On the Third Day of Christmas

I am hiding out in bed, but the ducklings are still pretty occupied with new toys.

It looks like the ducklings finally did get over The Stomach Flu That Never Leaves. Then we got it. The good news was, it wasn't on the Friday that Ron had three court hearings (all of which he won) and I had an interview for a new contract (which I got). The bad news, it hit both of us at once all weekend. Their Majesties took the ducklings out to get a Christmas tree and D1 and D2 decorated it. D1 put all the glass balls in one spot, and D2 decided to add the packing peanuts. But they are happy with it.

We got a little better on Monday, enough to get out of bed and try to face the world. But not a lot better. D1 wrapped most of the presents. There's no tape left in the house, but the presents were good and covered.

Her Majesty did the Christmas baking I had promised to do while I stayed in bed all Christmas Eve, fighting a relapse. We made it up for Christmas, very very late.

DOB points out that we have a lousy Christmas every three years. Three years ago, the twins were on the way. Six years ago, we woke up Christmas morning at 3 a.m. to the infant D1 vomiting all over her pack'n'play. (And that was after driving hours through a blizzard to make it to the airport and then flying standby to get here.) By contrast, this was pretty tame. It's hard to have a really cruddy Christmas when you have kids old enough to participate and young enough to get excited over opening boxes, let alone what's inside.

I really hope it doesn't take us another four weeks to fully recover from this and get back to just being regularly exhausted. Now that I have two ongoing contracts, we are really hoping and praying we can hire someone able-bodied in here to help out soon. Umm, today maybe?

Uphill Both Ways

So about a month ago we had a little stomach bug run through the kids, not a huge deal although it did seem a bit much coming right on the heels of a big legal-education-project thingy for the grownups.

Then just as everyone was getting better from that and I was all set to get things back to normal, we had a big snowstorm that knocked everything out of commission until Thanksgiving. Then D1 had a regression of the stomach flu. Then we thought she was better.

Then she was suddenly much worse again, and got dehydrated to the point of complete listlessness, which if you know D1 is a shocking sight indeed. But she finally started to improve again, and then it took me several more days to begin to feel human again. Tending to sick children takes out of me all the things I don't have enough to spare of anyway, especially when it's administering tiny doses of fluids around the clock.

So Monday was the first day I started to feel decent, started to work and do school with the kids again. We've had a few social/professional events I've managed to sneak away and attend in all this. I was still pretty tired, but things were beginning to come back together.

Then today D4 started throwing up again. I have NO IDEA what is going on. The doctor we took D1 to thought it might be her system still unbalanced from the former illness and prescribed probiotics. I don't know where it's going to hit next or if that was the end of it. I do know I'm very, very tired of holding one cranky small person while trying to keep the other three fed and occupied.

I don't even want to THINK about how close Christmas is.

The White and Drifted Snow

I probably shouldn't have chosen "Over the River and Through the Woods" as our folksong to learn this month. Repeatedly singing about the joys of an old New England Thanksgiving seems to have brought the appropriate weather out to the Northwest, where the proper Thanksgiving weather ought to be gray drizzle.

The adventure really started on Sunday after church, when we noticed a few flakes of snow. How charming, we thought. It will soon turn to rain, we thought. Or clear up and get cold. And so Wondergirl and Bookworm and I continued with our plans to take the ducklings to the zoo on Monday, since we had yet to make a second use of the zoo passes Wondergirl got for us back in July, what with car problems and busy grownups and all.

On Monday it looked a bit less promising. There was actual snow on the ground. But surely, it wouldn't stick to the roads, would it? Not the real roads that more than three cars use? Besides, Wondergirl used to live in the Northwoods and knew how to drive in snow. So even though it defied all expectations and kept on snowing, we ventured forth, confident that the roads would improve as we got further into civilization.

