OmegaMom

Remember, I didn’t participate (whew!).  But bunches and bunches of my regular blogstops did, and the whole slew of them are getting practically giddy with relief now that today is the final day and they are out of Blogging Durance Vile.

As a reader, of course, this sucks, because I’ve been happily seeing 25-30 new posts every morning by some of my faves.  And then 20 more as the day goes by.

But they’re giddy, I tell you!  Yelling “Whoopeee!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Thank GOD that’s over with!”  Dancing in the blogging streets.  Setting off fireworks.  Revelry. 

Bah.  Pooey.  Pbbbbbttt to the lot of them.  Harrumph.

Cast yer eyebones over to the left.  The Giving Tree is gone; all my Donors Choose projects were funded, though not all the way by my readers.  In its place is the Shameless Commerce Division (shamelessly cribbed from Car Talk), an experiment wherein I signed up with the BlogHer Ad Network.  We shall see; I’m hoping it doesn’t end up stalling blog loading.  If it does, please let me know.  Goodness only knows if I’ll get a few cents per month.

I need to send you on to Almost Quintessence, BlueGrassGirl’s blog, for a particular post all about having a dead bird in the freezer.  BGG is the sister of Jozet (of Halushki fame).  There’s obviously a hilarity gene, and the girls have got it.

The OmegaFamily is working very hard on the concept of “frustration” and how to handle it.  OmegaDad, in a fit of genius, came up with “The Attention Game”.  He told the dotter all about using her “ability”, which included listening and paying attention.  He tests her by giving her tasks, and if she does them, she gets a point.  If she doesn’t get it right, he gets a point.  They’re playing up to 30 points this weekend.

This has been prompted by the dotter’s absolute inability lately to deal with frustration, in any way, shape, or form.  She melts down and goes into stubbornness mode, wherein she keeps trying to do whatever it is that is frustrating her, and is crying and keening and whining while she does it, and is generally a drama queen about it.

This frustrates me to no end, and makes me snappy and snarky.  OmegaDad rode his white horse to my rescue this evening with this game.  I’m hoping it actually sinks in a bit with the competitiveness aspect, because the dotter’s response to her frustration is just irritating as hell.  I end up feeling like I want to run screaming into the street, far, far away.  The dotter, of course, thinks I’m abandoning her, and follows no matter where I go.  This makes me more uptight, and makes me want to retreat, and she gets more panicky and wants to cling, and it turns into a Spiral of Disturbance.  Bleah.

I go away now and play with Etsy.

My mom is a kick-ass mom.  Did you know that?  And boy howdy, can she make me cry.

So I’ve been whimpering about the lack of sunlight.

What does my mom do?

She sends me a package.  A mysterious package.  It didn’t say who it was from, and I didn’t remember ordering anything, so there was this big, flat package handed to me by the postal person that was just puzzling me.  Then I opened it up to reveal this:

And then, the following day, she sends me this:

The first is hung already, and we have a place for the second.

There’s nothing like a well-thought-out gift to make one feel…just plain happy and warm-n-fuzzy and like Someone Out There loves you and cares for you.

Thank you, mamasan!

There.  Is it so damned hard to say?!

No.

It’s not.

Jen, over at MimiBoo, mentions, towards the end of her post on anxious attachment, a discussion on a list she’s on about “what do you call your child’s birthmother?”  Much to my dismay (and Jen’s), the “tummy lady” term is still being used, as in “you grew in her tummy, so she’s your tummy lady”.

Oy!

(Aside from the objectification of the birthmother that the phrase embodies, I can’t stand the concept of teaching that pregnancy means “coming from someone’s tummy”.  It’s my own hang-up, and poor OmegaDotter will probably complain to her therapist when she’s 30 that her mother kept telling her how babies grow in uteruses whenever she tried the “I grew in her tummy” statement.)

In this house, we call our child’s birthmother ”your mommy in China”.  Or “your Chinese mommy”.  Or, “your birthmother”.  And it’s “your daddy in China”, and “your other grandparents, who you have never met”.

I made damned sure those words would come easy to me by the time the dotter really needed to talk about such concepts.  I practiced telling her them from the day we brought her home.  Maybe the first time or two it was difficult.  But as a result, these days we have a dotter who feels quite safe in asking questions about her birthmother while we’re eating dinner, and let me tell you, that’s mighty damned important to me.

A helluva lot more important than reserving the Sacred Word “mommy” or “mother” for my use alone.

The “Tummy lady” term has repulsed me since the day I heard that Rosie O’Donnell was using that as her term for birthmother to her adopted children.  It wasn’t because it was being used by Rosie (har!), it was because it seemed to be–and still does seem to be–a way of deliberately distancing yourself and your child from her family of birth, a way of giving lipservice to the idea of discussing birthfamily without having to actually deal with the emotional reality.  OmegaDad, when I discussed it with him in bed last night, wrinkled his nose at the phrase and called it “incredibly impersonal”.

Of course, I have to hold my scorn towards people who use that term in check right now–because I have no idea what I’ll be like if OmegaDotter actually finds her birthmother.  Here and now, the main reaction I have to terms like “tummy lady” is:  Being comfortable with the term, the idea, of “birthmother” is not about me.  It’s about my dotter.  It’s not my life that was yanked about without my consent–it’s hers.  And if feeling comfortable enough to talk about her birth family while her mouth is full of cheesy pasta helps her, then that’s what counts.

…poop after an embryo transfer.

Really, truly.

Yes.

Just think of trying to expel a tampon by pooping, ‘kay?  How many times have you done that?  Then think of doing the same thing with something that is teeny tiny and has been (hopefully) placed right near your uterine lining so it can snag in there and settle in and grow.

OmegaMom understands that you are very worried and protective and hoping you’re not going to waste money poured into an expensive and heart-rending procedure by doing a normal, everyday physical action.

But, Virginia, you should not be asking this particular question of Dr. Google.  Perhaps you should be asking this question of your own doctor?  Or his/her staff?

I hasten to add, Virginia, you can rest assured that you are not alone in asking that question.  Because OmegaMom gets hits from Google searches for that question at least once a week.

OmegaMom rolls her eyes and gets back to other things, with promises of a real post later on.

For many years, my mom took me to see the Nutcracker in downtown Chicago.  I am trying to follow in her footsteps by taking the dotter as well.

Big City Ballet was showing the Nutcracker, so I bought (ack gasp!) (expensive!) tickets for the three of us for this afternoon.  Unfortunately, OmegaDad got the creeping crud yesterday and was feeling like hell today, so it was just the dotter and I.

Of course, we had already purchased the requisite fancy Christmas dress…last year’s is much too small, making me forcefully aware of how much bigger the girl has gotten.  (As Miss C. said in her commentary on my last post, OmegaDotter is forever three years old in memory.)

What might not be immediately evident in the above picture is the fact that this year’s requisite fancy shoes that grabbed the dotter’s fancy are…

…are…

Well…urg…they have heels.  ACK!

Strappy black shoes with heels.  I felt like I was introducing an innocent to something like crack.  Or like a traitor to feminism and battling the patriarchy.  Additionally, I felt like a dreadfully wussy woman, to cave to the dotter’s pleas for these shoes, no others.  But, dayum, they did look mighty cute.

