Walking in a winter wonderland

I'm on to all of you Californians and Floridians and Texans.  I see the way you post your temperatures in the comments, taunting me with your balmy November weather.

Oh yeah, well, your kids never get to look like adorable bundled up mini-marshmallow men, now do they.  Ha!

Stats:

Minutes spent dressing four children in full winter gear:  40
Minutes until Nate pooped his pants after dressing:  5
Minutes Saige, Garrett and Quinn spent actually playing in the snow: 25
Minutes Nate spent playing in the snow:  0
Minutes Nate spent crying about the snow: 15
Steps Nate willingly took from that spot: 0
Pictures taken: 72
Pictures in which Nate smiled so that I could write a lying blog post about how awesome the snow is: 1
Days since I have left our 7000 square foot lot except for one pathetic, desperate trip to McDonald's playland: 5
Number of times I have played Candyland: 6
Number of times I have wished I could stick a fork in my brain to avoid playing Candyland: 5
Logs carried to the wood stove:  1,000,843, at least
Number of times I have asked Matt if we can move to Hawaii: 15
Number of times he has completely ignored me: 14
Fights over thermostat:  2

What, like walk around in it? Are you kidding me?  I want to go back in by the fire.

Are you guys catching this? She wants us to play in this cold shit.

Look how cute I am.  (Please, please save me, this place is not fit for human habitation. These Eskimo people are insane.  I think we could convince mom to come with me, she'd probably even play Candyland with your kids.)

Comments are closed.  Yes, I'm that grumpy.  Kidding, I love every single comment (from people who are as cold as I am).  I'm trying to design a website.  That is Matt you hear laughing at me in the background. Computers might crash through windows over this project.

Well, I never

I suck at quick comebacks.  If there was a competition, I would finish dead last.  When someone says something mean or snarky to me, I usually just stare, or mutter, or look down, while thinking eff off, asshole in my head as hard as I can.  As if they will telepathically know that I think they suck donkey balls.

Then, six hours later in bed stewing about it instead of sleeping I think of the perfect, whip-smart response and I yell, OH YEAH, WELL ... .  And then I feel much better until Matt says, "you're insane, go to sleep" and the only reply I can come up with is, "oh yeah, did you hear how I just told that idiot."

"The one from the grocery store six hours ago who has forgotten that you exist?"

"Yes, that one, thank you."

Which is all background to help you understand why I am beside myself with excitement right now over yet another Costco parking lot incident.  After school pick up this afternoon, I took all four kids to Costco.  I can't tell you why I do that.  Don't ask me.  I enjoy putting myself through hell?  Well, I found it.  Costco at 4:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Eve is, in fact, hell.  And get this, it's frozen over.  It was exactly nine degrees when we left the minivan and I dragged my demonic minions across the parking lot toward the flaming gates. 

They were really, really good and I only needed a few things, but given the crowds and the lines and the fact that I was trying to maneuever a cart through the hordes with three children hanging off of the sides it was dark when we exited the building and bitter, bitter cold.  That's when my hungry, tired minions lost it.  Quinn screeched for his mittens, which he had screeched in opposition to donning moments before, as I dragged him along behind me across the ice.  Garrett, who appears to have the problem solving skill set of this woman's dog, (go and read that, it is the funniest thing I have read on the internet perhaps ever), made a high pitched keening noise that centered around the word, "cooooooollllldddddddd." 

 What does that country song say?  If you're going through hell, keep on going.  I did and I reached the minivan, threw them all inside, started it and turned on the heat, but I hadn't gotten the doors closed yet because I was still trying to extract the baby from the cart. 

That is when the neatly coiffed and bundled older woman loading the car next to mine said, "Well, I never. Why on earth did you drag all those poor babies to Costco in this cold?"

I didn't miss a beat, you guys, I am FRIGHTENINGLY proud of myself.

I said, leaning in a little and holding the bottle aloft, "I needed more wine."

She gasped, which pretty much makes my holiday.

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Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.  May your pies be perfect, your wine be plentiful and your snarky comebacks be quick.

xo, Stacey

Counting my blessings

Infinity.

Plus infinity.

(Minus ten because yesterday as he played with his miniature monster truck on my kitchen counter, he said, "the other day (code for any time in the past that wasn't yesterday from two years ago to the day before yesterday) this monster truck fell in the toilet, but yeah, it's okay, I fished it out."  And then I died a little inside and I couldn't bring myself to ask him whether the toilet had been used and/or flushed prior to the accident and subsequent search and rescue.  Some things are just better left unknown.)

