A long winter's nap

Posted by jo(e) at 11:24 PM 0 comments

Holiday time

The energy level in the household has been rising as out-of-town family and friends arrive. Quick took his last final exam and was in our living room 24 hours later, playing chess with With-a-Why. Sailor Boy, who took a week’s leave from the Coast Guard to be here for the holidays, spent last week training in Southern State That Cannot Handle Snow and had planned to fly here Friday. After 72 hours of traveling, or mostly sitting in airports sending pathetic text messages, he finally arrived here Monday afternoon. “I need a shower,” he said when he came through the door.

Blonde Niece arrived home in time to help me do some Christmas shopping. As long-time readers know, I’m terrified of the mall, but Blonde Niece is fearless. She efficiently steered me through the necessary stores, then we relaxed in the food court and talked about her first semester of college. (That evening, that same food court was the site of a holiday flashmob organized by a local college student. About 300 people, mostly college students, alerted by a notice on facebook, gathered in the mall. The loud speakers began playing Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas is you” and on cue, hundreds of young people began dancing, much to the surprise of all the holiday shoppers who had just come to get something to eat. As much as I hate the mall, I would have loved to see that event.)

I declared a week-long ban on computer games. In return, With-a-Why was allowed to skip school to be home with his siblings. The rest of us have the week off, so we’ve mostly been hanging out by the fire and getting ready for Christmas. Red-haired Sister, Tie-dye Brother-in-law, and their two kids arrived yesterday. They brought a bag of presents for the little neighbor kids; my sister’s plan is to leave them on the doorstep in the middle of the night.

But the real Christmas miracle? I haven’t yet killed any of the cats.

Posted by jo(e) at 8:25 PM 13 comments

Fa la la la

A couple days ago, my husband decided it would be a good experience for my two youngest kids to do some community service at the assisted-living facility where my mother-in-law lives. With-a-Why is shy, and when he does volunteer work, he usually chooses something like setting up chairs in an empty room. But Spouse figured he could use music to coax With-a-Why out of his shell.

“We’d love to have your boys come and play some Christmas carols,” the social director said when my husband called.

This afternoon, I coerced the boys into taking showers, and we loaded the keyboard into the car, with With-a-Why complaining. “I need pedals. I can’t do most of my songs on this keyboard.”

“You don’t have to play the kind of music you do for recitals,” I said. “Mostly, the old folks just want to see you having fun.”

Shaggy Hair Boy grabbed a folder of Christmas music, and that’s mostly what the boys ended up playing. The elderly folks started singing along right away, and the social director ran to get a microphone for my husband, who has a beautiful voice and who warms up quickly to an audience who laughs at corny jokes.

It wasn’t a very polished performance. Shaggy Hair Boy kept rooting through the folder of music to find songs, accidentally dumping the whole thing onto the floor at one point. My husband joked with the boys and the residents as they moved from song to song. It was the kind of informal jam session my kids are used to.

When I saw that one woman knew the words to every song, I nudged my husband, and he rolled her wheelchair up to the microphone so they could sing a couple of duets. Shaggy Hair Boy good-naturedly took requests from the audience, even when they weren’t songs he knew very well. He and With-a-Why did a four-handed piece that got a round of applause from the crowd, who by then had figured out that With-a-Why was shy. They loved it when he played some of the score from the Charlie Brown Christmas special. My mother-in-law sat in the front row and looked proud.

“Admit it,” I said to the boys on our way home, “You had a good time. And doesn’t it feel good to know that everyone there enjoyed it?”

“I don’t really like nursing homes,” said Shaggy Hair Boy said.

“No one does,” I said. “That was the point. To make it feel like our living room instead.”

“If the world exploded right now,” Shaggy Hair Boy said, “I’d probably go right to heaven.”

Posted by jo(e) at 6:31 PM 14 comments

Takes a village

Yesterday, when the two little neighbor kids came over, I gave them the task of setting up the Christmas village on newly washed white sheets. “We’ll be in charge,” Little Biker Boy said importantly. I knew he and Ponytail would be eager to play with the little figurines and houses. He’d asked about the Christmas village just as soon as Christmas commercials began appearing on television.