In honor of the occasion, I, too, wore heels.

Let me just say:  I am out of practice with high heels.  My feet have gotten longer.  And fatter.  And flatter.  My darling husband, my the Kozmik All forever smile upon him, eyeballed the shoes and asked me, “You are going to take some ’sensible’ shoes with you, right?”  Quickly disabused of the idea of wearing them all the way to Big City and back, I backpedaled and said, ”Oh, of course!” and crammed my tootsies into my nice, comfy, ugly faux Ugg boots.

Thank heavens.

Because wearing the high heels and walking the two blocks from the parking garage to the ballet venue made me quite aware of how out of high-heel-shape my feet are.  By the time we sat down in our seats, I heaved a huge sigh of relief as I surreptitiously kicked my pointy-toed high heels off.

At intermission, out in the middle of the lobby while looking at kewl Christmas ornaments for sale, I slipped them off again, and just carried them with us wherever we went.

There was, of course, a whirlwind of little girls dressed in fancy dresses and holiday finery.  I adore looking at all the girly girls in their Christmas splendor, and sighed quietly at some of the dresses which OmegaDotter had nixed (in favor of that triumph of marketing, the fancy dress with the doll-sized version of the fancy dress hanging off, ready for your 18″ doll to wear to match you).

The problem was, at the end of the performance (which was splendid) I couldn’t just walk back to the car in my stocking feet.  By the time we got downstairs and outdoors, I was mincing and wincing with every step.

So say bye-bye to the pointy-toed high heel shoes.  They are hitting the “donate to Goodwill” pile as of this evening.  Too bad, because they are quite pretty…but I will not suffer for beauty!

(P.S.  For those who are wondering:  Yes.  That is a Christmas sweater.  Not only is it a Christmas sweater, but it has glitter and beads, to boot.  I have admitted in many previous posts that I am an anti-fashionista, and I’m sure the very fact that I have a Christmas sweater, let alone wear it, consigns me to the utter depths of non-fashionable depravity in some people’s eyes.)

On Tuesday, we were invited to the dotter’s school to watch the kids’ Thanksgiving program.  Which was, of course, very cute.

When we heard about the program, OmegaDad told me, “I’ll bet you anything they’ve made her an Indian.”  As in, hey, she has long black hair, so they’re going to cast her to type.  I’d like to report that he was wrong, and she was a Pilgrim, but no–she was, indeed, an Indian:

We took videos using our digicams.  Unfortunately, we had never tested these particular digicams’ video capability, and somehow or other we ended up with no sound.  Bah.  Not that you missed much:  the boys said, as Pilgrims, ”Let’s go hunt!”, or as Indians, “Big strong brave!”  The girls’ lines were either “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” for the Pilgrim ladies, or “Busy, busy, busy!” for the Indian girls.  Far be it from me to be snarky or obnoxious, but does it seem like the boys had more…um…complex lines?  And that the line for the Indian boys was…um…somewhat typecast?  So, yes, men went hunting and being brave and what-not, while the girls got to just comment on the boys’ actions.  The turkeys went “Gobble, gobble, gobble!”, and everyone said “Pop, pop, pop!” whenever corn was mentioned.

It was not, shall we say, great literature.  But, boy, was it cute.

Then, as we were leaving, we saw the artwork posted on the bulletin boards outside the classroom.  Here’s the dotter’s Pilgrim:

What charmed us most (aside from the dotter’s penchant for very plump lips on her drawings) was the tale of her Pilgrim’s progress.  It seems that Mrs. Shoehorn asked each kid what they would do if they were setting out for the New World.  Here is the dotter’s answer:

It made us laugh.  I particularly liked that she would clean up our mess at home…I’m eagerly awaiting that day!

Every year at this time, U.S. blogs are filled with an outpouring of “I am thankful for…” posts, due to Thanksgiving Day.

Lemming-like, I follow suit.

I’m thankful for OmegaDad.  He’s an amazing person.  He cooks like a dream.  He is thoughtful (oh-so-thoughtful, really!), in both senses of the word.  He makes beautiful gardens.  And he makes me laugh.  Even when I’m totally grumpy and bitchy, he can make me laugh.  I love him immensely, and am thankful for him being in my life.

I’m thankful for OmegaDotter, who is right now listening to a Barney video doing “This is the way we wash our clothes”, and running in place next to me in a purple gymnastics leotard.  It has been an amazing adventure to be parent to this child.  She’s smart, and funny, and sweet, and silly, and very creative.  She’s her own person, and every time I turn around, she reveals something new about herself, or discovers something new about herself.

I’m thankful for OmegaGranny.  What can I say?  I love my mom.  She’s a really cool person.  As I’ve said before, if I met my mom unknown, she would become an instant friend–she’s just that kind of person.

I’m thankful for still having Great Grandma around.  Marguerite will be celebrating her 104th birthday in a few weeks.  Think about that for a few minutes.  She was born in the year Wilbur and Orville Wright made their famous flights at Kitty Hawk.  She has seen the invention of computers, the spreading prevalence of automobiles and telephones, a landing on the moon, two world wars–the world is totally different than it was when she was born.

I’m thankful that we sold our house when we did; the value plummeted further after our assessments were done, and by the time we got our equity, the Zillow value was down another 12%, off 29% from the Zillow high in the summer of 2006.  Yes, 29%.

I’m thankful I have a bunch of readers who are willing to listen to me whinge, and pat me on the head and tell me it’s going to be better, but it’s understandable to be feeling the way I do right now.  That’s pretty special.

We’re having Crispy Duck, yams, green bean casserole (I wanted green beans.  OmegaDad heard “green bean casserole”.  What we have here is a failure to communicate.), pumpkin pie, all the stuff.  Hope your Thanksgiving Day feast is as yummy!

(Isn’t that a great word?  Whinge.  Love it.  For those who don’t know, it’s the British version of whining.)

Leah has given me permission to whine.  So here goes with confession time.

I’m homesick.

There.  I said it.

I live in Alaska, land of wilderness and mountains and oceans, a place so many people dream about coming to, and I’m homesick.

I miss the sun, oh so much.  Right now, we’ve got 6 hours and 53 minutes of sunlight per day.  That’s if you call it “sunlight”.  First, we get “sunlight” maybe once every four days.  Second, the angle of the sun is so low that while the sky gets light, we don’t get the sun for about an hour after “sunrise” (it hides out behind the mountains), and similarly it hides before sunset.  Third, that low angle of sun means that the sunlight we do get is watery late afternoon sunlight all day.  But most of the days are gray with clouds.

I miss the stars, oh so much.  When we were moving here, I just assumed that, being in the northern wilderness, we’d have glorious stars.  Not so.  We’re near enough to the coast to have high humidity, which washes out the stars…when it’s not totally overcast (those gray days extend to gray nights, too).  I miss seeing the Milky Way almost every night, arching across the sky.  And so far we haven’t had any northern lights to take the place of my glorious, shimmering, take-your-breath-away stars.

I miss the smell of pine trees in the sunshine.

I miss the openness of the piney woods.

I miss our ratty old log home, smelly and poorly designed and cold and drafty as it was.  It had character.  Our new house is nice enough, but it’s a basic box and lacks character.

