Things That Hurt

My  head. I woke up with a pounding headache that I blame entirely on a horrible dream wherein I was married to my ex-husband once again and we were moving into a giant weird house full of spiders. I was trying to run away with the kids but nobody could understand why I was so upset. I hate dreams like that. I wonder what causes them? I refuse to blame the peppermint candy ice cream I ate before bed. It has enough guilt to bear for the stomach ache that I fell asleep to.

I haven't had much to say lately, partly because I have been somewhat busy, making picturesquely imperfect (leave me my fantasies) gingerbread houses and homemade dinners, and starting loads of laundry which my Adorable Husband ends up following through to the fold an put away stage. And then when I sit down with my computer and contemplate something deep and profound to say, websites like Urban Outfitters and Victoria's Secret and Amazon all scream out to me with their amazing Holiday deals and I have difficulty focusing on anything except boots and things like that. And then there is the issue of the Very Cute, but Very Bad puppy who at this moment is shaking an unwrapped Christmas Present like a dead kitten in her little needle teeth. If I catch her chewing on something I can possibly live without, like an empty cardboard box or the car microfiber duster I paid $1 for, I let her be, since it's going to be that or something else. This morning she brought me first one, and when that was confiscated, the other red velvet shoe from my closet. At least she has good taste. And I will say the jingle bell collar was a wise investment since she is easily located now, wherever she is tearing up something that she should not be.

Right now The Avett Brothers are playing on 101.7, and sometimes I forget how much I love them. But the first strains of I & Love & You reverberate along with a chill down my spine and the warm fuzzy feeling of KNOWING not only them, but their songs, and their people, and the ideals that they champion in their music. Christmas Music is a nice little break from routine for us, other than Josh, who is already sick of everything except the California Raisins' version of We Three Kings, but I am secretly excited for January and making up for all this lost time with my boys.

This last few days, or week, or maybe even half of a month has been a little tough for me, on several levels. I've already done enough whining about the physical stuff, so I think I will delve into some internal stew that has been simmering since my Loving Husband, ever so tenderly, called me out on my bad attitude. Just when I was feeling all smug for my positivity and happy spirit, and self righteously condemning the pharisees who couldn't just catch the contagious joy that probably had something to do with an unbridled Holiday Shopping binge and endless espressos and parties and an excuse for a Whole New Wardrobe, I run face to face with the ugly truth of my selfishness. Why Josh couldn't just "get happy" was beyond my grasp, since the world is perfect and I have new skirt. When he finally got tired enough of tolerating me, he was able to articulate quite well, my self absorbed approach to life. The unfortunate thing about being married to Josh is that he is almost always right. He is graciously learning to allow me to be wrong from time to time without needing to crusade against my erroneous views, but in this instance, he was dead on and I was out of excuses. I was being shallow and judgemental and all of the things that I professed to loathed. So, in true contrition, I begged him for the grace to allow my little binge of selfish misbehavior continue until after Christmas, at which time I would become absolvent and depressed in response to the dire conditions we face in this life. No, but seriously, I needed a kick in the butt and I am thankful for a guy who can do it, even if clumsily, at least faithfully to me.

So I am still working through some of this inner process, which loosely translates to a mild slow-down in spending and more cautious approach to spousal reprimands and arbitrary judgements.

On another note - I just got called for an interview as an Emergency Room tech at the hospital. This is something that I will have to carefully consider. A grown up job with grown up side effects - like giving up fire season? But something that I would enjoy and would keep my mind and body active, and helping people... Pondering.

Things That Flatter Me

Really this title is somewhat inappropriate, since I have only one "thing" to write about that can be in any way considered flattering. I have several unflattering things I would like to comment on, including intelligent husbands who are still as dense as rocks, sewing and menstruation. Let's begin with the flattery though.

 Back when I was a tiny young mother and still gleaning a sense of fashion, which by now is as well rounded as my seamstress skills, I bought very few items of clothing in which I would be caught dead today. This is partially due to the fact that I couldn't squeeze one calf into a size two now, and also because they are just not that cool. Maybe for 1997, but not 2012. I did buy one thing, back in the olden days, that I still have. One of the reasons I have kept it is because my little sister has hounded me for years to give it to her, which equals cool status regardless of current trends. This stand alone item is also still cool because Robin Wright wore it in Unbreakable with Bruce Willis, and as we all know, there is nothing in an M Knight Shyamalan movie, or that the Princess Bride would wear, that goes out of style. Ever. Anyway, this specific article of clothing is a tan leather jacket from the Gap, and just yesterday, I received this picture from my sister, of the identical jacket that she bought off of eBay. 

