My Eva

Yesterday was my little sister Eva's 20th birthday. If she were within calling distance of me, I would tell her what my best friend told me when I turned 20:

When you're 20, you're perfect. You're not 19 anymore, so you're not a teenager, but you're not yet 21, so you're not an adult. You're nobody, and everybody knows that nobody is perfect.

A year of being perfect, that's what my Eva has. And since she's a missionary in Russia, it will be the best kind of perfect. Not necessarily straight-A's and dreamy boyfriends, but the year that will be perfect for her. My mission was perfect for me. What could be more perfect for an insecure girl who grew up in affluent Southern California, who didn't know how to talk to boys, and who thought that being smart(er than other people) was the most important thing than going to Romania where people earning $20 a week insisted on treating me to pastries and coca-cola and where I got to work with 19-year-old missionaries who taught me that there was DEFINITELY nothing to be scared of in talking to boys. Oh, and where I learned that loving people is more important that being smarter than them. I don't know how my Eva's year of being a missionary will change her, but I am excited to be a witness to it.

From the Kitchen

Peaceful naptime on a Thursday afternoon. Just a few days ago, Dave pulled out the electric drill and put up a kitchen shelf that is going to and already has changed my life. It's my media center--out of reach of the children, but big enough for a laptop, a small speaker, our phone and answering machine (yes, we actually have an old fashioned answering machine), and my cell phone. Above it, I've hung my faithful little whiteboard that Dave and I conscientiously populate each Sunday night with the schedule for the coming week. So now, when I think of the most brilliant Facebook status update while elbow-deep in dishwater--voila, I can turn around, dry my hands, and impress the world :).

The shelf itself gave Dave some trouble. He found it for $6 at Goodwill (which is the right price and the right retail outlet for us at this point :), but it needed a fresh coat of paint and a little bit of sanding. So Dave took it out to our screened-in porch underneath the deck and worked on it a few nights last week. Well, it was FREEZING (actually, below freezing), and it turns out that spray paint doesn't apply so well in sub-zero temperatures. So a once-over turned into a thrice-over or more before Dave finally brought it inside and just slapped on a coat of acrylic white. He wasn't satisfied with the somewhat blotchy result, but I'm too impatient to be a perfectionist. And the sentimental part of me looks at the somewhat uneven finish as evidence that my husband loves me enough to spend not one, not two, but three freezing nights outside with the sander and the paintbrush, just so my life in my warm kitchen can be a little bit better.

And now, for your reading pleasure, a transcription of the song Polly was making up while I was writing this! (she has My Little Ponies on the brain)  

Even though I love the pony,
Walked and walked and ate the marshmallows!
These are all the places that I love!
When my sister was a little girl,
Princess Luna wasn't my friend anymore.

Not sure how to interpret this, but it's sure fun to listen to!

Happy Birthday, Joshey-Mosh!!!

So Joshua is officially one year old. The calendar cooperated nicely with us this year, giving Dave the day off for Martin Luther King Day. We celebrated by going to Chick-fil-A for lunch (always a grand treat), where I was that pushy mother who told the circulating serving staff that it was my son't birthday, so they brought him some free ice cream and sang Happy Birthday to the packed lunchtime crowd. I love making an exhibition of myself and the people I love :). In the afternoon, Polly went with Dave to pick out a Dollar Store present (a little clapping toy--perfect for Joshey, who loves to shake things and make noise), and I made a cake. Nothing fancy, just an old Halloween confetti cake mix that I'd stocked up on when the price went down to 25 cents per box at the beginning of November. Hope my kids like it, because we have about 15 of those boxes down in our food storage! Polly helped me decorate it with vanilla pudding, two tiaras, a bracelet, and Twilight Sparkle. Oh, what a boyhood Joshey has in store, with these two older sisters. Then we tried to wrangle the kids for some birthday games (roll the ball, tag with party blowers), and when it became apparent that the balance was tipping toward chaos, we shipped everyone off to bed. And thus begins our birthday year! Polly and Cici will be turning 5 and 3 in just a month, and we'll be spending a couple of days in Morgantown to celebrate (and for Dave to give a talk at WVU). I'm excited for that. But mostly I'm excited to have my little grinning, shrieking, walking, wrestling, exploring, climbing, 5-toothed 1-year-old!