I miss my buddies back in Arizona.  I miss having the Society of Geeky Gals meeting up for dinner and a play on a regular basis.  I miss my Northern Arizona FCC buds.

I miss my mom and my grandma.  Oh, lordy, do I miss them.  I miss being able to say to myself on a lazy Sunday, “Hunh!  Wonder what Mom’s up to…I think I’ll drive down and hang out for a while!”

I miss our old neighbors.  We had some cool neighbors back there.

I feel so guilty to be feeling so homesick.  Here I am, on the adventure of a lifetime.  For cryin’ out loud, the feds paid for us to come here. 

I know that I need to give it all some time, that I will make new friends, that in about six weeks’ time the days will start getting longer, that we’ll find new places to hang out, that I’ll be able to visit my old hangouts every now and then to get a jolt of piney woods and stark desert and stars and vivid sunlight.

I know all that.

But right now, I’m homesick and I just want to cry.

I have a bunch of blogs I’ve stumbled on one way or another that I haven’t put into my blogroll…So I thought it might be nice if I passed them on with a blurb or two.

First on my list is Kate at High Altitude Gardening.  I discovered her blog via the “Next Blog” button on Blogger, totally at random.  Being that I am married to Mr. Total Green Thumb, who paid his way through college by running his own nursery business, and am the daughter of Granny Total Green Thumb, and am very interested in gardening at high altitudes (though now it’s a moot point, sigh), I started reading.  I liked what I read.  I kept reading.  I bookmarked her.  She writes about gardening in the mountains of Utah–yes–but also about all sorts of other things.  A great read!

Bent Objects is an intriguing spot to visit.  Mr. Bent Objects creates tiny sculptures out of ordinary, everyday items–hourglasses, corkscrews, a paddle-ball–and infuses them with a sense of whimsy.  I discovered Bent Objects via Clicked.

Mutha, at Word to your Mutha, is a mom to three, one of them adopted from China.  She writes amusing tales of life with three little ones.  And she has a podcast! 

Check out Passive-Aggressive Notes.  Readers submit notes they’ve found or had directed to them that are the epitome, the essence, of passive-aggressiveness.  Many of them are hilarious, some intentionally so, some not.  The commenters have a lot of in-jokes as a result of following PAN for a while, one of which is being the first to post a comment saying, “That (subject of note) was fucking delicious!”  The Heisa Monster is another in-joke.  I don’t remember how I found PAN; it may have been via Clicked as well.

An old friend/acquaintance/adversary of many years is Blog Antagonist, at Blogs Are Stupid.  She started her blog as a snarky sideswipe at a bunch of folks who were, lemming-like, starting blogs…then she discovered, ironically and much to her surprise, that a blog was an agreeable pastime that offered her an outlet for her desire to write.  She still has a tendency to use ten-dollar words when three-dollar words would do much better, but I enjoy her writing and think many of my readers would, too.

So there ya go.  Dip in and enjoy. 

Long gone (for now, at least) are the nights when getting the dotter to sleep was a struggle.  These days, we have two routines, which we alternate. 

One routine is “eleven minutes”, in which the dotter and OmegaDad get rambunctious, play “Brother and Sister”, climb into the Thomas the Tank Engine play tent and march around the house uttering train-like noises (”Whoooo-whoooo!”), put on performances, etc.  It’s called “eleven minutes” because at one time in the distant past, it lasted 11 minutes.  These days, it can range from a true 11 minutes to an hour or so.

The other routine is Dotter snuggles up with mommy in bed and we read a story or a chapter or two from a chapter book.

Then it’s bedtime.  And every night, we play the “Feeling Game”.  We take turns telling what made us happy, what made us sad, and what made us angry during the day.  This is something that came from pre-school, and was supposed to help the kiddos learn to recognize their feelings, and maybe pass on a little bit of what went on during the day.  We take turns going first, because often the dotter copies what made me happy, which isn’t really the purpose.

And then we segue off into other topics sometimes, and then it’s Time For Bed, and I read a bit and the dotter (usually) sinks into a sound sleep within five minutes.  (I am terrified that even writing this will cause the Kozmik All to laugh uproariously and deem that it is time for sleep disturbances again…)

The “other topics” can range from blatant attempts to put off bedtime (”I need to tell you something, Mommy!”  “What?”  “What is that?”–pointing at something that she knows very well.  I give her the hairy eyeball.  She giggles.  “Let’s talk about that!”  Unh-hunh.  Yeah, right.) to social issues at school (”Marie is mean, Mommy!”) to adoption.

A few weeks ago, she wanted to talk about her mommy in China.  So we talked about her, and how she was adopted, and the story…and then she said something:

“Mommy?”

“Um-hmmm?”

“Y’know I have her in my heart.”

And she touched herself on the chest with an earnest look at me.

“My mommy in China…I have her in my heart.  Always.”

And then she went to sleep.

Now.  That’s a pretty standard thing to say as an adult, but I don’t think we’ve said anything like that to the dotter ever.  So she just came up with it on her own.

Which I thought was pretty cool.

Linky love tomorrow, really!

One of the staples of a certain subset of science fiction stories is the Singularity (sometimes called the “TechnoRaputure”)–the point at which technological change, married to computers, starts coming so quickly and heavily and becomes so very intertwined with our lives and consciousness that it’s almost impossible for people before the Singularity to comprehend what it’s like living after the Singularity.

One aspect is to be so interconnected with computers–using, say, brain-computer interfaces–that humanity is enhanced by the computer use to being almost super-human.

Be that as it may…it’s an interesting concept. 

Right now, we already have plenty of people whose short-term memory is fading because it’s not in use anymore–they use the computer to store that information, and leave their brains free from that clutter.  (Think speed-dialing, email programs that store people’s email addresses so you don’t have to remember them, calendaring programs to keep important dates handy.)  This is all done with computers being “outside” us.

What will it be like when the computer is more of an extension of ourselves than an outside appliance?

So I keep looking at news stories about human-computer interfaces with a certain amount of interest.  OmegaDad and I, for instance, really, really want the RetinaCam, an always online camera embedded in your eye that you can turn on in the blink of an instant, so that all those wonderful pictures that you never get, you can now get.  (Get it?)

They don’t have the RetinaCam yet.  But a company called “Eye-Fi” recently came out with a wi-fi-enabled digital camera chip.  This is way kewl.

Then there’s the recent news of the guy who has been paralyzed for years, unable to speak.  Boston University researchers, working with guys from a company called Neural Signals, Inc., have been working with Eric Ramsay on translating the signals in his brain into real speech.  Right now, they think they have gotten to the point where they recognize 80% of the signals in his speech centers, and they hope to hook this information into a computer speech synthesis program soon.  This is amazing.

More on the brain-computer interface front:  a research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has come up with a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI)–a helmet type doodad that records brain signals–that allows someone to control a Second Life avatar.  Just by thinking about moving forward, you get your SL avatar to move forward.  Think about turning it one way or the other, and it moves that way.  Whoa.

Much to my dismay, I’m unable to find any references to the next item, which makes me think I’m searching on the wrong terms.  I know it was on ScienceBlogs recently, but not within the past week or two.  This makes it hard to locate, sigh.  Anyway, there was a music concert where the instruments or the music (can’t remember which) was controlled by the audience’s brainwaves.  I think.  Agh!  I should have bookmarked it when I first saw it!  Anyway, that was another way kewl approach to computer-human interfaces.

