Onsite - accomplished

It is the day after onsite. I discussed GBS treatment practicalities, scared some freshwomen-to-be, inserted some IVs, resuscitated some plastic dummies, and actually found this to be one of the most practically helpful onsites I've had so far.

And now I am home and it STINKS. I've learned, I think, that after onsite I want to either be with my family or go home and get stuff done without them...doesn't matter which, really, as long as it isn't BOTH, which just plain sucks. Oh, not that I don't want to see my family until the next day, but a couple of hours to get my stuff put away and the clothing off the floor and dinner started before dealing with attention-starved children...that would be good.

On Weds, Boyness got dairy (mostly DH's fault but it was innocent, I'll spare the details) and turned into the full dairy monster, waking up in the middle of the night yelling about nothing and everything. His hearing is obviously affected still, or at least it was last night when I needed to speak far too loud for the situation and when we read aloud from Harry Potter, he moved to within a couple feet of me because he just couldn't hear me where he was (usually they lounge on their beds).

Anyway, the house is a wreck, the yard is a wreck, the brick path needs to be completed, the seedlings need planting, my dad is visiting tomorrow and I can't pull out the futon until I've planted the seedlings and removed the extra table from the living room, I need to return school materials, I have a midwifery care exam...busy, busy, busy.

Teething!!

Toddlerness is teething again. And she's actually doing it somewhat gracefully. I didn't even notice it, in fact, until ~l~ mentioned that her toddler was teething and I thought "hmm, Toddlerness has been a tad contrary this past week." I thought it was pretty normal toddler behavior, actually. For Toddlerness, who has always treated teething as a full-contact sport, the very fact that her molars coming in could escape my notice is absolutely stunning. By the time ~l~'s observations prompted my little adventure into toddler mouth spelunking, Toddlerness had sprouted two new bottom teeth and the top ones were pressing their way out of her gums.

Now, not all of my children have been as dramatic as toddlerness. In fact, the only way I could ever tell Boyness was teething was that my nipples would hurt a little as his latch would change. Girliness was the model of stoicism. Nevermind teething, you couldn't tell she was sick until you touched her and your hands blistered. No worries, she's grown out of that.

Anywho...it was this teething thing that had us sleeping, me on my side with toddlerness reclined against my belly, Fran on his back with toddlerness' feet wedged under his arm, for most of the night last night. Apparently it isn't bad enough that she'll yell about it (I'd give her motrin for that) but she DID cast herself all over the damn bed every couple of hours trying to get comfy (which looked suspiciously like "uncomfy" from my point of view, but whatever, she was sleeping).

Toddlerism

"Nomi, what a big pee you're making!" (as toddlerness proves she has the bladder of steel by filling her potty....)
"No!" - looks horrified - "no BIG pee!"
"OK hon, that's a cute little pee you made this morning!"
"yeah, yeah cute pee yeah."

Oh, the princessness of it all...

Day in Pictures

Becca making dandelion cookies:



Contrast from the sunlight:





The new desk:



Using the new desk:




Much to my surprise, Toddlerness was able to thread this whole strand by herself (she did complete it, but decided to put the beads back before I could get a picture).

Wednesday Fun

That was my Toddlerness, 5 minutes after leaving ~l~'s house yesterday. Yah, I was driving, not the best pic ever, but you get the idea. Crash city. Even after being generously dosed with sugar - because ~l~ is truly evil: she gave my children two purple peeps each as they entered the van. Luckily the little purple peeple eaters had so much fun at her house that they dropped like flies in a freezer - the car starts, and eyelids start drooping, and before you know it, I'm driving along with nobody but the radio for company. By the time we got home, the older two were in a great mood, but Toddlerness had decided that she would DIE ON THE SPOT if she didn't get nummies in bed (maynownies - short for "lay-down-have-nummies"), peep stickiness and backyard grime and all. It was an unpleasant bath but um, no girlie. She still sleeps in my bed. I don't think so.

Toddlerness learned about fair trades. ~l~'s toddler is now in very proud posession of a pair of pink Dora boots, and my Toddlerness can hardly believe her luck, as she came home with the covetted green froggy rainboots.

