11-10

A sad anniversary today. Sad, and still hard to believe.

I considered feeding everyone braunschweiger for lunch, which would have been appropriately character-building, but instead I went for a really fun day with my kids. Because it goes too fast.

beary good

     In my thirteen (!) years in Colorado, I had seen a real-live bear only twice. Once from afar in a car (me, not the bear), and once last year, when one practically joined us around the campfire - it walked into our campsite as we watched awestruck, ripped the top off of the beer cooler, and then left. But really, twice in thirteen years - it's a rare event.
     Until this year. The drought, the recession, blah blah, and there have been bears, at least three, hanging out in our neighborhood all summer. We have pictures of the bears in our neighbors' driveways, moseying down Eagle St, chillin' in yards. One enterprising one smashed down our chain-link fence and dragged the trash dumpster all around our yard. Every so often some municipal folks run one up a tree, shoot it with darts, tag its ear, and haul it off. (Side note - now whenever anything at our house breaks, Isaac tells me it was the bear)
     The other day our neighbor alerted us that there was a bear sleeping up the tree of the people across the alley, so walked over to see it.  My mom is reading this and taking a deep breath about now. I get that it wasn't the smartest choice of evening recreation, but really, there's a bear snoozing in your neighbor's tree - what are you going to do? Especially if you have Blaser genes in there anywhere, you are going to go see the bear, and you are going to take your kids so they don't miss out  (Afterward, you might spin donuts in your pickup on a frozen pond, but that's a post for another day).
     It was a little bear, and it was huddled about as far up the tree as it could get, curled around the trunk, trying to look like it wasn't there. We were all very quiet, and we kept our distance, and we got a look at the bear, and we went home to dinner. But I'm still thinking about this bear. It was maybe a year old. It had been tagged twice already, which meant the next time it got picked up would be the last time. Obviously I know that bears can't be hanging around neighborhoods. My kids live here, and plenty of other people's kids, and that is that. But part of me is still hoping, even though I know it doesn't work this way, that maybe the bear has a chance, that maybe there is room in the world for my kids and the bears too.

sporadic

Man, an entire month went by somewhere in there. Somewhere between the dog's spinal blood clot and the cat's hysterectomy and a mouse taking up residence in our pantry (in my lunch cooler, to be precise), and the almost-daily dismembered songbird stashed behind the TV (pretty sure it's the cat and not Isaac...) and my second grad-school mailing, after which my mentor, incredibly, has not yet decided I suck, and Halloween, and Alec having strep, and Owen barfing for 24 hours, and Ryan making lunch for Bill Gates, and then continuing to hunt elk, and getting ready to present at the national GT conference (a lot of geeks are about to converge on Denver), and a couple of minor car breakdowns and some missed bills, sometimes forgetting to send Alec to school with a morning snack, feeding the kids too much candy and trying to make sense of Faulkner, I have failed to post anything at all.

I could devote an entire post to the fact that I am not going to see my niece over Thanksgiving (OR Christmas), but I'm not going to, since I have such admirable self-restraint, and I totally understand that it's not all about me, and it's poor form to complain in a public internet space about how heartless one's sister is, and I would never do that.

instinct

So I was in the kitchen the other day, making a big pot of chicken and dumplings to take the chill off the fall evening. Isaac was standing next to me, 'helping' although he can barely see over the counter. The cat had trotted in from outside and was playing by our feet.
I was sort of soaking up the idyllic family moment (because these are fairly rare at my house - usually someone is sitting too close to someone else or touching their toys) when I heard the cat growl. I have never heard the cat growl. Our cat has taken more abuse and misuse in her six months than many cats suffer in a lifetime, and she tolerates it all with limp resignation, so naturally a growl got my attention.
I looked down to discover that the cat was in the process of casually murdering a bird inches away from our toes. I met the bird's panic-stricken little eyes and screamed like a five-year-old fairy princess. This brought my husband running to the rescue (all I could think to do was pick Isaac up and hold him over my head - because obviously he was in danger from a bloodthirsty predator). Ryan was able to extricate the bird and carry it outside, and apparently it was not too murdered yet because it was able to fly away.

