Light and Momentary

Sniffle

One of the fruits of spending less time online is that I have more time to do other stuff. This seems silly now that I have typed it out [note to my brother: don't leave me another comment with "duh" in it. It hurts my feelings and I am a fragile flower this week.] but it has been a pleasant surprise.

Since last Saturday I have finished both of the socks pictured in their embryonic state (or maybe the striped one was a fetal sock) in this June post. I decided to cast on something new and fun: Pomatomus, in the pretty green Socks That Rock yarn I bought for Stella's sweater and booties. I had a whole skein of it and I was cruising along. The pattern was easy for me to pick up but very fun to see developing all the same. This sock was a happy thing amid the festival of crud. [<-git yer foreshadowing right here, folks] Tonight I started the heel flap, thinking, "I bet I can get the heel turned before I go to bed and then I'll be halfway."

"...Hm," I thought to myself. "This sock-in-progress feels very heavy. And this ball of yarn does not feel very heavy." My kitchen scale confirmed my fears: I don't have enough yarn to finish the pair. This baffled me momentarily and then I realized: mediumweight yarn won't give me the same yardage I've come to expect from a skein of sock yarn. This would be another "duh" moment except see above re: temporary fragile-flower-ness.

This makes me gnash my teeth a little bit. Can I get some knitterly input? I could (a) order another skein, but they make a big deal about how skeins ordered separately might not match each other and that would make me even grumpier. I could (b) frog the booties and cannibalize the yarn. Would I have to wash it so it could relax? (In case it is unclear, the answer I am looking for is "No, Jamie, you can just pull it right off those booties. No need to wash and rewind it; just go right ahead. You are knitting on the same size needles, so it won't be a problem at all." Unless that answer will cause me greater teeth-gnashing down the line, in which case I might possibly be reconciled to a different answer. Possibly. Did I mention the fragile?)

I also noticed that the leg of this sock has a bunch of lengthwise stretch. I could (c) continue to rib across the sole and take advantage of that lengthwise stretch, knitting a sock that looks like it would only fit a Chinese foot-binding victim but which would actually stretch to fit my very own unbound feet. Would a ribbed sole be uncomfortable? Or would a stockinette sole stretch lengthwise?

Input much appreciated to save me from option (d): flinging myself out the window and running away in search of ice cream.

The horror! the horror!

It's not just the 9yo with lice. It's also the 12yo, the 7yo, and I have my suspicions about the 4yo. And...shudder shudder SHUDDER SHUDDER I pulled a little crawling nymph off the baby's head.

That is deeply wrong. It also means I have to consider myself infested. I just don't see how I can sleep next to her every night and not pick them up if she's got them. Dr. Sears never warned us about that particular hazard of co-sleeping.

So. I decided to try the smothering approach on the two of us. I am not putting insecticide on a baby's scalp and I cannot be systematic about nit-combing an 8-month-old's head. I am not putting insecticide on my scalp because it will get absorbed into my bloodstream and into my baby's food supply. (I assume. The active ingredient is lipophilic so I assume it gets into human milk. Anybody know for sure?) If this doesn't work I will buzz my head because my hair is crazy thick. Won't that be attractive? Almost as attractive as this look (baby with butter which is less trickly, mom with olive oil which is less smelly).

She's still cute even with butter on her head, if you ask me.

Last night after baths I found four lice on three boys' heads and they each asked me -- separately, without knowing that their brothers felt the same way -- why we had to kill the lice. Couldn't we keep them? Couldn't we set them free?

My head did not explode (which is too bad, because that would have to be an effective lice management strategy, don't you figure?) but I did say, "What part of BLOODSUCKING PARASITE do you not understand?"

Here is where I kick myself for my tree-hugging peasant-skirted Birkenstock-wearing home-birthing co-sleeping tandem-nursing hippie-ness. What is this stupid "gentle with living things" mantra I have been spouting? Why didn't I say "MOSTLY gentle with living things BUT when you see bloodsucking parasites then go all Rambo on their sorry little heinies"??

I am adopting an alter-ego for dealing with lice: Jambo, the Mighty Louse Hunter. I thought about pretending that I had to find as many lice as possible to feed my family but you know what? Even my imagination doesn't stretch that far because ICK, and ICK some more. Jambo the MLH kills with relish and perhaps a very small louse-sized M16. Plus, she lives for laundering the bedding and the towels. Now if you'll pardon us, the dryer just buzzed. I'll be back, she says, sounding remarkably like the Terminator.

Seven Quick Takes: Icky Bloody Weary Rainy Feast of St. Augustine Edition

1. Last night one of my boys brought me a small bug on his finger. He said, "My head has been itching and what do you suppose this is?"