Polly loves having me snap pictures of her but apparently hates actually looking up for them. No mind, she has a lovely profile, doesn't she?

The exact time that Joshey was born! (more or less--might have been 6:18 pm)

Pancakes and fresh pineapple for dinner.

Polly, again, not wanting her face captured on camera.This picture is so typical of so many things about our family :).

And the handsome little birthday boy himself.

'Twas the Night Before Joshey

Tomorrow is Joshey's birthday, which means that precisely one year ago today, I was home on a Saturday evening, straightening up the house after the girls went to bed. Dave was at the lab, slaving over another do-or-die experiment, and Joshey's due date was a couple of days away. After I got the house in decent shape, I eased my pregnant body into bed, and then I felt the tell-tale rush of fluid signalling that my water had ruptured. I was scared. I had known, of course, that labor and delivery was imminent, within the next week, but it's one thing to feel like something hard is a day or two away, after another full night of sleep, after another normal day perhaps, and it's something very different to realize that the hard thing has just started at that very moment. You've made it to the top of the water slide, and there's no one left in front of you in line. You sit down, and the only way out is through that dark, fast, frightening tunnel. I'd like to think that I knelt down and said a prayer first, and I probably did. Those are generally my instincts. Then I called Dave, who was slipping into the "die" part of the do-or-die experiment and was very willing to manfully set aside the possibility of his boss's wrath and come home to his laboring wife. Then I called my midwife, and then I called my dear friend Candida, who was my babysitter-on-call. I didn't know how fast labor would progress, and Candida assured me that she was ready to come over and stay with the girls no matter what hour of day or night. So I found my guided imagery labor-and-delivery CD (yes, I placed FULL trust in this soothing voice to get me through this difficult, scary thing), and I listened to it over and over as I was packing my hospital bag and working through the irregular, minor contractions that were developing. Oh, and I ate a big bowl of oatmeal, because I knew that as soon as I went to the hospital, all eating would cease. Then--nothing happened. I went to bed, I counted contractions, I slept, and by morning, productive labor hadn't started. But since my water had ruptured, I needed to go in to the hospital, so we dropped off the girls at Candida's house, took a few pictures, and were off to Mon General with the giddy excitement of going on a very long date without the kids (that giddyness didn't last too long). I won't recount the full birth story, which probably isn't entirely suited for a public audience anyway, since it ends with my shrieking like a banshee as Joshey finally emerged at 6:20 pm that night. But I find myself dwelling on that night before Joshey's birth. It feels heavy, solemn, even dark in my memory. Dave was unhappy at work, and we had recently realized that this meant a major divergence in his career path, with all of the accompanying financial and family insecurity and uncertainty. I was quite concerned about my little Cici, whose speech was very noticeably delayed by that point. It was the middle of a long, cold winter, and I knew that I was embarking on the fatigue of mothering an infant. It just seemed like a stark realization of all of the heaviness and difficulty that was awaiting us without that emboldening joy that comes from holding a newborn and seeing how little everything else matters in comparison. Now we are here, a year later, with a chubby, dapper little toddler enthroned as the reigning baby in our house. He charms everyone he sees, and he beams light out at the world. He is as strong and as good as his name. The year of uncertainty and fear and darkness and heaviness, the year of long, tense conversations late into the night and grim calculations of our savings account, the year of unpaid internships and job applications, the year of packing up and saying goodbye and then unpacking and saying hello--that year has ended now. I was making the very unremarkable observation to Dave that the first year of Polly's life seemed like FOREVER, and the first year of Cici's life seemed quite long, but the first year of Joshey's life flashed by. I really do feel like our family was scooped up by a kind, protective, wise hand and placed down in a new and more sure place. Polly was my Tuesday child ("Tuesday's child is full of grace"), Cici was my Monday child ("Monday's child is fair in face"), and Joshey is my Sunday child ("But the one who is born on the Sabbath Day is bonny and blithe and good and gay").