And the moral of the story is:
a. I do not know why anybody has cats
b. having kids turns your brain into soup
c. all's well that ends well
d. all of the above

     So I was rushing between seminars today, feeling  on the surface sort of elated, but also mostly exhausted, overwhelmed, inadequate, and anxious, and I thought to myself, that is a strange cocktail of emotion to add up to elation. Wherein lies the alchemy?
      I realized that this Master's program, while challenging and delightful in many ways, is only part of it, that the real amazement comes out of the wider context of having my kids call me every day, having my husband be the glue to hold everything together while I am gone, and knowing that, when I get back in a week, they will have missed me like crazy but they will be fine.

independence

I listened to my iPod today. I never, ever listen to my iPod. Having things in my ears means I cannot hear when my children are trying to kill each other or the housepets.

Being in a different state also means I cannot hear them, so I might as well listen to my iPod.

Amber Alert

      The phone rings, and it is Michelle, who lives maybe half a mile up the road from us. She is calling because a basset hound is trotting along her street and she wonders if it is our basset hound. I stick my head out the door, and there is Daisy, so I assure her that my hound is accounted for, and that I cannot think of anything that could induce Daisy to climb the huge hill between her house and ours. After hanging up with Michelle, I call Karen across the tracks, who has a much younger basset who is far more likely to be out wandering. Karen checks on Sadie, who is unexpectedly right where she should be. Then I call Elmo, which is a long shot because his basset is even older and less mobile than Daisy, and sure enough Bo is stationed firmly on the recliner (legend has it that Bo leaves the recliner only for biological necessity, and to wake his owners up early so they will turn up the heat).  I never did find out whose basset was at large, but I really enjoyed the small-town basset-check.

wee mishaps

 
Sooo...

     This morning I awoke to Explorer Kitty snuggled up on my bed beside me, looking adorable (Alec got a kitten for his birthday)(said kitten, over the course of two weeks, has gone from adorable, fuzzy, helpless newborn to ankle-biting savage with dilated pupils and teenage attitude). Upon seeing me stir, she stood up, peed all over the down comforter, hopped down, and went on with her day.

     We are in the very nascent stages of a kitchen remodel (okay, really a facelift...just covering up the turquoise linoleum countertops and the linoleum parquet floors and the fifty-year-old wallpaper with somewhat spiffier materials), and the guys were coming in to scrape and patch and paint today, which meant that, after the necessary laundry was done, the boys and I were more or less evicted from the house for most of the day. So we ran errands, we went to the library, we splashed in the river, we ran more errands, and at last we needed a bathroom break. We are terribly fond of all crowding into a single stall during public restroom forays, and we are not discouraged if the handicapped stall is not available; we see no problem with cramming all four of us into a regular stall that is hardly big enough for one adult to turn around inside. It was during such cramming, when at least two of us were actively peeing and one more was preparing to do so, that a lapse in attention occurred at a crucial moment, resulting in an unfortunate ricochet. Mind you, reader, at this point we are not even in our hometown. We are nearly ten miles from our clean laundry, and now several of us are either crying or giggling because so-and-so peed on so-and-so, who does not think it is funny and no longer wishes to wear his shorts. So I get us all packed back into the minivan, some without shorts and some showing at least a little remorse.  For the short-term solution, we go back to the river and soak our shorts, and that seems to distract from the immediate crisis.

    I am choosing to focus on the fact that tomorrow is another day, and I'm not going to think too hard about what kind of a message the universe may or may not be trying to send.

Ayanda

So I don't mean to be ungrateful, but after an excessively, painfully, agonizingly long wait, we finally got some pictures of the new niece, and it totally made everything worse. Now it's not some imaginary, hypothetical niece I don't get to hold, it's that one right there, the adorable squishy one in the monkey hat.
Damn.

in a nutshell

Mom: "What do you think we should name our new kitten?"

Alec: "Adventure Scout!"

Owen: "Mittens!"

Isaac: "Buttcrack!"


This was like some kind of unintended snapshot personality test.

lock up your veggies

Mom: "Alec, do you know who pulled all the green tomatoes off the plants?"

Alec: "..."

Mom: "Alec."

Alec: "Um, yeah, but I didn't see his face. But he was wearing all black. And a mask. He was definitely a bad guy."