I was busy cleaning the kitchen — we were getting ready for our annual Christmas party — but I could hear the kids talking as they played. “We need to put the castle HERE,” Little Biker Boy said to his sister emphatically. “That’s where it was last year. I remember.”

Friends and family might tease me about making the exact same food for every party, but Little Biker Boy loves that predictability. “You’re going to make that punch again? With lemons floating in it?”

He loves the seasonal rituals of our household. His own life has not been that stable. He spent almost a year in foster care when he was small. Then when he was about kindergarten age, his father kidnapped him for a couple of years. The details of his life during those years he was a missing child are murky: he remembers that he lived in the Florida for a while, and that he lived in an apartment over a bar.

Little Biker Boy is looking forward to our first big snowstorm. “I’m going to shovel a path for you. Remember how I did that last year?”

Whenever our furnace clicks on, he likes to come into the kitchen and sit on the floor near the register, to enjoy the warm air flowing out. I usually sit down with him and we talk for a few minutes. “You aren’t ever going to move, are you?” he’ll ask as he leans against me for a hug.

“Not likely,” I tell him. “We own this house, and we don’t have plans to sell it.”

That answer always comforts him, but I don’t have the heart to say aloud what he already knows. His life is less predictable than mine, and neither one of us can predict where he might be next year, or even next season.

Posted by jo(e) at 10:05 AM 15 comments

Trouble in the Christmas village

Every year after we decorate the Christmas tree, I take a photo of the wooden village beneath it. The village was a gift from my parents many years ago. My father built the little houses, shops, church, museum, and castle; my mother painted them. Little kids who come to our house — and sometimes adults too — will spend hours lying on the floor, playing with the pieces and imagining life in this little utopian world.

As I pulled the village out of the box this year, spreading white sheets on the floor beneath the Christmas tree to simulate snow-covered ground, I imagined writing a nice blog post about the village. I figured I’d take a sweet photo of the neighbor kids playing with the village. Little Biker Boy had already asked about it. Or perhaps I’d take a picture of Rogue, the cat who had already curled up near the castle, as if she were guarding the village.

But last night, just as my husband and I were snuggling in bed with a laptop, ready to watch the latest Big Bang Theory, Shaggy Hair Boy burst into our bedroom. “Uh, something bad happened in the Christmas Village.”

I leaped up. “One of the cats?”

“Yep.”

Trouble, a grey male cat, had walked over to the village, stood right on the tin foil skating pond, and sprayed urine across the houses, the figurines, the cotton drifts of snow. It’s not the first natural disaster to hit the Christmas village — one year Skater Boy fell into it and broke the ice pond mirror — but I think it might be the most foul. Those poor little ceramic ice skaters never knew what hit them.

I yanked up the wet sheets to throw them in the washer, ranted about how I hated all things feline, and piled the village on the kitchen counter to be washed. So instead of a lovely photo of the Christmas village nestled under the tree, here’s a photo of houses and figurines piled into a colander to be washed.

Damned cat.

Posted by jo(e) at 6:28 PM 19 comments

And found

I bought toothpaste at the grocery store. I know I did. But I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked in the bathroom, opening drawers and checking to see if it had fallen to the floor. I went downstairs to the kitchen and searched the counter where I unload the groceries.

I went back upstairs. The toothpaste had still not materialized. I came back down and searched again. I was beginning to feel a little crazy. Had I left a bag of groceries in the car? I remembered the time that I found a gallon of milk in my trunk, ten hot summer days after I bought it. That was pretty nasty.

I turned to the gang in the living room. “Has anyone seen some brand new boxes of toothpaste?”

Shaggy Hair Boy looked up from his computer, “I remember seeing them somewhere."

“Where?”

He shrugged, “I don’t know.”

I went upstairs again and burst into my daughter’s bedroom. She and Sailor Boy were deep in conversation, both intently looking at something on her computer.

“I can’t find the boxes of toothpaste I bought at the store,” I announced dramatically. “I KNOW I bought some."

Beautiful Smart Wonderful Daughter said, without hesitation: “Usually you set stuff like that on the stairs.”

The stairs? I’d run up and down the stairs about five times in my search. But I went back and looked anyhow.

Yep. There on the third step were two boxes of toothpaste.

It’s nice to have my daughter home.

Posted by jo(e) at 8:18 PM 8 comments

All together

All my kids are home. Beautiful Smart Wonderful Daughter arrived by train yesterday, after a week of writing papers and getting almost no sleep. She looked exhausted, but at least she didn’t have the flu.

“That’s the advantage of having no life,” she said cheerfully. “I haven’t been near anyone so I couldn’t catch anything.”

Tonight, we’re all hanging about the living room. Shaggy Hair Boy is at the piano, playing jazz. My daughter is on the couch, with a brother on either side. My husband is at the table with his laptop. I haven’t built a fire because I’m waiting to be over my cough, but the Christmas tree makes the room cozy.

I’ve been decorating the tree while the kids – as tradition dictates – make unhelpful comments that make me laugh. We bought an already-cut tree this year because it was pouring rain on Sunday, but the weather has gotten colder now and there’s snow outside the window, as there should be. My daughter had a paper to finish this afternoon, Shaggy Hair Boy has one more final, and I’m not done with my grading, but we’re gradually making the transition into the holiday season.

Posted by jo(e) at 10:41 PM 5 comments

What I learned this semester

At the end of the fall semester, I ask my first year students to each write on an index card one thing they learned their first semester in college. I tell them that they can include things they learned in the residence halls or from their friends or in any class. Then I shuffle the cards and read them aloud. Here's what they wrote this year.

I learned how to write lab reports and do research.

I learned how to freewrite – and why.

I learned to get up on my own instead of my Mom waking me up.

It’s means it is. And that’s the only time the word needs an apostrophe.

I’ve learned how to work on an average of 13 hours of sleep per week.

The frustrating and amazing complexity of Biology. Not only the organisms, but also the numerous terminologies.

The really depressing effects of Chernobyl.

Facts about Lyme disease.

I learned that chameleon tongues are hydrostatic skeletons. Their short and fat tongues have a set of muscles that will stretch the tongue out so that the chameleon can catch its food.

This semester I learned that if I’m going to do something, I should take my time with it. Patience has a way of revealing answers.

Outdoor classes rule!

PowerPoints are BORING. And I want to stab myself every time I sit through one.

My high school math teachers were awesome.

Mountaintop removal really sucks.

How to use facebook.

I learned how to procrastinate. And that’s not a good thing.

How to make solar cells.

How to share a room with another person.

How very many hippies there are.

Why everyone loves the state fair.

Tiger Woods is a playa.

Budgeting your time is super important.

That it’s 2.3 miles from my dorm bed to the entrance of the library.

Snow is cute. So far.

Politics are hard to avoid.

I learned that you have to study way more in college than you do in high school.

I learned that there is never enough time to sleep AND get your homework done.

Also -- hugs are more necessary than you might think.

I learned to take more responsibility and to be more independent. I also learned what it feels like to be stressed, lonely, happy, confused, and what my family means to me.

I learned that squirrels can see in color.

Parasites have it easy.

Posted by jo(e) at 8:22 PM 17 comments

Prayer flags

In our living room, these Tibetan prayer flags (miniature ones made by my friend Gorgeous Eyes) catch moments of afternoon sunshine. They hang from the orange tree that Shaggy Hair Boy planted when he was little.

Posted by jo(e) at 10:00 PM 5 comments

Droopy household

Our holiday season has gotten off to a slow start. Thanks to this never-ending flu, I’ve missed the holiday piano recital and the first two holidays parties. But finally, I’m starting to feel better. I actually slept last night: the cough is getting better. I’m tired and achy, but I had the energy today to sit at my desk and make a to-do list. I'm leaving it out for elves to find.

I’m wondering who the household is going to get sick next. My husband already has a cough. Boy in Black complained last night that his ears and throat were hurting. We had planned to go get our Christmas tree this afternoon, but this afternoon, I looked around the house and noticed sleeping bodies everywhere. No one seems to have any energy. The kids and I are at the end of our semesters and my husband took the week of Christmas off. I think everyone is looking forward to a quiet time of eating warm food and catching up on sleep.



Boy in Black, napping on the couch.

Posted by jo(e) at 8:34 PM 6 comments