Monkey see, Monkey do,

Last night, when I arrived home from Bible study it was a little after 9:00. Overall, we tend to be night owls around our house, so I was a little surprised to walk in the door to the sound of nothing. Usually the TV is on, or music is playing, or at the very least, I can hear the kids whispering not so quietly to each other in their rooms. But last night, nothing.

Poor Doctor had conked out on the couch like a felled tree, and barely twitched when I came in. Big Guy was sound asleep with his stuffed entourage of critters, and Doodle Bug, usually the last one asleep, was so deeply asleep in his bed that not even a wild monkey on a banana frenzied rampage could wake him.

Now that may sound a little strange. Unfortunately, I can truthfully say that we DID have a monkey and banana rampage take place last night. And, therefore, I can truthfully tell you that Doodle Bug did indeed sleep right through it.

As I made the rounds after arriving home, I felt my shoulders start to relax. If everyone is sleeping, I can kick back and do whatever I want. But sadly for me, the fates had something different in store. Or at least someone had something different in store for me. Just when I thought I was safe... Tater Tot's head popped around the corner.

Tater is our Queen of many things. Things like finding trouble where none should exist, creating mayhem in less time that should be humanly possible, and discovering new and creative ways to entertain herself. Usually this means that I spend much of my time dealing with her "entertainments" and "experiments".

For example, this week, she took two pounds of butter out of the fridge, unwrapped each of the sticks, spread them on the counter, and then chopped them all up and used them to "make the kitchen and her arms and face softer". Then she got into my make-up drawer in the bathroom, and after trying on various "colors", she used the lip gloss to draw pictures on the counter, the wall, the mirror, herself, and her brother who was trying to use the facilities. She took out every game from the game closet and dumped out the gazillion pieces to make a soup, she tried to lift some fish and a frog out of the fish tank for her friend to hold, and she changed her outfit no less than seven and a half times. Once she just swapped shirts. Oh, and today is Tuesday, so when I say this week, I mean that's what she did yesterday.

My point to this is that I should not have been caught off guard last night when her little impish angel faced popped around the corner and beamed up at me. Nope, I should have expected it.

I also shouldn't have been caught off guard when she suddenly looked down at the floor in the hallway, widened her eyes, and then popped back into her room and slammed the door. Nope, shouldn't have been surprised at all.

Looking down at the floor of the hallway, I had to give her points for having a healthy self-preservation instinct. It seems that her monkey, the stuffed puppet she checked out from the library, had been hungry and needed a snack. She had snuck out of bed and found some bananas, obvious choice, and fed them to her monkey. Sadly, monkey did not want this snack and "had a very bad tantrum" (her words). Monkey then proceeded to rip those bananas to shreds (something monkeys are prone to do) and then, that "bad monkey" shoved the rejected bananas into the heating grill in the wall. "Bad monkey." (her words again)

The photos don't do justice to the fruity carnage, and I cleaned up quite a bit of it before I took the pics, but really, I think you get the idea. I have never liked monkeys, not since my family was attacked by a family of crafty, devious Japanese snow monkeys when I was nine. Now, I really don't like monkeys. But I DO like my little monkey. And even though she drives me absolutely batty as I chase her from one side of the house to the other, scolding her and cleaning up after her, I still love the joy she brings with her happy heart and her impish smile. And now I'm off to discover what our little Queen of mayhem has been doing while I write this...

The Joy of Oblivion

I am spending a LOT of time getting ready for gardening season these days. I have cleaned, sharpened and oiled my tools; sorted my seed packs and made lists of what to start when, where, and how; I've already planted out the strawberries, the onion starts, and some of the cool weather seeds that prefer direct sowing. I have even (don't laugh) covered all of my garden beds that sport cover crops with yards of thick plastic sheeting to keep the soil from becoming too waterlogged and to warm it up. I know, I know. I am a little bit over the top...