I have been victimized by the green tomato ninja.

moving right along

So Daisy is healing nicely, even though I did not make her a hound cake, and now she has her barking buddy staying with her all summer long! Woo hoo! Athena is staying with us all summer because Mom is off to Johannesburg to squeeze Caitlin's baby, and I am not going into How Wrong and Desperately Unfair It Is that I am about to have a niece in another hemisphere who I will not get to cuddle and squeeze and babysit and inundate with can't-live-without books and pink frilly things, so you had all just better be impressed by how stoically and silently I am suffering.
Athena, on the other hand, is not one to suffer silently, especially when someone dares trespass upon the sidewalk in front of our house, so she and Daisy spend much of the day raising hue and cry in two-part dog harmony.

In other news, I am set to check out of my classrooms today, and so that will be that until August 15th. Hooray for summer!

the world according to Owen

"Mom, look! I can smush up blueberries and make juice handprints on the couch!!"

Seriously.

I don't care if the kid has been reading since he was three, there are some cylinders not firing up there.

I fought the car and...

Poor Daisy, my stout and helpful basset, ran into a car this afternoon. She got off easy this time: a splint, a few stitches, and the Cone of Shame.  She does, however, most definitely need a Hound Cake.

every dog has her day

Mom: (mixing a bowl of batter)

Isaac: Hey, Mom! What you makin'?   (Isaac is drawn to the sound of the mixer like a moth to flame)

Mom: Pound cake.

Isaac: Is Daisy birfday?

April

April, the month when all of my whiteboard markers have given up the ghost, and my lunches consist of PB&J or freezer meals.
Five weeks til summer vacation!

the games we play

My kids have a game. The adult translation of this game is, more or less, jumping on the couch while yelling your favorite word as loudly as possible.
Their favorite words, in descending order of popularity, are luggage, semicircle, murphy, and buttcrack.

I have no idea where these children came from.

I spent most of today in a teacher-training session, being trained by an old, jowly fellow who takes the fixed and vocal stance that we should go back to explicitly teaching grammar in the classroom. Like, subordinating conjunctions and dangling participles and all. The general horror at the very idea was nearly palpable.
The crazy thing is, he totally convinced me. In two hours he presented English grammar in its entirety as an elegantly patterned and systematic whole that allows us to make sense of how our minds perceive the universe (Seriously. I was not on drugs. That is what he said, and it seemed perfectly logical at the time.). My less-word-nerdy colleagues were less entertained by the presentation, but fairly entertained by how excited I got about it...glad I could help.
I am ready to sashay myself back into the classroom and heroically mend some split infinitives.

My dog is asleep on the couch, exhausted after a week with her barking buddy.
Daisy is your typical basset hound - what looks to humans like near-catatonia is, in dog reality, exemplary good manners and demure disposition. She never barks, she never jumps on people, she never bothers the chickens...she never really gets off the couch for any reason at all unless the kids are eating a snack.
Until Mom's dog comes over for a week. Daisy and Athena go way back. All the way back, in fact, to being virtual adoptive littermates. And when Athena is around, Daisy totally gets her groove back.

Okay, so I am not a basketball fan. Or sports of any kind, really. I could mostly not give a crap. My husband feels the same way, and we appreciate this about each other.
The inevitable exceptions, however, occur during KU games taking place in March. I mean, this is my alma mater we're talking about, and they do tend to kick basketballular ass. So a few times a year, Ryan wonders if his wife has been taken over by some weird pod person. He tends to be very good about suffering silently, knowing it will soon pass.
All this is to make the point that I can understand how it happened, and yet am still appalled, that, during Monday night's rather important basketball game, I got up to get a drink, and returned to the living room to find the channel changed...to RuPaul's Drag Race.

more about school

You may be working in a gifted classroom when these two directives come out of your mouth within sixty seconds:

"Cole, apologize to Brooklyn and stop licking her pencil!"

"Cole! Your job right now is not to reconfigure the site urls on the class blog!"

Moments like these help me to understand why everybody does not want my job. Oh well, their loss.

maybe in science class...

Today in reading class, my gifted third-grader learned to launch a pencil out of his belly button.

He was obviously not in *my* reading class (at the very least, I would have made him write instructions for other would-be pencil launchers).

dyn-o-mite

Alec's guitar teacher gave him a CD of songs that he will be working on for the spring recital. The CD contains two songs. Queen's "We Will Rock You" and Justin Bieber's "Dynamite," the latter of which you know even if you don't think you know it. It's the one where the chorus goes "hey-o something something-o" and it's already enshrined in the collective subconscious.
Alec thinks it is the best music he has ever heard, and so we listened to that CD Seven Thousand Times today. By the spring recital, he should be able to play both songs using only his brainwaves.