Plus infinity.

Minus ten million.  Okay, fine, it's kind of pretty.  Minus nine million.

Plus infinity.

(Minus ten because he thinks stacking firewood in the snow is amusing.  I suppose plus ten because that means I don't have to do it.  But, then, no, minus ten again because I would never live here if he didn't live here and even if I did live here I certainly wouldn't stack firewood unless I were the last possible firewood stacker on earth.  I would move to Texas with Greis and Wendi and Tracy.  Possibly Hawaii.  Although, I would be all grief stricken and devastated.  Also, warm.  I'll take butt ass cold, but only barely, dammit.)

Minus infinity.

And minus an extra million for muddy, wet paws twenty times a day.  HMPHHHH. Take off another million because his head is resting on the table while his paws are on the ground and also because he ate at least three legos this morning.

My back is turned and I'm pouting.  Gaaarrrgggg.  You're right.  Plus maybe a hundred or two for sweetness and the fact that he hasn't actually eaten a baby yet.

Plus infinity.

So that is blessings = ([infinity x 5] + 200 ) - (infinity + 11,000,020) = approx (infinity x 4)

I think that math comes out slightly in my favor.

Divination

"I want to see my other mommy," she says from behind me.  We are halfway through the chaotic drive to school.  I glance at her cheerful face in the rear view mirror.  It is a simple thought, simply stated.

"Your Haiti mommy?"  I ask her.

"Yes, my other mommy.  In Haiti.  I want to see her."

My heart accelerates and my muscles tense.  Not because I don't want her to ask. I want to have this conversation often and openly. I don't feel threatened or upset.  Because I want to get this - this one thing - right so very badly that my teeth hurt where I have clenched them together.  I don't in general believe there is a "right" way to parent.  I don't think there are good moms and bad moms.  I don't subscribe to a certain philosophy of child raising in the hope that it will allow me to raise "better" children than other people raise.  Raising children is hard.  We all do the best we can.  We are all best for our children and our decisions are best for our families.

But this.  This thing that she must live with.  This fact that I am not her first mother and this family is not the one that shares her genes or her features or even something so basic as her hair.  This discussion about how to settle into the knowledge that she has another mother and how to carry that knowledge through her life, whether with acceptance or understanding or anger or pain.  I would like to get this "right."  Where the definition of right is that, as an adult, she will look back on the way that I handled it with understanding and, perhaps, dare I hope, respect.

"Of course you do.  You should want to see her.  I'd love to take you to Haiti when you're older.  I'd love to go there with you.  Right now, we can't go because it's so far and you're so young, but we can later.

"We can see her?" 

I hesitate.  I don't know the answer and there are words I won't say to my five-year-old daughter.  Earthquake.  Death toll.  Cholera.  There are promises that I can't make.

"We can try.  Sometimes, people are hard to find in Haiti, but we can try our hardest."

Quinn sings a loud nonsense song.  Garrett stares out the window at the solid fleece-gray sky.

"My Haiti mommy has a dog," Saige tells me in her blaringly loud speaking voice.  I resist the urge to remind her to use her talking voice not her yelling voice.  "A pink dog named Princess.  She has a lot of crayons."

I have a rudimentary knowledge of these things, enough to understand that fantasy is a way of processing for children, that I needn't correct her. She won't see it as a lie later.  She will outgrow the need to create a world that her mother lives within.

"Mmmmmm."  I make a listening noise, neither affirmative or negative.

"And she has light skin."

"No," I tell her, unwilling to let this one pass, "she has beautiful brown just skin like yours.  Do you remember the picture. We can look at it again."

"Does she have brown eyes like ours?"

"Yes, just like yours."

"Like ours," she corrects me.  "Does she have hair like mine."

"Exactly like yours.  In fact, I would bet that she's a really good hair braider, much faster than mommy."

She giggles.  I glance quickly over my right shoulder at her again, strapped into her five-point harness, her hair in pigtails on the top of her head, her beautiful high cheekbones prominent when she smiles.  Like her Haiti mother's.

"I miss her."  This one is easy.  There is no question or equivocation.  Anyone who is a mother knows the answer.  I choke on it only because I know that it's true.

"She misses you too."