Yorick, Now With Bling

I think it was Karen Edmisten who talked about having special outings with mom that were actually trips to the grocery store, an idea I would have adopted if I did the grocery shopping for our family. Instead I am inviting a boy or two to come along for other errands -- last night to Lowe's (where the customer service was so awful that I bought nothing on my list, even the things I was able to find in that cavernous refuge for clueless and unhelpful teenagers, but we still had a nice time chatting as we wandered through the aisles) and tonight to Michael's. I am trying to get caught up on putting pictures into albums, which is not (as I may have mentioned once or twice before) my favorite thing. I ordered pictures from Snapfish earlier this summer, and put them in chronological order earlier this week, and I needed to buy that stupid scrapbooky double-sided tape so I could stick them down on album pages after the requisite hand-wringing about how much I dislike the sticking-down part.

I told the boys they could look around on their own while I was trying to find my stuff; they had a good time with the Halloween decorations. (On August 26! I ask you, what are the Halloween decorations doing on display in August? I do not approve.) "I want to find some plastic weapons," said Marty the 9yo. "Why are there no weapons here?" I offered him three different sets of pink and purple stickers instead -- perhaps the ones with a sparkly magic wand? or the ones with a dress with a nice big bow? or the ones with high-heeled pink slippers? I'd never noticed how much girly stuff predominates there, perhaps because I'd never gone to Michael's in search of plastic weapons.

He never did find weapons, but he found a skull covered with silver beads. He held it up at arm's length and apostrophized it. "To be or not to be," he started in -- and kept going! I have no idea where he picked it up. Motherhood is full of surprises. Sometimes they are the "who stuck this chewing gum under the couch?" kind of surprise. But sometimes they are much more pleasant, like posting about being a quirky kid who memorized poetry for fun and then discovering a similar quirk, hitherto unsuspected, in one of the boys.

Change

Dear AL,

So far so good. I am sticking with the plan not to play on the computer unless the kitchen is clean, and it's working well. One of the unfortunate things I have learned about myself, though, is that I am great at Plans to Reform My Whole Sad-Sack Life -- for about five days. Then they make me tired, and I decide that my whole sad-sack life was not actually that bad. This is day four, so please keep praying for me. Temperance and fortitude, fortitude and temperance. It's too bad heroic virtue has to be, you know, heroic.

One of my self-defeating tendencies is that I try to change everything all at once and then give up in disgust. But that book I was talking about at your house [Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy, about which more soon] got me thinking. We are wired so that change is hard, the author says. In fact, that's one of the hallmarks of mental illness -- frequent sudden changes to the self. See, I am not just slothful: I am sane (and also slothful).

This summer I've been thinking a lot about gardening as a metaphor for the Christian life. I have this tendency to break out my metaphorical hedge clippers and whack the weeds down to their bases, instead of taking the time to go along the beds, one step at a time, and pull the roots out. The first approach leaves things looking great, for about three days. Then the weeds grow back from the roots that I left lurking there and they take over the joint again.

So I am working on small but manageable habits. In the morning, the routine tasks need to be done before I touch the computer: bed made, laundry in the washer, clean dishes put away*, bathrooms wiped down*, dinner planned, Office of Readings finished and rosary begun. (*The boys do parts of these tasks, but I need to make sure they're done.)

Also, I have changed my home page to http://www.online-stopwatch.com. It is showing me that I have been sitting here for longer than I realized, so off I go...

Dear Anneleisa

[Last weekend I was talking to my friend Anneleisa about my struggles with using the computer wisely. I asked her if she would hold me accountable as I try to make some changes this fall. With her permission, I am also going to post about it here. I'm doing this for two reasons: first, I could use the extra nudge not to slide right back into bad habits, and second, I know I'm not the only one who has a hard time with it.]

You know the strangest thing about our drive home on Sunday? I was unexpectedly happy. I was stuck in the back seat of our van with children asking "how much longer? how much longer now? wait, how much longer did you say?" I was surrounded by dirty laundry and returning to a grubby house. And yet I felt oddly joyful. Some of it was because spending time with your family was refreshing. Some of it was the effect of a week with no laundry and two adults around most of the time.

But I think my weeklong internet fast was a big part of it -- it is not good for my brain when I spend so much time in front of a computer screen, clicking idly from place to place. Just like anything I do that brings out my compulsive streak, it feels good at first and then the pleasure dwindles rapidly. Honestly, I think the enforced time away from email and blogs and FB hit a reset button somewhere in my brain.

I have often lamented the truth of "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." (I am still lobbying to have it amended; I much prefer "If Mama ain't happy, the rest of the family cuts her some slack and perhaps gives her a foot rub.") I've been thinking a ton about mood contagion. I think my happiness on the drive home made it much more manageable and even fun for the kids. So what is my crabbiness doing to our family?