Tomorrow:  Linky Love; Monday:  Prostheses galore!

Well.  Who’d'a thunk it?  My commentary about my *#@!% raw data being changed had two people wanting to know more!

Here’s the scoop, interesting only to about four of my readers, maybe five:  I’m grabbing data from our campus data warehouse via a web report.  (This means that other data providers won’t work, sorry, Jane!)

Once upon a time, before there were a series of high-profile data break-ins at colleges and universities (not ours), folks like me on campus were able to just link directly to the accounting system and grab the data as read-only users.

Now, alas, the IT department is more security minded.  This is Good!  Really!  In general.  But not for folks like me, small potatoes applications systems analysts working for particular departments, that want to be able to do things with the data.

Because instead of being able to link directly to the data…or even the data warehouse snapshot of the data…now we have to use (ack gasp barf) Business Objects to access the data.  And we can’t use the desktop version of BO, we have to use the web tool.  I re-iterate:  ack gasp barf.

So what once required only an ODBC connection and some of my very own SQL statements now requires:

1. Using a generic report available to the entire campus.
2. Which can be changed at a moments’ notice.
3. Without any warning.
4. So I have to open a web browser.
5. …run the report…
6. …Then save to a local machine as an Excel spreadsheet.
7. (Though no doubt I could do the same via code, assuming they didn’t upgrade BO and change the layout and the commands and the name of the report and…)
8. Then my code has to open the spreadsheet…
9. …Run a query that collects only the data I need…
10. …massage that data so the format is correct…
11. …and insert that data into a table in my local database so that my users can see data from the accounting system side by side with data from our work order management system for reconciliation purposes.  All of which is a major pain, and I wish we didn’t need this reconciliation stuff, but due to a particular decision two years ago, we’re stuck with two systems that we need to ensure are both showing the same numbers.

(FYI:  The direct link?  I could do 9, 10, and 11, and be done.)

Dudes.  This sucks dead toads.  Not only did I find out yesterday that they changed the column names at some point in the past, so my code that queries the spreadsheet downloaded from the web doesn’t work anymore (hey, no errors–it just doesn’t insert any data, because the column I was querying on doesn’t exist any more).  But today I find out that a transaction detail report that previously showed revenue figures suddenly just ignores any revenue and dumps a zero in instead.  Because, hey, we’re a university and nobody gets revenue, right?  Har, har, think again.

Dudes.  This really sucks dead toads.

And nowhere…nowhere…in all of this was there any kind of warning that the report had been changed.  None.  Nowhere.

Gah.  Gimme back my direct link, dammit.  We can see all this stuff just fine using the accounting system’s web interface (ack gack, another web interface, slow and ponderous and irritating as hell), one transaction at a time, so it’s not like we shouldn’t be seeing the info to start with.  But Kozmik All forbid anyone should want to actually do something with that information, or see multiple transactions, or, or, or…

Grumble, grumble, grumble.  I’m going to be talking to the DW folks to see if we can have them create us a specific-to-our-department report.  What a pain.  They’ve got months‘ worth of reports to create…any request from us could take months to do.  Maybe I’ll try to learn more about BO and create my own report.  Even if it took me months, it would be less time.

Grumble.

A lot of the cool kids are doing bullet-style posts recently.  Since most of them are doing NaBloPoMo, they get a pass from me because the daily posting drains the creative well dry very quickly.

I, on the other hand, am doing a bullet-style post because I’m just plain lazy.  No NaBloPoMo excuse from me, as I’m not participating.

• It’s 4:00.  The sun is setting in a few minutes.  The sun rose today at 9:10 or thereabouts.  According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, we’re supposed to have 7 hours and 17 minutes of sunlight today.  Well, yeah, I suppose we did.  There were no clouds, so we saw the sun today.  That was nice.  But the maximum altitude of the sun hereabouts was 10 degrees.  Ten.  Sort of like having sunset all day.
• I don’t care that Hilary Clinton had someone planted in her audience lob her a planted question meant to point out some of her stands on certain issues.
• I equally don’t care that FEMA had a plant in their audience at a press conference to ask questions guaranteeing that a few things got mentioned.
• I further don’t care that John McCain didn’t lambast one of his supporters when she asked, “How do we beat the bitch?” when talking about Hilary Clinton.  I thought “Can someone translate that for me?” was a perfectly good way of saying, “Yo!  That’s not nice!”
• I’m afraid to open our gas bill.  I don’t want to know what a month’s worth of heating costs, especially given that it will be much higher in the next few months.
• Context is important to me.  If a person writes an article in which she makes a comment to her adopted daughter that could indicate she has a savior complex and thinks China is a land of indentured orphans, I’d like to know what kind of relationship she has with her daughter.  If it’s one kind of relationship, it’s an in-joke about what some people say about adoption; if it’s a different kind of relationship, it’s snide and insensitive and denigrating.  Given the remainder of the article, I lean towards the former…but a helluva lot of folks in the blog world are leaning towards the latter and a kerfuffle has ensued.
• On the other hand, if angry comments on the article coming from adult adoptees were censored, that sucks.  In my read of the article yesterday, though, it looked like many of the originally censored comments were in.  ?  I don’t know.
• Thanksgiving is next week.  How the hell did that happen?!  It’s far too soon.
• And that means Christmas isn’t far behind.
• My carefully crafted code to dive into the “raw data” from a downloaded web report was foiled–foiled!–when the people who created the report went and changed the column names on the raw data tab of that report.  Grrr.  Now I have to do some figuring on how to check those column names beforehand, and have to stash them in a table so that the next time they decide to get fancy with column names, we’ll be able to catch it right away, instead of wondering for a few weeks why no new data was being imported.  Let me just say:  Duh, OmegaMom.  On the other hand, why the hell did the folks change those column names?  Raw data=stuff that gets used somewhere.  Not raw data=stuff that you can fiddle with all you want.  Or at least let people know with a popup the next time they cruise your web reports.
• Boots, snowpants, and snowgloves arrived yesterday from LandsEnd.  OmegaDotter is happy.  Winter parka is back-ordered.
• Will discuss way-kewl interfaces tomorrow.  And way-kewl prosthetic devices the day after.  Or maybe combine the two.

Actually, she’s in love with the song “She’s In Love With The Boy” by Trisha Yearwood.  So OmegaDad bought her the CD, and we’ve been listening to it.  (Let me just say, I love the idea of anime mashup with country music accompaniment…)

In fifteen years, you will see a young Asian-American country singer, I swear.  Who dances like a dream.

Emotional whiplash:  I’m staring across the dinner table at the dotter, feeling all gooey and mushy.  She’s being charming and funny and fun to be with, and is singing this song.  I’m sitting there thinking just how very kewl she is and how smart and funny and sweet she is, and how elegant and beautiful she’ll be when she’s grown up, when she turns around on her chair, sticks her butt up in the air, and lets loose with a trio of juicy raspberries.

“Pbbbbt!  Pbbbbt!  Pbbbbt!”

Oh, yes, truly elegant.