Winter in Parkville

Friday is the most celebratory day of the week around here. The hour between when Dave gets home in the evening and when the kids go to bed somehow seem the most carefree and full of potential. The weekend seems endlessly accommodating to whatever chores or outings we want to do, and I still have the hope that the bathroom will be cleaned, the laundry will be done, and the house will be sparkling before Sunday (taking the sacrament with the assurance of having left a clean house is heaven to me :). By even mid-morning on Saturday, I come back to earth a little bit and realize that the limitations of time and space still apply, even on weekends. But here, for your viewing pleasure, is a snapshot of our Friday. We took a late afternoon walk to shake off some of the cabin-fever-crazies. Joshey wasn't so interested in being pushed in the stroller as in pushing the stroller himself :). In the meantime, Polly was being a very good little mommy to her Purple Baby (official name, of course). But the best time of all was when Daddy came home. Joshey lights up like a spotlight as soon as he sees Dave. Last night, I was getting some pizza in the oven (I have a great and easy recipe for thin-crust pizza, if you ever want it--ready in 20 minutes!) while the girls were downstairs and Joshey was eating canned peaches. Joshey had a clear view to the front door, so when Dave got home and tried to sneak up on me, Joshey ruined his surprise by bursting into a happy chatter and huge grin. 

Now it's Saturday, late-morning. Dave took the girls to their weekly library outing, and Joshey just woke up from his morning nap. We'll head off to the B&O Museum as soon as the girls come back, and then it'll be time for "Installation Afternoon"--installing our new diaper sprayer, our new flag/flagpole bracket on the front porch, a shelf in the kitchen. Like I said, endlessly accommodating to our wildest desires of productivity and fun, right? 

Singing in the Basement

I have a dear friend, Julie, who is trying to keep three little babies safely gestating in her belly for 11 or 12 more weeks. She's had quite a few scares with them over the past couple of weeks, and after driving across state lines in a tricked-out minivan to get life-saving surgery for two of them, she's now on complete bedrest until they come. Which means, of course, that she'll need good reading material between now and April. So, my beloved Julie, I'm going to try to provide you with frequent entertainment from the Sloan corner of the world. I wish I were close enough to rub your feet and clean your bathroom and play the piano for you, but since I'm not, I'll give you a peek into the craziness of three children that will soon be your life. Of course, I came by my three children over the course of 4 years, not all at one time. So this is like getting tutoring for the AP Calculus exam from a remedial math student (which, coincidentally, is also what I am these days).