In my defense, we are still eating veg from last season courtesy of our two deep freezers humming away on the garage. I can easily justify all the effort, to say nothing of the eccentric behavior. Well, most of it. Setting up the heating pad and the CD player to serenade my seed starts with classical music may have been a little over the top. But you really can't beat the taste of well pampered, homegrown fruits and veggies.

So on this train of thought, I have spent a lot of time pondering the role of the urban farmer (ME!) and gardener in the greater picture of life. Every year, one of the most persistent thoughts I have (besides how many slugs there are in my garden, how fun it is to get my hands dirty, how much I detest slugs, and how did all these slugs GET here???) is how similar being a gardener (or farm-ily challenged farmer, as I like to call myself) is to being a mom.

At first glance, it seems like these two vocations are not that closely related, but I submit the following evidence for your consideration. These are just a few of the numerous comparisons I have found. Maybe I'll write a book, Motherhood and Garden, The Joy of Oblivion.

1. You forget how bad it really was. By this, I mean that enough time has passed from one birthing to the next, or from one planting to the next, that you have forgotten just how awful the whole thing really was last time. If we had to give birth with only a month or three to recover and then thought about doing it again... well, we'd all end up with one kid and one garden. It's the same with gardening. Every year, I put in all this work and slave away all summer, only to have slugs or raccoons or small children tornado through and destroy all the fruits of my labor (The Tiny Tornado, or T3, and the resulting carnage is another similarity between gardening and parenting.)I need an entire winter to forget just how maddening the last time was.

2. You have to accept that a little dirt never hurt. Kids attract dirt like firemen to a burning building. No amount of isolation, preventative measures, or encasing them in giant plastic bubbles will keep them from finding their destiny. In fact, kids don't even need to go find the dirt; it finds them. Case in point, Tater Tot takes a bath, puts on her PJs, walks out of the room for 12 seconds, and then reappears with a mysterious beard of dirt, grubby hands and unknown substances smeared across her previously spotless PJs. Spooky... As for the garden, well the dirt connection is obvious. But I will take it a step further and tell you, that mysterious, symbiotic relationship the kids have with dirt, it happens to me in the garden. I cannot seem to walk through the garden without finding dirt under my nails, smudges on my arms and face, and the cuffs and knees of my jeans stained by the time I reach the other side. Spooky...

3. Yelling has no impact whatsoever. And trust me, I have done extensive testing on this concept. I have always been a yeller and probably always will be. It works on kids as well as it works on plants. By that I mean not at all. Standing in the garden, berating a tomato plant for having blossom end rot is not very productive in produce production. It IS however, entertaining for the neighbors. At least, that's what they always tell me. Yelling at the kids for pulling all the blossoms of one of my squash plants to make Barbie parachutes gets pretty much the same response. Kids/plants standing silently before me and then toddling off. (well the kids, not the plants)

4. Hard work and hands-on involvement really does pay off. So I am told. And I believe it. The more effort I put into my garden, the bigger the yields. The produce is healthier, more plentiful, and tastes amazing. The more quality time I spend there results in compound interest which equals two full freezers and lots of happy neighbors. Kids are hard work too, and need lots of quality, hands-on interaction. Sometimes I feel too tired, or not in the mood, and that's ok. But I know that spending as much quality time with them as possible, and by putting in the hard work of parenting, I am helping them to grow. They are growing, not like weeds, as the saying goes, but like scarlet runner beans or summer squash. My kids and my garden are reaching for the sky and the only thing holding them back is gravity.

I don't think I have anything earth shattering to write about today. Not that any of my other writing falls under the heading of earth shattering, or even earth hairline fracturing. I am laying on my bed, feet propped high on The Doctor's pillows, blanket from my Pier 1 days tucked up under my chin and my favorite natty old sweater keeping me warm. I have a book, a coke, and my laptop and the promise of dinner brought in on a tray. Can my evening get any better?

Big Guy has come in to do his homework at my desk. He normally does it at the dining table, but he has been increasingly intolerant of his siblings lately, and he needs someplace more quiet to work. Someplace where Weird Al isn't blasting on the CD player.