Then there’s the discussion about “she signs her letters with x’s and o’s” (another song on the Trisha Yearwood CD), and OmegaDad admits to the dotter that he and I sign our emails to each other with x’s and o’s.  I inform her that the x’s stand for kisses and the o’s stand for hugs.

She immediately gets down, grabs a piece of paper, and says, “I’m writing a letter!”

One one side, it says, “To OmegaDotter, Love Isaac”.  (Isaac is her current flame.)  (Notice it does not say, “To Isaac, Love OmegaDotter”; she’s a little unclear on the concept of “to” and “from”.)  On the other side it has a very carefully constructed Tic-Tac-Toe board with x’s and o’s filled in.

Har!

The perennial discussion about “Gotcha Day” is rearing its head once again on a China adoption site.  First there’s the person who posts a link to an article about how “Gotcha Day” is offensive to some adoptees with a “something to think about” comment.  Then some more folks post pointers to other articles.  Then someone gets offended by the offense and says it’s all PC-talk.  Someone says that the kids feel kidnapped by their adopters.  Someone takes real offense to that, saying they didn’t kidnap the kids, and should they just leave them in an orphanage?!  Things escalate, and feelings get all hurt all over the place.

Nothing new.  It’s been a topic of discussion for years.

Articles by adult adoptees who say they find the term offensive have been available for years, too.  I read those articles way back when, and posts by adult adoptees on adoption triad lists, and decided to ditch the term myself, because I could see how it could be offensive.  I “got” a car.  I “got” a dog.  No-one asks when I “got” my husband, eh?  They always ask when I “met” him.

So we’ve gone on our merry way, and I’ve trained myself to use the phrase “when we met you” to the dotter so it’s become ingrained in my psyche.  When talking about that day, I use “Metcha Day”.  But other than that, I don’t think much about it until a hoo-rah like this rises up.

A few months ago, when we were newly come to Alaska, the dotter and I had gone for a hike along Little Lady River in Margaret Pass and were returning to the parking lot.  As we emerged, my Caucasian-parent-with-Asian-children radar went off, focusing in on a guy with a bunch of boykids with him, all of whom were Asian.  At some point he hailed me and I wandered up to introduce myself and the dotter.

At some point in the conversation, he asked, “We got him” (pointing at one son) “in (some city), and him” (pointing at another) “in (some other city) and him” (yeah, there were a bunch!) “in (third city).  Where’d you get her?”

Now, he was an utterly nice guy.  The boys all looked like fine, happy, healthy lads, playing all over the place and doing boyishly romping things in and out of his eyesight.  But y’know, this was the very first time someone had ever asked me that question in that way, and it just…jarred me.  And I guess I hesitated, or something in my face showed, because he was suddenly somewhat defensively apologetic, saying, “Or are you one of Those Folk who don’t like that term?  I know some people don’t like it!”

Erg.  Well.  Um.  Yeah, I guess I’m one of “those folk”. 

Anyway, I answered that we had met the dotter in Guilin, avoiding the whole question of where I stand on “get” versus “met”, back in 2002, and yadda yadda yadda.  We talked some more, the dotter and I left, and I sort of forgot about it until the topic came up again.

I don’t know how OmegaDad feels about it.  I’m pretty sure he’d like the cuteness of “Gotcha Day”, and thinks more in terms of the daddy chasing the giggling girl, catching her, and going “Gotcha!”  Whereas I listened to the nice guy at the parking lot “getting” his boys (a pre-teen two of whom were sitting right there listening to the conversation), and just imagined going to the kid shop and “getting” one.

I dunno.  I suppose I’m turning all PC, and a lot of my readers are rolling their eyes at me and my oh-so-Victorian sensitivity to the term.  But for some reason, that meeting just cemented in me why I don’t like it, and made me understand just why some adult adoptees (and teens) might find it offensive or just icky.

(On a totally different note:  Have any of my blogging buddies gotten a slew of separate multi-page hits in a row from a new-to-them reader, all of them direct links without a referring page?  It’s just kind of weird…)

OMG.  From one extreme (non-existant but dearly-longed-for loose tooth) to the other (two loose teeth, right next to each other).

She didn’t believe me.  But there I was, wiggling one tooth with a finger, while she was wiggling the one next to it with her tongue.

Kris comments:

enjoy those straight pearly whites now…because ‘real’ teeth are not that white and can be down right crooked! when connors 2 front bottom teeth came in last fall i was shocked at their color (which while normal per his dentist was still a shock) and their position…

Yup, that’s what I’m afraid of.  Little gray crooked teeth that stick straight out.  But we shall see!

In other news, we got the equity in our house.  Finally.  So we finally bought a second car.  Used, but pricey, but still less than the sticker price (having cash is a big incentive, especially right now).  It’s an SUV…well, no, maybe it’s a station wagon?…Hm, no, sort of a minivan-ish thing…but, hey, it’s like an SUV…

It’s a Ford Freestyle, with all-wheel-drive.  It has seven seats!  The back two rows fold down!  We can get a surfboard in it!  (Not that we have a surfboard, but if we did, we could.)  We’re no longer all tied together like some weird bondage thing, and I will suddenly have an extra hour to hour-and-a-half of time per week day.

Now I’m like a soccer Mom, I guess.  That’s probably why the blog has gotten so boring lately.  I’m trying to pull my brain together to discuss love and stepchildren and adoption and stuff like that…or way kewl new brain-computer interfaces which are popping up like daisies all over the place…or how fences make good neighbors…some major differences between Alaska and Arizona…but lately, mostly all I’m doing is posting boring stuff.  Bah.  Ask me some questions, maybe that’ll spark something.

I grew up with Daylight Savings Time.  It was just another one of those things that marked the turning of the seasons.  I was just used to it, like all the rest of the folks around the U.S. who live with it.  I never questioned it, either, just going with the flow.  I thought everyone in the U.S. did it, so it was no big deal.

(A lemming.  I think that was what I was in a previous lifetime.  A lemming.)

Then a buddy of mine–one of those people whose lives are filled with drama, and it turns out that the drama is self-manufactured–moved to Indiana near the border with Michigan.  Indiana (or the area of Indiana she lived in) was Daylight-Savings-Time-free; her job, however, happened to be in Michigan, which was not DSTF, so she had the delight of dealing with two separate timezones for her life.  Of course, this provided additional fodder for her ongoing lifetime drama.  Anyway, this was all very new to me…a place without DST?

Let’s not discuss how I managed to grow up within 20-30 miles of Indiana and never knew that the state didn’t observe DST.  Life in a big city can be very parochial at times.

Skip forward a few years, to when the Omegas moved to Arizona.

Arizona is also a DST-free zone.  Most of it–the Navajo Indian Reservation uses DST, so you can drive through AZ on one time, drive through the reservation on another time, drive through northern AZ back on the first time, and then out into Utah or Nevada and back into DST.

We had to keep a mental note of whether we were ahead of our friends and family in different states, or at the same time, or behind.  OmegaDad’s cute little mnemonic trick was “In the summer, you go to the beach; in the winter, you go to the mountains”.  Thus, in the summer, we’d be the same time as California; in the winter, we’d be the same time as Colorado.

We grew quite accustomed to not having to fiddle with the clocks or resetting our internal body clocks.  OmegaDotter has never had to deal with it.

