04:00

I'd like to give a shout out to the grandmothers today! I happen to know that Nana (Kathy, my stepmom) checks every day to see if there's something new on the blog, which means she suffers disappointment about 95% of the time; sorry about that. I know Grammy (Margie, Chris's mom) checks regularly as well -- not sure if it's every day or every hour. That's a lot of pressure. Gramma (Claudia, my mom) may be subscribed to the RSS feed, so she gets some kind of trumpet fanfare every four months when I post something. The other two grandmothers might want to look into that to save time.

All three are clearly devoted to their lovely grandkids, and I should probably post more often so they can get more details about Soren's and Sigrid's daily doings. I certainly wish we could get together more often.

Happy Mother's Day, grandmothers! We love you!

Quiet Time: Now With Less Noise

2009-05-05T15:30:00.004-04:00

Soren took an hour-long nap today! Taking all the scatterable toys (i.e. his three sets of magnetic letters and the butterflies from the Elefun game) seems to have helped keep quiet time a little quieter. Chris gets full credit for that idea. Soren spends more time reading books now and less time making crashing noises. I heard him sounding out some words yesterday -- "Ssss....mmmm....eh..ull...ull...yuh. Smelly." Pretty cute.

Last night, Chris was putting Sigrid in her crib, and I wanted to share my observation that she flips onto her stomach in one direction exclusively. If you put her toward the wrong side of the crib, she gets hung up against the bars when she turns over, which makes her mad. My advice to Chris, therefore: "Put her against the far end of the crib so she can move toward the middle, because that's how she rolls."

Aww yeeeeah.

The End of an Era

2009-05-01T16:02:00.003-04:00

Soren has always been a good sleeper. He started sleeping 7 hours straight at 7 weeks old, and hasn't made a fuss about it since. He's even been excellent about taking a nice looooong nap (2.5 hours) pretty much every day in the last year.

But no more. He's only napped once this week. He's upstairs right now, actually, in the process of figuring out what "Quiet Time in Your Room" entails. (Hint: it does not entail yelling down the stairs every five minutes that you want to come downstairs)

I don't know about him, but I really need Quiet Time. Ever since he's been out of day care, I've tried to engage with him during the vast majority of his waking hours (except when Sigrid needs something or he's busy playing with other kids). I wonder sometimes if I should leave him to his own devices more often, since he hasn't been playing independently very much lately. Plus I have that other kid who seems to want attention sometimes. She seems mostly happy grabbing her toes and watching Soren do stuff, but I'm not sure that's a recipe for a fulfilling childhood. Anyway, Mama needs some alone time to recharge in the afternoon, and maybe I've been spoiled by both kids napping at the same time, but if it's wrong to be spoiled, I don't want to be right. Because being right is tiring.

We'll see how well the Quiet Time thing catches on. I've noticed he's quietest when he's doing things he's not supposed to be doing. Maybe I should stock his room with Sharpies, jars of rainbow sprinkles, and the diaper bag.

To balance out the universe, however, Sigrid slept from 9:30 to 7:30 last night! I'll take some more of that.

Singer/Songwriter

2009-04-22T14:31:00.002-04:00

One of the fun things about having kids is the fact that you can make up weird songs for them and they won't think you're insane until they turn ten. I think my talents as a lyricist have been underappreciated, maybe because my fan base consists of two people under the age of three. But I sure do know what my audience likes. Take the timeless classic The Baby Truck Song, for instance. I've posted the lyrics on the blog before, but why not trot it out again?

[Sung to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star]

Baby trucks are very nice
Kiss them once and kiss them twice
Whisper something in their ears
I don't know if trucks can hear
Baby trucks are very nice
Kiss them once and kiss them twice

I've made up a couple songs for Sigrid which don't have set lyrics, per se; they're more improvisational.

[To the tune of What Do Ye Do With a Drunken Sailor]

What do ye do with a naked baby
What do ye do with a naked baby
What do ye do with a naked baby
Earlye in the mornin'?

Put her in her crib until she's sober
Put her in her crib until she's sober
Put her in her crib until she's sober
Earlye in the mornin'!

Hey-oh, and up she rises
etc.

And this one, inspired by her nickname (Schkernky), "sung" to the "tune" of the admittedly vulgar song Berserker from Clerks:

She is wearing stripy pants, a Schkernker
And she has a fuzzy head, a Schkernker
Kicking with her tiny feet, a Schkernker
Does she need a diaper change, a Schkernker

Not all my most popular works are kid-related. There's one I like to sing when we're making toast, because our stupid toaster oven insists on making an annoying ticking-timer sound the ENTIRE TIME the heating element is on, like I need a constant reminder that it's doing something. Anyway, the song goes like this, and is sung along with the ticking.

Making toast, making toast
Here I am, I'm making toast
I hope you will like the toast
That I make for you

Would you like butter on your toast
Or would you like jelly on it
You can have anything you like
On your luscious toast

Now, the tune to The Toast Song.... well, you know the "Helllooooooo!!!" voice on Seinfeld? I think one of Jerry's girlfriends had a weird-looking belly button that looked like it was talking to him, and he made up this funny voice for the belly button, and he and George and Kramer went around for a while saying "Hellllooooooo!" to each other in the weird voice. Anyway, imagine that belly button singing a song about toast, and you pretty much have the tune of The Toast Song.

Of course, I didn't come by this songwriting talent completely out of the blue -- I have to give full credit to my dad, who is bit of an accomplished singer/songwriter himself. I'll leave you with the lyrics to one of his best works. This song meant a lot to Erica and me when we were growing up, and I think I speak for both of us when I say that it still brings tears to our eyes. Without further ado: The Dump Song.

We're goooooooo-ing to the dump
To the dump
To the dump!

We're goooooooo-ing to the dump
To the dump
To the dump!

We're goooooooo-ing to the dump
To the dump
To the dump!

[ad infinitum]

Eye Candy

2009-04-14T09:13:00.002-04:00

I have things to write about, such as Easter fun, my deep fear of wind turbines, and an analysis of why Facebook is better now for old people like me than it ever will be for subsequent generations of old people, but I don't have time to deal with any of that right now. Instead, please enjoy some lovely children.

Trash Talk

2009-04-05T09:57:00.002-04:00

I was playing Mario Kart last night for Soren's amusement, racing the courses he requested (usually Bowser's Castle and Mushroom Gorge) while trying to hold Sigrid in my lap and keep her from grabbing the controller. So my usually superior skillz were severely compromised. At one point, when I fell off a bridge into a lake of molten lava for the third time, this conversation ensued:

Soren: Mama, what's that sound?

Me: Um, what sound? I'm not sure.

Soren: That's the sound of you not playing very well.

Did I just get smacked down by a two-year-old??? Excuse me? Well, at least we know where he got the sassiness from.

Dear Sigrid

2009-04-03T17:47:00.004-04:00

Darling daughter, sweet sweet treasure,

PLEASE start sleeping through the night. It's been at least nine months since I got seven uninterrupted hours of sleep, and holy crap, I want those seven hours. That's what you can give me for Mother's Day. Except I'd like my present early, like tonight. You'll never have to get me anything ever again, as long as you can live with the guilt of never honoring me and my sacrifice on the day which Hallmark hath set aside for such an occasion.

Because I am trained as an illustrator, here is a story illustrating my tiredness:

Last night, I was tasked* with making couscous, and I put the water in the microwave and set the timer instead of the cook time. Then I realized my mistake and turned the cooking magic on, and your Daddy started laughing at me, because it turned out that I hadn't really put the water in the microwave, and it was still sitting on the counter, and I was cooking air. And that's why Daddy and I split up.

In sum, the dents between the fat rolls on your thighs are deep enough to hold a pencil in, which means you surely have enough stores to last seven hours without a meal. And your brother slept through the night starting when he was seven weeks old. Why can't you be more like your brother?

All my love,

Mama

*People who know me will be SHOCKED to see that I am fatigued enough to use "task" as a verb.

More Horrible Parenting on My Part

2009-03-25T16:34:00.002-04:00

Sigrid took her first forward-facing ride in the stroller today! She seemed to think it was a good thing, what with all her smiling and foot-kicking and lack of crying, but she's wrong. It's stunting her language development, dontcha know. It is my parental duty to interact with her AT ALL TIMES. Even now. She's been napping in the stroller for a good 2.5 hours now, but I should probably be keeping her awake so I can talk to her and keep her on the college-bound track.

Just think how much more verbal Soren could be if we'd kept him rear-facing in the stroller all this time. The mind boggles.

Big City Adventures

2009-03-24T15:24:00.006-04:00

Chris and I got back yesterday from a three-day stay in NYC! Grammy and Grampy were kind enough to come out and stay with the kiddos while Chris and I took a little time away. Sigrid has been a little iffy about eating from a bottle lately, but she apparently chose to break her hunger strike after only six hours, and thereafter took the bottle quite cooperatively. She also slept from 11 to 5 last night, maybe because she thinks I'll leave again if she doesn't start shaping up. I'll let her keep right on thinking that.