So your story for today, my dearest Julie, is right up your alley because it's all about singing (Julie, for those who don't know her, has a divine voice). By the time Dave came home yesterday evening, I'd worked myself into being grumpy. The reason? Because I'm spoiled rotten. When we lived in Morgantown and Dave was a simple post-doc, he was usually home by about 5:25 pm, because he worked a mile away and could walk fast. (Dave would interject here and remind me that he was either home at 5:25 pm or at, like, 3 am if he were doing an experiment and had to stay late. Whatever, Dave. Just go along with the story). Well, now that we're in Baltimore and he's a big-time grunt in a consulting company, he's usually home around 5:45, and this week, it was after 6 every night. This is where the spoiled rotten part comes in--I have several sisters and a truckload of friends who would salivate at the prospect of having their husbands home that early. But not me. I have commute envy. I know that Dave leaves the office shortly after 5, so between 5 and whenever he comes home, while the kids are getting grumpier and clingier and hungrier and louder, I'm dwelling darkly on how Dave is just relaxing in the car. He's probably listening to an audio book or singing along with a CD. He has not a care in the world, now that he's clocked out of work. He's planning which old episode of Lost he'll watch tonight, or what project he'll work on after the kids go to bed, which will be about 20 minutes after he comes home. As for me, I lament to myself, my work day starts at 6 am when Joshey wakes up and doesn't end until the last girl stops coming down for one last drink of water. And then the swing shift starts for Joshey's midnight and 3 am snack. Dave doesn't even know how hard I work, I think while slamming dinner dishes on the table. He gets to go to the bathroom without a child climbing onto his lap. H eats lunch sitting down. He can check his e-mail without getting interrupted every three minutes. Anyway, you get the idea. These are the complaints of someone who is spoiled rotten. There's probably a single mom or two out there that would have something to say about my work load. Nevertheless, these were my thoughts as 6 pm came and went and Dave still wasn't home. He came home not long after that, and I managed to be civil during dinner. Except there wasn't really dinner for me, because Joshey started throwing food and throwing fits after I'd had about three bites. So I got up, put Joshey in the bathtub, and then, because martyrs don't sit back down to eat after they've been interrupted at dinner, I went downstairs to hang up a load of laundry. I actually highly recommend hanging laundry if you're in a bad mood. You can feel sorry for yourself because you're doing something that servants used to have to do three hundred years ago. But there's also some physical outlet in snapping the clothes sharply to get the wrinkles out before hanging them up and in all of the bending down and standing up. So for whatever reason, I started to feel better almost immediately. And once the first edge of self-pity wore off, I started to sing. "Goodnight, My Someone," from the Music Man, then "Lida Rose." By this time, Dave and the girls had finished dinner, and Dave was finishing bathing Joshey. The bathroom is right above the laundry room, and down through the heating ducts and water pipes, I heard Dave join in with me. He would take the harmony line; I would have to listen to keep the right timing with him. We finished our Music Man repertoire and moved on to "Oh, how lovely is the evening." Then, as I finished hanging the last shirt, Dave was there at the door with a clean-smelling, cheerful, freshly-diapered baby. And my bad mood was over.

Made it through Tuesday!

Have I ever mentioned that Tuesday is one of my hardest days? The weekend is already a thing of the past, the next weekend is still a thing of the distant future, and Polly doesn't have preschool, which means that it's just one long day stuck inside trying to stay warm and sane. But we made it through today. We had a couple of speech therapy-related visits for little Cici (which are always gratifying, because no matter how delayed Cici's speech may be, she just charms the pants off of anyone who spends any time with her). I hung a couple of loads of laundry (I'm perfecting my use of the straight pin, which means I can hang an entire load-and-a-half on a laundry line that crosses my laundry room ceiling and the basement hall just once. Ma Ingalls would be so proud!). Then around 3:30 pm, when Joshey was up from his nap, the house was in its usual state of afternoon shambles, and all of the kids were just beginning to get extremely whiny, I called my sister Rachel and had her talk me through the duldrums. "You can make it, Naomi," she said. "Just give yourself permission to do nothing else for the rest of the day except play with your kids. Don't worry about cleaning the bathroom [how well she knows me], don't worry about returning e-mails, just play with your kids and then put them to bed an hour early. And do some deep breathing." How wise my little sister is. I tucked the kids under my arm, took them downstairs where the pellet stove was keeping the basement nice and cozy, and I just started--well, I just started singing at the top of my lungs and picking up blocks. "Oh an Austrian went yodeling on a mountain so high, when along came a cookoo-bird interrupting his cry!" It's amazing how cathartic it is to belt. And the kids were thrilled. Polly joined in with the cleaning, Cici became interested in actually playing with the blocks (which is fine with me!), and Joshey toddled around from one end of the playroom to the other, delighted. Somehow Polly and I ended up in a game of chase around the basement, me still singing at the top of my lungs and still trying to clean up--and let me tell you, singing and running and stooping to pick up toys is great exercise! So we got through Tuesday afternoon, and the basement was even decently picked up by the end of it. Of course, 30 minutes later I was forcing Cici into the bathtub and she was wailing at the top of her lungs, but that happens. In the meantime, here's my wise sister and my charming daughter. On to Wednesday!