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that fact that Big Guy is a second grader. I don't remember much before second grade, but from then on, hoo-boy! I am still best friends with the gals I met in second grade.

He does have his own room, complete with a snazzy little red desk, lamp, chair, and fuzzy throw rug, but he seldom spends time there and he never does his homework there. Life a catch-22 for him. He wants to be near people, but more and more often, he cannot stand to be near people. I struggle with parenting him as well. It is so easy to get frustrated or exasperated with him. He lashes out at everyone, but refuses to be anywhere else. He seems to desperately want something that he can't tolerate.

As anyone with a special needs kid knows, it is so easy to point blame at ourselves for the behaviors and personalities of our kids. Am I allowing him too much freedom? Am I being too strict? What did I do to make him like this? I question myself all the time. I guess all moms do, but I think those of us with "atypical" kids do it more.

What we have to realize though is that yes, there may be times when we do influence our kids in ways that cause bad behavior, but this is also just part of who they are. My son will always be quirky on good days and impossible on the bad days. I will still love him though. And I will still love myself. Though I may doubt my "Best mom" status three to five days out of the week, I will still tell myself that I am doing the very best job I can and that I AM a good mom.

And Big Guy is still a good son. Even on those impossible days, I wouldn't change him for the world. He will always remind me to laugh at unexpected moments, to enjoy the smallest details, to strive for perfection in the things that matter to me, and that Star Wars is really, really awesome. He will always be a little bit outside the pack, but he will always be part of my pack.

Big Hair Beach Bash

Tonight our fam went over to church for the First Annual Big Hair Beach Bash. Say that
three times fast. The Beach Bash part was simple enough. There was sand and a wading pool for the kids. There were grilled hotdogs, fruit salad, and tons of cookies and treats. We spread beach blankets on the floor, filled our bellies with great food, and watched the kids chase beach balls and play volleyball, bare feet slapping on the carpeted floor.

The wacky part about the Bash was not the shorts and swimsuits in the middle of the coldest March since the '70s. It was the big hair part. I'm not really sure whose idea it was, but it was definitely a big idea.

Um, what can I say to describe the glory of Big Hair? There was glitter, there was teasing (and not the kind that happened in kindergarten), and [insert dramatic pause here] there were cans and cans of hairspray.

Now some of you may shrug your shoulders and say, "so what?" But others of you will nod your heads knowingly and smile a smile of things remembered from days gone by. To put this into a little perspective, I will tell you now that my award at the end of 7th grade was "Most Flammable Hair." I used to have six to eight inch bangs (depending on the humidity level) and "lacquered and/or shellacked" was an integral part of my hair care regime.

So, as you can see from the above photo, tonight was not only a lot of fun, it was a walk down memory lane on a section of sidewalk I never thought to trod again. It brought back a lot of old memories, and made me realize that as much fun as I remember having back in the day, I am having way more fun now.

MS actually stands for Must Sleep...

Having MS is mostly No Fun. Tonight, I finished eating dinner and then felt too tired to do more than sit and stare at the table, hoping that all the dishes would magically dance themselves into the kitchen and put themselves away a la Disney's Beauty and the Beast. No such luck. Unless you count the kids working together to clear the table for me. That IS kind of magical, I guess.

The Doctor took one look at my sagging self and sent me off to bed. At 7pm. I am too tired to argue with him and so here I am, all tucked into bed and making a last ditch effort to salvage my evening by writing on my blog. At least this way, I don't feel like I have completely given up without a fight. There is just something discouraging to me about having more in common with my grandmother than with my peers.

Being in your thirties means you have moved on from that juvenile feeling of invincibility that so many of us suffered from in our teens and into our twenties. Being thirty-something means that you are finally somewhat comfortable in your own skin, you know sort of who you are, and you probably know what you want to be when you grow up.

I somehow skipped over all that. I moved right on past and now find myself more on par with the retired set than with the saving for retirement set. I have always loved visiting with the older people in my life. They have so much life in them and I come away feeling like I have lived something special, if just vicariously. But now I find myself feeling almost as though I am one of them. I find myself comparing the pros and cons of various medical treatments, bemoaning the loss of memory or mobility or energy, or discussing the always entertaining worst procedure stories. I have become old on the inside while remaining young on the outside.