So here are some things I did in New York:

Wore the wrong shoes, as I always seem to do when going to NYC, thus crippling myself temporarily and requiring a trip to a shoe store to get something I could walk in. Nice suede Merrill slip-ons this time.
Didn't take any pictures. See next item.
Left the backpack containing the camera (the point-and-shoot, not the SLR, thank goodness), Travel Scrabble, OH AND the breast pump on the Metro-North. Still no word on whether we'll be getting it back -- it takes a few days for the MTA to process found items.
Bought a new pump -- a manual one, in case I get my fancy electric one back.
Saw this at the store where I got the new pump. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
Saw the orchid show at the Botanic Gardens.
Felt all snooty about the people taking pictures of the orchids with their little pathetic cameras. Honey, you do NOT have the minimum focal distance to pull that off.
Tried a couple different bagel places. Ess-a-Bagel was pretty good, but freaking crowded.
Kicked a Jaguar (car, not cat) whose driver was trying to verrrrry slowly mow down a crosswalk full of pedestrians in Times Square. Felt good.
Bought socks at Bloomingdale's.
Strolled the MoMA.
Tried out the whispering arch in Grand Central.
Saw Coraline 3-D, which was AWESOME.
Slept. Oh hell yeah.
Ate at Babbo (Mario Batali's restaurant). The food and service were excellent! I'll write more about it if any foodies care.
Failed to buy Soren a toy taxi. I'm sorry!
Missed the kids just enough to come home.

It's good to be home! Please send backpack-retrieval vibes.

Spring is Coming...

2009-03-16T11:08:00.001-04:00

IMG_1890.JPG
Originally uploaded by kirsten.anderson

This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

2009-03-06T11:38:00.004-05:00

See, this is what happens when I try to take advantage of a teachable moment when Soren expresses an interest in both measuring things and going outside. I hand him my good straightedge and tell him we're going to measure how deep the snow is, and let him outside while I'm putting my boots on, and then when I come outside he asks me where the ruler is, and I ask HIM where the ruler is, and it turns out he's dropped it into the crawl space under the deck, and I'm not going under there because there are dead spiders, and so my good straightedge is gone FOREVER. And I have to buy a new one. That's it! No more learning.

Note: Comments pointing out that I shouldn't have given a toddler my good straightedge will be deleted.

Postcount++

2009-03-04T15:10:00.003-05:00

Splitting my thoughts up into several short blog posts makes me seem so much more productive, if blogging counts as being productive. It's certainly more productive than Facebook Scrabble. I have six games going at once. What? Shut up.

We had something of a "Kids Say the Darnedest Things" moment yesterday. I had to take Soren and Sigrid along with me to a doctor's appointment in the morning, since the law has things to say about me leaving them at home alone, and they were their usual charming selves the whole time. Soren brought his lizard Beanie Baby (named, incidentally, Lizard Patrick Lizard) with him and made conversation with everyone who expressed an interest in him, Lizard, or Sigrid. Eventually, he remembered that doctor's visits generally involve lollipops, so I produced a root-beer-flavored Dum Dum pop for him in order to buy further good behavior.

When the visit was over, we got into the elevator with one of the receptionists, who asked Soren all the de rigeur questions about his sister ("Her name is See-gwid!") his lizard ("Lizard is my best friend!") and his lollipop. A transcript of the lollipop conversation follows. It is mercifully short.

---
Receptionist: Hey, is that lollipop good?

Soren: This lollipop is brown! Like your face!

Me: Uhhhhh...

Elevator: Ding!
---

Now, it is true that the lollipop was brown, and the receptionist also happened to be brown. And she laughed, which hopefully means she wasn't offended. And it's not like it was offensive, right? I hope? I mean, it's not like the time when I was four and I told one of my mom's friends that she had a fat butt. If he'd said something like that -- or should I say WHEN he says something like that -- I would feel horrible and might actually die right on the spot. I think it was his wording. "Like your face?" Really? He couldn't just say, "Like you?"

Okay, I can't decide whether to feel bad about it or not, so I'll stop thinking about it.

Squid Hat Claims Second Anderson Child

2009-03-04T15:07:00.002-05:00

The squid hat lives!

Why Smoke Crack When You Can Knit

2009-02-19T14:28:00.004-05:00

I bet the two habits cost about the same. I have nothing of note to report -- no current or pending hospitalizations, although I still can't hear out of my left ear -- so I figured I'd post some pictures of the stuff I've been knitting. And then you can leave comments telling me how cute it all is. I live for comments.

First: hats. I am knitting baby hats like a crazy person. I am currently working on my fourth Sweet Baby Cap, and will probably make a few more before I decide I'm bored with that pattern. It's just so cute! And stripy! And it makes Sigrid look like a spaceman (well, spacewoman)!

I also made a Bobble-Textured Hat a few months ago with some lovely merino-possum blend yarn (Australian possums, not American opossums). It finally fits Sigrid, sort of, so here's a picture.

I've also knocked out a couple sweaters... boy, it really sounds like I have too much time on my hands, doesn't it? Anyway, this one was made with the kick-ass alpaca that Amber spun and dyed herself. Talk about an awesome Christmas present. Sigrid says the sweater makes her feel super.

Finally, a moss-stitch cardigan from the supremely lovely Rowan Pipsqueaks pattern book, which is second only to Rowan Babies. Kim Hargreaves is a fantastic designer -- simple, classic sweater designs. I think I'll make a few more of this design as well to give as gifts.

Okay, now I'm going to go tell Soren to stop kicking the wall. He keeps finding new things to do in place of napping. I think I prefer it when he sings the alphabet song.

Nope, Can't Catch a Break

2009-02-10T11:33:00.002-05:00

Soren, Sigrid and I all took a fun and, ultimately, pointless trip to the "Express" Care clinic at Kent Hospital yesterday, since I've had a raging sore throat and no voice for three days, and Soren has been sick since time immemorial and finally tripped the "Go To Doctor" switch by chundering all over the coffee table yesterday morning. Sigrid, however, was just along for the ride, since she's been on amoxicillin for her ear infection and doesn't seem to have caught any major viruses in the meantime. Atta girl.

I called and made doctor's appointments for me and for Soren, which was a nice thought but very inconvenient, since they were half an hour apart at offices in two different cities. I would pay good money, incidentally, to have the pediatrician swab me for strep after taking a look at Soren. It would have saved us so much hassle. I mean, I understand why the doctor can't examine someone who isn't his patient, but that won't stop me from complaining about it.

So, yeah, I made appointments for the afternoon. In the meantime, I decided to try out the only place where someone would see both of us at the same time: "Express" Care. I should really put more quotes around that word. I guess it's technically faster than waiting for a doctor to randomly wander into your home and ask you what's wrong, but there's really nothing Express about it.

Here is the part of the story, however, where I stop complaining and start throwing praise around like it's going out of style. My two children were absolute angels while we waited a million years to be seen at the clinic. I am especially proud of Soren, who can actually make a conscious decision whether or not he wants to be good, and chose goodness despite being sick AND missing his nap. He sat nicely in the chair next to me for a while, playing with trucks, then played with trucks on the floor, then took off for the door while I was nursing Sigrid (okay, that part wasn't so good, but a helpful stranger stopped him from escaping), and then serenaded a really old guy with a charming rendition of Old MacDonald.

We were there for 2.5 hours before finally giving up and going to our appointments (Chris was good enough to come home early and take Soren to his doctor). In the end, I was a little annoyed that we waited there for nothing, but since Soren was playing happily the whole time, it almost felt like I could classify it as our outing for the day. It's just as well, since we can't really go anywhere that's actually fun until we stop shedding horrible pathogens.

As an added bonus, he likes the bubble-gum flavored amoxicillin, so there are no fights about taking his medicine. And he swallows it, unlike Sigrid, who seems to enjoy the flavor so much that she grins hugely and lets it all dribble out of her mouth. Sigh.

For Your Amusement

2009-02-03T13:19:00.002-05:00

A limerick, inspired by Sigrid's ear infection:

There once was a doctor named Titus
Whose laughter was boist'rous and riotous
He about blew a gasket
When a patient once askéd
"Tell me, why does my ear hurt, O Titus?"

Go Ahead. Guess Where I Was Yesterday.

2009-02-02T15:17:00.004-05:00

No, really!!!! Guess!!!!!!!!! I will give you ten million dollars if you guess wrong!!!!!!!!!!!!

All the exclamation points are probably a clue to the level of crazy to which I have been pushed. Yes, friends, the answer is: The Hospital. &*^#$%*&^#$%

Sigrid was absolutely inconsolable yesterday morning, except at a few key points which I will get to later. Mainly, she was screaming a lot and refusing to nurse. So we called the pediatrician's office and got an appointment to come right in. Yes, on a Sunday! How sweet is that? A very nice feature. But you know what would be a nicer feature of this particular office? If the pediatrician on duty would actually do a thorough freaking examination before deciding she doesn't know what's wrong, but since Sigrid is clearly miserable, she needs blood work and a spinal tap (SPINAL TAP) and should be taken to the ER.

When a baby is miserable for no apparently acute reason (i.e. no wounds or broken bones), it's probably one of a few things: ear infection, UTI, or hair tourniquet. The doctor barely looked at Sigrid's ears, mentioned the possibility of a UTI but didn't do anything about it, and never even looked for a hair tourniquet (I didn't look either, but I'd forgotten about that possibility -- the ER nurse did a thorough hair-tourniquet search, though). I was a little too frazzled by the screaming baby to realize how half-assed the exam was, so when the doctor said we should go to the ER, I figured it was just the way my universe has been working lately, so I went.

When we got there, there were two kids in hospital beds IN THE WAITING ROOM. And a million other people in chairs. This was pretty much looking like a six-hour wait, which I've experienced before, and it's not fun, especially with no food or distractions -- I hadn't exactly planned for this when leaving the house.

I went up to the registration desk, and of course, Sigrid was sleeping peacefully at this point. Babies are a lot like cars that way. They work great when you bring them to the mechanic. The nurse asks why we're there, and I have to explain that it's because my daughter is inconsolable, except for the fact that she's, you know, sleeping peacefully. So I look like an idiot. Great. And there's always the possibility that I AM an idiot, and she was just a little fussy and is fine now, and I'll be sitting in the ER waiting room for no reason. Kind of like the person next to me, who was there because her four-year-old had a 1/2" cut on his forehead that wasn't even actively bleeding. Maybe she just really wanted to get out of a Super Bowl party or something.

Luckily (?), Sigrid started crying again right on cue when she was taken into triage, so we managed to convince the nurse that there was probably something wrong. She was having trouble settling Sigrid down enough to hear lung sounds (the non-screaming kind of lung sounds, anyway), so she called in another nurse with a Baby Whisperer reputation, and that nurse did an OK job of quieting Sigrid down, but then pissed me off by suggesting that it was probably gas. Everyone blames crying on gas. Whatever.

There was a lovely moment in all this, though: after I'd been walking around with poor screaming Schkernky for a while, a woman came up and gave me a bottle of water, totally out of the blue. That was really kind. I'll have to pay that forward.

And more kindness: Chris drove all the way up to the hospital with food and distractions (knitting, video games) for me even though it was Soren's nap time and there was a risk of wrecking the rest of the day by screwing up his nap. Thank you, dear. I'll plan on paying that back rather than forward.

After not too terribly wrong -- perhaps they wanted to move the screaming to a different room? -- we got a triage room in the back and were seen fairly promptly by a doctor. This doctor did wacky things like cleaning the wax out of Sigrid's ears so she could actually SEE something with the otoscope! How crazy! During the ear cleaning, the screaming increased a hundredfold, which was a clue to the problem, and then the doctor finally saw that there was inflammation and gross stuff in there, so it was ruled to be an ear infection with ruptured tympanic membrane, which sounds awful but is apparently routine. Some Tylenol, bubble-gum flavored antibiotics, and we were on our way. Except for a crappy period today when I waited too long to give Sigrid her dose of Tylenol, she's been feeling better. End of story. All's well that ends well. Oh, except for the four-hour wait and hundred-dollar copay that we could have been spared if the pediatrician had examined Sigrid's ears. Right. I was holding on to my anger about that long enough to blog about it, and now I think I can let go. Closure is a beautiful thing.

Happily, we got to go up to Brian and Edith's house for a Super Bowl party in the evening! It was really nice to get out of the house and see friends and eat pigs in blankets. Much nicer than being at the hospital.

Countdown to Crazy

2009-01-22T12:28:00.004-05:00

Having a two-year-old has really changed my standards; somehow, being at home all day with a newborn is pretty much like being at home alone. It must be all that sleeping. And the lack of tantrums, movie requests, snack spills, and refusals to put on one's shoes.

My "alone" days are coming to an end, however -- next week is Soren's last week of daycare. Originally, I was actually working while he was in school three days a week, and then it was really handy to have a familiar place for him to go while everyone else was busy being hospitalized, but now the funding and excuses have dried up, so he'll be back with boring old mom full-time. I want to make sure I don't completely give up on giving him structure (i.e. bossing him around and making him do activities) during the day, since I think his time at school has really given him better listening and social skills, but I'm not totally sure how to do that at home; maybe I should set up a "school" area somewhere in the house. Or maybe I'm overthinking this.

I also figure the recipe for stay-at-home-mom success is not to do too much staying at home; we'll be going to lots of play groups (I'm a member of three local Meetups... and haven't done anything with any of them for three months, but I have great excuses) and will spend lots of time wandering around our fabulous neighborhood, with its kick-ass new and improved playground. I have really high hopes for that playground. I think it'll be a good place to pick up chicks.

It sounds like I'm totally dreading this transition, which isn't really true. First of all, Soren is a complete laugh riot/sweetheart/amazing supergenius, and I love hanging out with him 97% of the time. The other 3% tends to use up 99% of my patience, of course, but I'm working on that. I'm looking forward to taking him out and being more social with other moms and kids, and if I can get my act together, I think we'll have a good time doing school-type stuff together (lest you get the wrong impression, let me assure you that he'll be slumming it with all the other public-school kids as soon as he turns 5... I wouldn't want to disappoint you, Amber).

Look how cute he is!

As for the other child -- the one who sleeps so much she still barely counts as company -- she's doing quite well, and has completely recovered from RSV and bronchiolitis. She does have two major periods of wakefulness during the day (morning and evening... such a reasonable schedule) and tends to be really jolly during both. I still haven't managed to get a good picture of her insanely cute open-mouth grin, though. It's hard to look away long enough to go get the camera when she's feeling super happy. This is the closest I've gotten:

Which is a big improvement over this:

Chris is back to teaching again, which fills him with joy, because he lives for nothing more than watching the spark of knowledge ignite in an undergrad's eyes. Right, dear?

As for me, I'm doing only kind of OK health-wise, and have found myself in the weird position of being glad to find out that I've had C. diff for the past three weeks. The first C. diff test, a couple weeks ago, was negative, which meant that I was having symptoms of an ulcerative colitis flare that weren't being helped at all by crazy doses of steroids and mesalamine (have you ever taken 7.6 GRAMS per day of any particular drug?). I didn't really like that concept, because there's really not a lot more they can do to control a flare. So when I was retested for C. diff and it finally came back positive, I was bizarrely relieved, since I can take antibiotics for that and it will go away. And probably come back again later. But whatever.

Ooh, and I have a colonoscopy coming up on Monday! Because I am now old and have old person health problems! Prep involves drinking a gallon of salt water in the span of about an hour. But the salt water comes with flavor packets! Cherry, orange, pineapple, or lemon-lime! Thrilling. Maybe I'll mix them all together to make fruit punch. It couldn't possibly be more disgusting than one of the flavors alone.

On the bright side, being sick for so long has gotten me back into my pre-pregnancy jeans faster than I ever thought possible. Hooray for being thin at any cost! I have my priorities straight!

When the Cat's away...

2009-01-16T20:28:00.011-05:00

When Soren and I went to the bookstore on Thursday (a common retreat where he can play with their Thomas set and I can get coffee), he wound up sitting on the story stage and sounding out the name of a book-of-the-week, "If You Give a Cat a Cupcake." This is one of the installments of the "If You Give..." series, in which the title is an opening line that leads to a series of ludicrous events. The second page suggests that if you give a cat a cupcake, he will surely want some sprinkles to put on it.

--- --- ---

I took Thursday mostly off from work to give Soren a mental health day, because he's really not up to doing school more than two days in a row, and he'd gone Monday-Wednesday. I slept until he called me in the morning, since I spent the previous night at the hospital, which was less than completely fulfilling, sleepwise. After breakfast, I left Soren to watch his alphabet movie (Leapfrog's Letter Factory, which he loves) so I could take a shower. When I came back downstairs, the living room was empty, and it was eerily quiet.

I walked through and searched the dining room and my office for my charge, and finally checked the kitchen. Soren wasn't immediately visible, but the baking cabinet was slightly ajar. (The baking cabinet is the one he's standing in front of in this picture, so he could (almost) entirely conceal himself; the child lock had been left ajar--as in the picture--by a certain resident of the house who responds to Momma.)

What could be in there? The goldfishies are in the other cabinet. This one has, mostly, 1) bread 2) single malt scotch and 3) vinegar.

I approached the cabinet and called out, "Soren." He immediately turned around, with the door swinging open, and asked, "Can I have a roll?" pointing the grinder rolls near where he was standing. His fingers, however, told a different story. They were, though he was looking at me, plunging in and out of a half-gone jar of multicolored sprinkles (jimmies, for those of you from New England) resting on a chest-height (to him) shelf; he was hiding in the cupboard and eating sprinkles out of the package whilst I was cleansing myself.

I was utterly unsure what to do. My first reaction was that this was hilarious and I should take his picture, but the tone was entirely incorrect because what he was doing was wrong, and he clearly knew it. However, he had not received a warning about the specific behavior of eating all the sprinkles, which is prerequisite for a two-minute time out, the capital punishment of toddler sanctions. So, I had to choke down my laughter and somehow express disapprobation. He had, fortunately for me, spilled quite a few a of the sprinkles, so I was able to focus on the mess he made (after throwing out the rest of the bottle), and his responsibility for helping to clean it up.

But I did have to call Kirsten to get the laugh out.

Home!

2009-01-16T12:37:00.002-05:00

Sigrid is home! Yay!!!! She's currently enjoying a little wiggle time on the living room rug, staring at the ceiling beam. Ah, the comforts of home.

Moving On Up

2009-01-15T10:16:00.002-05:00

...to the fourth floor! Sigrid's out of the ICU!