So now we’ve moved to Alaska, and back into the land of Daylight Savings Time.  Leaving aside the question of why AK bothers to use Daylight Savings Time, and the highly politicized answers and discussions attached to that, there we are, having changed the clocks last week.

This week has been horrid.  The dotter, tired enough in the middle of the week already, was practically falling asleep in her ballet class on Wednesday, and did fall asleep one minute after leaving.  Worse yet is the fact that the dotter is waking up at 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.

Let me just repeat that:  she is waking up at 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.

My response, in one word:  Grrrr.

In other news:  Let’s talk about really sucky people, to wit, a pair of young women (19 and 20 years old) who held up a bunch of Halloween trick-or-treaters at gunpoint and demanded their candy, shooting into the air above their heads.  That sucks.  Not only does it suck, but it’s stupid–after all, there are plenty of folks (like the Omegas) who will gladly hand out Halloween candy to anyone who knocks at the door if they’re in costume.  Not only is it stupid and sucky in that manner, it’s really stupid in general–because the police, contacted by the alert 10-year-olds who memorized the license plate of their truck, searched their homes and found (a) a trick-or-treat bag with the name of one of the victims on it, and (b) $100,000 worth of other stolen goods, thus breaking up a local crime spree that they had been working on for months.

That must have been one terrible Jones for Halloween candy those young women had, is all I can say.

About a year and a half ago, the dotter insisted that she had a loose tooth.  I investigated, I was unable to find it, but she claimed it was there, and for a week or two I believed her.

About six weeks ago, the same thing happened.  Peer group pressure, I am sure; being exposed to multiple gap-toothed kids of varying ages reminded her that, hey, having a loose tooth is a sign of Age and Dignity and Wisdom.  Once again, I was unable to corroborate the story, and that “loose tooth”, too, faded away.

Last night, as we were eating dinner and chattering away about this and that, out of the blue the dotter suddenly stood up from her chair and proclaimed:

“Omigosh.  Oh.  My.  GOSH!  My tooth!  My tooth!  It’s LOOSE!  It’s really loose!  I have a loose tooth!  Omigosh!  Really, truly, I have a loose tooth!  You’ve got to see!”

She was breathless with excitement.

Being the mother, I was forced to insert my exploratory finger into her mouth right then and there to locate the aforesaid tooth.

Sure enough, it was loose.  Not “teeny tiny just possibly loose, I’ll-believe-you-but-I’m-really-dubious-about-this loose”, but really, TRULY loose.

Of course, a cause for celebration Chez OmegaMom.  The dotter was ecstatic.  OmegaDad was congratulatory.  I, on the other hand, was suddenly swept with a bittersweet sorrow.  Wasn’t it just yesterday that that very same tooth was just coming in?  That my baby was drooling all over everything and chewing everything in sight (including my hands)?  How on earth can she be old enough to have a truly loose tooth that wiggles wildly from front to back when she pokes it with her tongue?  No, no, it’s not possible–she’s just a baby.

Right?

I was almost crying there at the dinner table.  We had to explain to the dotter, once again, about being happy-sad; one of those more confusing concepts that become easier to understand as you get older.

So sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a picture of a gap-toothed girl.  And when the Tooth Fairy slips the Sacajawea dollar under OmegaDotter’s pillow that night, TF will probably also be shedding a tear or two at the passing of another small milestone in a child’s passage to adulthood.

(Not to mention the fear of future orthodontia.  The dotter has beautiful pearly whites right now; I am quite fearful of what her adult teeth will bring as they come in.  I see to recall a pediatric dentist giving me grim warning that those nice neat baby teeth, which look so pretty, are probably too close together for adult tooth spacing…)

When we moved in, we signed up for the local cable company’s Super Duper Way-Kewl Ultra Deluxe Combo Package with SCREAMING INTERNET (INTERNET…Internet…internet…internet!) (that’s meant to be read in the way that the “SCREAMING U.S. 30 DRAGSTRIP!” echoes sound on those radio ads).

The SDWKUDC package included local phone service.

But local phone service wasn’t available here yet.  (Though it was coming!  Soon!)

So I signed us up for local phone service with the local phone cooperative.

Then, in late October, after weeks of intermittent droppage of internet connections while the cable company upgraded all the cable lines between here and Big City, I got a call from the cable company.  To wit:  local phone service was now available, and did we want to start it up?

Well, yeah, considering that the local phone cooperative is incredibly expensive.  Incredibly.

So the nice gal set up a day and time to do the switchover, and I had to confirm it with her supervisor, repeating everything I had just said to gal #1, and then had to confirm it with an outside contracting company, repeating yet again the stuff I had said to gal #1.  I do understand why it’s necessary.  Really, I do.  I had friends and family who were automagically switched from one phone company to another without their knowledge during the era of those aggressive telecomm company tactics, and it’s a scummy thing to do.  But do we really need the customer to repeat the same information three times?  How about recording the conversation, playing it back to Joe Customer, and asking Joe Customer, “Did you say this of your own free will and are you sure you want to switch?”  Much simpler.  I was forcibly reminded, in any case, of the tendency of computer programs to repeatedly ask, “Are you really, really sure you want to do this??”

The day of the switch comes and goes, and even though I’m totally devoid of phone networking savvy and still wonder how it got switched over from phone company cabling to cable company cabling without some nice hunky young technician coming to the door and having to switch cabling doodads, it seems to have worked.

I just got a phone call.

“Hello?  Mrs. OmegaMom?  This is Polly from ABC Cable?”

“Hi, Polly…”

“I’m just calling to be sure everything is okay with your phone service since we switched you over?”

Now.  Just let that particular sentence stew around in your head for a moment.

She just called me on the phone to see if everything is working okay…with my phone.

Hello?!

Does this strike anyone else as just a bit non-functional?

Like, how are they going to know if I didn’t answer the phone because I was in the bathroom or out of the house or–gasp!–the phone isn’t working?!

Gah.

This weekend, I purchased Uno for the dotter and me to play.

We’ve been non-game-players for quite a while, with a few forays into Go Fish and Candyland.  But I thought it was time to introduce the dotter to a slightly more complicated game, and figured she had reached the point where we would actually spend time playing the game, rather than me stripping it of the finer points so that she comprehended how to play it.

I was right.  We spent an hour playing Uno this evening, she and I, while OmegaDad cooked a delicious dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches and carrot and celery sticks with peanut butter.  Yum.

Anyway, the dotter thought it was great fun.  But I had reached a point where I wanted a break.  She kept pleading for “just one more game!” and I did my stock model firm “No.”  No yelling, no storming, no frustration, just plain, “No.”

And when she realized that (as is my norm when I use that “No”) I actually meant it, she said:

“Oooooh, dammit!”

My eyes bugged out.  OmegaDad’s eyes bugged out.

OmegaDotter put a shocked hand up to her mouth, with bugged eyes of her own, then hid her head in my shoulder.  Giggling.  But, yes, she realized it’s a “bad word”.

It’s the first time she’s used a “bad word” with full intent, in the right context, and with feeling.

I don’t know whether to be appalled or proud.

In a comment to the previous entry, Kate said I should try the Lindy Hop.

