nudle

Dear Han,

I am going to write this very fast so I can go write. Someday your mom is going to have a book on the shelves! I'm rolling a new project around in my head, and it's uncomfortable. So I'd better get to work!

But first...

It's been a long time since I wrote to you about you. You've grown about a foot and more into your sassy, headstrong, loving, observant self. When you're mad at me you shout, "I'm rude at you!" or "You're stupid at me!" But yesterday I did something to make you really mad, like insist that you get dressed before you ate breakfast, and you ran to the sofa, crying, and screamed, "I hate you, Mom! I hate hate hate you!" 

I don't hold that against you. It happens. 

You ended up completely missing breakfast, so it's lucky your preschool always has food on the table when we get there. You ate three bowls of granola and a lot of banana slices, and then you were your normal, non-demonic self again.

You only ever want to wear short-sleeved t-shirts, shorts and the checkered Vans you chose all by yourself when we went shoe shopping. You stick your hands in your pockets when you walk. You're missing your two front teeth and one on the bottom. It gives you a scrappy look. Plus, you need a haircut.

You love gum.

You notice everything! You're quick to smile and what you seem to want most (besides gum and love) is to make people laugh. You've discovered that the words "poop" and "toilet" and "butt" get laughs, so you use them frequently even though they earn you frowns from me. 

Lately, you've started role playing with your toys, using voices and creating worlds and characters. Iona did this at your age. (She still does it, I suspect, but don't tell anyone.) I love listening to you play by yourself in this way.

At school, you have friends you play with a lot, particularly Leo and Cormack. Cormack is missing a tooth, but Leo is the one who walked up to me the other day and announced, "I'm Toothless!" I was taken aback until he explained Toothless is a character in the movie, "How to Train Your Dragon."

You are the most curious person I know, and by that I mean you want to know everything, not that you're odd or strange. Yesterday the young tattooed philosopher window washer who was here at our house all day noticed how inquisitive you are. "That's good," he said. I agree.

I love you, Hanster Monster, to infinity and beyond!

Mom

There is a cafe close to school that we visit on our way home sometimes. Usually it's when Iona's had a bad day, so we can get her a chocolate chip cookie. Han gets something, too, and sometimes I even get a scone or biscotti. They are nice. It's an old house with an aura of friendliness and neighborhoodiness. The people smile and recognize us. All these are good when you weren't asked to play soccer at lunch recess and even if you hate soccer, it would have been nice to be asked, and you would have even played, had you been asked. So when we found ourselves standing outside the glass front yesterday, I realized that my wallet was sitting uselessly at home and all I had was my checkbook. We went in anyway. I hate asking for favors which is a weakness of mine but I am able to overcome it in a lunch-recess-no-soccer-invitation emergency, which is a strength. So I asked if they'd take a check. The woman said, "How about if you just bring the money in tomorrow and take the cookies now. Would that be okay?" It was okay. So today maybe we'll go back, take money, and buy more cookies.

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?

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.

  

She's turning ten.

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.

Scotland 2011.

We returned from Scotland last night after a long day of travel. The kids and I were shutting down from exhaustion, while Ewan stayed optimistic, pointing out how bright the sky still was as we drove home from the airport around seven o'clock. But I always feel energized the day after returning from Europe. We all woke at six and I finished my run before eight. I'm pretty sure I gained four pounds over there, with Mary's good cooking and a couple late-night visits to the Clyde Bar to listen to broad Scottish accents.

Yesterday I sat next to Mike, a charming chemist, on the flight from London to Chicago. He runs Eli Lily's diabetes research arm. "I have two words for you: diet and exercise," he said after I pressed him to talk about his work. I asked because the other day I heard the statistic that among U.S. residents ages 65 years and older, 10.9 million, or 26.9 percent, had diabetes in 2010. Um, that's a lot. So I ran this morning, then followed that up with a BLT with a soft-boiled egg for breakfast. Okay, there was no L but the B was turkey bacon, and the bread was wheat.

Then again, I've requested French dip sandwiches for dinner (it's my birthday tomorrow), so I will have to run again.

Iona is upstairs learning "Here Comes the Sun" on the guitar with Jim and Lake Washington is glittering with reflected sunshine. 

We had a great time in Scotland. I'm learning that dealing well with jet lag is part management (Nytol, Benadryl, gin) and part acceptance. I'm learning to say no most days when offered wine with lunch, and that helps some. Mary and Iain were amazing hosts as always. I love hearing the family lore, looking at Iain's photos and family movies and spending time (too short) with Ewan's parents and sister's family, including three-year-old Mia and five-year-old Finlay. Mia will probably take over the world, Finlay will charm the pants off it, Iona will dreamily paint it and Han will entertain it. It's nice to be certain of your children's future, if only for five jet-lagged minutes.

The bonus of our trip was that we got to see Ewan's fun sailing friends and their children the first couple days we were there.

Tomorrow I turn forty-four. I'm going to spend the day writing, with luck and the help of our much-loved babysitter. I've been having a tough time buckling down on my second draft of this book, but tomorrow I'll be ready to put some scratches on paper. I don't have a choice, as it's burning a hole inside me. 

Ready, set, go.

Luck and other superstitions.

It seemed like bad juju to leave my last post, with its vitriol and swearwords, hanging there. I still feel that way, I feel all that anger toward cancer and death. I tried to drown last night's sorrows in beer. I did a pretty good job, because I woke with a pounding headache this morning before six, took Advil, then went back to sleep until nine. Thank you, Han, for waiting quietly in your crib. What a great kid he is, both of them are. I must remember to love them the way they are and praise them without stopping. (Making note of that now, resolution number seven.)

Now just after three, it is quiet in the house. Han is sleeping and Ewan and Iona are on their way back from snow sports. I need to re-draft a scene in my book before the house is noisy again. I start a class on refining and rewriting a novel on January 23, and I have a deadline for submitting my beloved piece of scrap. I have a deus ex machina on page forty-eight. What an amazing problem to have on a day when there is much sadness and horror in Tucson, Acapulco and right here in Seattle, at Swedish Hospital.

Scribbles.

Thank you for the generous comments on my last post. In spite of regular, familiar insecurity I am 'enjoying' writing this story. Some people actually like to write. I feel about writing (especially first-drafting) much the way I feel about running. I sort of love it, I sort of hate it. I can get lost while I'm doing it; that always feels good. I always love how I feel right after I've done it. I find it addictive when I do it regularly.

Eventually these kids are going to resolve their situation, I hope. They are taking me for quite a ride. Boy, do I love them.

Then comes the rewrite. Then the rewrite.

I scribbled this picture of them last night as I lay in bed, thus the funny crooked eyes.

Dinner Redux by Art Olsen.

Saturday evening, August 14, almost two weeks ago, fifteen friends sat down to dinner. Art Olsen cooked, with help from sous-chefs and servers and friends, and I was lucky to be included. Thank you to Art, Tonnie, Tessa, Hannah, Nick, Kerri, Angie, Jarrett, Brian and probably someone else I am forgetting, for an unforgettable time.

Art Olsen 

Tessa, Hannah, Tonnie

The amount of training, practice, planning, procuring, cooking and eating that went into this dinner was mind-blowing. It deserves a proper story; that's why this post is long. (Read all the way to the end for more photos.)

Art's little black book