We are in the drop off line and there are buckles to undue and backpacks to grab.  One of the teachers helps them out of the car and I wave and kiss and call I love you hurriedly because I have to drive on, out of the way of the line of cars.  I find myself, breathless and shaken, alone in the car with Quinn on the slow drive to toddler class, wishing for a soothsayer to appear beside me. A fortune teller with a crystal ball to look into the future for me, read the swirls and wisps of gray that echo the heavy, clouded sky and answer my deceptively simple questions.  The questions we'd all like to ask, really.   Am I doing this right?  How the hell am I doing here?

Life, in parts

Part I - My sister visited this weekend and so, as lame and unfortunate as it is and as much as I would like to email every single one of you, I am going to have to do this once again: THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR PARTICIPATING IN ANNUAL STACEY-POSTS-PICTURES-OF-HER-CHILDREN-SO-YOU-WILL-FAWN-OVER-THEM-DAY. I feel vindicated and justified and I read every comment at least five times because it made me that happy.  I have remembered the most important thing about blogging, I don't need Matt to be excited about anything I love, I have other people for that.

Part II - Aunt H took Saige and Garrett and Quinn to Yo Gabba Gabba live. They may never be the same. You see, THEY-CAME-OUT-OF-A-TV-AND-THEY-WERE-REAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Balloons!! Bubbles!! Glow sticks!! The report was that Quinn didn't move through the entire show and at the end he whispered, without taking his wide eyes off the stage, "can we watch it again." Sweet baby.

Part III - Matt bought a rice cooker. I hate brown rice so much. It tastes like crunchy paperballs of fiber yuckness. Someone save me.

Part IV - I just took a shower and as I walked out of the bathroom into the upstairs hall I turned off the lights behind me because all of the kids are asleep. I heard someone walking down the hall towards me and I went all angry quacking duck momma on their ass immediately. WHO is out of their bed? Get back in your bed right now. The footsteps kept coming. I couldn't see anything and I vaguely realized that it was someone heavier than your average thirty pound five-year-old. The steps were more heavy psycho serial killer than pattering baby scurrying back to bed. I lost my shit and got all high pitched and squeaky and then I realized it was Matt. He had been rocking the baby. He didn't say anything because he likes it when I pee my brand clean pajama pants, apparently. He's temporarily dead to me.

Part V - I don't think I mentioned above how very much I appreciated your sweet affirmation of my small butt in the picture comments. My small butt and I love you.

Part VI - Hampton Noodle has a chain inside our living room anchored to the wall. It's not as mean as it sounds. We chain him when he's on his dog bed. He's too big for a crate. Except that I should say he HAD a chain in our living room anchored to the wall because the other day I welcomed small children and their mothers into my home for a play date when suddenly he was in the midst of the fray, bowling small people like pins in every direction, dragging a long and dangerous chain because he had pulled the anchor hook from the wall along with our entire base board. No words.

Part VI(A) - This is my life. One minute, I'm helping Amy's twenty pound daughter take off her shoes and the next minute it's like a Great Dane grenade exploded in my living room. Fortunately, the casualties were superficial, but that was mainly luck.

Part VI(B) Hampton is actually an incredibly sweet and gentle ten-month-old puppy. He's just a 160-pound ten-month-old puppy. I should tell a sweet Hampton story now. Nate insists on sitting on Hampton's dog bed to eat his snacks. He plops his little butt down right next to the poor dog's head and "shares" his waffle, which involves laughing hysterically while the dog licks microscopic waffle crumbs offered between pinched fingers. That dog never touches the actual waffle in the baby's other hand, which is the most amazing dog behavior I have ever witnessed.

Part VII - One of our Kindergartners, who regressed to putting poop where poop should not be placed earlier this school year and had to be bribed with a fish for its birthday to stop placing poop there before its mother died or killed it - the child not the fish - that very Kindergartner now wants a crab. It's like it thinks this is a god damned national aquarium. It brings me its underwear each night and insists that I inspect the happy cleanliness of said under garments in the hope that it can earn a crab by Christmas. Ah, motherhood.

Part VIII - We have entered I-might-want-to-die, I-may-never-get-out-of-bed, the-sky-is-so-gray, the-rainy-snow-sleet-is-so-foul, the-cold-is-sooooo-cold winter here in the northern border-of-Idaho arctic. In case you can't tell from this lackluster update, it's affecting me. I don't feel like writing or putting on real clothes or leaving my house. I'm uninspired. I feel cranky about crap on twitter instead of reading & writing & participating. Sincerely hoping this condition doesn't last until the sun returns because it's a long time until June. Please send sun. Or at least chai tea lattes.

Part VIII(A) - After seven years, off and on, on the border of Idaho, I finally ordered a winter coat yesterday.  I think that means that I have left the denial phase behind at last and accepted my non-tropical life in the arctic.  This may be the anger phase?   Does shouting obscenities at the snow on Sunday morning count as anger?

These are my kids on cute

You know you have spent too much time with a photographer when? He gives you the digital files so that you can share them on your blog. Nick Follger how do I love you? Let me count the ways. I love you because you make my kids look clean and sweet and happy.

I've said it before, or at least tweeted it before, but I still might die of loving this picture.

I love you for making my face look flawless, even if it is an alternate reality.  I love you because all four children and the horse-dog are looking at the camera howisthatevenpossibleohmygod.  I love you because most people would hate us two minutes into this photo shoot and you pretend that I am not a crazy person and Matt is not completely apathetic about family photos and my children are not whiny, difficult brats after ten minutes of set up.

I know. It is absolutely ridiculous how big Hampton Noodle is.  

I kind of love you a little bit in this one because my butt looks small.  I love you because memories are priceless and, as much as I love words and storytelling, I can only capture so much.

Thank you, Nick. (Yes, this totally is annual Stacey-posts-professional-pictures-because-she-wants-you-to-fawn-all-over-her-children-day. I don't ask for much, do I? DO I? Fine. Matt is completely apathetic about pictures, somebody for the love of God gush with me and tell me how worth it it is and that the money is justified and that you almost died of cuteness in that first shot and Ford should hire my children to sell trucks for them.  Thanks.  Hope you're having a great holiday weekend.  If I don't die of loving the first picture, I may die of having my uber adorable children home with me for four days because ohmygod the talking, my brain is bleeding.)

Something is better than nothing

A friend who is slowly processing her own (very different) trauma wrote to me.  I know you've dealt with tragedy in your life, she said.  How have you dealt with the residual sadness and guilt and all of that nasty stuff?

Residue. It's the perfect word.  For a long time I felt like there was a residue on everything I touched, physically, mentally and emotionally.  A waxy build up of shame and doubt and uncertainty and fear and sadness and guilt.

How did I deal with it when the wound was fresh? I cried a lot.  I didn't sleep.  Sometimes, I wonder in those first dark months, when I dreaded every interaction, every chance meeting, every innocent query, every visit to every place I had ever been, every email congratulating us on our fourth child who had become, quietly, our third, how I didn't beg that we pack up and leave this town.  Move to a place where there were no Kin.derm.usik moms to ask at a chance grocery store meeting a question that sliced through breastplate, cartilage and bone.  Didn't you have an older son?  How is O?  And then walk on as if I weren't bleeding out on the tile floor in front of the bananas.

I don't know why I didn't.  I'm a resilient soul.  I don't hold grudges and I expect others to let go. I'm a partner in a wonderful marriage. I knew it was right for that little boy.  I am happy.  I am loved and I love.  I knew he was loved.  I have strong friends.

Even with all of that, some days it wasn't enough.

How do I deal when my thoughts encounter a sticky spot on my soul?  I don't cry any more, but I can still be knocked off balance, sent reeling.  Can't we all?  What Bon wrote is true; she always writes the truth. The terrible beautiful truth.  "we all have broken places, hurts. we’ve all done terrible or wonderful things in the dark, at least once. we’re too old now to deny it. most of us have had things happen that we didn’t deserve. there’s no point in shame, but it’s damn hard to unlearn."

Sometimes the same thing is both terrible and wonderful.

It is a terrible thing that we adopted a child that we couldn't parent. It is a terrible and wonderful thing that we admitted our helplessness, our resentment and our anger to ourselves and then to others and then worked with professionals for a solution.  It is a wonderful thing that he found parents who could parent him, that he found attachment and bonding, that he found peace.

