OmegaMom

Woohoo!

OmegaMom is doing the Snoopy Dance here. The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Watch for our area, with predicted up to 18 inches of snow by Saturday night. This is the first WSW we’ve had all winter.

Being a superstitious type, OmegaMom refuses to believe the hype. We’ll get 5 inches of snow, watch.

But 5 inches is better than nothing, which is what we’ve had all season.

Maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to (whisper) break out the cross-country skis tomorrow.

OmegaMom is plum tuckered out.

The fuddy duddy short course on connecting databases to websites is over and done. I came home from the class Monday night and Wednesday night and just fell dead asleep when shepherding the dotter into her sleep.

Now it’s time to rehash things.

Always before, when I’ve taught a short course on website programming, it’s been using a prepared curriculum and aimed at techie types. So there turned out to be an awful lot of things that I “ass”umed.

These students had had (maybe) one programming course before. And maybe one website design course.

They had amazing and awesome ideas about their research projects. It was grand fun to listen to their first description, then, as the weeks passed, showing them how to approach each little special “enhancement” they needed to make their project work.

But the shortness of the course and the lack of programming background conspired to make it more and more frustrating to me as the weeks passed. I had to keep scaling back my Grand Plan further and further, because we weren’t moving forward as fast as I had planned at the start.

But. The good aspect is that the students who were at the last class (which, unfortunately, was at the same time as an unexpected championship game for Mountain University, thus, only half the students showed up!) all seemed very psyched with how it had gone, and felt they had learned something. The best indicator was that they all asked if the course (an experiment) were going to be offered again in the fall semester, and all of them agreed it would be better as a full semester course.

So there ya have it. It was great, it was fun, it was exhausting, and, boy, did it eat into my spare time! And it was interesting for me to see how teaching people without the background is so very different from teaching those who do have the background. It makes you realize that, when you have become proficient at some task, a lot of it becomes subconscious. When you walk as an adult, for instance, you don’t consciously stop and think, “Now I put my right foot out, then shift my weight so it’s balanced over that foot; now I put my left foot out, etc.” But when you look at a toddler just learning to walk, you realize that there’s a great deal of mechanical, physical stuff going on that has become deeply ingrained in your brain. It’s a major accomplishment for a toddler to reach the point where he can walk without thinking about it.

My linguistics fuddy duddies needed to learn to walk before they could try running. Something for me to remember if I decide to teach the course again.

Dawn, over at This Woman’s Work, has an essay on her open adoption over at Salon. For those who are considering open domestic adoption, I’d say it’s a “must read”.

…the latest news on the ban-abortion front has me worried.

I don’t like abortions; I don’t think anyone does. It’s not like folks who are pro-choice are out there urging all and sundry preggo females they encounter that they should get abortions.

But.

But.

I have a number of female friends who have been raped.

I have a SIL whose first (eagerly awaited) pregnancy was revealed, at 12 weeks, to be a fetus with severe defects.

Looking back, I know that one of my best friends in grammar school was being molested by her stepfather.

I had a friend who religiously took her birth control pills, but still got pregnant.

The governor of South Dakota signed the bill outlawing all abortions except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. Those lucky, lucky women who were raped or subjected to incest can have emergency contraception, whoopee.

Mississippi has a similar law wending its way through the state legislature.

Pinko Feminist Hellcat has an excellent post about the current anti-abortion push. Read it.

Yesterday morning, OmegaDotter was watching Free Willy 3. (OmegaMom has dubious feelings about this movie. Free Willy was charming. Free Willy 2 was iffy. Free Willy 3 has a lot of violence, which bugs me. But OmegaDotter, when given a choice, often chooses number three over the other two. Hmmm.)

At the end of the movie, Willy the whale gives birth (maybe her name is Wilhemina?).

This movie has been viewed off and on by OmegaDotter for a year.

Suddenly, yesterday, the lightbulb went off in her head. She came dashing in to the office.

“Mommy! Mommy! Willy had a baby! Come see, come see! A little baby whale!”

So she dragged me into the living room and pointed at the TV, and, sure enough, there was Willy (Wilhemina?), complete with baby. Then the ending credits started to roll. OmegaDotter promptly asked to see the “part with the baby!” again. I obliged.