Come with me friends, to a time long ago, a simpler time, a time when OmegaMom was a carefree single living in Chicago…

There was (and still is) a “lifelong learning” organization in Chicago called The Discovery Center.  After many times flipping through their monthly course catalog and looking yearningly at the dance classes, I decided to take the plunge and sign up for a Swing Dance class, even though (being single) I had no partner.

It was a great class.

The teachers started out slow.  We partnered up with each other, and switched partners after every little bit of practice, and then, at the end of the evening’s class, they put on some nice slow jazz and we’d practice our mostly-klutzy-but-slowly-improving dance steps.

(Part of the idea, of course, was to introduce singles to each other.  Sort of a pseudo-mass-dating scene.)

It was an eight-week session.  By week six, Mr. Police Officer Into Nudism and I were heading out after class to Jukebox Saturday Night, on Clark Street, and tripping the light fantastic on the dance floor.  We danced well enough, I might add, that we got applause and had people asking us how long we had been dancing together.

(Let us pause for a moment while OmegaMom preens herself.)

It was grand fun.  Let’s put aside the fact that Mr. Police Officer kept a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants at all times.  And that he really, really wanted me to come to the nudist club with him for a weekend.  And that I was too uptight to even consider it.  I got some experience with a radar gun and some dates out of the whole affair, and we both had fun at the nightclub.

The problem is that this was at least twenty years ago.

The additional problem is that OmegaDad has the rhythmic competency of a piece of driftwood:  i.e., none.

The third piece of the puzzle is that, while OmegaDad actually can dance if he is very carefully handled by my cousin Sissy (I have seen this with my own two eyeballs), my cousin Sissy has the patience of a saint.  I do not.  So any practice would need to be done by OmegaDad and Someone Else.  But OmegaDad is finicky about things…for quite a while, he would get insulted if some cute thing flirted with him in the checkout line, because he was Married! dammit!  My explaining that the flirter probably didn’t see his wedding ring wouldn’t cause him to pardon her; she was automatically placed into the category of Bad Person.  Anyway, I can hardly imagine how he would respond to dancing with some woman who wasn’t OmegaMom.  Except for cousin Sissy, who is a special case.

Anyway, once upon a time, OmegaMom could dance quite well, and all the credit should go to the method of teaching, which was:  slow, steady, and practice over and over and over again.  And have fun.

Which is what I was talking about in my previous post.

And to all and sundry who said they’d take one of these courses if I started one, I will merely point out that I am in Alaska, Land of Wild Freedom, and you all are Outsiders.  (That’s what they call the Lower 48 here: “Outside”.)  It would be quite difficult to hold a class for someone who lives in Kentucky, someone who lives in NJ, someone who lives in Oregon, and someone who lives in Arizona.

But!  If we were all in the same neck of the woods…!  Hey, we’d have to just hire ourselves a dance teacher and have a grand ol’ time.

Right?

Sooooo…Did OmegaDad return home with the blue Spiderman backpack as threatened?

Well, no.  He returned home with a pink thing that, even though it wasn’t a “pully” kind of backpack, which she particularly wanted, had lots of compartments and a water bottle, so it fully satisfied the dotter.

Onto other things:  A few weeks ago, I signed up for a ballet class for adults at the dance studio the dotter goes to for ballet.  I’ve gone to one class.  Last week I fizzled at the last minute, blaming Halloween pumpkin-carving and dinner makings.  This week?

Well, I think I’m not going to go.

Why?

Um.  Y’know…I don’t really like ballet.

There.  I said it.  It just doesn’t do anything for me.  And the class was all bar work.  Lots of pliés and footwork.  In a word:  boring.

So I’ve been watching the dotter’s ballet class, and it’s fun.  Her gymnastics class is fun.  They don’t push the kids; they move them at a slow pace, repeating things, making sure they learn each new thing well, and making sure it’s just plain fun.

Why can’t they do that for adults?  The dotter won’t be stuck into bar work for another few years.  But she’s getting lots of dancing and lots of basic moves and having fun.

I wanna have fun.   I wanna take a gymnastics class that lets me bounce on a trampoline and run an obstacle course where you do lots of somersaults and walk on a balance beam (over and over and over again) at a very basic level before being asked to do more.  I want a basic class that admits that, yes, adults can be klutzes, and, like children, need to repeat the same thing over and over and over again before it sinks into the kinetic unconscious.  This is why I back out of aerobics classes or step classes that are too advanced:  they whip you from one combo to the next when you’re just starting out, and the next thing you know, while the entire class is be-boppin’ in one direction, you’re doing a box-step in the other direction.  I don’t get embarrassed by it any more, it’s just the way I am.  But I do get frustrated, and I do end up box-stepping right into someone who’s be-boppin’, and it just isn’t fun.

But, when I do get a class where they take it slow and let klutzes like me learn the basic combos a bit at a time, and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse them before moving on, I do have fun.

Klutzes of the world, unite!  We need to demand fun classes that are slow-paced in the learning aspects, but not slow-paced in movement!

Woohoo! Join me, fellow rebels!

So after complaining–mightily!–about how horrible Ms. Hyde has been visiting lately, yesterday was a day’s worth of Dr. Jekyll.  It was awesome.

First, in pursuit of the goat idea, OmegaDad had been corresponding with the Farm Lady With Champeen Nigerian Dwarf Goats.  He finagled an invite to her spread.  We went yesterday a.m.

Now, OmegaDad has an ag degree.  He grew up doing FFA and hanging with 4H kids, raised and showed pigs and bulls and other livestock.  Thus, OmegaDad knows all about birthing and hypocalcemia, the issues of thiamin deficiency, protein content of various livestock foodstuffs, how to inseminate a bull, fat-to-milk ratios of various cattle and goat lines, and acts nonchalant when a three-week-old kid starts sucking his finger.

I, on the other hand, am a city kid through and through.  I can navigate my way through Chicago blindfolded, can tell you what time of day to ride the El, where to catch the #36 bus, the free days at the various museums, and where the more obscure park statuary resides.

Everyone has his or her talents.

Anyway, the itty-bitty goat babies were adorably cute.  The older goats were pretty and laid back.  The Farm Lady was a font of information.  For instance, you need to insulate the goat stall, because goats like to huddle up together up against a wall, and when you have days on end of -20F weather, they can get frostbite.

Um.

I gave OmegaDad the hairy eyeball as we were driving away, saying, “You know I’m lazy.  I don’t want to end up having to take care of goats!”  At which he hastened to reassure me, once again, that the plan was to get the dotter used to small animals that don’t give a hoot how cute you are, but will butt or bite when you treat them roughly.

The dotter was enchanted.

Then we went searching for a new backpack for her, because her old one has bit the dust.  Just a note for the uninformed:  November is not the month to go looking for kids’ backpacks.  September is.  If your kid’s backpack goes belly up during any other month, you are SOL and your options are extremely limited.

So we had to go to Wally World.  (Cue foreboding music.)  At Wally World, the dotter and I both (for differing reasons) began getting crankier and crankier.

By the time we left, with plans to drop me off at home and the dotter and dad to go look at other stores for bacvkpacks, OmegaDad had Had It with the dotter, and laid down the law.  This included the line, “I don’t want to hear one peep or one whine or any crying.  And if I do…”  At which point, I mentally wondered what threat he was going to come up with that he wouldn’t follow through on…

“If I do, you will be dropped off at home with your mother, and I will go shopping for a backpack for you, and I’m going to find you a blue backpack, with Spiderman on it, and you’re going to use that damned backpack until it falls apart and you’re not going to complain!”