Just this morning my grandma and I joked/complained about the annoyance of having so little energy. We tried to outdo each other with stories demonstrating our fatigue. Mine was that I had put a fitted sheet on our bed but the struggle had worn me out so much that I had to take a nap before tackling the top sheet. It made me think back to my days at my last job when we would swap stories about projects we'd done, trying to outdo each other with tales of unflagging strength, endurance and energy.

It's like I am a two-sided coin. Heads and tails all in one. I used to be heads, always thinking, working, moving. Now, I feel as though I am always tails, lagging behind, resting, waiting. I lay here, all tuckered out and listening to the family whirling around in the other room, and I wonder, will my coin flip again?

Grandma Mayno's house

A few days ago, I drove the family up to grandma Mayno's house so that we could see if we wanted anything from her estate. Her estate sounds so black and white, so cut and dried. How do you choose one or two things to represent someone's entire life? There are so many things in her house that hold memories of her for me, and I know even more so for The Doctor, her grandson. How do you sort through things, to pick and choose what to take and what to toss?

Grandma kept everything, from old letters with brown and crumbling creases to chipped and dusty teacups no longer usable. For reasons known only to her, she carefully placed these things on shelves or in drawers and gave them a home instead of tossing them in the wastebin. It is both a blessing and a curse. The curse being that someone has to sort through it all and make those difficult decisions now. What to keep and cherish and what to throw into the giant green dumpster that has been backed up to the side door.

The blessing is that we get to spend a little more time with grandma this way; we get to know her a little bit in ways that we hadn't before. I never knew that grandma collected tea cups like I do. I didn't know that she was such an accomplished painter. I didn't know that she loved crafts as much as I do. I have only known this woman for a dozen years, and I always think I know so much about a person, even after a few hours, much less a dozen years.

Going through her things, through her house, her closets, her shelves, and her drawers, made me realize that she was so very much more than I ever knew. I so often am caught up in looking at the world through my own eyes, my own perceptions, that I forget about the person that I am looking at. I don't see them as they are, I see them as I think they are. There is a whole world of differences between those two.

I will admit that it has been fun to find treasures in her house (especially since I am not the one who has had to deal with all the not-quite treasures!). It has also been sad to go through her things and to know that this is the last time I will set foot in this place and have it be Hers. But the thought foremost in my mind is how eager I am to see her again someday. To talk to her about the things I think I now know about her from this last visit. Questions I never thought to ask until it was too late.

Spelling

"D-N-O-R-D-A. What does that spell? Did I spell a word?"

Those are the questions I have been asked dozens, even hundreds of times each day for the last month or so. Doodle Bug has discovered spelling. Though he has been five for several months now, he won't start Kindergarten until this coming fall, and he is way beyond ready to go. We're talking space shuttle final launch sequence ready to go.

His latest "I am ready for school" manifestation is spelling, but he has also been eager to try his hand at adding, subtracting, and writing as well. The spelling frenzy is the easiest to indulge in though; you don't need paper or writing implements. You just spell things. Most of the time it's a fun game we can play together and it's always beautiful to see his mind soaking all this information up like those little pills that turn into dinosaur sponges when you add warm water that he's so fond of.

Sometimes though, the comparison to the sponge dinos doesn't make it past the pill part. Like right now, for example. "What does this spell if I add an N? How do you spell THE END? What does this spell? How do you...???" See where I'm going with the pill part?

At times like this, I always hear the voices of all the moms whose kids are grown and gone now. They always listen to my grousing about whining and repetitive questions and the insatiable curiosity of my kids. And then they gently smile and remind me that they (the kids, not the moms) grow so fast and before I know it, they'll be off in college and then I'll miss these days.