Then she returned to the office, climbed on my lap, and said, “I was a baby! And I came out of your tummy!”

Erm. Sigh.

“No, sweetie, you didn’t come out of my tummy. Your daddy and I went to China to adopt you. You came out of your birthmother’s tummy.”

“My birthmother in China?”

“Yup.”

This has all been very sudden. Birth and babies and birthmother questions showing up. It’s one of those developmental leaps that children take, which you can view clearly in hindsight, but they are sometimes hard to describe. Some leaps are very easy to pinpoint: beginning to walk. Beginning to talk. Suddenly using two-word or three-word sentences. Suddenly using adjectives. The birth of imaginative talk. But this one is harder to describe–it’s more internal; it’s as if the mental gears are suddenly meshing in just a slightly different manner, and more abstract notions are beginning to take hold.

Watching a child grow and develop is one of the most fascinating things one can do.

But, while it seems so very individual and amazing when it’s us and OmegaDotter, I know, from reading on various lists, that she has hit an adoption milestone almost dead on in terms of age. The next big one is between 7 and 9 years old, when the adopted child begins to realize that, having been adopted, that means that someone, somewhere, abandoned them. Oh, in domestic adoptions, you can reassure the child that the birthmother “made an adoption plan”…but from discussions with adult adoptees, even the ones who are pretty sanguine about adoption and truly love their adoptive parents say that underneath it all, no matter what story was told, there is the one overriding emotion: Why didn’t she want me? Why did she give me away/leave me/abandon me?

Some respond with anger. Some with grief. Some with both.

But we will cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now, she’s just beginning to add two and two, and come up with babies and mommies and birthmothers.

(Shamelessly stolen from a board I’m on.)

Things I can’t do:

The two-finger whistle–for the life of me, this one eludes me. I have managed to do it ONCE in my entire life (fairly recently), and it amazed and delighted me so much that I spent another hour trying to reproduce the sound. Nothin’ doin’.

Snap my fingers the “proper” way–I can snap my fingers using the thumb and the ring finger, on one hand, but I have never been able to do it using the thumb and middle finger or thumb and index finger. All I get is a “flub…flub…flub” sound, no crisp snap!

Turn a cartwheel–While my cohorts in elementary school were turning cartwheels all over the place, I was left behind.

Keep a house neat and orderly–I try. I really do. But what I need is a hired person whose sole job is to follow each and every member of my household around, picking things up and putting them in their Proper Place. I can keep myself in order. Add a husband and a dotter, and I’m hopeless.

See the “magic pictures”, the ones where you are supposed to focus in one spot in a hodgepodge of color, and suddenly a picture appears? I think it’s a trick. I think those so-called “magic pictures” are really what they look like: unformed blobs of color. The people who claim to see the pictures are actually just saying it because they’re afraid everyone else can see the pictures, and admitting they can’t would make them a failure of some sort.

Balance my checkbook–The less said about this one, the better.

Complete a craft project–I have an endless supply of half-finished craft projects littering my past.

Things I can do:

Put my heels behind my neck.

Cook an awesome spaghetti sauce from memory.

Bake an endless variety of quickbreads.

Type 120 words per minute.

Walk on my knees in the lotus position.

Read from a book in an interesting and entertaining manner, with different voices for each character and appropriate dramatic phrasing for the narrative.

Cross-country ski.

Read topographic maps.

Write programs in a wide variety of programming languages.

Fold a fitted sheet.

Make origami cranes.

Recite the “Jabberwocky” from memory.

Since the Dotter was young, we have taken her on nap drives on weekend days. OmegaDad has his favorite routes; I have mine. My most favorite is to drive out on Three Lakes Road, out past Lower Dam Lake, Upper Dam Lake, and out to Big Natural Lake, then turn around at the wildlife lookout on the bluff, and back into town.

It’s a lovely drive, and very restful. The changing of the seasons is very noticeable along this drive, what with the march of the flowers bringing succeeding waves of different flowers dotting the roadside in spring and summer, and waves of golden flowers covering the hillsides in early fall, then the coming and going of ice floes on the lakes and snow dusting the hills or burying them, as the case may be. Then things warm up, the ice floes melt away, and springtime arrives with the mountain bluebirds and the nesting bald eagles.