The snow kept coming, and the roads did not improve, but we were well bundled up and had lots of food in the car in case of emergencies and made it all the way to the zoo, at which point it seemed silly to give up and go back. So we went in. We were half an hour past opening, and the first people to arrive. We decided to stick with the aquarium, which had the advantage of being interesting AND indoors. It was really quite lovely to be able to browse at leisure without having to constantly worry about losing children in the crowd. According to their preferences, D3 stood and watched the same window for nearly the whole time, while the others ran around three times over. There was only one other family there the entire time.

Which was not a very long time, because a zookeeper came out and informed us they were closing the zoo. But we could take our time and head back out when we were ready. Since I was trying to get home for an online class at one, this gave us about as much time as we had planned on. We emerged from the aquarium to find the snow had progressed from powdered sugar sprinkle to cream cheese icing thick.

The good news about the return trip was that there was no danger of injury, because everyone was traveling so slowly. The bad news was, I was in serious danger of missing my class at one. However, we all remained in good holiday spirits and sang all the verses of all the Thanksgiving songs we know, which is quite a few. And I parceled out lunch in slow sequence so that the children would have something to munch on or at least look forward to for the entire long trip home.

We did arrive in one piece and I raced inside to start my class only to discover it really started at three. Which was a pity, because the snow got thicker and thicker and the wind got higher and higher, and it became evident that a class started at three was probably not going to get finished. But I tried anyway.

DOB was at the office and thought, when things started closing down and they started sending everyone home, that he'd just wait for everyone to get off the road and then proceed home himself. He decided against it, though, and therefore arrived all the way home a short while before the power winked out for good. The next morning he thought he would venture forth and discovered a very large tree across the road, pulling down the power lines. He tried to go up the hill on the other side, but gave up when he went more back than forward. It was just as well, as just over the next crest was another tree down.

So we were marooned. Fortunately Their Majesties are well stocked with wood stoves and flashlights and even a generator (except they'd forgotten to get gas) and it really was only a modest inconvenience. Once the wind had died down we went out and inspected the damage to all our favorite climbing trees and climbed on them horizontally instead.

We figured it was a bad sign when Her Majesty called the power company and in the message about the outage it said, cheerfully, "Did you know that if you are without power for more than 120 hours, you qualify for a $50 rebate?"

By Tuesday afternoon the roads were reasonably clear, but there was no sign of light. We had finally persuaded D4 that the power being out was not the end of the world, and that a man would come in a big truck to fix it, a thought which gave him much consolation although he continues to be afraid of the dark.

On Wednesday Her Majesty and I had the bright idea of doing a Christmas present craft project for the kids, which it was great to have done, and I was reminded that the reason I am not the sort of mom who does elaborate, creative crafts to build warm memories with my children is that the warmth in those memories would derive from the increasing vehemence of my feelings and the creativity would be primarily manifest in the language used to describe this paper backing of lamentable heritage and dubious prospects that won't just come off the recalcitrant fabric already. I think we'll stick to memorizing a lot of holiday songs.

Anyway, the power came back on Thursday afternoon, and since all the baking parts of Thanksgiving were taken care of by people whose power was already on, everything went fine. Except that D1 came down sick and we had to leave early. But still, we had much to be thankful for.

Assorted Craziness

1. DOB is learning to be a trial lawyer, so he took a class in it for a very intense weekend last month and then this past Saturday they did a mock trial in a real courtroom with a real judge and real objections (though not enough of them). I got to practice my evidence-fabricating skills by making up pictures to go with the fact scenario: D1 and D3 posed for childhood shots of the plaintiff, and I painstakingly modified a picture of "Mugsys Sports Bar" to become "Chuggies Sports Bar." (No apostrophe--what do sports bars know of apostrophes?) I also got to be a witness. We won, slightly. We learned a lot and had a lot of fun and then met up with some good friends for dinner and got home very, very late indeed.

2. The difference between the first and the fourth baby, as observed with our friends--people who have had their first baby find it turns their life upside down and they can't do *anything* for awhile. People who are on number four realize that they can pull extra babysitting and household help credits and take advantage of that quiet, portable newborn to get out for once.