I know they're right. I thought just this morning how crazy it is that I'll have TWO kids in elementary school in just a few months. They DO grow up fast. But right this second, as I have to keep going back and deleting the typos and wrong words because Doodle Bug is climbing up my arm and onto my shoulder as he grills me about the best way to spell "Invatengialangel" (I don't know what that is and neither does he, so don't ask. He just liked the sound of it.), right now, I think that having kids at collage sounds like a good idea.

In fact, I think I am going to go buy some new locks for the doors in anticipation of that day. But in the meantime, in case you were wondering, snugglebunny is spelled D-o-o-d-l-e B-u-g.

The garden has begun

Today was such a gloriously warm day; the kind of day that teases you out of the house and makes promises that spring is really just a day or two away. This time of year can be such a tease. Just last week, we had a day like this, when we all ran around out in the yard in just t-shirts (well, and pants, of course). We were sure spring had come. And then we woke up to snow the next morning.

Today, though, was different. Today was the day that I bought into it. It felt like spring in the air, and so I answered the call of the wild and jumped into the garden with both feet. And both hands. I pulled up dead plants that had been left from the fall, I gathered all the debris and trash that's been rattling around out there in that neglected part of my life, and I filled up the compost bin to overflowing.

The best part about the day though was uncovering the garlic. I planted 125 cloves of garlic in the fall, all different types and varieties, as well as a few kinds of onions. (Including some "Egyptian walking onions" I am very excited about!) In order to keep them safe and warm and cozy through the winter, I had buried them all under hay and then left them to fend for themselves through the cold winter months. Today, giving in to the lure of the promise of spring, I cleared those beds off. Those wonderful bulbs have been hard at work already. There are tidy little rows of green shoots marching across the beds, and already, the smell is wonderful!

I have placed my orders from Henry Field's, from Gurney's, and from Burpee, and I can't wait to get those goodies in the ground as well. But for now, it is something akin to the feeling of being a new mom, albeit on a bit smaller scale, to see all those growing, living things out back where just this morning it had looked bleak and barren. I can only imagine what joy God must feel when he looks down at each of us and sees us, small and spindly though we are, reaching up to the sky as high as we can reach.

Entourage

So my charming eldest is snuggled up in bed with me this evening and is ready to help me write the first post for this new blog I'm starting. He wants to know what a blog is, so I explain that it is something like a diary that you keep online. "A diarrhea-y?" he innocently (well, maybe) asks me, "I had that this morning." He then goes on to give me a moment-by-moment description of his morning bout with his very own blog, so to speak...

Ok, so we have gotten off to a rough start with the whole family blogging thing. In fact, Big Guy has now verbally galloped off into 'could dinosaurs be living in the center of the earth' territory, and is pondering the effects of hot lava on said dinos. Then, smack in the middle of his musings, when I think I've lost him for good, he looks over at me and asks, "What's a blog?" again.

I tell him, "It's where you write online about anything you want."

"Oh, you mean like a diary?"

"Um, yes, just like a diary." I reply, pleased at how he has pieced this together.

Now that we have the explanations out of the way, he wants me to write that he doesn't want to be a normal human. He really likes Anakin's ship. He cannot do a cartwheel, and he also can't juggle. At this point, all the other members of the family chime in to add that they can't juggle either. When I started typing the title of this blog, it was just me, but by the time I have moved the cursor down to type the actual blog, Big Guy has snuggled up under one arm. Not long after that, his brother and sister come wandering in, followed by their dad.

No matter what I do - make dinner, read a book in my chair, write a blog, or even go to the bathroom - I inevitably draw a crowd. Granted, it's just my kids and sometimes my husband, but that does feel like a crowd sometimes. And, most of the time, it's really, really annoying.

Other times, though, it is an awesome thing. They applaud small, silly things. Like the time I made ten tissue free throws into the trash in a row from across the room, or the time I sang all the lyrics to the Diego Live CD we checked out from the library. Silly things, but things that make me feel good that someone had noticed.

Being a mom means you rarely have time for yourself, you are usually tired and have too much to do, but it also means someone thinks you are pretty amazing. It also means that someone wants to be with you. Kind of like a tiny entourage.