Last year at this time, there was water everywhere. We had had two years’ worth of precipitation in the space of four months. Over the course of those four months, I watched on my drives as the water came pouring into the Dam Lakes, and the extent of the lakes was pushed further and further outward. Finally the time came when water went rushing over the spillways–something that hadn’t happened in years. People from Small Mountain Town drove out on the weekends to park by the spillways and gawk at the water flowing over and down. There was so much water that the parking lot at the boatramp was halfway under water, and the various trees whichhad been safely high and dry for years were girdled with water up to their lower branches.

Everywhere you looked, there was water. Pouring down little hillside rivulets, rushing down the dry washes, flooding the lower-lying spots in the forest. Big Natural Lake, which had been bone dry for years, began filling up in March, the ground was so saturated. (The folks that were used to four-wheeling through the dry lake beds were bummed, and it was amusing to see the signs declaring “No vehicle traffic beyond this point” barely poking out of the lake.)

That spring and summer, the plants grew rapidly, the grasses sprouted lush and thick, the flowers put on a stellar show, and all the pine trees–which had been dying off rapidly for the previous two years due to drought and a pine bark beetle infestation–looked healtheir than they had for quite a while.

Alas, since we got two years’ worth of water in such a short span of time, this year the Weather Gods are laughing. We have had, as noted previously, no rain. The big southern California storm which dumped 10 inches of rain in a day a few weeks ago moseyed our way and dropped a trace. A trace.

We now have lots of lovely grayish-gold grasses, tinder dry and waiting for a spark and a bit of wind. We have pine trees which are already showing signs of dying off again. It starts at the top, with a few clumps of yellow or white needles, and then, amazingly rapidly, it sweeps through the whole tree, until, in one or two short months, the entire tree is golden brown rather than green. The next year, the pine needles have weathered to a silvery gray, and then they get blown off in one of our autumn or spring windstorms, and the following year they are tall gaunt black skeletons.

So, while the drive was lovely as usual, I couldn’t help but notice the newly dead trees peeping out here and there, and the trees with the disastrous touch of yellow up top, heralding another dead tree to come. Two years ago, there were some stretches of the forest where up to 90% of the trees died off; I’m hoping nothing similar happens this year. I console myself with the realization that the current thickness of the woods is not natural, but an artifact of 100 years of fire suppression, and that this is Nature simply taking her course. But it’s still sad to see.

The other night, OmegaDotter was snuggling with me as I read her her bedtime book, “Cats (a First Discovery Book)”. (Digression: The First Discovery series is reeellly cool, and I’m going to buy more as soon as I can.)

“Cats” has one page with information about female cats having kittens, which I have used as a springboard for discussions about birth, babies in uteruses, babies in general, and–ahah!–OmegaDotter having been born to another woman, her birthmother.

(For those who worry about adoptive moms drenching their children in sorrow and sadness about birthfamilies, let me reassure you that this is an on-again, off-again thing, very factual, and usually OmegaDotter is much more interested in the picture of two kittens playing on the opposite page.)

So we reached that page, and the dotter, drowsy with sleep, her eyelids at half-mast, suddenly asked me, “Where’s my birthmother?”

“She’s somewhere in China, we think.”

“Can we go see her?”

“Well, sweetie, we don’t really know where in China she is.”

“Oh. Where is she?”

“She probably lives somewhere near Guilin, where you were in the orphanage.”

“Oh.”

And then it was time to choose which kitten we liked best.

“Sure. What do you want to talk about?”

“Horses and ponies!”

(Silly mama.)

“Wellll…I’ve been thinking about maybe signing you up for pony camp this summer. Would you like that?”

Gasp! “Oh, yes! Can I ride some of the ponies??”

“Yes. You’d learn to ride them and ride different ponies and take care of them.”

“Oooh!”

Silence for a few moments, then:

“I ride SilverMoon all the time, mommy.”

“Yes, you do. But SilverMoon wouldn’t be at the pony camp, you’d have to ride other ponies. Is that okay?”