Oh, yeah, thought I.  Riiiight.  Of course, right away, the dotter starts saying something.  And OmegaDad roared, “WHAT DID I SAY?!” and OmegaDotter whines, “But I just–” and OmegaDad says, “That’s a peep.  That’s it.”

Sure enough, he pulls into our driveway, I get out, the subdued dotter sits pitifully in the back seat, and both OmegaDad and I inform her that she didn’t listen to daddy, she did continue to talk and whine, and she was staying home with me.  She followed me sloooowly into the garage, the very picture of abject misery.

Too bad, so sad.

And then, within a half an hour, she had flipped the switch from Miss Whinypants to Dr. Jekyll, my happy, helpful and cheerful companion, and she stayed that way all day long and into the night with not a single whine.

So, anyway, there we are.  We will muddle through.

Of course, the thing is, as Jean pointed out in the comments, to be consistent and provide boundaries.  There’s a certain amount of frustration in me about this; as an example, let me simply point out that the dotter fastens her own seatbelt without a fuss 95% of the time when it’s just me and her in the car, but she neeeeedsss heeeeeelllp 95% of the time when OmegaDad is around.

(Grammar hounds:  Should that be “it’s just me and her”?  Maybe I’ll just rewrite it to “me and the dotter”…”the dotter and I”???  Agh.)

Another big plus of the day is that I did not succumb to the cute little goatlets.  Damn, they were cute!

I said at the tail end of yesterday’s post that I had thought of, but discarded, the idea of doing a post based on “Teenage Wasteland”.

I have reconsidered.  I pulled that post idea out of the dustbin.

Please.  Please.  PUH-leeze tell me that almost-six-year-olds are demons sent to earth to torment us?  Please.

I love my darling OmegaDotter.  I really, truly do.

But y’know what?  Awful confession time:  Right now, I just don’t like being with her.

She is:  snotty.  Whiny.  Snippy.  Tantrummy.  Rude.  Disrespectful.  Mean.  Self-centered.  Sassy.

Just plain horrid.

Like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead…”When she was good, she was very, very good.  But when she was bad…

“She was horrid.”

She is being so horrid that even OmegaDad, in whose eyes she can (generally) do no wrong, has decided that she is whiny, sassy, mean, rude, disrespectful, etc.

I find myself thinking that we have utterly failed.  That we’ve raised a hellion.  A brat.  That we should never have been entrusted with raising a child, because we’re obviously so bad at it.

The worst of it?  Is that, apparently, she’s just a doll at school and at before/after school care.  She saves all this shit for us.  Bah.

Okay, it seems worst because it’s hurtful.  It’s actually not worst, because at least she’s not behaving like a snotty little brat with the rest of the world.

Then Ms. Hyde disappears for a while and Dr. Jekyll reappears, and all is sweetness and light and fun and pleasant.  She hands me notes that say, “To Mommy, Love OmegaDotter”, and that have little “I ♥ you”s scattered about.  She glows at me when she is done with her gymnastics class.  She sings silly songs at me when we’re driving from OmegaDad’s office to her before-school place.  She draws and builds elaborate creations.  Bit by bit, she’s reading.  She can make us laugh like crazy.

And then Ms. Hyde reappears.

My only hope is that I can recall a few younger relatives who were absolute pills at the age of five or six, and who have turned out to be model citizens and fairly nice all-around human beings as adults.

So there’s this thang going on, called NaBloPoMo, which stands for National Blog Posting Month.  The idea is, you should sign up, pledging to write one post per day for the month of November.  Various folk volunteer a variety of prizes, and random drawings are held from all the folk who actually complete NaBloPoMo so that they have a chance to win the aforesaid prizes.

An admirable goal.

Really!

So admirable that I tried it last year.

And then, right towards the final third of the month, I missed a day.  Oh, the anguish!  The gnashing of teeth and rending of garments!

Y’see, Jessica had volunteered a prize of six months’ blog hosting plus a custom-designed blog banner.  And I really, really wanted it.

But I blew it.  And gnashed and rent.

So this year, when rumblings of NaBloPoMo started surfacing across the blogosphere, I was very tempted.

Very.

They’ve also got this way kewl LOLCat badge.  That tempted me even further.

But I kept thinking of the pressure.  And the gnashing and rending.  So I decided “No go to NaBloPoMo”.

However!  Lots and lots of my regular reads did sign up, like Halushki and her sister, Quintessence, ChicagoMama, GrrlTravels, Escaping Suburbia, the Figgy ladies, and lots, lots more.  Even PAGent seems to be sort of vaguely in on it, though it might be NaNoWriMo instead (he has done a PAGent noir post).  Just check out my blogroll; if you click on a link, you’ve got a 50/50 chance of hitting someone who is participating. 

The end result:  I am blissfully free of pressure and I get lots of posts from my blogroll.

It’s very neat:  I wake up in the morning, look at my Bloglines blogroll, and there are 20 or 30 posts to read.  Every.  Single.  Day.

Woot!

On the other hand, how will I get anything done???

(TShapedGirl says of the dotter, “I just can’t believe that she is capable of stomping a foot or throwing a fit…”  May I just say:  BWAHAHAHAHAHA!  And add that today’s post was almost one titled with some play on “Teenage Wasteland”…though “Almost-Six-Year-Old Wasteland” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.  Maybe tomorrow.) 

For the past two years, the dotter has been a horsie at Halloween.  This year, however, in a break from tradition, she decided she wanted to be a kitty cat.

So I scoured the interwebs for cute cat costumes.  The problem, of course, is that what I thought of as “cute” was not what she thought of as “cute”.

There were some really spiffy kitty cat costumes available on eBay–handmade, boutiquey things.  Tiger-y.  Leopard-y.  Trimmed with feather boas or faux fur.  I liked them.

The dotter didn’t.  She said, “Find a good kitty cat costume!”  Stifling a wounded, “But I thought these were ‘good’ costumes!”, I resorted to Mr. Google and various costume houses on the ‘net.  I carefully favorited a bunch of different cat costumes for kids (no “sexy cat lady” here!), then called the dotter into the office for her to judge them.

These weren’t “spiffy” kitty cat costumes, but they also weren’t too bad.

She saw this one first.  She said, “I want that one!”  I said, “Now, dear, you need to look at some more, y’know.  You might find one you like better.”  “No.  I want that one.”  But, being a mom, I forced her to sit through about ten different cat costumes, to which I got commentary like, “Ew, no.”  Or, “Boooring.”  Or, “That’s a cat?!  Mommy, that’s not a cat.  That’s a dog.  Or something.”

Do you detect signs of a teen-in-the-making?

Anyway, she was delighted with the cat costume.  She got to wear it at her kindy Halloween party.  She got to wear it at after-school care.  She got to wear it to the Trick-or-Treat Town at school.  She got to wear it t-or-ting.  She went to school this morning with the kitty cat face still on, and the kitty cat ears.

But this morning, in the dark car on the way to before-school care, her voice came out of the back:  “Mommy?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Mommy, I want to be a horse next Halloween.”