In three weeks, I'll speak in Bethesda to parents seeking to adopt older children from the foster-adopt system about the reality, the emotions, the unexpectedness of the moment when a traumatized child enters your home.  I'll answer questions about what I felt went "wrong" in our home so that they can feel like they are prepared to do things "right."  I correspond with parents more often than I ever fathomed I would. They write to me from their fear or their hurt or their frustration or their resignation, glad to have found someone who has said out loud, we struggled, we hurt, we failed.  I sit on our hardwood stairs in the dark and I listen to a mother cry through her story.  A mother I've never met.  A mother who wrote to me and trusted me with her darkness.

Matt asks me why I want to talk about it. Why I put myself and our story and this pain out there. I remember a bleak day in 2007 bathed in sunshine when a women I had never met, a women from a yahoo chat group, became real through a ring and a wire and a wish.  I remember how it felt when she told me she had fostered five children and there had been one - a little girl - that she couldn't parent and whom she would never forget.  It felt like safety.  It felt like a net under a wire strung so high that I couldn't see the ground.  It felt like being the last human alive at the very end of time and looking across the wasteland to see another person waving at me.

I'm not sure that I buy the idea that our worst hurts, our darkest moments, put us where we need to be.  Who wants to be there on the floor, curled around that pain?  Who needs to be?  We could all live our lives quite happily oblivious to pain and impervious to tragedy.  But I do believe that those very moments can put us where someone else needs us to be.  Damn hard to unlearn, indeed.  That is something, isn't it?

Eventually, we have to walk out from whatever it is that we are under and look up at the clear blue sky.  It's not as if it doesn't hurt any longer.  It hurts, but we've made our peace with ourselves and it just doesn't matter as much as it once did what others think, there is no blood left to bleed on the grocery store floor.  Which is a separate kind of peace.  And that is something too.

This is what evil looks like

Since you asked, here are their evil Halloween costumes, straight off of the good little Christian Kindergartener "not allowed" list. A witch and a vampire. And yes, if you don't know the back story, I am being totally and completely obnoxious in this post because I decided to send my kids to a Christian school and then the Christian school sent home of list of "evil" and "not allowed" Halloween costumes the TOP TWO of which my children had already chosen to be.

Someone deserves to be mocked here and it's my blog, so I'm going with the uptight Christian administration.

Eeeeeeeeevviiiiiiilllllllll, I tell you.

Shocking, no?

How am I allowed to parent them? They are practically devil worshipers.

Whoa. That is evil. He made that face pretty much all night. He was a much happier giraffe.

Ditto. Until he discovered passing out candy and then he was in heaven. Until the trick-or-treaters dared to move on to another house and take away their bags of candy delivering happiness and then he screamed like the pagan spawn of evil that he is.

 

 There they go. Out to wreak mayhem and havoc on unsuspecting innocents.

Sweet baby Jesus, somebody warn the neighborhood.

A long overdue thank you

Liz over at Mom-101 did a post called National Thank a Blogger Day.  It was such a brilliant idea and I immediately resolved to steal it and credit her for my own woefully overdue thank yous and now it's been weeks and the subject of much late night angst on my part.  There is nothing that I can't angst about in the midnight hours.

Procrastination OVER.  There are so many bloggers I need to thank.  For inspiration. For support.  For fun and friendship.  For awesome writing. For courage. For making me think and laugh and gasp and cry.

But this gorgeous lady is my thank you of today.  Not only does she write well, not only is she honest and open and true, not only is she a good friend, she also did one of the sweetest things I've ever experienced.  Last August, one of my posts was chosen to be one of  BlogHer's Voice of the Year posts.  It was featured with one hundred posts in the art gala and auction in New York City. The artwork inspired by the posts kept me gawking for two hours. I loved "my" piece. I gazed. I took pictures. I flew home.  Life.  Kindergarten. Lunchboxes. Fevers. Bedtimes. I abashedly admit that the actual online auction of the art, benefiting The Nature Conservacy, went completely under my radar.

Until a package came in the mail.  Cat had bid on "my" art and sent it to me.  I know. I'm all teary typing this.

Unbelievably lovely thought, lovely lady and a lovely picture in my home that makes me think every single day about how much this on-line world - and all of you - mean to me.  (I am further embarrassed to tell you that I never wrote down the artist's name and I can't find a list at BlogHer.  If anyone knows, write to me!) (Update! The artist is Rhonda Hesse.  Thank you to Kim at Mosey Along for sending me the name.)

Thank you, Cat.  With much love, Stacey.

Comments are closed, but if you wanted to go and give Cat a big blogger kiss for me, well, thanks.