3. Sunday morning after all of that, we were almost ready for church when D3 threw up all over our new carpet scraps. We decided not to go to church.

4. Carpet scraps--it turns out almost all of DOB's extra feet/ankle/knee problems over the past several months, which we thought were *car* related, were actually *floor* related. (The floors around here being tile, a variety with much value as, for instance, when people throw up all over it.) A quick trip to the carpet outlet and his feet are feeling much better and he can drive again. If only, if only . . .
However, it's very good to have him able to function again.

5. The illness has gone around at least with the kids, but the symptoms are so intermittent and mild it's hard to know when it begins or ends.

6. I'm progressing on taking my online courses, but not so fast as I wanted to. They don't always download so well--especially, some theorize, when it's windy. Or something. Anyway, only nine hours to go. I'm also getting to draft a whole motion for summary judgment. (Which is basically a paper explaining to the judge why you shouldn't bother with a trial because the other side couldn't possibly win.)

7. We also had a windstorm, power outage, and earthquake this week. But I didn't feel the earthquake.

Just In Case You Needed It

Or perhaps I'm the last person on the Interwebs to discover it, but we just found a new way to waste time this week: Wolfram Mathematica Demonstrations. I came across it looking for a way to demonstrate the tides (after we nearly got sloshed by one that was coming in faster than we thought) and we quickly got hooked on all kinds of cool little free doohickeys where you can change This and change That and ooo! See what it does!

And it's got "Mathematics" right there on the top, so it's got to be educational, right?

Synacisms

For many years I've been subject to a particular variety of slip of the tongue which as far as I know is an as-yet unobserved and unnamed phenomenon.

The situation is this: There are two words that have essentially the same meaning, and so your mind is unable to choose between them. Instead of one or the other, out comes a mishmash that combines half of each, which just happens to be another, quite unrelated word. Awkwardly, you grasp for the correct term--and instead produce a second mishmash with the remaining elements, which turns out to be yet another unrelated word.

The first time it happened was when I was much younger, driving about with my siblings, and observed a heavy-set woman working in front of her house. "There's someone working in her lard," I said, and then on further reflection corrected, "No, no, I mean her yawn!"

When I first studied corporate law, I spent a lot of time pondering what exactly happened when a corporation issued shocks--er, that is, stares.

And recently I was telling DOB about how the children went out in the puddles and got their shoots--that is, their booze--soaping, that is, socking, wet.

So I propose a term for this phenomenon: a synacism. Have you ever met one?

The Final Results

From left to right: D2 as a dangerous green and yellow dragon, D4 as a cowboy turned workerman at the last minute when the other cowboy hat vanished, D1 as a medieval princess, and D3 as a cowgirl with a lasso. Guess which parts of the costumes I was carrying within five minutes of arriving at the carnival, along with four balloon animals, the water, and DOB's shoes.

A good time was had by all, and the following morning as they sorted out and compared their candy, D3 composed the following song:

"I see mine! It's all mine! It's all mine! I love that it's mine! I can see mine! ..."

Into the Woods

Fun: Building forts and climbing in the giant maple trees on a sunny fall day.

Not so fun: Clearing out half an acre of nettles in order to get to the trees.

As Long As It's Gray

So the big kids have been thinking a lot about costumes this week, and about the AWANA carnival coming up next week. Actually they've been thinking about it a lot for the past two months.

D1 has remained unvarying in her choice: a princess. However, she's been designing her own costume, including making a headdress loosely inspired by Griselda in The Court Jester which consists of a piece of purple gingham in an embroidery hoop, with purple butterfly charms sewn onto it. (Yes, she did them herself, with some help threading the needle.) I'm not sure what will wind up being on the rest of her, but you can be sure of one thing: She will not look like she got a Disney Princess costume off the rack.

