nudle

What goes around comes around.

There is so much tumbling around in my brain that I don't know where to begin. First, this neglected blog. I am considering shutting it down, though I honestly don't know how. I remember starting it all those years ago in 2006 (wasn't that only last year?). I was excited and scared. Who was I to think I could have my own blog? Now I look at that woman and say to myself, who was that person? I've moved forward, which is a great feeling. Now I need to stop asking, who am I to think I can write books, get an agent, have my books published? To that end, I am slowly laying the groundwork for a professional writer's site, including a professional blog. The blog is where I'll start, since I have yet to be published. This is mortifying to admit, but I have yet to actually SUBMIT anything I've written. So I guess that 2006 woman is still living still, in this almost-2013 body. So is my ten-year-old self, full of yearning, and my fourteen-year-old self, full of anticipation and new power. And there is still the twenty-year-old party girl in there and also the twenty-two-year-old adventurer, chomping at the bit.

This morning I remembered the past self who was unable to effectively manage her time. She was the forty-three-year old me. Forty-three was when I decided I'd change my way of being loose in the world. Not really planning my weeks, my days, not having a plan for my life wasn't working for me any more with two kids, with a baby again--though he was really a baby-toddler when we brought him home. A boddler? Anyway, he was already nearly on the run, getting into everything, demanding EVERYTHING. Such a precious, adorable child whom I could not appreciate, because I was blindsided by feelings of being completely overwhelmed. I will always be full of sorrow for both Han and me during those first couple of years. This morning I woke after one of those wonderful, long, rare uninterrupted sleeps and I heard the familiar soft pad, pad, pad of feet on stairs. "Snuggle with me, please, Mommmy!" he pleaded, even though it was after seven and past time to get up. Because my time management issues aren't completely gone, I got back in bed with him and we did snuggle for a few minutes. Man, oh man, do I love that boy now. It took a long time, but he has grown my heart sooo big! (Thanks, Theodore Geisel, for the Grinchly visual.) There is a book in there, something about the boy with three mommies, and it will come when it's ready. But anyway, my being overwhelmed thing that got in the way of the growing the heart thing? It was partly a lack of time management and general organization.

So move from that tender, loving moment to 8:21 today and I was using my voice as a deadly weapon against my daughter, who had once again left a major school project to the very last minute. It's due today, and Tuesday we parents got a reminder about the deadline from her teacher in the weekly letter. Iona's chosen deliverable is a PowerPoint defining most of the Greek gods and goddesses. Okay, she had done some drawings, ready to scan except they were in light pencil, which required some serious Photoshop level-setting by yours truly. Okay, it took a couple hours, but I did it and Iona was effusively grateful, through all my grumbling about how we were NEVER, NEVER, NEVER waiting 'til the la-hast minute. (Thanks, Taylor Swift, for the song now running through my head without mercy.) Okay, so she got pretty much right on it again yesterday after school. I grumbled about how was she going to do a PowerPoint when she had never used it before, and it had to all be done in one night, and I struggled with whether or not I should put together a template for her. Was this overstepping bounds of letting her do her own work? I decided it was, yes. So I gave her a few PowerPointers and set her loose, occasionally helping out if she got stuck.

The thing is, she did it. Not only did she teach herself how to do those cool (horrible! awful!) transitions between slides, she completely changed the template and made all her own design decisions. My daughter taught herself how to use PowerPoint in about two hours. "You know how Dad does all those charts?" she said to me. "That's right here. I bet I could do charts."

The thing she didn't do was put the finished presentation on the flash drive until 8:21 this morning, and then the flash drive didn't work, and her hair wasn't brushed and neither were her teeth, and I saw the big glaring evidence that through genetics and behavioral modeling I had passed my Big, Ugly Flaw on to her. Being organized matters in today's world, because if you're not, even if you're talented and smart, you'll never produce anything and get it out in the world if you can't lay out the tasks and meet the deadlines, or just FINISH SOMETHING. You'll never be able to make a living. And here's where the circle goes round and round like those wheels on the bus Han is always singing about. And who was I really yelling at? I know who.

I apologized to both kids for polluting the morning with my mad yelling, but I knew it could have been worse. I've been worse. And while Iona looked a little wan and her eyes were a little pink around the edges when I sent her off to fifth grade with her late slip, she's got to be very aware that she's a bit of a genius for conquering PowerPoint and the Gods and Goddesses, because I told her that too. But honey, pulling things out at the last minute is not a lifelong recipe for success. So learn it now.

And the question is, does that ever work? Do we ever learn life lessons because someone tells us to? Or do we learn them when we're ready, or when the choice is so clear as to be like a gun to our head?

Today's photo randomizer.

   

What I love* today:

Coffee. 

Robert Horton, a principled, drily funny man of movies and comic books. I try not to miss him Wednesdays on Steve Scher's Weekday and I usually do miss him.