Buttercup, er, Robin Wright in my jacket

And I was flattered. Slightly deflated since I no longer have that One Thing that she wants, as I already gave her the smaller size (loathe) of my favorite belt, and she adopted her own collection of (also smaller, also loathe) Liv Jeans and we even have the same Frye boots (ok, these I copied from her, but I still feel like I should get credit for her over all sense of style). We could be twins on pretty much any given day, as these items are pretty much the only things we both wear constantly, except I would be the ginormous twin and she would be the little cute one that makes all my favorite clothes look good. (super loathe). How did I turn the ONE flattering thing into a non-flattery. The heck. Maybe the unflattering things will also reverse on me. Let's try:

About super-smart husbands that say really dumb things: I have an amazing husband. Like, bring me coffee at work, take the puppy potty in the middle of the night, rub one foot while we watch zombie shows, awesome husband that every girl should be jealous of. One of his rare flaws is his aptitude for saying EXACTLY the worst thing ever to a girl. Like this for instance: "Don't give that jacket to your sister. It will fit you again eventually." What the poor man doesn't understand is that the jacket still DOES fit me, and I can even squeeze a hoodie under it if I don't want to bend my arms at all. Which I frequently don't. Just because I can't button it doesn't mean it doesn't fit. It's a jacket after all. Meant to be left open all carelessly with a scarf and sleeveless shirt that allows at least some movement. Doesn't this man realize that I have lost 13 pounds this year? Collectively of course, over the last 12 months or so. And I may or may not have gained a few back, but that doesn't take away the loosing part. Really.

Another unflattering thing is sewing. At least for me. I can work with words. I kind of like to mess with them and bend them around to say something that at least somewhat resembles the abstract mess that is my head. But fabric? Especially dollar-a-yard, laugh-in-your-face, deny-your-dreams fabric. That's the thing about dollar-a-yard fabric that I found out. It's soul purpose in existing is to make an utter fool out of you when you try to translate some totally awesome thing in your head into a totally awesome thing out of your head. Today I was mocked repeatedly by some pretty vintagey fabric that worked well as table cloths for my wedding party, largely because my sister was the one handling it. But I put one finger to the stuff and it's like it wanted to punish me for thinking I could sew. So today, since my bean soup turned out ok and I am still feeling domesticish, I tackled this vision of a bed skirt I have had in my head for the last several nights as I lie awake missing my Tylenol PM. It only took me 6 hours to find out that I have not the slightest idea how to make a bed skirt, but by then I had resorted to using safety pins to FORCE the stupid cloth, in assorted pieces, to do what I wanted. I ended up with this:

It is still mocking me. But to make sure it didn't think it had won the battle, I also made a cover for an ugly couch pillow and patched a queen size fitted sheet. Which is no small feat, especially when the hole is dead center and you have to feed like 100,000 feet of flannel under the pressure foot on the sewing machine to find the spot. I won the battle, and if mom and dad complain about a ferocious amount of thick stitches that I used to attach the patch, I will  probably just pull the bed apart and point out the safety pins in the bed skirt. Sewing is definitely not my most flattering skill.

Perhaps all of these things are particularly unflattering today because it's That Time of The Month, and pretty much everything in the world is ungracious right now. Except sweatpants. It's that glorious moment in time when sweatpants become the Sexiest Thing Ever. And if you say they aren't, you know that you have taken a huge gamble with your life and will probably find yourself categorized with the smart but dumber-than-poop husband. Today was probably not the best day to decide to sew away all of my hopes and dreams. It was probably a terrible day to try on the new skinny slacks I bought at Old Navy yesterday. I found myself chuckling sardonically that I had actually been concerned that a 10 would be too big as I forced my enormous rear end into them. Refusing to admit defeat, I got them on. And since I had worked up a sweat to get into them I decided to wear them for awhile, until I lost feeling in both of my legs and nearly passed out trying to get them off. I'm thinking they run small. After I had escaped the skinny pants, I was so exhausted that I just put on the pair of jeans on top of the pile, which turned out to be another bad idea since they were the smaller size that fit me for like 5 minutes last week, before I re found some of that 13 pounds. I guess it was a really good time to sit down in my super hott sweatpants for a good cry. Another thing to NOT do at this time of the month is clean the kids bathroom, or even consider it, for that matter. All I did was think about it, and I got so irritated that I actually looked up reform schools on the internet.

The salvation of this unflattering day came in the unexpected form of a text from my little brother, asking for my fashion input on a pair of golf shorts. Obviously my first advice was just don't. Golf shorts are rarely a good idea, unless you're putting together a geek costume for Halloween, or you need a gift for an effeminate cousin that you hate. But if he MUST wear golf shorts, I helped him select between the lesser of two evil plaids. Gabe is lucky that he's cute enough to pull off golf shorts and a psycho-stalker mustache. If he stays in his room. But it was flattering that he reached out to ME for my opinion, unless he was inferring that I was the only one un-cool enough to speak golf short etiquette. That concerns me greatly.