“Yes!”

And then it was time for her stuffed horsie backpack, Dreamer, to ride around on top of mommy for a few minutes.

Then she fell asleep.

Oh, what fun it is in the Omega house today!

The wee lass woke in a snarky mood. She came whining into the bedroom. “I waaaaant a mooooovie!”

No. Whining is not what gets you what you want in the Omega house.

“I waaaaant it!”

No, OmegaDotter, you have to ask for it nicely.

She pitched a fit. Snot flying, screaming, pounding the floor.

Ooba dooba.

The fit got so bad, that we informed her (when it was over) that since she had behaved so badly, she was movie free for the day.

Bam! Into the fit again.

Then, when we were picking her up: “I waaaaant to go to the stooooore!” (There’s a store at the corner where daycare is.)

No, OmegaDotter, we don’t whine when asking for things.

“I waaaaaant iiiiit!”

And whammo-blammo, right into another fit, screaming, crying, snot, the whole nine yards.

She calmed down before we reached the store near our house, and so we all went in for some stuff.

“I waaaaaaant a moooooovieeeeee!”

No, OmegaDotter, remember this morning?

“But I waaaaaaaant iiiiiiit!”

Sorry, kiddo; we told you this morning no movies today, because you were so badly behaved about it this morning.

BAM! And yet another installment, which entailed OmegaDad carrying a screeching, flailing demon child out of the store, and John at the store laughing and saying, “Toby never does that. Neeeeeever!” (Toby is 4 years old as well.) Then John and Pat and the other neighbor commiserate. And OmegaDad and I sit in the car with a screaming, flailing, out-of-control child until she calms down enough to get into the carseat.

Lordy, lordy. We know it’s a stage. We know it’s normal. But the dotter simply loses it, and can’t pull herself out.

Life is tough for four-year-olds. You have to start learning about “civilized behavior”. You have to learn to start behaving nicely around other people, or they just won’t want to have you around. You have to start moving from your nice, safe cocoon of babyhood and into the big, wide world around you.

Lest you think this is OmegaMom being snotty, let me confess: I can remember being ten years old, and throwing one tantrum apiece at each set of grandparents’ houses. What I remember most is that both grandmothers, pressed to the limit by the tantrums, informed me that if I ever behaved like that again, I would not be welcome there any more. (It obviously left an impression on me!) So if OmegaMom was still able to become demon-possessed at that late stage in the game, it seems pretty fair to say the Omega household will encounter days like this in the future.

OmegaMom’s life has been hectic lately.

Mountain University is switching versions on the financial system, going from an oh-so-old-fashioned text-based interface to a NEW! IMPROVED! →web-based← interface. Oh, joy. There are times—data-entry times, in particular—when web-based interfaces do not really make things better. Anyway, this entails pulling together a wide variety of test plans from a wide variety of departments, OmegaMom’s included. So OmegaMom has been scurrying around trying to corral non-techie people and entice them into giving her details on how they use the current system so we can test the same processes on the new system. The problem is that some of the non-techies balk: “How can I possibly provide a test case when I don’t know what the new version even looks like, or how it works??”

OmegaMom also foolishly agreed to teach this night course to the linguistics fuddy-duddy candidates. It’s all great fun, the FDCs are all rarin’ to go and have great ideas on the types of interactive research they’d like to toss up on the web (many of which require OmegaMom to go scurrying off to Google to locate ways and means to implement them), buuuut…but it eats up three nights a week that OmegaMom would rather spend vegging out (or blogging).

Then there’s the fact that OmegaDad is taking a course himself, one night a week. So OmegaMom is precluded from vegging out on that night, as well.

The Trusty Justy sounds like one of its wheelbearings is going bad, so we are down to one car.

The Dawg pooped on the living room rug sometime today, because all the Omegas forgot to let him out this morning.

OmegaMom has to get out the Suck Machine (a steam vac) to clean the mess up.

OmegaDotter is having transition problems with the New Bed/sleeping in her own bedroom routine.

To top it all off, OmegaMom has a toenail fungus.

You will all get much better blogging entries from OmegaMom Very Soon Now, I promise.