Light and Momentary

Still waiting

I took down the post I wrote last night, about deciding to call CPS in a case of suspected child abuse. Elwood said the kid in question might not want it posted, and I see his point. Here's a follow-up, though, for anyone who was curious.

I hit publish as the phone was ringing: a social worker called me back at almost 11pm. Turns out that I don't have enough information for them to open an investigation. Parents have the legal right to spank their kids, and I don't know if he's being hit with objects or if there are bruises I can't see. I said, "Don't you intervene in cases of emotional abuse? Because this is not the same kid I've known since 2006. He is in a bad way."

She said yes, they do investigate emotional abuse. But I don't have the credentials to prompt that investigation -- the information needs to come from someone with mental health training. She said I could call his school and report my concerns to his counselor -- ask them to keep an eye on him. She said I could get more information about the physical stuff and call back.

It's a good thing that they don't open investigations casually. (This conversation, though, makes me wonder what exactly that neighbor lady said to the social worker she talked to in the summer of 2008!) I didn't feel brushed off at all, but she was pretty clear that they need something more substantial before they can proceed. I'm not quite sure where that leaves me.

Seven Quick Takes: Sweet Pete Edition

1. Today Pete is 7. He is the sweetest boy you ever saw, thoughtful and earnest and slender and wide-eyed. I can't even complain that this disrupts the 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15 thing we had going with the kids' ages.
2. I went back and read his birth story and I am so glad I wrote it all down.
3. He was my first blog baby -- I posted about him from the positive pregnancy test onward.
4. One of his brothers wants to give him a birthday present that seems ridiculously expensive to me -- a super duper Nerf gun. "Talk it over with Dad," I said. Elwood said, "Talk it through with Mom." Neither one of us wants to say, "No, you can't use your own money to be that generous to your brother!" It would be an awfully big gift, though.
5. I complained when the school said we couldn't bring in homemade treats this year, but there's something to be said for the policy. At 2:17 I realized with a gasp that I should have stopped grading 10 minutes earlier if I was going to get to school on time with the promised ice cream sandwiches. But I raced to the car and thence to Kroger, and I pulled into the school parking lot at 2:30 precisely. No fan needed, no dishes to wash. (I thought that at some point I had posted a picture of my kitchen after I made a batch of spiderweb cupcakes to send to school, but I don't think I wanted to be reminded of the carnage. It was always pretty ugly.)
6. Oh, darn it, did I just say that I am appreciating the DECLINE of WESTERN CIVILIZATION? I think I might have said that. Accidentally.
7. I don't often post to Facebook but I've been doing it all day in between grading, remembering little snippets from the day Pete was born. Here's one I thought about but didn't post: Seven years ago tonight my midwife arrived and said, "Almost 9!" And I thought, "Wait, what?! Nine?" (I was guessing 4, and Elwood agreed. Best surprise ever! But I feel a little funny talking about my cervix on Facebook, so I'll talk about it here instead.)

More quick takes (probably cervix-free ones) at Jen's.

Adrenaline Surge

Stella has begun easing outside unannounced. She puts her shoes on, sort of, though they're usually on the wrong feet with the tongues smushed way up into the toes, and then she slips out the back, Jack. She loves to be outside and the boring grownups usually say "wait" or "maybe later" when she asks, so she takes matters into her own hands.

So far it hasn't been a big deal. I've dealt with escaping preschoolers before and I had been pretty relaxed about it. She's always easy to spot; I tell her she needs to let mama know when she wants to go outside. Our street is blocked off at the moment (because it caved in, which is another story), so street safety isn't really an issue.

This morning I was tying Pete's broken shoelace at the front door when she decided she might like to head outside with her brothers. I figured I'd find her in her usual haunts when I saw the back door open and her shoes missing, but she wasn't anywhere that I could see.

I looked inside again -- she likes to climb up in her brother's loft bed, she likes to go in the teenager's room and soak up the ambience. But she wasn't in any of those places.

I asked the construction guys if they had seen a little girl in a green shirt -- a little shyly, because WHO misplaces a DAUGHTER? They had only seen the boys, walking unaccompanied to school.

I tried to pray, and I tried to think clearly. Should I walk around the block to see if she had gone to visit Mason the friendly cat? Should I call the police? Could she be trapped inside the house -- maybe in a closet? I had no idea where she could be. I envisioned myself calling 911 to say I had lost my daughter. I made one more circuit inside: not upstairs, not downstairs, not in the basement. I made one more circuit around the house, and this time I noticed a flutter of movement in the back of the van.