When I walked into her room last night after my stint at home, it seemed like she looked a little different -- it took me a minute to realize that was because she didn't have anything on her face! They'd taken her cannula out, and she was breathing room air again (and a lot happier for it). She's been off oxygen since then, and has only required one breathing treatment (epinephrine at 5 AM), so our doctor says she's on track to go home tomorrow. Yay!!!!

Sadly, we're back to sharing a room. I'd figured we 'd be shoo-ins for another single, what with the whole contagion issue, but apparently they're not concerned about that. Oh well. It's not so bad in and of itself, but there's no window on our side of the room, so it's a little... dark.

Well, I should go make sure she's sleeping and not forcing her nurse to be on paci duty. As always, thanks for all the good wishes.

Improving+++

2009-01-14T23:04:00.002-05:00

Sigrid is moving out of the ICU and into the regular hospital this evening, ahead of schedule. Everyone is very pleased with her progress from where she was Monday.

I decided the trick with the chair is not to think of it as crappy bed, but rather like I somehow wound up in business class. I used my airline eye mask and ear plugs, and just like on the plane, there are a lot of bonging noises, babies crying, and people to bring you water.

Improving++

2009-01-14T19:59:00.005-05:00

Sigrid's oxygen has been turned way down, and she gets to nurse again! She may be able to move out of the ICU tomorrow and onto a regular patient floor, and then... maybe a day or two until she's free? I don't want to jinx anything.

Last night, I got to sleep in my own bed while Chris took one for the team and slept on the Chair That Turns Into What They Call a Bed But Which Is Pretty Much Just a Flat Chair. So I'm grateful for that. I'm back on third shift tonight, but hopefully Sigrid will be more comfortable than she's been the past few nights.

Improving

2009-01-13T12:03:00.002-05:00

Sigrid is looking better today -- her breathing is a lot less labored, especially when she's sleeping, which she's been doing all morning. We had a rough couple hours last night between 2 and 4; she was hungry (they'd shut her feeding tube off yesterday just in case they had to intubate), which understandably made it hard for her to settle down and sleep, and she was coughing a lot. I tried to hold her to help her settle down, but she just got madder, probably because my main role in her life is feeding her when she's hungry, and I keep refusing to do that for some reason. Chris apparently gets big smiles when he shows up; I get looks that range from mild puzzlement to YOU IDIOT WHY AREN'T YOU FEEDING ME?????????

Anyway, she was worked up, and I was worked up because I couldn't calm her down, and they had to suction her a couple times, and it was all a big mess. They finally decided to start feeding her again, perhaps at my insistence (I'd been asking them to do that all afternoon/evening, since it would help her sleep and stay calm), but probably because it was the Medically Right Thing To Do.

We both managed to get some rest eventually, although I did feel the need to get up and not look like an uncombed hill person by the time the doctors were making their rounds, so I've gotten significantly less sleep than Sigrid has. They're hoping to wean her off the high-flow oxygen today and maybe let her nurse; keep your fingers crossed!

This is Getting Ridiculous

2009-01-12T12:58:00.004-05:00

Could I have jinxed everything more effectively with the first paragraph of my previous post? Cue the medical emergency. It's Sigrid this time; seems the girls are in charge of the medical drama in our household. She contracted RSV from The Vector (by which I mean Soren), which manifests more or less as a cold in children/adults, but which can cause bronchiolitis in infants, as is the case here. She's not in any danger or anything -- she just needs regular suction and some supplemental oxygen to keep her from tiring out (her breathing is very labored). She was admitted to Hasbro on Saturday, and I'm not going to venture much of a guess about when she'll be discharged except to say that it won't be tomorrow.

It's hard to explain how I feel about all this. I'm sad that she has to be here, covered in wires and unable to nurse, and I really want to bring her home and make her smile again... and at the same time, I'm not worried, exactly, which seems strange to say when my baby is in the ICU. I guess I've just heard enough reassurances about RSV and the way it runs its course to feel okay about her being treated here. The illness generally peaks in severity around day 5 (which is today, I think, but I'm not positive), and babies with RSV just tend to need medical care during the worst part so they don't get a more severe infection or get too worn out to eat. So here we are. Wish us luck.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-05T14:29:00.003-05:00

2009 has been a lovely year so far. There haven't been any medical emergencies yet, Chris found some dry aged ground beef at Whole Foods last night, and both kids are napping at the moment. That's my recipe for a good year. Oh, but we're out of rum. That's not so good.

Anyway, we've had a busy couple weeks, what with the holidays and all, but we not only survived -- we enjoyed ourselves! A lot! Grammy, Grampy, Aunt Rachel, and Uncle Dude came out to visit for Christmas, and we enjoyed a lovely, low-key holiday with them. Soren and Sigrid were treated very well by Santa and pretty much everyone in the family except their parents. Well, that's not totally true -- Chris made an awesome Lego table for Soren, which is the first decent gift he's gotten from us so far in his lifetime (besides love and a college fund, but we'll see about the college fund... it's not doing so well at the moment). Anyway, Chris and I didn't give Sigrid anything for Christmas, because we are lazy, and because she is a baby and was destined to get a million presents from everyone else in the world. The siblings exchanged very thoughtful gifts; Sigrid gave Soren a set of translucent Duplo blocks for building on his new table, and Soren gave Sigrid an Uglydoll which he picked out himself. The Uglydoll is actually quite a sweet gift, since Soren has loved his own Uglydoll (which he named Mimi) since he got it from Grammy and Grampy in 2007, and he wanted to get Sigrid one to match. He brings Sigrid her Mimi when she gets upset (and occasionally when she's not). What a good big brother. Here they are with their Mimis.

And here's the only decent family portrait we managed to get, with the requisite crying baby and uncooperative toddler.

A couple days after Chris's family left, we packed up the kids and went up to New Hampshire for the annual New Year's festivities. We'd originally thought we weren't going to go, since two kids seems to be a lot, but then we realized that we were tired of sitting around at home, we wanted to see our friends, Soren could probably handle a few nights in a twin-size bed, and Sigrid sleeps just fine in her car seat whether she's in her own room or not. So we went for it, and it worked out pretty well. We took up more than our fair share of space, since Soren really can't sleep in the same room as a baby that needs to nurse and have her diaper changed twice a night, but Seth (and everyone else) was quite gracious about us taking up half the house. We all quite enjoyed ourselves during the day as well; various people were happy to play with Soren and hold Sigrid, and I was happy to let them do it while I played games and knitted and generally pretended I didn't have any kids. Soren took a few walks outside with Chris, Adam and Margot, and Chris got some great pictures:

There's more, but Soren's awake and yelling "MAMA WHERE ARE YOU RIGHT NOW I'M ALL WAKED UUUUUUP," so perhaps I should post more later on.

Nickname Tournament

2008-12-28T21:15:00.005-05:00

In our family, it's important that infants have a nickname that's good enough to make even the crying during the day's 14th diaper change seem endearing. Kirsten is usually the designated nicknamer, and she does pretty well (Soren was Snuffles a.k.a. Mr. Snuffleton, based on the sounds he made during his first cold). However, Kirsten's absence during Sigrid's first week home allowed competitors to arise, and some of them will not die.

While Kirsten was gone, I dubbed the small, squirmy thing Gridder Critter, which rolled into The Griddler (with associated fussing sounds characterized as "griddling"). Since Kirsten's returned, and Sigrid's picked up a cold, Kirsten's added Schkernky [it's pronounced just the way it's spelled. -Kirsten] to the mix, echoing some of Sigrid's lovely snorty breathing sounds.

Kirsten uses Schkernky almost exclusively, and I mix Schkernky and Gridder Critter. Soren, however, is a firm advocate of The Griddler. Enough so that if he hears Kirsten refer to Sigrid as Schkernky, he says, "No Mama. Don't say that. Say 'Griddler'." Perhaps he remembers the indignity of being referred to as a sound you make when you have a cold, or perhaps he just prefers his sister's nickname allude to one of the better Batman villains.

Conversations with Soren

2008-12-19T15:01:00.002-05:00

It seems like Soren has become a Really Big Boy all of a sudden, at least conversationally. He's been talking really well for a long time now, but I find myself wondering at the complexity, or at least the eloquence, of his statements lately.

We're enjoying a snowy day at home, so I lit a fire and turned on the Christmas music. I was puttering around a little, and Soren said, "Mommy, can you come in the living room?" So I poked my head in, and he was lying on the couch, looking pretty content. "Will you sleep on the couch with me, Mommy? There's room over there to be comfortable for you. You can put your head on that pillow and I will put my head on this pillow. And then we can look at the fire. It's nice to sit and look at the fire to make it warm and comfortable for us."

Well, then. Hard to say not to that.

So we lay on the couch together for a little while, and although he'd mentioned sleeping and asked me to close my eyes, we seem to have moved on from that plan to a different plan wherein he takes balls of yarn out of my knitting bag and pulls them all over the house to make an enormous tangle. Hey, at least it isn't the yarn I'm using at the moment. Maybe untangling everything can be our family activity for the evening.

Helping...as Much as Possible

2008-12-18T10:18:00.004-05:00

Shortly after I got home yesterday, Sigrid woke and began crying for dinner #1. Soren was playing nearby. I looked toward Sigrid and said, "Mama will be out soon to feed you."

Soren jumped up and ran toward Sigrid and pulled up his shirt. I asked him if he was showing Sigrid his belly. He said yes, because that's what Mama does to help Sigrid stop crying.