In other news, this morning, Boyness found the condom stash and decided that they would be fun to play with. No open packaging, he just used them as frisbees...oh the fun I'm having finding them scattered around the living room. Tell me again why the packages are shiny? At least it's handy when you're searching for them amidst the kid art supply mess.

Beany Addendum

DH has decided that dried beans are MUCH better in chili than canned ones. Went all raving about it.

So, add another meal to the list of meals I need to plan IN ADVANCE. Why does "good" have to be such a PITA!? Yes, I hear you now, dried-bean-lovers, "it's not so much work." The point isn't the volume of work, it's the fact it needs to be planned and I'm plan phobic.

Mmmmm, Beany

So I didn't fuck up beans. The chili came out great, the kids love it (bonus, they helped sort the beans and Toddlerness is now reminiscing as she eats them...with enthusiasm).

We went to IKEA today and the kids nearly got into a fist fight about what color their new desk would be. And I nearly strangled Toddlerness after about the (oh, let's seee...) 500th or some-odd iteration of "sit DOWN [Toddlerness]". It was not the most relaxing trip to IKEA that has ever been taken. But we got what we needed.

I spent most of the afternoon putting all the due dates for the quarter on one of those desk-sized calendars that I've always wondered WTF could possibly be used for...apparently, for stuff like this. First quarter I kept everything online and it got frustrating turning back and forth and wondering which version was correct. Second quarter I put it all in a binder and never used it. So gigantic calendar it is. I am really liking it so far. Guess how long it took Toddlerness to scribble on it? Yeah, I had only finished writing in the dates for one course.

Incidentally, I have a massive set of Learning Objectives (individualized assignments) due on the 7th. About subject material we're supposed to cover starting the 9th. Tell me again how this is supposed to make sense? How I'm supposed to hang on to my sanity? Um, no, it isn't working. First day of the quarter and I'm confused already.

Fuck.

Oh, wait, let's end this post on a good note. I've got planty-type things growing in my living room. On purpose. In egg cartons. They're doing nicely. I should have given the broccoli more room, as ALL of it is sprouting and growing nicely but I'm going to have to thin it down a LOT. And I need to move the tomato plants on up to something with a little more growing room. But yes, having them actually GROW is a nice turn of events after the too-late planting fiasco that occured last year.

Break - Over

So tomorrow (Monday) marks the start of another quarter. And how would I *really* know this, except that one textbook failed to arrive, one textbook failed to SHIP (that's what I get for buying used through Amazon, eh?), and one class book list updated too late to buy the frigging thing in time anyway.

We celebrated the end of break in style at the D.Family house (I need to come up with a nickname for you guys...) with kid crafts, rotisserie chicken, movies, and strawberry shortcake. Ah, fun.

But I'm tired just THINKING about starting another school cycle. *Sigh* and I don't even have a practicum site set up yet (waiting on the school).

In other news, I am going to try, for the first time EVER, to cook using dried beans. Getting them ready to make chili tomorrow. I'm skeert. This sounds like the kind of easy thing I could fuck up and not know why...ever. Like how some people just *can't* make bread, no matter how *right* they seem to make it (I can, incidentally, make bread just fine...but am scared of beans forsomeoddreason).

Freaky!

You can get these doll things to look an awfully lot like your real self...my kids are getting a real kick out of these too.

ETA - here they are!

Becca:

Tony:


Naomi (Becca had a lot to do with this one):

Whirlwind!

As if to prove that:

1) It is indeed spring, and
2) I am indeed on break

We've done too many things to blog about in the last several days. Had ~l~'s family over (adventures), had BIL over for dinner, had a bonfire, had GirlieG sleep over (more adventures), put down more patio bricks, had another nine-kid meetup over at MD's place, went to the History Museum (Free every Thursday 5-8pm!). Somewhere in there the kids played outside enough to need several baths a day and go through too much clothing. Busy, busy, busy.