She had opened the van door (didn't know she could do that) and closed it behind her (sure didn't know she could do that) and climbed up in Pete's booster, which she covets. She took one look at my face and said, "You sad?" I scooped her up with a long shuddery sigh and brought her inside for breakfast. My hands are still shaking.

Spouses Have Words About Words With Spouses

Okay, everyone, I promise not to keep blogging about Words With Friends but it deserves one more post.

First, I need to post about it because my husband feels he has been slandered. He feels I do not actually understand his secret heart. He just likes to play Scrabble, is all. No inner bloodthirstiness, no drive to obliterate. He would like you to know that I win at least half of our games (which is totally true if half means <0.33 in your dialect). He would like you to know that he is at a disadvantage, because he is a math major up against someone with an undergrad literature degree. He contends that most of his high scores have happened in games that he wound up losing (to, um, me). He thinks, in short, that he got a bad rap.

However, I also need to post about it because I am still reassembling the fragments of my exploded head from last night. Brad commented about my hypothetical and actual racks, and I had a moment of feeling pleased with myself because Brad is the King of Scrabble, or at least the Archduke of Scrabble, and his recommendation was exactly what I played. (I should have seen CIVIC too, but Vs are my least favorite Scrabble letter and two of them on my rack at one time = guarantee of Scrabble panic.) Good, I thought. Maybe I couldn't play UNENUREE (but what else, I ask you, would one call a person who was re-sensitized?), but at least I had come up with a Brad-approved word all on my own. I was a little grumpy because you just can't wring many points out of ENURE, but I was moving on with my life.

Until. Oh, until. I checked my iPod and discovered that Elwood had played OXLIP with the X on the triple letter and the P on the triple word. For 98 points. Ninety! eight! points! OXLIP, I ask you.

...I think my threat to take this game back might have been a leetle premature.

Words with Spouses

My husband loves to beat me at Scrabble. If you ask him, he will say that he just loves to play Scrabble, but I know his secret heart and in that secret heart he loves nothing better than for me to play a 400-point game of Scrabble in which he just happens to score 425 points. "Good game," he will say graciously. I am, sad to say, usually not very gracious in return because my recognition that I need to be a good sport is invariably locked in a death match with my competitive streak. Generally at that moment Competitive is sitting on Sportsmanlike's head, engaged in a maneuver that would get it drummed right out of the WWF, so I flash a reluctant rictus in his direction and vow to practice anagramming before our next match.

I just started playing Words with Friends (I am a late adopter), and I mentioned to Elwood that he should give it a whirl. We never get to play Scrabble, because we play slowly and the kids interrupt us, and because I hate to lose with the fire of a thousand supernovas am often very busy in the evenings. I said, This way no one can bump the board and wreck our game. I said, This way I'll never push you to move faster when you're figuring out a bingo. I said, It'll be fun!

What was I smoking, internet?

He is kicking my butt, one seven-letter word at a time. I lost the first game, by [redacted] to 7,267,360,082 (but who's counting?), and I am on track to do even worse this time. In my first few games I never had one of those soul-sucking racks that make you want to eat the Scrabble tiles in hopes that you might be able to draw new ones without anyone noticing (C C V I I I V is awesome for making Roman numerals but not so much for actual English words), and I speculated that there might be some sort of algorithm that minimized soul-suckage in Words With Friends.

"I hope not," said Elwood in the lofty tones of someone who can anagram B P R Q V L C to spell "700 points for me ha ha sucker" and make it be in the dictionary too. "That's part of the game."

Well, it appears to be part of my game, says the person whose rack currently sports two Us and three Es, but not his. He laid down another bingo while I was upstairs putting Stella to sleep, but when I came harrumphingly downstairs (who was that person who was just blogging about being Wise and Mature and St. Francis-Like? because something is whispering in my ear that St. Francis might have been a little less bent out of shape about a Facebook game) -- anyway, setting aside my shortcomings for the moment -- Elwood announced that I had stolen his space. He was going to play "sedation" across the triple word and the double word so he could sextuple his score, but instead he'd had to make do with "donates" across the piddly double word.

Usually when he announces that I have stolen his space I say, "Here, I will play a very sad song on a very small violin for you." Tonight I said, "That doesn't even merit a microscopic violin." Because I am wifely like that.

Somewhere inside me, internet, lie the vestiges of Jamie Who Used To Try To Be A  Good Sport, looking rather like a defenseless camptosaurus savaged by a particularly vicious and hungry carnivore. If you're looking for me, I'll be trying to anagram R N U U E E E into "I am totally coming back to win this game, so watch your back."

Desultory notes from the garden

Hi, internet, it's been a while! I have been busy losing my mind and then finding it again. It's been a good thing. It's been an unexpected answer to a longtime prayer, actually, but I'm not sure how much of it I should blog. The trouble with keeping an anonymous blog is wanting to tell your real-life friends about it and never knowing if you should. The trouble with telling all your friends about your previously anonymous blog is that pouring out your heart becomes awkward.

For everybody who used to hang out in the infertility blogosphere ca. 2004, do you ever wonder what happened to Getupgrrl? I wonder too what her blog would be like these days: would she have gone public and lost her edge?

I will have to keep thinking about the bloggable/unbloggable distinctions. But I took a piece of advice that people have been offering me for about the past seven years, and it turned out to be really good advice. It made me think of that old joke about the person sitting on the roof in the flood. A guy in a boat came by and said, "Want to come with me?" "Oh, no," said the roof-sitter, "God is going to rescue me." Another guy in a boat came by and said, "Wow, I'm glad I found you! The water's really rising!" "Oh, no," said the roof-sitter, "God is going to rescue me." Finally a helicopter choppa-chopped overhead and dropped a ladder down to the man, now standing in water up to his neck. "Oh, no," said the roof-sitter, "God is going to rescue me." Then he drowned. He went to heaven, where he said, "God, I thought you were going to rescue me!" "What do you want?" God replied. "I sent you two boats and a helicopter!"

And now I will stop being cryptic.

I spent some time gardening today, yanking weeds and putting in flowers and herbs. I put pansies in all along the south side of the house, purple and lavender and cream and gold ones, and petunias along the east side. The petunias are all deep velvety purple, because that is the superlative petunia color. Petely didn't know what I was doing until he came out of the house to go on an errand with Elwood. "OH!" he exclaimed. (You have to imagine a supernova of delight and surprise bursting out of that lowly "oh.) "You're gardening!" He decided on the spot that a change of plans was in order, and spent the next hour helping me. We discussed the relative merits of our two pairs of shears, the ethics of slug salting (we started to exterminate a miniature specimen and then thought better of it, a decision I may regret if he and his descendants find my chard patch), and the anatomy of asparagus.

Last year we put in ten asparagus crowns, and so far seven of them have sent up stalks like spring's ensigns. (Do slugs eat asparagus crowns? Is there an underground slug cabal that perhaps fathered the slug we didn't salt today, and the even tinier specimen that I accidentally brought in on my hand after we finished? I did not freak out about having a slug on my hand, because I am Wise and Mature and St. Francis-Like and also because he was very very very tiny and even unexpectedly cute with his little waving slug horns. Cute is something I never thought I'd say about a slug. My previous comments about slugs have tended to be of the "we hates it forever" variety, accompanied by twitches of revulsion and despair, so I felt very pleased with myself for looking calmly at an actual slug on my actual body. But if they ate my other three asparagus crowns, this is totally war.) That is the worst parenthetical construction I have ever constructed, but let us move on. Anyway, did you know this? The scales on a stalk of asparagus are the spots where the little ferny fronds emerge if you don't cut it. The scales are not strictly decorative, like patch pockets for the Jolly Green Giant; they seem to support the baby stalks. Pete pointed it out to me, on the stalk we cut today that should really have been cut yesterday instead because it was juuuuuust beginning to fern out today. Very cool.

I was reluctant to plant asparagus and rhubarb because they require patience. But I think that patience gets easier as I get older, because I know that a year will whoosh by in no time flat. I planted bare-root rhubarb two years ago, which means that this year we should be able to harvest all it gives us. And this year we can pick some of our asparagus, even though we don't get to go hogwild until next year. Pete and I eat it one stalk at a time, admiring its superior flavor. I am tempted to feel like a genius when I see a new stalk peeking up through the ground. I think, "I planted that!" But then I think about 1 Corinthians 3: I planted it; Pete watered it. But God made it grow.