Things That Are Ridiculous

Holy cow. You know, I was looking for a mostly plan-less weekend last weekend, one where the kids are playing gleefully in the yard while Josh bar-b-ques in a manly fashion and I spend most of the sunny day in a hammock. For some reason, however, we came up with this great idea: see, Josh had just a little bit of work to finish at his jobsite to be ready to paint on Monday morning, and I felt a little guilty since I had distracted him from his work by making him take me to lunch (in Prineville) to meet our buddy John. So I suggested he take the girls with him to help, since he was demoing a deck and they would be good haulers (hahahahahahahaah). ANYWAY.... these little glimpses of Terrible Teenage started showing in all three of the biggers, and I could see the writing on the wall. I volunteered myself for the work party when I began to realize that if there was no mediation, some one would probably NOT be coming back from the Mountain High neighborhood on Saturday. Since they've already had their share of murder/suicides on that street in recent months (that will be another story), I felt it best to offer my mediation skills. This may have been the fatal flaw in my weekend planning.

It was all coming together nicely - Actually, it was coming APART nicely, since we were tearing out a deck - until something set Nattie off. Whether it was the black widow nests on the beams from the underside of the deck, or the slippery mud in the flower beds that they had to tromp through, or the weight of the soggy 2x6es that were being hauled through the muddy flower beds, we may never know. My personal theory is that the socio-emotional cumulative stress of the first week of school combined with staying up until 1 AM watching H2O (this show is a socio-emotional stress in and of itself), did her in. But at any rate, Nattie snapped. Now, for those of you that know Nattie, you know what this means. Nattie is the child that learned that climbing stairs was a bad idea only after she took a header from the top at 22 months. Spankings, reprimands, lectures - none of these have ever borne any weight for the petite blond that is, in the words of all of her teachers, an ideal child. Nattie, in addition to her will of steel, wrote the book on The Human Temper. Being her mother, and primary disciplinarian, I have to admit, she terrifies me. I once sprained my wrist just trying to keep her from throwing her skull into the wall of the bathtub. Of course she was doing this to avoid a spanking that would have hurt much less than bashing her head on bathroom fixtures, but for Nattie, it's all about who's idea it is. So last Saturday, Nattie snapped. It started off with minor fuming, under-her-breath cussing and dramatic huffs-and-puffs indicating her displeasure with her tasks. The lure of a $5 reward + Cuppa Yo did nothing to dissuade her from her downward spiral, but then it got Really Nasty. I asked Nattie to help Aspen carry a piece of lattice that was twice her size to the trash pile. I knew it was a bad idea before I finished pointing, but once it had been issued, I had no choice but to back the order up. With some carefully placed grunts and sighs, Nattie found an ideal moment to "accidentally" drop the lattice on Aspen, and as it grated down her bare legs (goodmom FAIL - always wear long pants for construction demo, especially if you are 8), the shrieking started. Aspen is a tough kid, especially for a girl. Her boy cousins can cry circles around her, and everybody knows if Aspen makes a deal out of it, it's a DEAL. She was crying. Full-on, hold-you-breath, passing-out, crying. There were big, bloodyish scrapes down both of her thighs all the way to her knees, where apparently the lattice got bored with tormenting her and fell to the ground.

Nattie INSTANTLY threw her hands in the air and starting screaming about the accidental nature of her transgression, and running wildly across the yard to escape her apparently imminent retribution. Picture, if you will, a serene, wooded neighborhood, of sprawling ranch style homes and large open yards, all decorated with the ceramic cats and cement fairies that somehow become intensely appealing upon retirement. Mountain View is peopled largely by upper-middle class retirees from everywhere except central Oregon. While the clients that Josh works for in this neighborhood are some of the nicest Californians you would ever care to meet, their neighbor must have come of age in the wealthiest district of Fairbanks, Alaska, where entitlement and Seasonal Affective Disorder come crashing together in a miserable existence. She is not a nice person, and really likes to make sure Everybody Knows It. Her favorite complaint, however is about any noise. Especially noise in the morning. Like the kind of noise that Natalee was generating at a galloping pace. As quickly as I could I herded the screaming demon into the cab of the truck, where she proceeded to thrash around wildly, projecting about her impending death, which was apparently going to be inflicted by me. Natalee spent most of the rest of the morning in the truck, and I would like to establish, for the record, that I did not lose it with her. I'll admit the thought of duck taping her mouth and hands flashed through my mind, I reflected on those stories you read in the news about parents who do crap like that and since I would rather garnish fame in other ways,  I discarded the notion.

Somehow we all survived the morning, in spite of Kizzie being Bored Beyond Belief, and Aspen bouncing mindlessly through piles of old boards with rusty nail-spikes just begging to skewer her foot. We are working on that whole awareness thing. We had a robust reward of Taco Bell and Cuppa Yo (under 6 oz - which is No Small Feat) and went home, where Josh and I had a nap. Really a nap is a great way to avoid doling out well deserved sanctions on misbehaving kids, like Halle who had woken us up at 5 AM looking for a pair of shorts that I was supposed to have exchanged for her (this was the latest in a long stream of how-to-make-your-parents-despair-moves on her part).

I am writing this as I am on hold with the medical clinic to cancel appointments for sports physicals that apparently, the older girls didn't even need, but let me panic about for weeks. I can never understand a 15 minute wait time to cancel an appointment. I should have just gone to the appointment, it would have taken less time! But at least the wait music is a really terrible tropical sounding interpretation of "land down under", which will make the rest of the day seem awesome, once I am set free.