Somewhere in all this I made a decision I've been sitting on for quite a while and pulled Girliness out of K12/WAVA. The letter I wrote to her teacher really sums it up pretty nicely, so I'm not going to rewrite it...here it is:

I thought I'd give you a heads-up that you will not be receiving work samples from us. We are withdrawing from WAVA. We have found it a poor fit for Becca's learning style. We've found that she goes on a fit of learning in a single subject and that the WAVA curriculum slows that learning down - and that when she is unprepared to learn a particular thing she simply does not, creating a battle. She is currently reading Level 2 books, but according to the WAVA benchmarks isn't reading at all. This is not as simple a problem as it sounds...we chose to forego traditional schooling to avoid this type of busy work, only to find ourselves in a situation in which I would be testing her for the next year and a half on things that I know that she knows. Meanwhile, she is finding and naming insects, using a field guide to identify plants, and learning about monocots and dicots...and going nowhere in the WAVA science curriculum.

In short, K12 is at odds with the way she would learn in a natural non-forced way. Since the natural way that she learns is both faster and easier than forcing a curriculum on her, we've elected to stop the struggle and lay aside the artificial structure.

You have been an excellent teacher and we appreciate that. There is nothing artificial in the above statements about why we are leaving. The administration and you, our teacher, have been wonderful and non-adversarial despite our failure to "fit in" from the beginning.

So now we are afloat in a complete lack of curriculum. Not that I care. We were paring down the K12 curriculum a ton and STILL felt like we were just going through the motions, the real learning happening elsewhere. I do believe that now that Becca has officially shaken off the public school mentality (as of a month or so ago), we're ready to dive into unschooling headfirst. I already know that we'll come out on top, because Becca has rapidly picked up better and better reading and writing skills without any coaching at all from me (aside from the occassional "I can't read this word mama, o-u-t-s-i-d-e" "what does o-u-t spell?" "out...OH, outside!"). So...woohooooo off we go.

New and Variations on that Theme

There it is! The new piano! Thanks almost-all to my FIL, who thought it important enough to send us some money.

So off we went to The Guitar Center, where we took entirely too long picking it out and haggling over various things. The stand in the ad (supposedly free) wasn't available, so would you take a collapsible one instead? Errr, not really no? At the last minute they found one. Purchased the piano. Left.

Later that evening, I got almost all the way through assembling it (seriously, I was at "screw in the four fasteners, done!") before coming up against a "what screw hole" problem and realizing that this stand didn't fit this keyboard. I was all ready to go into a bit of a fit, but Fran said "can't we just modify it?" and ran out to the shed, grabbed a plank, cut it to size, and brought it triumphantly into the house. A bit of sandpaper and a few screws later, and we wind up with something that I think is actually BETTER than the original intended stand.

Meanwhile, I move the wall-mounted shelves up a few inches because they would have been in the way of the music prop.

We get everything together and in place before realizing - oh shit - that couple inches wasn't going to do it. I'd forgotten somehow that I didn't just need enough space for the stand itself, but also for the music that would go on it. I was out of drywall screws. The shelves are going to remain too close for a while, I think. This job is a royal PITA.

Yesterday we spent some time outside the house; I have laid approximately 20 more square feet of patio bricking. I gave up on "perfect" and am now aiming for "workable." Because it was just never going to get done on "perfect" mode.

I have the kids outside right now trying to collect small rocks to lay around the grill Fran made out of old cinder blocks (because it is ugly and the grass growing up around it is even uglier). I'll be going out in a minute here to lay more bricks. I planned to go out today, to grab some groceries and deposit some checks and take the kids to the library, but it is looking sunny and the kids are having fun. Who knows.

We've eaten dinner after 8 and slept after 10 for the past 5 nights. This heralds the awkward transition into summertime in this climate, I recognize it now. This failure to recognize that the day is closing until it actually gets dark, at which point an actual meal is out of the question and I'm fishing frozen spaghetti sauce from the back of the freezer while the kids shower mud from their tired bodies and check themselves for new cuts and scrapes...this is what spring looks like in the Pacific Northwest. In our home, in what little space we have, we made room for some plants - they are coming up now, little bits of life flourishing on the tabletop in the egg cartons, tomatoes and pumpkin and watermellon and canteloupe. Toddlerness picked some of the canteloupe seedlings, but luckily enough that was the plant that was coming up heartiest, so it was just a little lesson in how roots grow.

And to backtrack a bit, Girliness hadn't been at a sleepover without me for a long, long time when we decided she could stay at ~l~'s house on Friday night. I got "that" call with my softly crying child a bit after 10. Poor thing. She stayed the night and has decided that she had fun, though, and would do it again and be less scared if she could. It isn't like this is her first sleepover ever, and I'm not sure what her particular problem is. Goodness, she loves ~l~'s house! Out of practice I suppose.

Up Late For No Reason

Why, why, WHY?

I'm done with finals, been done since Thursday.

My kitchen is clean.

There is no work to do.

Haven't had any caffeine this afternoon. Yesterday afternoon, whatever.

It isn't the result of some fit of married-emotion-gone-wrong apoplexy.

And yet, here I am.

I have this vague sense of anxiety, this vague uneasiness. I feel like I've forgotten something, like at any moment my world is going to come crashing down around me and it will be all my fault. Like those forgotten homework assignments a few weeks back - I'll be happily noodling about la-dee-da and all of a sudden BAM! something will hit me and it will be irreversible, and I'll have screwed up EVERYTHING. Or as EVERYTHING as there can be, anyway, when you're living in 500sq feet and paying off a car that is older than your children.

Fran asked me, as we drove along with dozing children in the back of our dirty-plum-colored (and already mentioned above) minivan, what he could do to help me, what TANGIBLE thing he could do. And I couldn't answer him - not really, anyway. "My worries are more vague. We don't have enough money, I don't have enough time. I don't know what to ask you for. You wash dishes, you come home every night and you love on the kids. I just don't know." But he says he feels like he doesn't do enough, like I'm shouldering everything AND trying to squeeze my own dream in there somewhere. Which sometimes seems true, and sometimes doesn't. The fact is that I've got him and that is important. Yes, even if I sit around with my girlfriends and complain that he calls to often and talks about things that are too inconsequential - oh, that must be so much better than the reverse, right?

The feeling of general anxiety that I find on my shoulders now isn't entirely new - it's been something that has hit me, always for no discernable reason, a couple of times a year - just for a day and it's gone. What IS new is the fact that here I am, awake, typing on the computer. In the past I've been too sleep deprived (slept in until 10:30 this morning!) to let this get to me, and have managed to fall asleep right on cue with the kids and let the feelings dissappear along with sleep, the tendrils of unease gradually loosening and eventually drifting off entirely, gone by morning.

The frightening thing is that a few days ago I was walking around in my kitchen and feeling something familiar - something that felt an awful lot like what had rattled around in my head and in my aura (for lack of a better way to state it) during my bout with postpartum depression after the birth of my first. I wanted to say that it was different entirely, but I had caught the edges of it before. Perhaps the best thing that can be said is that having been in PPD and come through it, I can feel the edges of depression now and know them for what they are. I've palpated the mass of this feeling, finding where it blends seemlessly with sleep deprivation here, sticks out sorely from physical cause there, hides itself neatly where I'm scared to poke too hard elsehwere. And I felt its insidious aura, hanging about my core, standing in the kitchen that day. Not like I'd felt it many times this past month or so, as if it was simply present in some peripheral portion of my existance - maybe brushed over too many times by memory and thought about too often lately? - but like it had crept into the same room I was standing in and I could suddenly simply SENSE it there without ever actually seeing or feeling or hearing it slip in.

All this I have been wanting off my chest for a bit now, but sitting here at 2:30am and counting, it suddenly seems more important than the million other things I could write about the last two days (at least three of them interesting enough to rank whole entries of their own if I was in the mood). I do know this - lest anyone actually worry about me - I'll be fine, and I'm not just saying that. My thoughts dull; tiredness is finally creeping up on me, and I wonder if the simple act of getting this down has been enough to proffer relief. A green card into good mental health. Having taken words to my worries, they suddenly don't seem so large..although I'm sure I've managed to go and send at least a couple of you, oh reader-friends, into varying levels of "oh shit Niki is losing it"ness - like I've written some sort of an open letter to everyone "let me know if I start acting like I've disconnected from reality," all blaze and shit like I'm crying for help. Which really, I'm not. I'm looking for something a little more like catharsis, here in the wee hours of the morning, my family rapidly racking up sleep hours that I'm missing; looking for a bit of catharsis, a kind of healthier anesthesia for my nerves.

I'm debating whether or not to post this right now, because it seems pathetic, like I'm splaying open some untoward portion of my emotional innards, the psychological equivalent of plumbers butt - do you really post that on your blog? But for some reason, I feel like the cleansing will be more complete if it is really *out there." Like an advertisment for some sort of sequel to the other bits of ugliness that everyone already knows about me: "Niki - You've Seen the Petty Flaws, Come See the BIG Problem!"

Well, there it is. Niki's Big Problem. As plain as Plumber's Butt, out there in the open.

Learning Opportunities

Wow, I think everyone learned something yesterday!

I learned not to take two cold, tired toddlers on a long walk home by myself. Too big to carry. Too small to get pissed at and demand they just suck it up and walk home quickly. My arms hurt.

M learned that the ~l~ house vortex is a reality.

M's toddler learned that you do not lick crabs.

My toddlerness learned that it is not a good idea to take a flying leap from the top bunk. Yes, she landed on her feet. No, there wasn't anything softer than, well, the carpet, there to catch her. She's in the other room telling her daddy about it now. "My legs, a sleeping bed, a JUMP! Look a my toes! Look a my feet! A JUMP! A hurt!"

Boyness learned that Mr. P could kick his ass.

DH learned that if he knows the camera is about to run out of batteries, but doesn't charge it, and all the more pictures I get to take of awesome beachness are the above preliminaries, I might just be a little irritable.

Ah, a learning kind of day.

A poopie, a poopie

Because life just isn't complete until your toddlerness demonstrates just how like her daddy she is and starts making up her own songs. You write what you know, right? And toddlerness is toilet training, right? So her song:

A poopie, a poopie
Poopies, poopies
Flush a toilet, flushit!

Poopie, a Poopie
Poopies, poopies
Poopies on a floor, POOPIES!

Ah, doesn't your heart just melt? Or, um, not?

She's doing a fantastic job with the whole toilet training thing, so I guess I can overlook this bit of craziness. Kind of. As long as the older kids don't start singing with her.

Scissors and the Internet

No, they aren't related. Well, not in the cause-and-effect sort of way.

This morning things were going so phenominally well in kidville that I decided to go ahead and take the gyn exam. I might have even gotten most of the way through it before the kids ran out of energy on their projects and started bugging me again.

But nah, instead, Comcast picked this morning to simply stop working. No way to blame this on anyone tangible (and available for strangulation) like my husband - the neighbor's internet and phone didn't work either. Comcast has worked and worked and worked so solidly for us for so long that I was just FLOORED that it happened...this morning...while I was taking a final exam. I was a grand 'ole 14 questions in, already wondering how on earth I was going to finish it in the alotted time, when it happened. And I sat. And sat. And it didn't come back.

And I fumed.

And I called people.

And somewhere in this fuming and calling people, Boyness stopped using his scissors on his art project, and used them on Toddlerness' hair instead. Snipped a couple of times roundabouts her right ear. Some first haircut, eh?

Furious kind of touches the edges of how I felt. Kind of. But not quite. Be proud, be very proud - I did not beat the living shit out of my son. Matter of fact, I didn't even look at him. I sent him off to his bed, collected fallen hairs in a ziploc, and tried not to look at toddlerness' head until I wasn't quite so mad. Not her fault, after all. Somewhere in this time, toddlerness decided life was peachy and went about her toddlerific paper-fish rearrangements, which kind of left me without so much pissy ammo.

I got internet back, bitched at people, gave Boyness his reprieve, got the test reopened, took the test. Booked a hair appointment at the kiddie salon for Toddlerness. Got her there...and there was no consoling her. OMG she acted like she was being TORTURED. There was no holding even remotely still. Even on my lap she sobbed and flung and carried on. The poor woman who cut her hair did an admirable job and offered to touch it up if I thought I could coach some not-so-hysterics out of her for a return visit, but I don't know if that is going to happen. I think I'd rather have her hair be uneven than go through that again. I may try to fix it myself - she got a nice under layer in there before Toddlerness went completely into hysterics, but couldn't get anything remotely resembling "even" accomplished after that.





After spending too much money on a haircut, we spent too much money on lunch. But at least we all enjoyed the lunch part of the day. It is now 5:10 and I have accomplished almost nothing in my list of things to do today (which is imaginary, as anyone who knows me and my aversion to organization could have guessed).

I Love/Hate Coffee

Oh, magical stuff that gives me the staying power to sort through and reread gynecology LOs and articles until nearly 1am.

But I am not immune to its effects. I am now tired but not sleepy. And yeah, that sucks. This is why I usually don't drink anything caffeinated after 5pm.

I love that I've finished reorganizing all my Gyn stuff. I hate how I physically feel right now. Yeah. Love/Hate. Next time I'm out, I'm buying myself some decaf and mixing it in with the regular for these nighttime study sessions.

In the meantime, I'm going to go sit down with a non-school-related book and vibrate randomly until the caffeine clears my system. Or until enough of it does that fatigue overrides it and I drop instantly into an unnatural REM sleep cycle and wake up a million times tonight with random disjointed thoughts running halfway in and halfway out of my conscious awareness. Whichever.

Self-indulgent

My whining seems pretty heartily self-indulgent after listening to Louisa's day/night/day today. Hope you get the lengthy episode of unconsciousness you need, Louisa.

We're all kind of wondering, after the supporting-a-midwife primer we had this week (class ended at 8:15pm on Thursday, and I was literally in that building for over 12 hours...how ya like that one?) how in the fuck we're going to be able to handle it when we're doing both practicum and actual school work. We've been told that THIS is our hardest quarter...but that, eh, well, I wouldn't say the other ones are EASIER, just DIFFERENT.

This sounds suspiciously like the sugar-coated-shit everyone serves parents-to-be. It will be "different."

I hope that for ME, "different" means: "My life is in perpetual turmoil, and I have some days where I want to curl up in a corner and sing Itsy Bitsy Spider to myself (thanks for that visual, Kate), but I would not take it back for the WORLD, because other days are so awesome I can barely contain it...and the rest are just LIFE." Which, incidentally, is the kind of "different" that parenthood brought me.

Oh, this will be fun to read when I'm a senior student...

Vent, Rant, Rave

I'm out of energy. Finals next week, but I'm not really thinking about them. There's a schedule, but I don't know it.

Thinking about what I am doing *right now* and what is happening *right after* and no further.

It isn't even that I'm TIRED so much as I'm out of energy.

Thank GOODNESS we're on our last day of onsite.

Onsite Week Again

Here I am again.

At onsite week again.

*sigh* (again).

I love these because I love my classmates and most of the actual course material, but they are tough to get through.

In other news, I've thought forever that I'm lactose intolerant. On Saturday night, I had a huge-ass bowl of ice cream and on Sunday, I woke up with a raging headache and was an absolute, complete, utter lunatic by the afternoon. I'm thinking...am I Tony, or what? The thing is, I have relatively little dairy just because it isn't nice on me in a digestive sense...but having a raging headache, sinus pressure, and mild psychotic episode makes me think twice about the etiology here.

Not the Best Idea?

Seriously,

I should not have gotten up early this morning, started the laundry, started the fire, cleaned the kitchen, made coffee...

...sat down in front of the computer with my coffee, ahhhh....

And opened a 40-slide gyn presentation on visual findings in Reproductive Infections/STDs.

I just shouldn't have done that.

Now my coffee is all cold.