Today I am resolved not to play at the computer unless the kitchen is clean, and to keep track of how much time I'm spending here. (Except, darn it, I forgot to start my online stopwatch when I sat down this time. Maybe 20 minutes for the day so far?) My larger plan is to focus on my use of the computer from today, the feast of Mary's queenship, until October 7, the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. Pray for me!

Love,
J

I Hate Personal Growth

Two years ago I was taking a class in regression analysis. During the week that my second son turned eight and I needed to produce Halloween costumes for four children, I also had a big stats assignment due. I was doing this assignment with a freebie student version of SAS when the computer on which it lived died a sudden and yet harrowing death.

Seven Quick Takes: Blogger's Block Edition

1. I wanted to blog all through our trip. I wanted especially to write about the tactile memories of the week. We rented a little bitty cottage on a lake, just a few yards from the beach. This was great for the kids. This also meant sand EVERYWHERE, no matter how much sweeping of floors and shaking of sheets I tried to do. That gritty crunch underfoot -- I want to remember it and I won't see it in the pictures.

2. I also want to remember the night when I walked out on the dock with the baby. There was a college class held at that lake during the week we were there, and they had evening discussions around a campfire on the beach. I felt nostalgic as I listened to them -- the smell of smoke, the gustatory memory of toasted marshmallow with oozy chocolate and crumbly graham cracker. It was all very familiar until suddenly I saw a pair of strange bluish lights. Of course -- where there are college students, there will be cell phones. It is strange to me, and usually unwelcome, to see how quickly the cell phone has become ubiquitous. Only twenty years ago cell phones were unusual and there was no Google. It makes me curious about the world twenty years from now. What do we not even know we're missing right now, that we won't be able to imagine the world without then?

3. I didn't blog any of this, though, because I didn't have reliable internet access. Sometimes we could get a wavering signal if we stood on the picnic table, but not consistently. My husband could just stand there on the table but I had to hold the laptop above my head like an internet-age supplicant. Not conducive to blogging, so I didn't blog. I came home thinking a lot about my addictive tendencies and the place of the internet in my life. These are never very satisfactory thoughts.

4. Pete asked me to pause so I could look at Mercer Mayer's frog books with him. Those books are often used to elicit language samples from kids because they have engaging pictures and no text. It struck me this time through that I bet the language samples have changed over the past thirty years. The boy is clearly grade-school age. Why is he playing in a pond by himself? Isn't it dangerous for him to fall in like that? Where is his mother? I have posted about this change before but I've been thinking about it this week after seeing this article.

5. Lissa Wiley has a lovely post up about Anne Shirley which answered a question floating around in my head. All through our vacation, as I crunched sand underfoot and swept and crunched some more, I thought to myself, "If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year..." My friend Angela and I used to memorize poetry in junior high, some of which I can still recite. (I was trying to see if I could still remember all of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" but Pete interrupted me to say, "I hate this poem.") I was wondering why I would do such a thing, memorizing poetry just for fun. The reason was Anne. She and her friends all memorized poetry, and oh how I wanted to tesser through space and time (and reality) to be one of the Avonlea girls. 

6. One of the things Anne and I had in common was our hair. My hair isn't Lucille Ball red, but it's red enough to stand out. All my life that's been the first thing people noticed about me. It is unexpected, and delightful, to see my daughter's hair looking so much like mine. It is all the sweeter since she is named in honor of my redheaded grandmother.

7. Did anybody see this thing about redheads and pain? I could have told them that! I have said for years that those -caine family drugs don't work very well for me. Drilling dentists have told me, "You should be numb by now." (Ouch.) The anesthesiologist and the OB who attended Alex's birth were surprised by how much lidocaine I needed in the epidural and by how quickly it wore off. The OB was suspicious when I insisted on a local before he repaired the lacerations (yes, plural -- ouch again and hurray for homebirth). And now I know: it's not my fault if I'm a mutant.

Which is a weird note to end on, but that's all, folks. More quick takes here.

Stuck

I have blogger's block.

I am throwing up this post to see if it gets me unstuck.

Alive!

We got back tonight from a week away, in which I tried and failed to meet up with Arwen and Linda. Instead I met up with my in-laws, also on vacation, and dear friends whom we rarely see. They also have five kids, all the same ages as our five kids. Very, very fun visit.

I have heaps of laundry and a house to clean and an urgent need to go and buy school supplies from the sadly picked-over school supply aisles here in town. But I hadn't posted since July and more than half of August is gone, so I'm saying a quick hello. More soon.