D2 initially varied between being a robot and being a knight. No problem, I said, and made sure his fall wardrobe included a pair of gray sweatpants and a gray thermal shirt. Robot or knight, we're covered with the base, and he already had the knight accouterments, whereas a robot merely required a cardboard box spray-painted silver.

But "indecision" is D2's middle name. As the time drew near, he started thinking about other things. I got worried. DOB suggested a dog or a wolf. "It's OK," I said, "Dogs are gray. Wolves are gray. All it takes is a pair of ears. I can do that." Other ideas came up. D1 made a long list of possibilities (and an equally long list for herself, all variations on Girls Wearing Fancy Dresses), then asked me to correct the spelling and recopied it twice. Most of them could be done in some variation of gray, if not just regular clothes.

Unfortunately, what he finally seems to have settled on is Dragon, after some concern over whether it would violate the carnival's ban on scary costumes. (I pointed out that some dragons are non-scary, like the one in The Reluctant Dragon.) And what kind of boring dragon is gray?

I did dig up an old but not impossibly small bright yellow hoodie that I can sew felt spikes and a tail on. But I'm still kind of hoping he'll switch back to knight before I do it.

And I have an uneasy feeling that whatever I sew, he'll wish at the last minute he'd picked something else.

Picture from D2's Birthday

Impressed by my glamorous cake? He asked for a house. It was a house. He could help make it. We actually got it made. Someday D1 will be old enough to make fabulous complicated cakes like I used to make before I had kids to make them for.

The State of Things

After being absent all summer (and spring, and winter), the sun has finally come out. When it gets high enough to shine over the trees. Not entirely coincidentally, I recently decided to scuttle school in the mornings in favor of going outside. I needed more fresh air. The twins needed more activity in the morning, or they failed to fall asleep until 4:30 in the afternoon, and then had to be woken for supper, and it went downhill from there. The hard part has been persuading the big kids (OK, D1 mainly) that the great big world out there is in fact equally if not more interesting than that of books and drawing.

The main culprit in the aversion to outdoors has been the spiders. This has been an unusually good year for spiders, and for most of September one could hardly take a step outside without getting entangled in a web. Cars parked overnight would sport webs in the morning, sparkling over the slug trails.

As a counterbalancing measure, we read Charlotte's Web and Spiders by Seymour Simon and learned to identify and distinguish them, but academic interest could not entirely overcome the icky sensation of an unexpected face full of web. But the spiders are starting to die off with the advancing fall, and there are compensating activities: raiding the last of the raspberries and huckleberries; making stone soup; spotting rare squirrels, heron nests, and gopher snakes giving birth.

At the same time, the Washington Bar rule change finally became effective and I can qualify for active status again if I take 45 hours of continuing education; half of that has to be live. Then another fifteen hour class for good measure. Fortunately webcasts count as live classes for the first requirement, but even so getting it all in over the next two months so I can be active at the beginning of next year will be daunting. It also looks like the legal research I've been doing will be picking up, for another 15-20 hours a month. Which doesn't seem like that many hours on paper, but it does when someone wakes up early from naptime.

And school? Well, they taught themselves to read last year, so we're already ahead of the game. Why rush matters? They have their whole lives to be chained to desks; best to get them out and running while they still can. Besides, I still hold the best and simplest method of education is to leave a child idle in the presence of heaps of books. It worked for C. S. Lewis and Samuel Johnson. And, less illustriously but more practically, for me. Why not the ducklings?

Give me Five

Someone turned five today, at 8:30 this morning Pacific time, as we discussed in some detail, since it was 11:30 and Eastern time where he was born. Someone likes discussing time zones and looking at maps. And listening to stories. And reading stories. And coloring elaborate abstract designs.

Someone likes to pretend to be a small, cuddly version of a large, ferocious predator. Or dressing up as a hero of old. Someone is so busy inside his own head that it's hard to guess what's really going on in there.

Someone has a whole world that lives inside his stomach. Maybe that's why there's not always room for much dinner. But he still likes cooking meals and eating them. Or at least talking about eating them.