And I had total mommy-moment that my kid is old enough to listen to Justin Bieber. He is not, however, old enough to not call him Justin Beaver.

tea, creamy and sweet
lingering jasmine finish
topped with Daisy slurp

...green lining?

Spending an afternoon lying on the couch unavoidably calls to my attention the number of boogers stuck to the wall behind the couch.

Isaac recently went through a phase in which, whenever someone came over, he would loudly and insistently take them on a tour of our collection of wall-boogers, which always seem to crop up faster than I can scrub, peel, and/or chip them off.

I could really just  call this blog "Boogers."

silver linings

I am home sick from school for the second day this week. At least, the second half-day. I have been going in the mornings to proctor ability tests for second graders, which is sketchy on a good day ( I really think second grade is too early to test for gifted ability and expect solid results, at least in a whole-class type setting. I have kids who I know are extremely bright getting, like, 38th %ile on this test, which is just silly. ANYWAY.)

The first day I came home, something wonderful and amazing happened. I called my mom and she picked my kids up from school and brought soup over for dinner. It was wonderful and amazing.

Today on my way home, I stopped by the cafe so my husband could make me something warm and yummy (and if any of you are not afraid of being 'that' customer - the one your barista will mock, and rightly so, when you are out of earshot - I would highly recommend jasmine tea with steamed vanilla soymilk. It is worth barista-mockery.) I set my warm, yummy treasure safely in my cupholder, already dreaming of lying on the couch sipping it, when Daisy sneezed point-blank on top of it, and then licked it.

At this point, I'm thinking I'm already sick, so what difference will a few dog germs make? I know for a fact she's too old and fat to lick her butt.

couldn't make this up if I tried...

Last night, upon sampling dinner, Owen said in his best, brightest, educational-TV voice, "Wow, Mom! This tastes like something which is long and brown, and which you might find in the potty!"

February is the cruelest month.
Anyone inclined to hang that appellation on April is a dried-up, soulless jerk.

other (better) silver lining

Owen decided he wanted to get me something shiny and beautiful for my birthday. His take on "shiny and beautiful" was a toy airplane. Ryan steered him instead toward a large box of chocolates, explaining reasonably that Mama doesn't really play with toys.
All seemed well until bedtime, when he fell apart, sobbing, telling me he was so sorry he didn't get me a toy for my birthday.
 I assured him it was okay, that airplanes were wonderful, but that the best birthday present of all was having him for my kid. He loved that so much he fell asleep smiling.
Some days I have absolutely no idea what goes on inside his head, but it seems like a wild ride.

silver lining

Happy birthday to me! Thirty-five.
The good news is I haven't been preyed upon by 30-foot nematodes. I think the refrigeration keeps them docile.

Well, against my better judgment, I looked up what exactly a nematode is (apparently UNL has a fairly renowned Nematology department; just another of the many cool things that go on in Nebraska), and I am sort of wishing I hadn't.
I will not go into detail (the University of Nebraska's Nematology Department website went into considerable detail), but apparently the largest ones can be 8 meters long. And the ones in my fridge are specifically predatory.

If I don't show up to work one day, that's probably why. That, or I contracted brain-eating amoeba from using a neti pot.

I just found a packet in the fridge labeled "One Million Predatory Nematodes."

Most days my life feels like a sketch from a National Lampoon movie, but today I'm thinking second-rate sci-fi/horror.

to the teeth

I don't know if my husband is entering a midlife crisis or what, but the Murray Militia had an extremely good Christmas this year.
(Bear in mind that I have read way too much Barbara Kingsolver and vociferously espoused many lofty ideals about not letting my precious children play with toy weapons or even shoot each other with popsicle sticks, so I probably set myself up for this whole thing)(also my full-time work schedule and Ryan's not-full-time work schedule made for dad doing more of the Christmas shopping)
Post-holiday, Alec is armed with a rubber-band gun (which is much larger and more menacing than it sounds), a foam-dart bow, a suction-cup crossbow, and the kind of heavy plastic sword you use to train with in various martial arts.
Ryan is armed with two new rifles and I-cannot-tell-you-how-many sights and grips and tripods and stocks and laser-thingys, not to mention a very large and imposing gun safe.

I guess the silver lining is that he was indeed able to purchase said rifles, which means I did not have to.