Walking in on My Wife

2008-12-16T22:04:00.012-05:00

Kirsten assures me that there's some sort of demand out that for my version of the birth story. So, I'll temporarily suspend my governing principle that whatever the father does during labor and delivery doesn't matter (e.g., boiling water) and give you a little window into my mind.

First, I have to reveal that Kirsten is off on certain elements of the timeline. I can't fault her for this, as she wasn't so much near clocks or paying close attention to them, but as I was teaching at the time, I was keeping very careful track of each minute. In the event of later litigation, I have eight students who can testify as to when I walked out of class.

1:40 (Kirsten pegs at 1:20) My cell vibrates with an immediate second call from Kirsten, which we'd previously agreed was to be reserved for an I-should-walk-out-of-class (one I'm teaching) baby-related scenario. I interrupt trying to figure out how to get through Halton draws before class ends at 1:45 to answer the phone in the hall. Kirsten tells me her water has broken, but since she's not contracting, I don't need to head home immediately.

1:41 I apologize to my class that the "leave immediately" alert was triggered for a non-leave immediately scenario. Go on to explain how Halton draws can expedite numerical integration in the likelihood function of random coefficients logit models.

1:48 Get back to my office after class. Call Kirsten back to see how she's doing, and see if it's perhaps time to let my parents know they need to get on the next plane from Ohio (they're on call to take care of Soren while we're in the hospital). Kirsten suggests that perhaps it's best if I come home now.

1:50 Fire an email to my 2:00 meeting with a publisher rep that I would have to cancel because my wife's water just broke. In retrospect, this is at least as effective as the dead grandmother excuse.

1:52 Call my mother and tell her to get on a plane. She sets off to find my father.

1:53 Shave legs. Why...oh.

1:55 Pack my stuff and walk out of my office for the 30 minute commute home. On the way, I think about what I'm going to do with the inevitable time in labor before we go up to the hospital: the last place you want to be before it's time to be at the hospital is at the hospital, because they just leave you in a poorly-designed waiting room. For Soren's birth, I'd planned a bunch a distraction activities for Kirsten; I was a little behind in that respect for Sigrid.

2:29 Pull into the driveway. Collect myriad empty coffee cups from my car. Throw the recyclable ones into the bin on the way into the house.

2:30 Open the door and slip the non-recyclable cups in the garbage (I recall this specifically...it was important these be properly thrown away).

Pause, as I hear incongruent crying. It isn't Kirsten, and it isn't Soren (who should still be at school). I turn the corner when Kirsten calls, "Chris...", and she's standing in the dining room holding...the crying thing. "What is crying, and why is Kirsten holding that really realistic doll?" ran though my mind (really...that stuck me as more sensible than she'd just had the baby in the dining room and was holding it). Then I saw the umbilical cord and what happened became a little more clear. Kirsten reassured me "She's OK, she's OK," as I'm sure she saw a bazillion thoughts run across my face.

Now, I'm a planner and a strategizer, and I deal with these situations by doing things...what needs to be done. But this was a situation in which I never expected to find myself, and hence I had no idea what to do (though I did remind myself that, in fact, there was no need for boiled water). Fortunately, Kirsten intervened and told me to go upstairs and get a towel...that seemed sensible.

On the way back down, I was true to my academic nature and grabbed the pregnancy book to see what it suggested I do in this situation. It reassured me that sudden, unexpected at-home births were wonderful plot devices, but didn't happen enough in real life to worry about.

Failing to find satisfaction there, I called the OB's office, where are recorded voice informed me I was second in line.

I had hesitated to call 911 because it wasn't a life-or-death emergency, but as I sat on hold with the OB, I realized I was going to have to transport this tiny, tiny baby in my car if it wasn't in a rescue, and somehow getting her into a carseat seemed challenging and inappropriate. Also, if she was going to be more than 28" from Kirsten in transit, the cord was going to have to be cut and a placenta delivered. I wasn't trained in this, and the book clearly wasn't going to be much help. So, I hung up on the OB and called 911.

In the very few minutes while we waited for the ambulance, I did take a minute to hug Kirsten and look at the baby, and even to snap a few pictures. When rescue arrived, there were no fewer than seven paramedics and supervisors in the delivery room, so it was a bit crazy.

I did get to cut Sigrid's cord, and hold her briefly while they wrapped up Kirsten. When they drove off--lights and sirens--with my girls, I rolled up the rug, set about making after-school arrangements for Soren and took off for the hospital.

Fattening Up Nicely

2008-12-16T11:32:00.002-05:00

Sigrid, that is. I'm not sure about the other members of the family. She weighs 8 pounds! She's only in the 20th (I think) percentile for weight, which is weird after having a 90th percentile baby the first time around.

Soren is a great big brother -- he's actually actively nice to Sigrid, which is more than I dared hope for. When she cries, he says "It's okay, Sigrid! There's nothing to cry about." If she cries a lot, he starts saying "NO, Sigrid," which isn't as sweet, but we can only expect so much from him. He's also really into helping -- when I ask him if he'll do me a big favor by throwing a diaper away, he says, "Oh! Yes, yes!" and hops right to it. That's just the kind of attitude I like in my child laborers.

Chris is happy to report that he's getting over the cold from hell. I am sad to report that the cold has been passed on to me. Sigrid has it too, but she doesn't have sinuses, so she gets no sympathy from me. She's mainly just more snorty than usual... and her baseline snortiness is pretty high, so there's some major snorting going on around here. Schnerk.

Cute Baby/Big Brother/Daddy/Friends Alert

2008-12-10T18:34:00.002-05:00

Some can't-miss pictures!

Back Home Again, Hopefully For a Long Time

2008-12-10T11:13:00.002-05:00

We're back from the hospital after an incident-free (if fussy) night.

I'd have to rate Hasbro a 9 for hallway artwork, a 3 for computer access (couldn't get wireless in my room, but the Ronald McDonald House parents' lounge had a couple computers), a 1 for room comfort and privacy (shared a room with an appendectomy patient), and an 8 for food quality and access (there were free snacks in the parents' lounge and a 24-hour Au Bon Pain on campus). Oh, and a 7 for clown availability.

Continuing My Hospital Tour of Rhode Island: a PTSD Story

2008-12-09T13:47:00.003-05:00

It's not me this time! It's Sigrid. She's fine, everything's fine, but she had to have a frenulectomy (very minor surgery to correct tongue-tiedness) and is being monitored for 24 hours. At the hospital. And so I'm here with her. At the hospital. It's Hasbro Children's Hospital this time, so at least I get to check another facility off my life list. Very exciting.

So Sigrid's doing well, but I'm a slight mess. When we took her in to the otolaryngologist (nice, huh?) last week, we thought the doctor would just snip her frenulum in the office, since no one [on the internet, natch] seemed to think the procedure was a big deal. Heck, when the pediatrician at Kent noticed Sigrid was tongue-tied, she pretty much offered to get a pair of scissors and take care of it right then with no preparation whatsoever. That seemed a little... barbaric, so we held out to talk to our own pediatrician. He referred us to the otolaryngologist, where, as I said, I thought we'd get everything taken care of.

The doctor looked at Sigrid, agreed we should have the frenulectomy done, and then said, "Here's the bad news. We don't do that procedure here." After two hours of waiting, that's a bummer, but um... OK.

She went on, "You'll have to take her over to Hasbro so she can get some anaesthesia."

At this point, I'd been out of the hospital for less than 48 hours. Hasbro. That's a.... hospital.

"And then she'll need to stay under observation for 24 hours."

Which means I will need to stay with her. In. The. Hospital.

I could see Chris giving me little glances. I may or may not have started twitching.

The night I'd gotten home from Women and Infants', I watched Heroes on TV, and one of the characters ended up in the emergency room. They showed her in the bed, hooked up to the IV, with the little table next to her, and that pink ice water pitcher was on the table, and I couldn't deal with it. I could not look at the pink pitcher. And now, here I am, back in a hospital, and there's that pink pitcher again. I have a real problem with that pitcher.

I cried for a little while this morning when they brought us into the room and put her in the metal crib and showed me to my uncomfortable chair which may or may not turn into a bed. I really would like to go home. I at least have enough perspective to see that this is for Sigrid's good, not mine, and so I need to suck it up, but I'm really looking forward to this night being over. Anyway, at least I'm not hooked up to anything, or wearing a johnny, and I can get up and find food whenever I want, and I brought some knitting, so I can make useless baby socks all day long (the plan is: make a sock, put it on Sigrid, she will lose it, then I will make another one).

After this, I am done with hospitals. Let's hope life cooperates.

A Sure Sign of the End Times

2008-11-30T16:26:00.003-05:00

...or else the Percocet is affecting my brain. In either case, I actually thought today's Cathy was kind of funny. (Make sure you look at the 11/30/08 strip, because I'm guessing the strips on subsequent dates might not be, you know, funny)

They tell me I'll be able to go home tomorrow! It's a little intimidating, since I haven't been doing anything but sitting and taking pills for so long, but I think I'll be able to ease back into a normal routine pretty soon. It'll be nice to spend an entire consecutive 24-hour period with my daughter (yes, even the middle-of-the-night parts). Also, I'm really missing Soren, and I hear he misses me, too. Chris has been amazing through all this, and we're so thankful to have had help from Erica (who was finally released from duty on Friday), and now my mom, who flew out on Friday night.

Well, I suppose I should rest while I can... it's almost time to start doing all the things mothers of two have to do.

Hanging in There

2008-11-29T11:47:00.003-05:00

Hey. I'm doing OK, but will have to stay in the hospital for at least another couple days. Watching TV and sleeping is about all I'm good for these days, but I thought I'd at least post something. I'd update my Facebook status, but the hospital is now blocking FB. So lame. Anyway, wish me luck in the major goal of being able to eat normally again! I'm looking forward to feeling better and getting back home to my family.

Two Steps Forward...

2008-11-26T08:42:00.003-05:00

[The following is high on narrative content]

Sigrid: Was discharged from the hospital Monday. Monday night was pretty good, especially once Kirsten figured out that she wanted her arms bound in a swaddle (Soren wanted just legs), since their flailing impaired her going to sleep. At today's first appointment with her pediatrician she was back within an ounce of her birth weight. She has been pronounced in good shape. And very impatient.

Soren: Is still not sure what to make of his sister, so he mostly ignores her. But, he really likes the two trucks she brought him when she came home (thanks for letting us appropriate your present for that purpose, Mom and Dad), so she can't be all bad. His teacher said he smiled while answering questions about her at school yesterday. And yesterday evening, he asked me if Sigrid would like a goldfishy. Perhaps later.

Kirsten: Was relieved to be home with everyone, but she was sent straight from her GI appointment yesterday back to the hospital for her digestive issues. She's quite uncomfortable--since they're making her take antibiotics on an empty stomach, in addition to the discomfort of the underlying problems--and misses being with Sigrid (and the rest of us). We're hoping that now that she's not pregnant, they can actually treat the issues to resolution.

Me: I'm a little tired since I'm managing Soren and Sigrid (including the nighttime feedings; the hospital will let Sigrid stay with Kirsten, but Kirsten's in no shape). I'm relieved Sigrid seems to be holding it together eating from a bottle and sleeping in reasonable stretches at night. I curse the baby monitor for interrupting one of my stretches by beeping loudly for a new battery at 3:30am (and requiring not just a screwdriver, but a nonstandard screwdriver, to access at the battery compartment). And I'm glad Kirsten's sister is here to pitch in a little, and prevent Kirsten from going stir crazy.

I Hope I Don't Jinx Anything With This Post

2008-11-24T09:47:00.004-05:00

Thanks for all the comments :^) My self-esteem is at an all-time high. Which is helpful, because I've been, shall we say, riding a bit of a bummer for the past few days. First, the good news: Sigrid comes home today!!!! News previously thought to be bad, but was really just caused by a false alarm: she's still a patient here at the hospital (for another hour or so), which you may have guessed already, unless you thought she was coming home today from her first Caribbean cruise or something.

Because Sigrid really can't get enough drama -- she got addicted to it with that first preterm contraction -- she decided to test positive for a blood infection on the evening of the 21st. It was a lovely scene; I was watching Jeopardy with Chris, holding little Sigrid as she snored and squeaked, and then an RN came in, told us she would have to stay in the NICU for a week due to a positive blood culture, and TOOK HER AWAY. There was more sympathy and explanation than I'm recording here, but that's mainly what I remember. They took a second blood sample to rule out contamination in the original culture, but were going to start her on IV antibiotics and put her on monitors until Friday the 28th. I was, shall we say, a wreck.

The next morning, after some sleep and a few visits to the nursery, I felt more sane and was able to look at the positives. First, Sigrid was not showing any signs of illness, so they clearly caught whatever-it-was early. Second, even though I was being discharged, the hospital was going to allow us to stay in our room as boarders, FOR FREE. Plus, it turned out, they were going to continue to give me meals. They'd move us or kick us out if a patient needed the room, of course, but wow -- what a generous policy. I guarantee that we wouldn't have had that option if we'd ended up at Women & Infants' (as we'd planned before the whole "birth plan" went out the window). Third, there was a chance -- a small chance -- that the second culture would come back negative, and she'd never really had an infection at all. We tried not to get our hopes up too much on that front.

So, in short, I prepared for a week of nursing Sigrid in the NICU and pumping and storing milk so I might be able to come home for a night or two (also as insurance in case they had to kick me out of my free room).

In the end, obviously, the second blood culture still hadn't shown any growth after 48 hours, so she's been given a clean bill of health! And we get to go home! To a different kind of madness, I'm sure (since we'll suddenly have to start taking care of two kids at the same time), but it will be our own sweet family madness, and Sigrid will finally be allowed to wear cute clothes. And isn't that what's truly important?

The Birth Story

2008-11-21T15:58:00.005-05:00

Thanks for all the well-wishes! Sigrid, Chris, Soren and I are doing well, and I'm currently awaiting Chris' return to the hospital with the new big brother, who will finally be meeting his sister for the first time. In terms of Soren's level of interest in Sigrid, I'm guessing it will be somewhere between "I want some crackers" and "Can I push this button?" We'll see...

So, let's get down to business. The Birth Story: Timeline Form. If you're squeamish, or male, I assure you that the only slightly gross word in the story will be "placenta," and I won't be describing it or anything, so you should be able to handle this.

Yesterday morning, 8:30: Drop Soren off at daycare, then return home and read the paper. Consider taking nap.

9:00: OB's office calls to reschedule my 3:15 appointment, since the doctor's going home early; can I come in right now? Sure. I suppose the nap can wait.

9:30: Routine appointment; I'm 3-4 centimeters dilated, but still haven't felt any major contractions, so we'll just wait and see what things look like at my next appointment on Tuesday.

11:00: Return home; take nap.

1:15: Awaken from nap; remember that I have to send out a platemaking file for an invitation client.

1:16: Stop to use the bathroom on my way to my office, whereupon my water breaks. Hmmm. Well, apparently I'll be having this baby sometime in the next 24 hours.

1:17: Start putting together the platemaking order.

1:20: Finish order, call Chris. Inform him that my water has broken, but I haven't gone into labor yet, so I'll let him know when he needs to come home.

1:25: Decide it might be a good time to shower, since I won't want to do it while I'm in labor (based on how it went last time).

1:34: Shave legs. Why not?

1:35: Get out of shower. Chris calls. I have a contraction while talking to him, and it's kind of owie, so I tell him maybe it's a good time to come home.

1:50: Having gotten dressed, I decide to head downstairs, since the contractions are getting painful enough that I won't want to use the stairs pretty soon.

1:52: Call my mom; tell her I'm in labor.

1:53: Call my dad; tell him I'm in labor. End call abruptly with "I have to go," since I don't want to scare him by yelling OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAGGHHHHH into the phone.

1:54: Start contracting and making loud noises in earnest.

2:03: Maybe I should start timing these. Move into the dining room to lean against a chair.

2:04: Get back on the floor.

2:10: OH MY GOD CHRIS WILL YOU PLEASE GET HOME NOWWWWWWWWWWWW

2:12: I might call 911 if I could get up and get the phone. Alas.

2:15: Okay... there's no way I'm having the urge to push. It's way too soon for that.

2:16: This is insane. It's not time to push.

2:17: Perhaps I should think about removing my pants.

2:18: Issue vocalizations that make it sound like I'm an extra in a slasher film.

2:19: Perhaps I should prepare to catch the baby.

2:19:30: That seems to be a head.

2:20: Hey, there's the rest.

2:20:01: HOLY CRAP I JUST HAD THE BABY BY MYSELF ON THE DINING ROOM FLOOR.

--

Whereupon I took a few minutes to reflect on the fact that the baby was a girl, pink, crying a little, apparently had all her parts, and would probably pass the Apgar test. Then I had some time to think about how the baby was probably kind of cold, but all the clean towels were upstairs, and I really didn't think I should start wandering around when I still hadn't delivered the placenta. So I held her close and started wondering what exactly Chris would think when he got home. When he walked in at 2:30, he was a little.... surprised.

We called 911 and the rescue truck came immediately (helps that the fire dept is right down the street), and they helped deliver the placenta, covered us in blankets and various wires and sensors, and took us to the hospital, where a curious group of nurses was waiting to ogle us and say "AWWWWWW" as we came in. After some warming up, Sigrid was pronounced Just Fine, and now we're just hanging out and waiting to be discharged tomorrow (we could have left today, but we wanted to make sure her temp was stable overnight).

Makes me tired just thinking about it all. I'm going to take a nap. Go look at pictures, why don't you?

Intro-Deuce

2008-11-20T21:15:00.004-05:00

We are pleased to introduce Sigrid Isabel, the newest member of our family. She was born at 2:20 this afternoon. She is 6.6lbs, 19 3/4 inches long and wispy, curly hair. Mom and baby are resting happily.

There is a birth story that is Kirsten's to tell. Suffice it to say that I am awed to silence by my wife.

The Changing Tables Turned

2008-11-19T19:48:00.002-05:00

While Soren is usually very good about going to bed, he does often resist donning his PJs. Sometimes, this necessitates the counting to three routine, as in "Daddy's going to count to three, and if you're not standing on the P [on the police station of his play mat] so I can put on your PJs, then [undesirable consequence that results in wearing pajamas and losing dignity]." Tonight, I got as far as, "Daddy's going to count to three..." when I received the reply:

"One, two, three, four. I'm going to put you on the changing table."

Yeah, I'd like to see him try. 3T PJs won't fit over my forearm.

Two Good Reasons Not to Pick Up a Quarter in the Grocery Store Parking Lot

2008-11-18T16:17:00.002-05:00

1. You are nine months pregnant, and the ground is inaccessible to you.

2. Even if you did manage to pick it up, you would feel like a jerk for not giving it to the Salvation Army person you'd just passed, since you'd made eye contact and given her that we live in a plastic society and I don't carry any change look, and it was kind of far to walk back there with your heavy cart, because you are nine months pregnant.

OH $@!% IT'S THE FUZZ

2008-11-16T20:40:00.004-05:00

Hey, I do my best to be a responsible parent. But it's never enough, is it? Someone ALWAYS has to go and call the cops.

I somehow found the stamina to go on a walk with Soren the other day, so we went a few blocks to the town athletic fields, which feature a gigantor hill that Soren enjoys running up and down a million times. He invited me to come run with him, which I politely declined, so I sat on the bleachers while he did his thing. Incidentally, just think how much healthier we would all be if we never lost that urge to run at top speed up and down hills just for the hell of it.

Anyway, he was running, I was sitting, and all was well. I did notice a policeman talking to some people outside the church down the block, and wondered what kind of mischief was afoot. Soren spent some time exploring the middle and perimeter of the baseball field, then brought me a dandelion (awwww), which I suggested we bring back home to Grammy (AWWWWWW) as a subtle ploy to get him moving willingly toward home (genius!), and we set off. Just as we'd crossed the street alongside the field, someone called out behind us... how did you guess? It was the police officer.

"Did you just come from the field?" he asked.

"Yes." Did Soren vandalize something while I wasn't looking? Did I somehow accidentally leave my pants on the bleachers?

"Oh, okay. I got a call from some folks who saw your little one running around, but they didn't see anyone with him."

"Oh no! Sorry! I was sitting on the bleachers watching him! I can't keep up with him the way I used to! Ha ha! [etc]" Please don't arrest me omg omg omg

"Tell that to the boys down at the station."

OK, not really.

There's actually no satisfying denouement to the story, which ends rather abruptly with me not getting arrested and Soren enjoying saying hello to the policeman. Heck, I didn't even get a stern reminder to make sure I'm always in a position to catch my son before he runs out into traffic. Must have been my lucky day!

Finally diffcharged!

2008-11-07T13:23:00.002-05:00

How many awesome C. diff puns can there possibly be?!?!?! Okay, the answer may be none, but I'm trying my best.

Anyway, I'm back home as of Wednesday afternoon! So nice. I managed to talk my doctors into letting me take charge of my own pill-taking and hydration (i.e. drinking stuff instead of getting IV fluids, since I'd had no trouble staying hydrated before they admitted me), so they let me out. Besides the obvious perks, such as getting to wear clothes, see my family, and not be awakened five times a night by nurses (I can take care of that last one all by myself, TYVM), my push to be discharged was mainly guided by the need to stop eating their food, because -- get this -- it wasn't boring or bland enough. I know! This is hospital food we're talking about, right? And yet, even when they put me on their most boring diet, I still pretty much only had options like baked turkey and cooked carrots and mashed potatoes with lots of milk and butter. Tasty, but not even close to what I needed, and the diet made me feel worse every day I was there. At home, I've been eating noodle soup, white toast, white rice, and plain yogurt with honey, and have felt a major improvement. While the infection has yet to clear up completely, I haven't been experiencing anything close to 5 on the pain scale, which was the point I'd gotten to by the time they discharged me. The final straw was when I asked for the plainest yogurt they had and they sent up vanilla yogurt with aspartame AND high-fructose corn syrup. Sorry, friends, that is not food.

While I eat my white food and take four pills a day and wait for the whole thing to clear up, Chris's mom is here being very helpful in the areas of playing with toddlers and keeping the place way cleaner than I ever do. However, she does not have Chris's gin and tonics ready when he comes home, so I don't know how he feels about having her here.

On a completely unrelated note, the only two decent radio stations we get inside the house have switched over to 24-hour CHRISTMAS MUSIC and I want to KILL THEM. Yes, yes, there's the iPod and the internet radio and all those newfangled things, but I can't control them with a remote while sitting around on the couch. Also, it is a crime against humanity to play Christmas music for six weeks straight, because there are only ten Christmas songs total, and doesn't that make everyone go insane? Is it just me?

I've Been Diffenfranchised

2008-11-04T20:48:00.002-05:00

Good news: The Deuce and I are still doing OK (The Deuce, I daresay, is doing better).

Bad news: we're stuck here in the hospital at least until Thursday, maybe longer. Ugh.

Other bad news, but which turned out OK in the end anyway: They wouldn't let me out to vote. Luckily, RI is so blue that it really wasn't likely to matter, but If I lived in a swing state, I think I would have had to bust out of here and do my civic duty. I might get dressed first, though.

So, yeah, I'm still here. Whatever. Chris' mom finally gets her chance to shine, and will be flying out tomorrow afternoon to help out with Soren, which is certainly a huge help to all of us. Thanks, Grammy!

I'll write more tomorrow... Sitting with the laptop isn't all that comfortable after a while, especially with four Facebook Scrabble games to deal with.

Great to be Back...

2008-11-02T19:48:00.004-05:00

...in the hospital! SO GREAT. Don't worry, nothing really exciting or baby-related this time (except for the fact that they're interested in The Deuce's welfare in general); they just felt the need to admit me to give me some IV antibiotics for the persistent and aptly-named C. difficile. So here I am again, watching HGTV and wearing lots of plastic bracelets. Plus I have internet, so I guess that's a bonus.

The six hours in triage (or whatever they call the crappy rooms on the ground floor where they make you sit in a gown for six hours before you get admitted) were longer and crappier than usual, however. The "bed" (blue foam thing) is a lot less comfortable at 36 weeks pregnant than it was at 29 weeks, oddly enough. And the TV was apparently permanently tuned to Discovery Health, which is normally a questionable choice in a hospital anyway, but on this particular afternoon, they seemed to be running a marathon of "Dr. G: Medical Examiner," which is a really crappy show about dead people. How uplifting. It doesn't help that Dr. G's voice is more annoying than Sarah Palin's. So there was six hours of that.

Then there was the thing with the crackers. When I came in at 11, I hadn't eaten in a couple hours, but wasn't feeling great (obviously), so I sat around for a little while not really caring. After about an hour, though, I started to feel a mite peckish, so I asked if I could get some crackers. The nurse said she wasn't sure, so I waited until after the doctor came by. She gave me the go-ahead, so I asked for crackers again. Crackers were promised, but not delivered. The next time the nurse came in, I asked again. I was getting fairly hungry by this time, after four hours of not eating anything. Basically, every time the nurse came in, I asked for crackers, and got hungrier and hungrier, and received no crackers. After four hours of being in triage or whatever, they finally told me I was going to be admitted, which did not please me, but I dealt with it and called Chris to let him know what was going on. Then time passed. Continued to pass. I suppose I could have rung the call button and asked for food, but that seemed stupid, since I'm sure nurses are busy and stuff. After one million years, the nurse poked her head in again and asked if I needed anything... and through the sobbing, she somehow made out the word "crackers". "I know," she said, "it's hard to leave a little one at home. But they're resilient. He'll be fine, and you'll be home soon." I nodded at that, because she was right, it IS hard to be in the hospital and hope Soren will be OK, however: I was crying because I hadn't eaten in eight hours and wanted some damn crackers. Anyway, my obvious concern for my family must have moved her, because I finally got my wish. And then they moved me out of the room with the blue foam bed and the marathon of shows about dead people, up to my own room with a real bed and a channel changer.

As you can see, I am really preoccupied with my grave medical situation. Hopefully, the fun new antibiotics will work their magic, and I'll be able to get out of here tomorrow and have crackers whenever I want. Oh, and be with my loving family again.

Facebook is Ruining my Blogging Mojo

2008-10-29T22:38:00.003-04:00

Hi there. It's been a while, I know. See, ever since I signed up for Facebook, I spend all my internet time-wasting time playing FB Scrabble (and Scramble, and Pathwords...), checking status updates, leaving comments on stuff, and playing more Scrabble. And so my important internet time-wasting, i.e. Anderblog, is languishing.

Meanwhile, I've also been sitting around feeling sorry for myself because I'm sick AGAIN (C. difficile this time -- if you know what it is, pity me, and if you don't, don't look it up). But The Deuce is still well and growing and getting hiccups all the time, and I think I can actually make Soren's entire Halloween costume tomorrow while he's at school, and the invitation business is picking up a little bit (although I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not, timing-wise), so things are mostly going well.

Okay, I know I have to make a costume tomorrow, but I will also commit to writing about our fun weekend with the Anderson clan (Great-Grandpa Anderson's 90th birthday party was held in Newport, so most of the family was in the neighborhood). I think I can sneak some blogging in while I wait for the hot glue to dry. I mean, it's not like everyone's sitting around with bated breath waiting for my next post, but I like to have a little blogging discipline! After all, it's probably going to be a big part of the launch of my writing career. Seems to work for other people.

Pumpkin Express

2008-10-23T22:05:00.007-04:00

Those of you who've visited us in October have probably been dragged to Schartner Farms' Pumpkin Express event, at the Schartner Farms stand/nursery, which has appealed to us primarily through the opportunity to eat saugies (RI hot dogs) and fresh red potato curly fries where it's a little too cold and windy. We have never actually taken the Pumpkin Express itself, a hay ride out around the farm to a "pumpkin patch" with entertainment. However, this year, we thought Soren might enjoy the express, so last Saturday we planned to try it out.

When we suggested to Soren that we would go someplace where we could ride in a trailer behind a tractor, he stopped short, his little toddler horizons infinitely expanded by the possibility. He turned to us and uttered a breathy, dreamy "Yeah!" indicating he wanted to go.

Soren was thrilled when we got to the farm, and we stood in line, and then a real tractor pulled up, with two hay trailers. He sat in the middle with Kirsten and I, and played with the hay, a baby truck he'd brought, and looked at the farm as we rode around.

When we got to the pumpkin patch, Soren tried out the toddler version of the corn maze, and had a great time.

Kirsten found a pumpkin and speculated about how much bigger she was going to get.

And Soren sold me some ice cream from a "booth".

Note who's holding Kirsten's pumpkin, and buying Soren's straw flavored ice cream. Sucker.

Oh, and we had lunch of saugies and fresh red potato curly fries. Yum. Might need to go back this weekend.

Oktoberfest

2008-10-22T21:59:00.011-04:00

Amid the excitement and sloth of the last few weeks, we've delayed telling you about the fine time we had at the Acton, MA Oktoberfest celebration with Adam, Christi, Margot, Brian and Edith. Really, it has everything you want in an Oktoberfest, except beer, oompah bands, lederhosen, and the chicken dance.

Well, then, what did it have? Soren won a traditional Bavarian lollipop...

...and insisted on the highest form of Schwarzwald-region pastry, a frosted cookie shaped like a school bus (that cost $3 due to German wage rates, but was good for 90 minutes, so not a bad value)...

...and we saw the traditional Rhine jaws of life demonstration (which we have managed to miss by less than 10 minutes in each of our previous visits)...

...and Margot showed us some of the card tricks that are popular among babies on the streets of Berlin.

Also, we had some bratwurst, which were really pretty good, and actually something you'd expect at an Oktoberfest.

The day reminded us that we'd just missed Fall last year, since Fall in Alaska is about 20 minutes long; we just love these harvest festivals, so we'll probably go to more this month.

Overdoing the Halloween Decorations

2008-10-21T22:20:00.008-04:00

As Kirsten's previous posts mentioned, her mom worked hard to decorate our house for the upcoming fall holiday while she was here when Kirsten was bedresting. She made a wreath for the door, arranged mums on the stoop, cutout paper ghosts for the light fixture in the dining room, strung black skull garland over the fireplace, and apparently put a very realistic bat in the basement. What do you think?

OK, so Kirsten's mom probably didn't have anything to do with it, but that's a live bat in our basement. Right in the stairwell, at eye level when you open the door from the dining room.

We discovered it last Sunday evening, as I was putting the tools away after moving around our over-the-air HD antenna. I don't have anything against bats, so I gave it a few days to leave. It was there every time we checked, and other than possibly bat-caused thumps against the basement door on Monday and Tuesday evenings, it showed little inclination to leave. So on Tuesday night, we decided to help it. We opened the french doors and the basement door, and sat in the dark for a few hours, hoping it would just fly out on its own. No movement.

Then, I decided to help it. I put on gloves and a jacket, and armed with a tennis racquet and window screen, I swatted the wall near it, hoping it would fly away. No movement. Then I nudged it with the tennis racquet. It moved alright, but dropped straight to the floor and didn't move. Uh-oh. I trapped it in a bucket, without touching it, and carried it outside, vowing to call the health department in the morning.

When I was connected to the infectious disease nurse and explained the situation, she wanted to test the bat right away. So I canceled my meetings and drove home to get the bat and drive it to its demise in the state lab. However, when I got home, the bat had escaped. Good for the bat, I thought, it is not sick after all. However, when I called the infectious disease nurse back to share the good news the bat must have been fine, she had a different interpretation.

Long story medium-length, I'm now receiving treatment for rabies exposure. (It is extremely unlikely I was exposed, but there is no treatment for rabies so symptoms=death, and I'm not really willing to bet my life (literally) I was not sneezed or drooled on by the bat.) This is a series of shots, five on the first day, and then four more over the next few weeks. It's fine, as years of allergy shots and blood donations have desensitized me to needles, but somewhat inconvenient.

There's also this surreal quality to receiving this treatment...I'm being treated for what? Sorta like living in Alaska: I live where?

The All-Pervading Election

2008-10-10T15:58:00.002-04:00

Either we're watching more election coverage before 7 PM than I think we are, or they're teaching Soren current events at school. I was reading the paper the other day, and he pointed to a picture and said, "There's John McCain!" Wha? He also knows Barack Obama by sight. And I really don't know why. I mean, their names come up in conversation at home, and he's certainly heard them mentioned on TV, but I didn't know he was getting enough election info to be able to put the faces with the names. I wonder if he can also summarize their positions on health care and the war. I'll ask him.

Daughter's Helper

2008-10-05T22:14:00.004-04:00

So, it doesn't look like I've told you lately just how great my mom is. Let's remedy that.

When I went into the hospital, I called Mom and let her know what was going on, and she immediately volunteered to come out and help us out at home. I figured I'd be able to go home and pretty much go back to my normal life, so I told her I thought we'd be OK. Then, when I found out I was going to have to be on bed rest -- a few hours before being discharged from the hospital -- I called Mom back and asked, "So.... want to come over?" Turns out her offer was still good, and we got her a ticket for the next night.

And then began the helping. Oh, the helping. I would have been satisfied if she had just made sure Soren didn't starve or scream all day, but Mom went above and beyond. She got him dressed! Entertained him! Took him for walks! Dealt with his new whiny phase! Didn't make fun of me for taking four-hour naps an hour after getting up in the morning! Superwoman stuff. PLUS she put up some cool fall/Halloween decorations around the house, cooked delicious dinners, had Chris's gin & tonics ready when he got home from work.... actually, you know, all that stuff primarily made me look bad, so maybe I'm not so thankful for that. Kidding!

And throughout it all, she was good company. We got to play lots of Scrabble, and she let me win 99% of the time, which was really nice of her. She smuggled me out to Starbucks on my third day of bed rest, which was good for my sanity (don't worry, I sat slumped in a comfy chair the whole time we were out, so it was just like bed rest, only in a Starbucks). She taught me how to crochet, and we sat around making circles of various sizes for a few days (hers turned into cool skater hats; mine turned into... misshapen circles). Sure, lying around all day wasn't a barrel of fun, but getting to hang out with Mom made it much more enjoyable.

Mom, you turned what could have been a really stressful week into a fun visit -- thanks so much. We all love you!

In Which I Jinx Soren's First Night in His New Bed...

2008-10-05T20:31:00.003-04:00

...by saying that everything is going perfectly so far. Chris and I got Soren a toddler bed last week, and set it up today! Yes, our huge 2-year-old was still sleeping in a crib as of this afternoon, but he wasn't climbing out, so we were happy with its toddler-imprisoning capabilities. However, we were finally persuaded to get him into a big boy bed due to The Bouncing.

Ever since he was about a year old, when we read that toddlers will often bang their heads against things to soothe themselves and then congratulated ourselves for not having a weird kid like that, Soren has banged his head against things to soothe himself. More accurately, he sits on the couch and repeatedly bounces his head against the back cushions. In his crib, he doesn't bang his head against the railing (he has that much sense), but sits against the rails and bounces his back against them, producing a headache-inducing banging sound. And gradually working the crib's screws loose. Anyway, if he's having a restless night, the banging can go on for an hour at a time, in several sessions. When you're trying to sleep, or if you happen to be sitting in the room directly under his, it's really annoying, as soothing as it must be for our little weirdo.

In order to build positive toddler bed spin among our constituency, we took Soren to pick out some sheets the other night; you will be surprised to learn that he chose Cars sheets. He was really into it -- he carried the sheet set all through the store, out to the car, and into the house. He protested a little when it came time to dismantle the crib and put the new bed in, but once it was all done, he was pretty excited (not necessarily about sleeping, but definitely about carrying his new pillow around and jumping on it). Once bedtime rolled around, we tried to tuck him in (he declined, preferring to sleep on top of the blankets), said good night, and closed the door... and he stayed in bed. And, judging from the fact that it's been quiet up there for three hours, he is sleeping. In the bed. Yay!!!! No drama!!!! So far, anyway. We'll see what happens when he decides it's time to get up -- he's usually happy to sleep until a decent hour, but he hasn't, until now, been able to choose to get out of bed and play at 5 AM. We'll see!

Paroled

2008-09-30T14:42:00.002-04:00

I am free! Freeeeeeeeeeeeee! Actually, I've been off bed rest since talking to the doctor on Friday, so I guess I've just been enjoying my liberation too much to update the blog until now. And before that, I was too sleepy, or something. Amazing how sloth begets sloth. Anyway, since I haven't had any out-of-the-ordinary contractions since I left the hospital, I can go back to doing stuff!

So that's just a quick update to let you know I'm still alive... more soon!