My kids, duh. (The 'duh' is a tribute to Iona. Yesterday when I picked her up from school late, she glared. I asked if it was an accusatory look. "Yes!" "But I'm only four minutes late." "Duh, that's a long time when it's raining, Mom!")

Corn chips, specifically the ones from the brand Late July.

Getting a good night's sleep after several nights of not getting a good night's sleep. Han is newly sleeping in a big-boy bed, and though he is excited and proud, he's afraid. Like we're all afraid of change. Afraid when relationships change, afraid when we change, and afraid when the bars are taken off the bed. Afraid enough to yell for Mom at three in the morning several nights in a row. Then Mom's afraid enough of lots of things that she doesn't go back to sleep. And talk about scary, try sleep-deprived Mom. 

Escaping all connected devices (this is what I'm doing next) to go write in the other house, AKA the guest room over our garage, AKA MY STUDIO!

. . . . . . . . . .

* I try not to use the word 'love' in a casual way. But I don't want to replace it with 'like a lot' right this moment; I need to get to the studio and write. I am translating the book into first person for draft #3. And, at some point, I need to sign up for swim lessons for scaredy-cat swimmers (fills me with dread), partly as research (MC is afraid of water) and partly because I'd like to make up with water someday and be able to have fun in it, with my family. That'll be a future blog post, or series of them. Also, when am I going to start that professional writer's blog? What shall I call it? How am I going to execute it? Now is when I wish I knew how to make a web site. Who wants to make me a web site? If only my best designer friend wasn't so busy making a movie. Okay, enough of this. Gotta go.

Just after I throw in random photos of a recent nice day, taken with iPhone because my camera is broken again.

  

Cowgirls and cowboys.

Ewan's birthday card for Iona.

I finally catch up to Instagram.

And with our champion skiier.

Han has been waking at all hours, usually way too early in the morning, and yelling, moaning and crying. Since he is three and a half, I'm not convinced I should let him cry it out, but I don't know what else to do. So I'm letting him cry it out. This morning he commenced crying at 4:30, then 5:15, then 6:30. When I did sleep in between bouts I had horrible dreams about lice and flies buzzing in my ear. Then I dreamed that Han drowned in a swimming pool because I wasn't watching him, and someone took his body out and left it on the side. It was a horrific dream, and I woke to that feeling of great relief after such a nightmare.

When I finally got out of bed this morning I felt limp and soggy. I returned home after taking kids to school feeling blue. I forced myself to go for a run, and as I was tackling my first hill a guy on a bicycle stopped to let me cross the street. "Lookin' good," he said. "Keep it up." That simple thing, encouragement from a stranger, lifted my spirits immensely.

In other happy news, Iona doggedly finished a whole book in a day. Saturday night as she went to bed she broke down in tears, confessing that she had not read the book assigned to her class. Book group discussion for the book is today, and I am one of the facilitators. Yesterday I lectured her about responsibility and telling the truth. She picked up the almost 200-page novel and managed to read nearly the whole thing in between doing homework, being pestered by her brother and accompanying me on a three-hour outing. This morning she finished the book. I could tell she was proud of herself.

And finally, also in the good news department, it looks like Han has embraced the potty!

I really have no reason to be blue, do I?

Snow to thaw.

Han had a febrile seizure late this afternoon. He's okay now. He'd been sick all day with a fever and a 'stomach ache.' He slept, and ate and drank almost nothing. Around four, when the skiiers came home, he finally ate a few berries and watched a some Nemo. I hoped he was coming out of it.

Then he wandered into the office where I was jumping rope, trying to break loose from a paralyzed day. He laid down on the floor with his blanket. He does that sometimes if one of us is working in there and he's boycotting nap. Only this time, when I turned around a couple minutes later, he was in an unnatural, face-down position. His legs moved weirdly. For some reason, I knew immediately that he was seizing but my brain jammed. I turned him over. His face was blank. He wasn't with me. His lips looked blue. I shrieked nonsense. "Han! What are you doing?" I felt helpless. I called 911 on my cell. It seemed to take forever to connect. All I could think was every second mattered. Every second. He could die if I wasted even one second. I sent a freaked-out Iona to get Ewan, who was in the shower. Han stopped his bizarre dance after a couple, maybe several, minutes. He wasn't with me. His eyes looked somewhere else.

The firepeople came (one was a woman!). The main guy told us what was up. Many kids have seizures with a fever (febrile seizures). It is common. I yelled, "But he's still not himself! He has this birthmark!" The firepeople were nice and very good. They were confident. They were not alarmed. They said, "You can watch him or you can take him in." They said, "You can call us again if you need to."

We took him to urgent care, Children's Hospital, in Bellevue. By the time we got there, Han was himself, demanding a cereal bar when he saw Iona eating one. The doctor was calm. She looked at him, in his ears, made him pee in a basin. She gave him amoxicillin for an ear infection. I learned that a child's fever doesn't even have to be high to cause a seizure.

Han is asleep beside me. He will be fine. I thought I was going to lose him.