Someone doesn't fit the "typical little boy" profile at all, but is very, very happy being himself. And we're very, very happy to have had him with us for the past five years.

Journey North

So we've decided to sell our current van to eliminate the car payment. We'll be driving Their Majesty's old van instead. This, although it doesn't sound very simple, is much more complicated than it sounds--first, because DOB now uses hand controls to drive upright vehicles, and second, because a day or two after we decided to do this, I backed into my grandpa's old Dodge truck. (I don't know if the truck was damaged--it was hard to tell. But the van's bumper was done for.)

Step one, then, was taking both vans into the shop to get the hand controls switched. Not just any shop does this, of course--and the place we go to have it done is on the far side of Seattle, an hour and a half north if you're lucky about traffic. We originally chose this particular place--they are all pretty far away--because it is close to some good friends of ours. Unfortunately, their kids were getting over something involving vomiting, and our kids were getting over something involving coughing, sore throats, and mysterious rashes, and an exchange of germs seemed ill-advised. So we missed out on the hoped-for visit.

Wondergirl kindly agreed to help out with the driving, though, and we set out with the ducklings parceled out among us to allow both of us to use the carpool lane. I had hoped that stuffing breakfast in their hands (french toast and dried fruit in little baggies) as I buckled them in would make for a quiet ride up, but D3 decided to scream for the first twenty minutes, "I don't want you to drive!" This is going to be a long day, I thought. But after awhile D4 and I started chatting about the fascinating sights of the interstate and she quieted down to eavesdrop.

After the controls were removed from the first vehicle, we were free to go and found a couple of parks to explore and eat lunch at, which more than satisfied the ducklings as to the value of the expedition. On the way back to the shop, we spotted a pair of thrift stores and at Wondergirl's suggestion I seized the opportunity to take the big kids in to try on tennis shoes without having to occupy the twins at the same time.

I figured to time returning right at nap time. (Wondergirl waited for the second car and returned at her leisure, after braving the germs at our friends' house.) Understand that on our usual 10-minute drives back from town right before or after lunch, it is a heroic undertaking to keep D4 from falling soundly asleep, whereupon he wakes up when we arrive and never takes any more nap. But though I played soft music and spoke to no one, and though everyone else fell soundly asleep, D4 remained alert and chatty all two hours home.

At our usual exit there is an intersection that backs up severely in the late afternoon. I figured to avoid it, as is our usual custom, by getting off at the exit before and going around. Which I did--I got off at the exit, went around the roundabout, and got right back on the highway. It had been a long day.

We got home with everyone tired and cranky and I tried pulling out my latest secret weapon in the maternal arsenal: back rubs. I've been teaching them all how to massage each others' backs, and even the twins like to join in, tiny fists pounding. While it didn't make for perfect harmony (mostly on the question of whose turn it was be rubbed or rub), it was a lot better to have consensual pounding on backs instead of antagonistic pounding on heads.

Yesterday we did the only slightly less onerous undertaking of emptying the car of the landfill's worth of detritus that accumulates after about three minutes of buckling in kids. And we took it to a much closer shop to get the bumper replaced.

Laws of Children's Clothing

1. If you want the weather to warm back up, just complete the seasonal clothing switch.

2. If you allow a young boy to choose his own clothes, with or without the assistance of his father, the results will be as follows:
a. If the day's plans are staying at home or playing in the mud with his cousins, the clothing selected will be a nice sweater and a pair of corduroy slacks.
b. If the day's plans are church or going to town, the clothing selected will be a pair of ripped jeans and an old hoodie.

Comes Round the Year

It's one of those times when I get nostalgic and read back through the posts from a year ago, two years ago, three years ago . . . Goodness, there's a lot more history than there used to be. I really should learn how to do a more manageable archive.

Somehow--the revolution of the earth around the sun likely being responsible--the duchy has arrived at seven years of existence. A result that has often been in some doubt, not because we might set off without each other, but because we might just drop dead from exhaustion simultaneously.

Rereading old posts, I wonder how I manage to sound so chipper and sure of myself. I don't have as much momentum as I used to, and I definitely don't know as much as I used to. Sometimes I feel like trolling my old posts. Life's a lot tougher than you think it is, youngster.

And yet . . . it's worth it, too. There's four wonderful people in the world who wouldn't exist apart from us. (It's hard for me to feel like I can take credit for that. . . I mean, it's not like we were really working at it . . . but we've at least done our best with the follow-through.) We've stuck it out through difficulties that have done in many other relationships--and grown closer through them. We still have someone to talk to and laugh with.

Maybe we know less, but maybe it's that less of what isn't so. Maybe we have less starry-eyed optimism, but we have more real experience to count on.

Marriage isn't safe or easy, but it's good.

Conversation

D4: My neck hurts!

QOC: That's because you have a cold.

D4: Take the cold* off me!

QOC: No, you're sick. Your nose is running, your neck hurts. You are sick.

D4: I'm not six, I'm twelve!

QOC: No, sick is not the same word as six.

D4: Oh. I'm sick.

QOC: Right.

D4: My nose is running. My neck hurts. I am sick. I need a book!



*This is what he calls the ice cubes he gets on him when he bangs his head.

Faint Similarity

I write like
Douglas Adams

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

What really cracks me up is I first put in the Not So Simple post and got H. P. Lovecraft. (Not that I've ever read or ever in a million years would want to read H. P. Lovecraft.) Hmmm, I thought, what if I put in a real horror post? So I substituted the You Probably Don't Want to Read This Post and got Douglas Adams, which I can live with. There you go folks: If Douglas Adams had written about potty training, this is what it would read like.

An Equation

R = kO

Where

R is the time to recover from an organizing project.
O is the time actually spent organizing.
k is a constant factoring in the amount of time it takes the children to turn everything back into chaos.

This is why I can never get ahead.

Many Kinds of Peril

A month or so ago His Majesty picked up an old pup tent somewhere and set it up in the garden for the kids to play in. Needless to say, it wasn't too long before the older two were begging to be allowed to sleep out overnight in it.

Now, DOB and I have very different feelings about sleeping outside, and not according to gender stereotypes, either. He cannot conceive of why anyone would want to sleep outside, while I grew up in a family where tents were for sissies and where my aunt and uncle have slept outside every night for decades. (Although they live in southern California, so it doesn't quite apply here.)

Anyway, last Friday we finally agreed to let them have a try, and trotted out the requisite amounts of blankets, pillows, stuffed animals and flashlights. Then everyone remembered they hadn't been potty. Then everyone remembered something else they had forgotten.

Then everything got quiet.

Until ten o'clock, when we heard them at the door. D1 was crying because D2 didn't want to sleep outside anymore, and she didn't want to do it alone. So we sat down and discussed why D2 didn't want to sleep outside any more.

Actually, what we discussed, as D2 brought up one thing after another, was the better-known animals of several continents, their level of danger to humans and their likelihood of coming into the tent. Polar bears were perilous, but wouldn't like the heat. Lions couldn't cross the ocean. Bunnies were near at hand, but afraid of humans. So were deer. Slugs were not afraid of humans, but wouldn't like the tent fabric.

Spiders, though . . . there was no denying that spiders might get in. Whereupon D1 began to look relieved that sleeping out was no longer on the agenda.

We put the quilt over the table instead and let them camp out in the living room. As I passed by a few minutes later, I heard a small voice from under the table, "But . . . couldn't we bonk our heads on the table?"

Flowchart

If you have a 2-year-old daughter who is obsessed with animals,

And if you have a 2-year-old son who is obsessed with trucks,

And if you have a low tolerance for obvious morals and incessant rhyming in children's books,

Then you should definitely not let anyone bring this book home from the library: