OmegaMom

I had, somewhere in the midst of my old collection of LPs, the Angela Lansbury/George Hearn Sweeney Todd production.  It is a queasy-making musical, weird and fantastic and creepy and hair-raising…and full of quite hummable songs that talk about murder, violence, twisted lust, cannibalism, yadda, yadda, yadda.

One of these days I’m going to have to rent the Johnny Depp version.

So why discuss "the demon barber of Fleet Street"?

OmegaDad had a thing growing under his chin.  It grew quite fast.  We decided to send him off to the doc-in-a-box to get it checked out.

Dr. SledDog, the doc-in-a-box, shot him full of local anesthetic, whipped out his scalpel, and cut his throat.

Eeek!

Well, okay, not his throat, but the large goiterous mass under his chin.

And ever since OmegaDad came home with this humongous bandage under his chin, covering his beard, I have been humming "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" in my brain.

Grossitude ensued (really, this is a warning that you may not want to read the next bit):  Dr. SledDog, when he shot him with the anesthetic, had to shoot him four or five times, because each time he plunged the plunger on the opposite side of the growth, the anesthetic went squirting back out the other side.  When the growth was opened, some pus emerged, but Dr. SledDog had to reach inside with his scalpel and dig stuff out…which, apparently, was somewhat crystalline in make-up.  Then Dr. SledDog packed the entire thing up with gauze, slapped the bandage on top, shot OmegaDad with a butt-load of antibiotics, and sent him home with instructions to come back this morning for a follow-up.

Amazingly enough, OmegaDotter listened to me when I requested she not bounce OmegaDad, and was quite gentle with him for the entire evening.

This morning, OmegaDad went in for his follow-up.  He has returned, after having to have a CAT scan (?!).  He needs to go back again to learn the results.  It seems that there is more swelling and what-not that is not reachable, and Dr. SledDog needs to know what’s going on before plunging his straight razor scalpel back in and noodling around with it.

Many years ago, I had outpatient surgery to remove a cyst from my lower back.  (This cyst is apparently a genetic thing; Great-Grandma had one there, and so does OmegaGranny.  I didn’t know it at the time.)  The docs who did it told me it would be a quick-and-easy thing, in, a few numbing shots, slice, remove, sewed back up, and out the door.  Well, firstly, it was much bigger than they expected; a lot of it was subcutaneous.  Secondly, since it was bigger than they expected, they kept running out of numb skin.  That was fun.  Not.  So they ended up chasing the scalpel with more shots and digging further.  Finally, when they got it out, the whole thing was about the size of my thumb.  Ewww. 

Anyway, gross description aside, the thing I remember most was just how much that "small" surgery took out of me.  I was wasted for days; my feeling is that bodies are not made to be cut open on a whim, and doing it can send a finely-tuned collection of skin cells, nerve cells, hormones, chemical signaling pathways, and what-not into a great tizzy.

OmegaDad is feeling the same way.  I’m just waiting for Dr. SledDog to sew him up, fer cryin’ out loud.  And I’m really hoping that the CAT scan doesn’t show anything extraordinary, just more pus and where it is…and hoping that the antibiotics kick in and things calm down and OmegaDad can go to sleep at night, and then I can go to sleep at night.

Ah…

Ahhh…

AHchew!

In my early 20s, I would visit Grandma down in Sun City on a regular basis.  As planning would have it, there were a whole slew of elderly aunties and uncles that lived there, too–my grandfather having decided, as he was nearing the end of life, that he should move himself and Grandma to that area so that they’d have family around. 

Great Aunt Iola lived down the street from Grandma.  A tall, rangy, raw-boned woman with a deep voice, she was one of my most favorite of the elderly aunties.  Her austere exterior argued for a no-nonsense kind of woman, someone who was brusque and cold and distant.  In reality, though, Auntie Iola was a sentimental pushover, warm and loving and fun.  She introduced me to the wonder that is ginger-ale floats, a much better concoction than root beer floats, trust me.

Auntie Iola had a Siamese cat named Greta, cross-eyed and with a creaky voice, who loved to sun herself in the little courtyard attached to Auntie Iola’s Sun City duplex.  Greta would bask in the sunlight, and, when the mood struck her, would roll about on her back in the dust for minutes at a time.

Given that this was Arizona, and in the summertime, with low humidity (obviously pre-monsoon season), Greta’s fur would fill with static and she would return from one of these dust baths with her fur filled with torrents, masses of dust.

This is how I learned that I was allergic to dust.

KtChew! Ahhhh….ahhhhh…

Because Greta was a sucker for luvins.  So one day, when I was visiting, she returned to the house after her daily dust bath, leapt up onto the table in front of me, and did some serious nose-diving, begging for luvins.  I obliged, scritching around the base of her ears, scratching gently under her chin, pushing her over to massage her tummy.  And within minutes I erupted into the absolute worst allergy attack I have ever–before or since–encountered.

…chew!  Ktchew!

In this area of Alaska, the prevailing winds come looping up the coast, circle inland a bit, and barrel down the glaciers.  The satellite loops look like immense commas, great big swooping spirals of cloud that march in on a regular basis, dumping the moisture sucked up from the ocean.

Right now, though, they’re not dumping moisture.  What they’re doing is kicking up dust from the glaciers and riverbeds as they go.

Small Town Alaska, to the east of us, where OmegaDad works, has been shrouded in clouds of dust for days.  Suburban Alaska, where we live, hasn’t.  Until this weekend.  Suddenly, the laminate flooring upstairs has this fine layer of dust, blown in through the open windows.

We were outside in the back yard almost all weekend.  Early Sunday afternoon, my eyes started itching.  A few hours later and my nose was streaming, and sneezes were exploding from me like the snooze alarm on our clock.  A little series of sneezes–ktchew!  ktchew!  ktchew!–and then a momentary rest where I could snurfle up the runnies with a sound like the honking of a goose, and then another eruption of sneezes.

Antihistamines don’t seem to be doing very much good, either, though I suppose if I weren’t taking them, things would be worse.

So even though it’s gorgeous weather, the sun is out, the trees are green (yes!  green!  woot!), and we have actually had a series of red flag warnings due to (it is to laugh) "low" humidity and high winds, I am praying to the Kozmik All for a good drenching in the next few days, just to get the dust to settle.  And pollen, too, I suppose.  But mostly the dust.

Ahhhh….ahhhhh….

KtChew!

It’s Mother’s Day.  OmegaDad and OmegaDotter let me sleep in, and then marched in with breakfast in bed.  Whoa!  It was little Nancy’s quiches and strawberries, plus one of my Frappucinos…they then brought in their own and joined me, and presented me with a cardboard box which contained truffles (yum), three "flowers" made of pipecleaners and seed packets (some nice pansy varieties), a large abalone shell from the dotter (which I had given to her ages ago), a scarf from the dotter (which I had given to her ages ago), and another shell.

It was, actually, quite charming and loving, and I loved it. 

So much for being a "non-mom mom".  Har.  I’m cynically amused at how Teleflora and NBC scrambled all over themselves trying to recoup from that blunder.  At the same time, I’m glad that they did.

I’m sure they’d flinch at including birthmothers in any way in their motherhood tribute–too ambiguous for their tastes.  After all, they’d have to figure out how to present birthmothers as saintly martyrs who are gently satisfied with their choice, and avoid all the questions that even thinking about birthmoms brings to many folk.

OmegaDotter wrote a letter to her birthmother this morning.  She was happy to do it; she had asked me a while back if she could write a letter to her.  This entailed, of course, explaining that while she could write a letter, we had no way of delivering it because we didn’t know where her birthmother was or if she was okay.  But, I said, we could make a special box, and put letters to her birthmother in the box.  This morning, when she wrote the letter, she had completely forgotten that we couldn’t actually send it, and was all excited (momentarily) about getting a letter back.

::whimper::

But I explained again, and the dotter took it in good stead.

The letter was pretty short, but the first thing the dotter quickly wrote out was "I forgot your name."

::whimper::

She wrote that she can do cartwheels, and that she is good at learning.  And signed it, "Love, OmegaDotter".  Then she put it in an envelope clearly labeled "CHINA", and put it on the refrigerator, held by our very best, strongest magnet.

Then, that done, she merrily went on her way, demanding to help OmegaDad with building the veggie garden, helping me rake (yes, more raking), dipping into the house to build a picnic basket out of paper, and then dashing off next door to play with the kids there for a while.

I know that I have readers who simply don’t understand why we do things like this.  That it seems like a way to make the dotter feel capital-A-adopted.  That we make too much of it.  That our lives are all adoption angst.

First off, no, our lives are not all adoption angst.  In fact, there’s very little of it.  It’s just part of the tapestry of life for us and for the dotter; there are some things that remind her of being adopted, and we talk about them, and she chews on them a bit, and life goes on.  She goes to school, she has to do homework, we play with friends, we deal with Ballet Recital Madness, she practices her gymnastics, and on and on.

The thing is, she is adopted.  She’s our dotter, through and through, but somewhere out there is a birthmother and a birthfather, and a big question as to "why?"  From our readings of musings by adult adoptees, it seems that even the most happy, well-adjusted (female) adoptees think about birthparents and the circumstances of their adoption throughout their childhood, adolescence, adulthood.  And a lot of the adoptees who have written about it say that they were afraid to talk about it with their parents, that they feared hurting their parents by even thinking about another set of parents, by even wondering about their biological background.  Or that they tried talking about it, and their parents brushed it off, and they learned, very quickly, that it was a subject not to be touched.  And many of those adult adoptees said that they thought about the subject of birthparents a lot and were hurt and worried that they couldn’t talk about it with their parents.

Also, there’s OmegaDad.  OmegaDad’s mother died a week after giving birth to him.  He thought about her a lot.  He, too, learned early on that it was a sore subject; of course, it was because she died young, leaving a bereft husband and sons and parents, all of whom remembered her and were hurt by her early death.  So OmegaDad remembers wanting to know more about his mother, and not being able to talk about her.  So he feels it incumbent upon himself to make sure that OmegaDotter know that it’s okay to talk about her birthmother to both of us.

We’ve told the dotter her adoption story since we brought her home, too small to even understand what we were saying.  "Once upon a time, there was a lady in China who had a beautiful baby girl…" was how it started.  And "on the other side of the world, there was a man and a woman who really wanted to have children…"  And ending, "And they drove up the mountains to Small Mountain University Town in the little white car, and got home just a few days before Christmas, and that was the Very Best Christmas Ever."  As she’s grown older, the story has changed, gotten more detail, specifics have been fleshed out.

It’s all a little bit like sex, actually.  Well, not having sex, but talking about sex.  You want to keep the channels open.  You don’t want One Big Just So Story scene where you talk about sex when the kiddo is 17 and that’s that.  So you start out basic, you get comfy talking about the whole idea (omigod omigod i can’t even think about the dotter having sex omigod omigod), you try to not get tied up in knots when A Question comes up. 

I dunno.  It works for us.  Somewhere on the other side of the world is a woman who gave birth to our dotter.  Goodness knows why she had to abandon her–it could be that the dotter has an older sister, and her birthparents were trying for a son; it could be that her birthmother was a young, single woman who couldn’t keep a baby; it could be that there were in-laws who took her away and told her birthmother she was dead, in hopes of a future son to carry on the name; it could be that her birthmother couldn’t afford to keep her…We don’t know.  On a day like this, though, I think of her missing being able to watch this amazing girl grow up, not knowing her belly giggle, not knowing her artistic creations, not knowing her need to bounce and thump.  The least I can do for this other woman out there is to keep her memory alive and not flinch away when the dotter wants–or needs–to talk about her.

Adoption ranting alert!

Whoop!  Whoop!  WHOOP!  Brrrp…brrrp…brrrp…brrrp!

At this point in family life, I normally let the usual mainstream media faux pas (tell me how to pluralize that?  Please?!) about adoption pass me by.  At this point, life is less about Deep Musings About Adoption and more about how to survive the few weeks at the end of school year that are jam-packed with stuff like "Teacher Appreciation Week" (please bring a dish–Monday is breakfast, have it there by 8:30!, Tuesday is casseroles, Wednesday is sandwiches–but the staff are bringing the makings so don’t bother, Thursday is salads, and Friday is desserts) and "The Kindergarden Circus" (in which the dotter is being–natch–a "prancing horse"–and they really need volunteers to help sell popcorn before the circus) and ballet picture day (scheduled for the middle of the morning?  Oh, well, at least it’s not in the middle of school, since school ends two days before) and Ballet Recital Madness (update:  no, littlies don’t need to be there at oh-dark-thirty and stay for 24 hours straight, thank heavens!).

In other words, general adoption stuff has taken a back-burner to Real Life.

(Which is not to say "general adoption stuff" doesn’t happen, and isn’t important.  It does, and it is.  It’s just that what pops into the ol’ noggin to write about tends to be more on the panicky side than on the thinking deeply side.)

But when egregious mainstream media cluelessness attacks, I just have to sit up and take notice.

Brought to my attention by two adoption bloggers is this little lovely:  The category in the Mother’s Day TV special "America’s Favorite Mom" that is called–wait for it–"Non-Mom Moms".

I had a few "non-mom moms" in my life.  There was Aunt Lou, my mom’s best friend.  There was Mrs. Crysanthemum, who lived next door to my paternal grandparents, and who stunned me, absolutely stunned me, when she announced to me, at 16, that I should stop calling her "Mrs. Crysanthemum" and call her by her first name.  It took me years to be able to follow that request without feeling both awkward and disrespectful.  These were women who spent a lot of time with me, disciplined me, gave me hugs, fed me, let me have adventures with their kids, knew me from the time I was a wee chee-ild until I was a grown adult.

I never, ever though of Mrs. Libby, who lived on the other side of my grandparents and had an adopted kiddo, as a "non-mom mom".  Honest!  She was just Jarrett’s mom.

NBC and its minions, though, would place her (and me, and every other adoptive mommy on earth) smack dab into that category.

There it is, in all it’s glory, among the "semi-finalists" in the category "Non-Mom Moms":  "She was an adopted child who is now mom to her own daughter, plus six adopted children who started life as "meth babies"."

First off, even by their skewed standards, she’s a "mom mom":  she has "her own daughter".

OmegaDotter, of course, is not "my own daughter".  I’m just play-acting mommy for her.

Secondly, there’s that old cliche, the "crack baby", recycled as the "meth baby".

Thirdly, she’s not being a "mom" to those adopted children, oh no.  She’s being a "non-mom mom".

Sweet Kozmik All above.  Don’t these people think?  Don’t they have any concept of what "adoption" is?  Don’t they realize how they’ve dissed all the adoptive moms in their audience by that casual sweep of the semantic hand that dusts adoptive moms off into the "non-mom mom" dustbin?

Gah.  Get a grip, NBC.  My dotter has two moms, and they’re equally valid and important in my dotter’s life.  (Which I will talk about on Mother’s Day, I think.)

Frick-frackin’ rowrbazzlin’ dim-witted dismissive twits.

Nothing is going on with our lives.  Okay, yeah, the dotter ends her first year of Real School in a week and a half…it’s spring and I’ve seen one tree with all sorts of itty bitty pale green leaves bursting out, so that’s exciting.  And we have rhubarb growing.  And Mother’s Day is coming up.

But I?  Am in a rut.  Nothing seems interesting or exciting to me right now.

So, channeling my mom, I hear:  "Just join a club!  Go to a Mensa do!  Go take walks!" et cetera.  And I say it to myself, too, especially the "go take walks!" or the variation, "go get some exercise on a regular basis!", but it doesn’t help.

My life is boring.  My blog is boring.  Nothing is going on.  The most exciting thing that has happened to me recently is that I stabbed myself beneath my fingernail with a cactus spine opening the kitchen window.  And it hurts.

I even went off to The Daily Meme to see if any of the subjects might amuse me or incite me, and it was all…meh.

The dotter is losing teeth left and right.  The last one was one of the two top front teeth; this left the second one, also loose, all on its lonesome and able to stick out by itself when her lips were closed.  It was cute and adorable.  It also became quite wiggly.

At which point, it is my job to supervise the evening ablutions.  While both OmegaDad and I get the heebie-jeebies at really wiggly teeth, I have teeny-tiny heebie-jeebies; OmegaDad gets wigged out and has to leave the bathroom entirely.

Of course, it reached that particular point that parents the world over know:  it wiggled itself loose on one side and not on the other, and the dotter had reached the pinnacle of impatience.  I assured her it would come out over the next few days, but OmegaDad decided to promote the tie-a-string-around-the-tooth approach.

This resulted in severe dithering.  First it was "Oooh, yeah!"  Then it was "Ewwww, no!  Stop it!"  Then it was "Maybe I’ll try it."  Then it was tears and "I can’t do it!"  And all of this was before the string ever reached the tooth.

Like going zero to 60 and back to zero within a minute.  Whiplash!

So we abandoned the attempt and the dotter and I headed off to her bedroom for story time.

At which point, she decided she wanted to try it again.

This time, we avoided the bathroom, so she couldn’t see what was going on.  Apparently, it was seeing that was scaring her.  So we plopped her down on a dining chair conveniently scooched near the kitchen door, took the neat little lariat that OmegaDad had made out of cooking twine, and I slipped it over her tooth and cinched it down almost tight.

At which point, she decided she didn’t want to try it again.

Foreseeing an hour or two of this back-and-forthing, I reaching for the string, saying "Okay, okay, kiddo!  I’m taking the string off!" and surreptitiously yanked with one hand on the string while the other was making ineffectual forays at the string-encased tooth.

Pop!  Out came the tooth (of course).  (There was one moment of resistance, and I had a queasy fear that it wouldn’t work and the dotter would be both in pain and brokenhearted that Mommy was torturing her.)  The dotter had one moment of "Owww!" and then realized what had happened.  Much surprise and great swelled-headedness on her part:  "I did it!"  She totally thought that I had really been trying to untie the tooth…

Later on, in her bedroom, I whispered to her, "You know what?  I was sneaky.  I wasn’t trying to take the string off, I just yanked…"

She thinks it’s hilarious.  She has spent the last day giggling about it, and saying, "Ooooh, you’re so sneaky, Mommy!"  (Tee hee!)

She now has a two-tooth gap.  Another tooth is loose.  The Tooth Fairy is soon going to have to make another run to the bank for Sacajawea dollars.  I have it on good authority from the girls at gymnastics that at least one kid gets $20 per tooth, and another $8.  Whoa.  I got quarters.  The dotter gets the nice golden Sacajawea dollars.  And the Tooth Fairy is running out Real Soon Now.

You invited the dotter to your daughter’s birthday party.

The party was in Big City at the science museum.

WAY kewl!

Um.

But.

Um.

That’s a fifty mile drive.  One way.  It takes an hour to drive.  One way.

Sorry, we’re not going.

(Does it strike anyone else as a wee tad overboard to be having your six-year-old’s birthday party at a big science museum that is an hour’s drive away?)

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Elvis.

Of course.

And an island in a deep blue sea.  The island, I suspect, is related to Lilo and Stitch.

Many years ago, when I was growing up in Chicago, my mom and I would go to the Jewel on Clark Street to go grocery shopping on Saturdays.  We’d take a taxi off to the store, do our shopping, then I would hang out with the filled shopping cart while mom went into the drug store to buy cigarettes, and then we would call another taxi and head home.  (Keep in mind that this was many moons ago, when the taxi rate was something like 5 cents per one-sixth of a mile.)

Normally, mom’s foray into the drug store wouldn’t take too long, so I’d sit perched by the cart on the metal railings cleverly designed so that you couldn’t get the carts out into the parking lot, and daydream.  Cars would come and go, people would squeeze through the openings in the railings with their bags of groceries, the sun would dart in and out behind clouds.

Once in a while, though, she’d take "too long", as measured by my ten-year-old mind.  At which point, my daydreams would take a distinctly dark tone.

She’d been kidnapped.

There’d been a robbery, and she was shot, lying in the store by the cashier’s counter in a puddle of blood.

I knew I would sit there for hours before anyone would think to tell me that she was in the hospital on her death’s bed.

Something Dire (but unspecified) Had Happened.  My life was about to come crashing down.  Stuff like that.

And then she’d show up, purse and purchases in hand, and anticlimactically we’d await the taxi.  I was always very relieved, though I kept it to myself.

To this day, when someone precious to me takes "too long", as judged by my forty-mumble-year-old mind, I go off into that panic zone.  This is, of course, very silly.  "Too long" is extremely subjective.  But if, say, OmegaDad informs me that he and the dotter are going off to Home Debit to get some specific drill bits, my brain puts a fuzzy-logic time limit on that expedition.  Home Debit + "specific drill bits" = Not Too Long.  So, if the expedition expands to include, say, a stop at Greasy Fast Food Palace for burgers, fries, and sodas without my knowledge, a swirling mass of evil starts emerging around their heads (in my imagination).  It starts small, then grows.

When it reaches a crescendo, when I’m just about to start asking myself out loud, "Okay.  Is it time to start worrying for real yet?", this is, of course, when the garage door opens and the dotter comes barreling in, junk food in hand, with OmegaDad behind her.

"Precious" is one of those words that has been devalued and marginalized by pop culture.  "Oh, isn’t she just precious!" is the saccharine coo that the word conjures up these days.  Or–worse yet–gooey sweet big-eyed pastel figurines.  In our society, "precious" is something oh-just-so-darling-and-cute.  Oy.  Now, take Gollum–Gollum knew how to treat something precious: he obsessed over it for centuries.  That is "precious".  Something very important.  Very special.  Very loved.  Something you are protective about.  Something to be treasured and cherished.

For some reason, now that Great-Grandma is gone, the idea of my mom gallivanting around the U.S. on her own is much more disturbing than it was.  Before, mom was the "accompany-er", the travel companion for Great-Grandma.  As such, the focus of any worry, the need to care for and cherish, was Great-Grandma.  Now, however, mom is planning to travel off to visit OmegaBro and family, and OmegaCuzes and families, in one fell swoop.  The outer, more mature part of me is delighted, is glad that mom no longer has to stay in town to worry about her own mom and can be free to do such traveling.

But there she is–my one and only mamasan.  I have one aunt and uncle left alive, and mom.  None of the other forebears are alive.  She is doubly–triply–precious these days.  My safety net of elders has thinned, and I find my over-imaginative ten-year-old coming to the fore with Visions of Disaster.

Not too often, mind you.  But there it is.  Because she’s precious to me.

"Make new friends,
But keep the old,
One is silver
And the other gold…"

Anyone who’s been to Girl Scout camp knows that song.  I remember singing it (among others much less uplifting) while we hiked from our area of platform tents to the main mess hall for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  (I also remember that the much-sought-after reward for doing clean-up at mess hall was to get the "cows", the huge plastic bags that held milk for the milk dispensers, which made very nice inflatable pillows for the camp cots…)

Today I got a call from an old friend.

The sun is out, the day is warm, and I got a call from a good friend–what more can I ask?

Like many of my blogging buds, I am rather introverted.  It takes me a while to make friends, and I usually only have one or two "good" friends at a time.  Some were friends for long periods of time, some for shorter; I’ve lost touch with a bunch, which makes me sad.

I had lost touch with J–life being life, small kids occupying one’s mind and time–and hadn’t talked with her for about two years.

But last week, she called OmegaDad at work, having heard via the network that we moved to Alaska, and using her mad Internet research skillz to locate him.  He gave her our phone number and various email addresses, we coordinated times through email–me being out here in the Final Frontier, she being on the East Coast, and many hours of difference dividing the two.  And today, her being out and about on her own to go shopping and me being home after work hours coincided.

A good friend is the kind of friend who you can talk to for an hour on the phone after a lapse of two years and it’s like you haven’t been away from each other at all.  Sort of like my faux Ugg boots, or a good armchair–comfy and cozy and…well, friendly.

We have, of course, been making tentative social moves here, reaching out and getting to know people.  We’ve hung out with A’s mom and dad (A being adopted from the same area of China, one day older than OmegaDotter, and also in her gymnastics class), and it seems like there might be potential with S’s mom, too (another gymnastics bud).  It’s nice to start feeling less isolated.

But still.  Still, having an old friend call, and falling into the old, comfy conversational back-and-forth…ahhh.

(I can’t, for the life of me, remember the name of the camp, but it was in Virginia, we paddled canoes on the Potomac, learned to carve rudimentary artwork in redwood, hiked through forests, had sing-alongs around the campfire, and collected shark’s teeth.  All was good.)

The dotter is better.  It seems to have been a 24-hour bug; she was sick long enough for me to cancel a visit to a buddy on Saturday, but by the end of the day was able to eat regular food and keep it down, yay!

Yesterday was sunny, but we pretty much did nothing all day–the dotter, still recuperating, laid about and napped a few times, and I wasn’t feeling up to par myself.

But today–today was sunny and warm again.  Up in the 50s.  Oh, joy!

We now have slightly more than an acre.  About a fourth, I would say, is wooded.  The remainder is lawn.  One spot in the yard gets sun more often than any other, and it was free and clear of snow.  So I began raking it at 11 a.m.

By 4 p.m., that part of the yard was looking awesome.

I, on the other hand, now have been informed by both OmegaDotter and OmegaDad, on separate occasions, that my butt is quite dirty.  ("Hey!" says OmegaDad, "So sue me!  I like looking at my wife’s ass!")  I have a raw spot from where I was raking without gardening gloves.  Luckily, I realized it in time and grabbed the gloves, so it’s my only raw spot.

But my arms!  My legs!  My back!  Ack!

And it ends up I’ve only done about one-sixth of the yard.  I look out my office window into the back yard–the endless expanse of back yard, where the snow is rapidly shrinking, and say to myself, "Myself:  Look at that yard.  Maybe we want to let the woodlands come back."  Myself shakes her head and says, "No, no, me.  We need lawn so kids can run around and get tired out, and besides, we can’t let the woodlands grow over the septic tank or we will be sunk.  We can do this!  We’ll just do bits and pieces over the next few weekends, and then it will be time for OmegaDad to start mowing…"

By the way–underneath all the leaves?  The grass was green.  Not everywhere, just in spots.  But it was such a lovely, lovely color to see!

I spent the late afternoon snuggled up in bed, suffering from a sinus headache.  Oh, joy. 

Once upon a time, I didn’t have sinuses.  Or, rather, I had them, but they didn’t bother me.  It’s similar to how the dotter never complains about things like headaches; she gets a rather cute, scrunched up "Hunh?" look on her face when you ask her if she’s got one.  This went on for many years.  And then, one day…

One day…I got the Mother Of All Sinus Infections.  It came on fast and sudden.  I don’t remember very much about it except for the fact that my eye swelled shut and I was hauled off to either the doctor or the ER, and forthwith tossed into the hospital for a few days while they Did Things.  One of those things involved a bubous transparent plastic doo-dad attached to a big transparent plastic tank.  The nurses would come by every few hours, jam the end of the bulbous doo-dad into my nose, and vacuum me out.

Ewwwww.

I just want you to think about that.

My response?  Ewwwwww.

I think I was around eleven years old at the time.

After that–having primed the pump, as it were–my sinuses were in full-time infectious mode.  If the weather turned, if there was a high pressure system, if there was a low-pressure system, so long as there was a fluctuation in the humidity, I’d get sinus headaches.  Never to the extent of that first big blow out, but I could feel the fluid building up, then the skin on the right side of my nose near my eyebrow would start to puff out a bit, and the pounding would begin.

Then I moved to the great American Southwest.

Woohoo!

Freedom from sinus headaches!

Yay!  There was dancing in the streets!  (Except for the fact that my other headache bete noir, migraines, decided to take up the slack…)

Then we moved to Alaska.  Land of soaring mountains!  The Final Frontier!  Land of the Midnight Sun!  Yadda, yadda, yadda…

Also, land of unending humidity.

Guess what?  They’re baaaaack.

Oh, joy.

An important question, brought to my attention by Whatever:

Created by OnePlusYou

The utterly hilarious "An Engineer’s Guide to Cats", copped from Miss C Recommends:

We were discussing nicknames over dinner the other night.  I mentioned that my mother calls me "Katya" and that my dad called me "Puddin’".  The dotter said:  "Awwwww.  That’s sweet."  Then she thought for a moment.  Then she said, "He’s dead, y’know."  Cause–>effect.  Or something like that.

One of the things that Alaska is famous for is cabbage.  World-class cabbage.  HUGE cabbage.  At the State Fair, one of the biggest competitions is who gets to take home the award for the biggest cabbage of the year.

OmegaDad decided he, too, wanted to try his hand at Big Cabbages.

This required researching Big Cabbage seeds.  And buying same.  A number of different varieties.

Which, of course, required planting a number of each of a number of different varieties.

He set up his indoor "greenhouse"–a set of metal and wood shelves with grow-lights and heat and a plastic covering sealed with velcro–and set up some flats.  They were not all cabbages.  Thank heavens.

However.  We now have…oh…fifty? cabbage plants just about ready to be transplanted outdoors.  (It would help if we had (a) the vegetable beds set up and (b) no snow.  We’re getting there on both aspects.)

This evening at dinner, OmegaDad served a concoction of sauteed sliced cabbage, crisp bacon bits, and red onion.  It was better than his last cabbage concoction, and actually somewhat tasty.

He eyeballed me over dinner and said, portentously, "You know…we need to come up with cabbage recipes."

‘Tis true.  If all goes well, we are going to be swamped with cabbage.

Now.  I like cabbage, in moderation.  A nice small cabbage head, cut into quarters and boiled until just tender-crisp, and slathered with butter–yum.

Once in a while.

I much prefer our yearly bounty of beans and sugar-snap peas and snow peas.  And little bitty tender lettuce leaves, which make a splendid salad.

Cabbage, on the other hand…hmmm.

Anyone have any good cabbage recipes??  We’re really going to need them.

The husband frosted it, and the dotter decorated it.  It says "Happy Barth Day I ♥ you"…:

There were some very pretty roses and truffles:

A hand-made card from the dotter, featuring a "pop-out" present, and, inside, a B@rnes and N0ble card:

And then we ate cake, as Marie Antoinette recommended:

All in all, it was a good birthday.  Many thanks for all the birthday wishes!  My mamasan needn’t feel G.U.I.L.T. as she proclaimed in last post’s comments, since it was her guidance that produced the nostalgic birthday cake, via a flurry of emails between her and OmegaDad.

I will have you know that all the pictures were taken at about 8 p.m. (except for the roses, which were this morning) to give you an idea of how light it is at that time…

Today, we have had more snow, and more is expected tonight.  Have I mentioned that I am sick and tired of snow?  Gah.

When I listen to Santana and Chad Kroeger rocking out on "Into the Night", or listen to Lorena McKennitt or other singers with passionate rhythm sections behind them, I imagine myself dancing in the living room in dim light, with a long, swingy skirt, swaying to the rhythms and putting the world away.

I also imagine myself as a 25-year-old with long hair.

That self-image is resilient.  It sticks to me like chewing gum to a hot sidewalk.  I look at myself in the mirror and say, "Kate.  You’re forty-mumble years old.  Your hair is going grey."  But when it comes to "seeing myself" mentally, there I am, skinny, sexy, young, dancing.

Not plumpish, lazy, and arthritic.

Sigh.

So today I am forty-mumble-plus-one years old.  "Late" forties, to be honest.  Very.

My darling geeky husband sent me a birthday email with .kmz file to pull up in Google Earth, pinpointing the spot in Los Alamos, NM, where he remembers us having our first kiss.  He and the dotter have made an orange cake and will layer it with either apricot pie filling (preferred) or lemon curd, frost it with lemon frosting, and sing "Happy Birthday" to me this evening.

Makronee

Ol it tac for makronee is nootls and sos

Spgedeey

Ol it tac for spgedeey is nootls and meetdls and sos

(Translation:

Macaroni - All it takes for macaroni is noodles and sauce.

Spaghetti - All it takes for spaghetti is noodles and meatballs and sauce.)

Bon appetit!

So Scribbit nails it here, about how it feels right now in Alaska, in the season that is known elsewhere as "Spring".  Yes, you read it correctly when you hit the line "The sun isn’t going down until nearly nine o’clock now".

OmegaDad returns from a field trip this evening after two days away.  On the home front, the dotter and I have been cooking and hanging out.  She is now quite handy in the kitchen and I have even started allowing her to cut ingredients up with The Knife.  Let me tell you how hard it is to act nonchalant while your daughter is very carefully cutting up green peppers and Italian sausage with The Knife, which is Sharp.  Very.  I kept having visions of her slicing one of her fingers through, but she managed in spite of my parental and discreet hyperventilating behind her.

A side effect of the Food Network is that she is determined to be a chef someday, and has taken to actually eating weird combinations of foods.  "Weird", that is, in a six-year-old’s world view.  We had kung pao chicken on Tuesday night–full of "weird" ingredients.  She ate it all.  She liked it!  She called it "yummy"!  And she asked if I could make it again next week!

Whoa.

This was followed by the next night’s homemade spaghetti sauce (thus the green peppers and Italian sausage), which, unfortunately, was not as great a hit.  Even though she had specifically asked for it two nights running.

My mommy satisfaction quotient was quite high after these mother-dotter bonding experiences.  In fact, my head was swelled.  But then, at the dinner table last night, she informed me that "It’s just not as fun without daddy here."  *Pop* went my MSQ, deflating to nothing.

Then, when talking with OmegaDad on the phone afterwards, he reminded me that she had missed me terribly while I was down in Arizona, and went on to say that he was fun, but I was comfort.

Heh.  Which I proceeded to illustrate yesterday night by convincing the dotter that saying "I will have good dreams tonight" ten times in a row would make sure she didn’t have a nightmare, like she had had the night before.  (A real doozy, that involved crying.)

Anyway, since the man has been away, and I have been devoting time to the dotter, the blog has suffered. 

And it shows!  Sheesh, guys.  I don’t post for a day and my hits plummet.  Bah!  I say, BAH!  Nowadays I don’t like looking at my site meter some days, because it makes me feel antsy and like someone is going to tell me to clean up my room.

In the meantime, I am trying (very hard) to put up an itty bitty video of her cartwheeling.  Well, it’s up on my website, but how to get it to display is another thing.  Some research is in order.

A recent Disney film is now available on DVD.  So, since we’ve instituted "family movie night", wherein we watch a movie together and eat dinner in the family room, and since it’s a Disney movie, a fairy tale, we figured we’d get it and watch it and have a pleasant evening.

It’s a fun movie!  Really!  See, there’s this princess locked away by a prince’s evil stepmother, who’s very Snow-White-esque, singing to all the birds and animals and daydreaming of her handsome prince.  The prince hears her singing…he searches out the beauteous voice…he finds the princess…she’s swept off her feet…

And then the evil stepmother, trying to keep her away from the prince, dumps her into a wishing well that has, as it’s other end, New York City.

At which point, the movie turns from a cartoon into real life.

All well and good.  Lots of hilarity ensues when this dewy-eyed innocent Disney princess tries to cope with real-life NYC.

She meets a man.  She starts falling for the man.  The prince and a henchman of the stepmother also go through the wishing well to rescue her/keep the prince from rescuing her…

And then the evil stepmother, deciding her henchman is worthless, jumps into NYC herself.

At which point, the dotter crawled up into my lap.

And then the witch, foiled in various connivings, busts loose with lots of flames and witchery and turns into a very well-done CGI dragon lizard thing, big and scaly and scary.

"Scary" being the operative word.

Really scary for a six-year-old who has only encountered scary stuff in The Wizard of Oz (which is banned from the house for a few years) and in cartoons.  She’s quite the adept at the scary stuff in cartoons, because she’s well aware that it’s Not Real.  But CGI that’s presented in a realistic way?

Really, really scary.

I spent quite a bit of time last night in the dotter’s bedroom before she fell asleep, having to explain how it was all Make Believe.  How it was all done with computers.  How it wasn’t a real dragon lizard thing, and the witch wasn’t a real witch, and it wasn’t real fire, and it was all pretend, and everything was okay.

I felt blindsided, frankly.  I didn’t even think to research the movie beforehand–after all, it’s Disney, fer cryin’ out loud!  A Disney children’s movie.

So:  Make sure your kiddos aren’t quite as innocent about scary special effects as mine was before you show it to them.

Last night, while cleaning up bookcases to go into the family room, it occurred to me to wonder–when did the first person decide that smearing smushed up dried honeycombs on wood was a Good Idea?

I mean, really–what on earth prompted someone to do that in the first place?

It’s similar to something else I’ve wondered:  Who was the first person who decided that horseradish might be actually good to eat if it were ground up and mixed in with other foodstuffs?  What possessed this person?  One of my most memorable experiences was when my mom handed me a chunk of what we both thought was celeriac root–carefully cleaned and peeled–and I took a great big honkin’ bite.  It wasn’t celeriac.  It was horseradish.  Let me tell you:  horseradish, in its natural state, is not, repeat not, edible.  I chewed for about five seconds.  At which point, my brain told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was being poisoned.  It was ghastly.  Surely I’m not alone in that?  So what prompted some genius, in the long long ago, to decide that it might be okay if it were used sparingly?

Why is it that I suddenly have nothing I want to say?

I’ve been encountering some good discussions around the blogosphere.  They pique my interest.  I want to discuss them when I read them.  But then, a few hours later, I open up the ol’ bloggin’ software and am confronted with a blank page…at which point my brain goes blank, too.

Part of it is that we’re being very homey right now.  The house is slowly, slowly falling into place; more and more boxes are unpacked, curtains are up, bookcases are out and books soon to be placed in them.  It’s feeling like our home suddenly.  I still feel sad about leaving the old house, but am happy about having more space, and more closets (closets!!!  OMG!  I could just swoon with the joy!).  We have also–somehow–managed to stay on top of the creeping mess here, so things have their places and get put back/away, rather than accreting like a giant midden heap in various spots around the house.

We have light.  In fact, so much light that it is making me feel very odd and out-of-focus.  Twilight at nine p.m. should mean that the weather is almost hot and the flowers are blooming and the grass is green.  But right now, we still have snow in the backyard and ice in the driveway (and in the afternoons, a lovely thin layer of melting ice on top of the slick ice, which resulted in one of our cars slooooowy sliding backwards down the driveway…luckily I noticed this in time to move it back up to a non-icy spot!).  We have birds congregating around the bird feeder, but no greenery.  We have sunshine all day, but no buds on the trees.  My body keeps saying, "Sun!  Woot!  But…but…dude!  Where’s the ’spring’?!"

Then there are the various "just living" things.  Taking the dotter off to gymnastics class.  Doing teleconferences during the day.  Taking the dawg out to do his thing.  Planning a vegetable garden.  Putting up artwork.  Doing the laundry.

Anyway, right now, I open the blog, want to post something pithy and pungent, and find the P&P quotient in my brain has plummeted.

Give me some ideas!

One of the things that really bugs OmegaDad and me is when OmegaDotter doesn’t respond when we say something to her.

Case in point:  This afternoon, after putting up still more drapery hardware (the office needs some more drapery rings, because I thought 30 of the darned things would be enough, but, hey, more are on the way and I’ve learned my lesson for the time, ten years from now, that we do this thing again), OmegaDad and I joined the dotter on the futon to watch the last 40 minutes of Karate Kid.

Cool movie.  All sorts of Good Stuff about focusing, and working hard to reach your goals, and not using physical prowess to beat up skinny boys, and how you Shouldn’t Cheat, all with a few things slipped in about the effect the Manzanar camps had and the ease with which some folks use racial slurs to put Asians down.  I know that there are oodles of Asian Americans out there who get grumpy about Pat Morita being a token Asian whose acting was full of stereotypes, but I actually think the Karate Kid can prompt a lot of good discussion.

("Focus" being one of our latest, not really related to this post.  I think.  Hmmm.)

Anyway, the dotter was on my lap, waiting for Daniel to do the Crane Kick and beat the Bad Boys.

Daniel does the Crane Kick, the bad boys are beaten, all is well with the world…

I say to the dotter, "Okie doke, up you go!"  Happy tone of voice, all ready to jump up and get to work on other weekend projects.

And she sits there.  Not a word, not a twitch, no response.

I say again, "Dotter, off the lap, I want to get up!"  Still happy, though less so.

And she sits there.  Not a word, not a twitch, no response.

We’re talking a minute at a time.

Dudes, I wanted to get up.  And I did not want to be ignored.  I wanted my lap back, thankyewverramuch.  So I got grumpy, announced I was getting up, and dumped the dotter off to the side.

After which ensued a (loud) discussion about how it behooves people in the family to respond when other people in the family talk to them, yadda, yadda, yadda.  The dotter sitting and looking sullen, which is her modus operandi when she knows she’s in the wrong.  Then a talking-to from daddy.  Then she got angry ("I was getting up, it just was taking me a while!"–coulda fooled me, and besides, this "taking a while" can last up to five minutes and was repeated over and over this weekend) and broke the reins to her new poseable stuffed horsie.  And then it was waterworks time, complete with a "Mommy, can you fix my reins?"

Oy.

So I ended up sitting down with her, asking her how she would feel if she asked me to stop tickling her and I just kept on doing it, not saying anything, even after she asked me multiple times. 

At wits’ end about how to get her to actually think about it, I made her write sentences.  "I will answer when Mommy or Daddy asks me a question."

Oy!  I felt like a Mean Mommy.

So:  Any really good suggestions?

Or, more properly, the eggs and us.  Or we.  Or something.

Today was egg-dying day.  This year, OmegaDad read the instructions before preparing the dye (as opposed to after), so this year’s pink was…pink.  Rather than last year’s watery, pale, washed out color, it was deep and rich and dyed the eggs quickly.  Which, of course, suited OmegaDotter just fine, as she is still deeply into the Pink Phase of life.

Note the predominance of pink. 

This year’s egg-dying kit was a bug-themed thing with lots of unnecessary plastic objects.  OmegaDad had previously purchased a Princess egg-dying kit.  I am utterly, thoroughly, completely, absolutely over the Princess Thing.  Luckily, OmegaDad showed me his score late at night after the dotter was asleep.  I took one look at it over the top of the book I was reading, sighed, and said, succinctly, "No.  No more princesses.  Let’s find something else."  Bless his heart, he found something else last night, just about the only egg-dying kit left in all of suburban Alaska.

The dotter and I set to coloring eggs.  Note my dubious expression.  (Please do not look at the bags under my eyes.)  Note the dotter hamming it up.  (Please do not look at the holes in her OMG favorite T-shirt.)  (Also note the blue dye around the lips.  I have no idea how that happened.)

Some egg-cellent results (with pink):

The bugs were actually quite fun, once I decided to squelch my inner wet-blanket, which was snarling at the obsessive use of petrochemicals and the overpackaging of all U.S. consumer products, and join in the fun of decorating with stickers and plastic and wings and stuff.

The bugs posing:

The bugs at rest around our table centerpiece:

The dotter really wanted to hide the eggs immediately.  OmegaDad and I, thinking of the dawg and the cat that comes upstairs, and considering waking up to half-eaten eggs around the house, or considering waking up to an Awful Smell sometime in the future, nixed this idea.  We will hide them for her tomorrow, she will find them, then she will hide them for us, and we will be sure to find every last one of them.

The Easter Bunny is set to show up this evening.  The dotter has been asking me, multiple times and in multiple ways, if OmegaDad and/or I are/am the Easter Bunny.  "S. thinks that it’s the parents!" she informed me.  When she asked me if I were the Easter Bunny, I was quite happy to say "no".  Not a lie:  OmegaDad is the Easter Bunny.  He’s also Santa Claus.  I am the Tooth Fairy.  Anyway, I gave her one more year of ambiguity.  Maybe next year The Truth Will Out, but I hope that by that time she is in the frame of mind to love the magic even though it’s her (gasp!) parents doing it…

In your next life, when you meet a lady and and move in with her and she tells you, "You should go see a dentist", what will you do?

Will you wait 15 years, until your teeth are a horrible mess?

Or will you say, "Gee!  What a great idea!  I think I’ll make an appointment right now!"

I know which one I think you should do.

I think your wife in your next life will be very happy if you do that.

I know that your current wife, in your current life, is not a happy camper that it took you writhing in pain last year to finally go to the dentist.  At that visit, a tooth was removed.

And a root canal was performed on another tooth.

And more was scheduled.

But then we moved.

And you put it off for a while, until you were writhing in pain once again.  At which point, another tooth was removed.

Luckily, you seem to have finally seen the dental light.  You have been awesome at scheduling things and getting things done.

But, my love, the reason you had three teeth worked on today with the prospect of one of them being a root canal job, and are doped up with steroids and demerol, and wincing at the thought of eating right now is because you waited fifteen years to start the dental work.

In my next life, I will be sure to be a mommy if my husband says, "Yeah, yeah, you’re right…" and never goes to the dentist.  I will make sure I make an appointment right then and there, instead of saying, each year that I go to see the dentist, "Dear, you should go see a dentist."

Your loving wife, OmegaMom.

(For those who say, "Woman!  Why didn’t you make an appointment for him 15 years ago!", I say:  "Pish tosh!  The man was a grown up!  He could have picked up a phone!  I make appointments for myself and for my dotter, who is a child!"

Okay.  I’ve learned my lesson.  I’d much rather have been a mommy-type for my husband all those years ago than see him dealing with the consequences of putting things off.  The poor dear is truly in pain.  But, dayum.  Why does it take the equivalent of a mouth meltdown to finally get the wheels set in motion?!?!)

Most folks know that saying:  "A sound mind in a healthy body".

I’ve been thinking about this lately while ferrying OmegaDotter around to her various activities.

We placed the dotter, who wanted to "dance like a princess", into ballet last year in Small Mountain University Town.  She had a blast–the teacher was a wonder with children and kept them interested and involved and having fun.  So this year, we signed her up again, here in Suburban Alaska.  This time, it’s not turning out so well; the class is a lot slower, more focused on official balletic curriculum tenets, and less fun in general.  Around late November, she was whining complaining about it being boring and how she didn’t want to do it any more, but when she realized that ditching the class also meant ditching the recital (girly costumes!  makeup!  twirling around onstage!), after some bargaining attempts to get to do the recital without the class, she bowed to reality and said she’d finish off the year.  I suspect that ballet is going to bite the dust after the recital.

Towards the beginning of last summer, when we knew we were moving, a buddy of the dotter’s had a "take your friend to your gymnastics class" day.  Striving to ensure that she got as much contact with all her old buddies before she had to move, and influenced by her OT’s ongoing "you should put her in gymnastics, it would help her a great deal", we leaped on the chance.  She had a blast with that, too.  When it turned out that her before-and-after-school care facility was actually a gymnastics facility that offered gymnastics classes, I signed her up.  She loved the gymnastics so much that in November I signed her up for a second class per week.

She’s doing wonderfully.  She can do an awesome cartwheel.  (I never could do a cartwheel.  I was always a wuss about it, and I don’t know why.  Apparently, neither OmegaGranny nor Great Grandma could do cartwheels, either.)  She’s working on handstands.  The bouncing, the jumping, the balancing–all things necessary for her to get that "I want to thump into things!" modality out of her system–she glows when she’s done with class.

Now, I must admit to having had a horrible prejudice against gymnastics in general before this.  All I could think of was the horror stories about girls being browbeaten by ambitious coaches into anorexia.  It seemed a celebration of all that was "tiny" and "delicate", conjoined with a somewhat condescending "omigosh, lookit that girrrrl bounce around!"

But when I haul the dotter off to gymnastics and sit on the bleachers watching the ongoing three-ring circus of varying ages and abilities of boys and girls whirling and twirling and flipping and bouncing and climbing…

It’s a different world than I expected.

I see all these strong girls.  Flexible girls.  Girls with muscle.  (And boys, too, but as a parent of a girl, I’m much more aware of the girls defying age-old stereotypes.)  All ages, all sizes.  None of them look to be anorexic; there are, in fact, some Amazonian teens in the older gymnastic team practices, tall and lithe and muscular, well-proportioned and tall and still flipping over backwards and doing handstands and soaring from one uneven bar to the next.

The administration are always handing out flyers about good nutrition, things that emphasize the need for breakfast, for healthy snacks and proteins before a practice and afterwards.  Not a word about worrying about weight.  It’s refreshing.  And, of course, it’s totally counter to my prejudgment.

Yesterday I was focused on two girls, maybe seven or eight years old.  They were climbing up the ropes in the foam pit.  The gymnasium is two stories tall, and the ropes go the entire two stories.  There is a bell at the top of the rope; anyone who makes it to the top rings the bell, then heads on down.

These two girls–little things–worked their way up the ropes.  All the way.  They rang the bells.  Then they climbed down.

I couldn’t have been prouder of them than if they were my own dotters:  No-one was forcing them up those ropes.  No one was shouting at them to force them on, no one would have dissed them if they hadn’t made it all the way.  They were doing it because they wanted to, and they were determined about it.

In the end, I find these budding gymnasts inspiring and exciting to watch.  And when I get glimpses of the dotter, way off on the other side of the gymnasium, between the junior gymnastics team girls on the beams, or the boys on the rings, succeeding after weeks of work at a particular move on the bars–well, it makes me feel just all warm-n-fuzzy inside.

One of the Great Truths about me is that I never mastered Big Hair.  The only time I came close was when I had my poodle perm (see this post).  My hair has always been, and always will be, fine, straight, thin, silky hair that loses any hint of a curl when the relative humidity goes past 20%.  Since I grew up in Chicago, and lived there during the majority of the ’80s, perms were the only path to curldom.

Then there was the fact that, if one really wanted it, one could get Big Hair by spending inordinate amounts of time in the bathroom, fiddling with curlers, curling irons, hair spray, and teasing.  I had more important things to do, such as read.  Or write.

Anyway, I muddled through the ’80s as best I could.

Another Great Truth:  the dotter, though totally genetically unrelated to me, has that same hair:  fine, straight, thin, silky.

So last night, as you know, I subjected the dotter to soft curlers all over her head.

Of course, some came out during the night.

But!  The rest stayed in, and when they were unrolled, her hair was quite bouncy and curly.

I combed.  I sprayed.  I curling-ironed her bangs.  I didn’t do any hair-teasing because I am morally against such things.  So here’s our ’80s cowgirl, looking sassy (i.e., making a face):

It actually was big!  Here’s a close-up (the color is off and I couldn’t figure out how to correct it):

In which you can immediately tell that the bang curls didn’t do what they’re supposed to, and you can see some straight hairs that escaped the entire curler fiasco.

But the sad thing is that the dotter’s hair, like mine, immediately began to go flat.  Obviously, even though I applied what I thought was a dreadful amount of hair spray, lifting locks and spraying under them, holding them up so they’d dry a bit fluffy, it was all for naught.  By the time I haul her off to gymnastics this afternoon, the curls will be a sad, sorry shadow of themselves.  All that will be left is sticky residue.

Sigh.

The good news is that she will not be subjected to an entire decade of trying to do this every morning.

There were no shoulder pads (how could I forget shoulder pads?!  But I did!).  There were, however, jean legs tucked into the boots, and a hair pick in the back pocket.

It’s spring break week.  The dotter is at "camp" at her after-school care place, and they’re doing "Blast From The Past" as the theme this week.  Monday was the ’40s, Tuesday the ’50s, etc.  The kids are dressing up each day.  The dotter won for best dress-up on Wednesday–she had a mini skirt, a top with paisleys and funky colors, and a headband over carefully parted straight hair.

Tomorrow is the final day.  The ’80s.  Big Hair is my immediate response.  So we’ve purchased soft rollers and I plan to torture have tortured the child with them tonight, covered the result with a kerchief, sent her to bed, and plan to fill her hair with hair spray tomorrow.

From the back:

Looking winsome from the front:

Laughing:

Notice all the pink.  I spared you the picture of the dotter in her kerchief in her pink room.

I don’t really know how to do Big Hair, but we have a curling iron for Big Bangs and lots of hair spray.  I will display results tomorrow.

In the meantime…there’s talk of a Netherlands documentary about Chinese adoption, specifically that there are lots of folks these days who are having their kids kidnapped by government officials and dumped at orphanages.  There are those who are appalled and those who think it’s old news.  In the meantime, I sit here and realize that, while it was easier to think of someone reclaiming OmegaDotter when she was just a babe, she is firmly entrenched in my heart now and the thought of having someone tell me our adoption was null and void at this point would–yes–make me spend a lifetime and a fortune in court, fighting tooth and nail to keep her with us.  That aside, I will write up some thoughts on the issue tomorrow.

Saturday I got out of bed absolutely grumpy.  Grumpy enough to be shouting and slamming doors.  Why?  Because our lovely dotter had decided to spend an hour pestering me and OmegaDad.

I’m not proud, but, hey, there it is:  I am a Bad Mommy sometimes.

It didn’t last long.  Especially because of this:

And then, a few minutes later, there was this:

Which, of course, made me laugh, and so I was, indeed, hapee.

This afternoon, as we were driving off to get a movie for "family movie night", the dotter had her car window cranked all the way down, and was shouting with glee out the window.  The one that sticks in my head:

"Hellooooooooo!  Hello all you nice people out there!  I don’t know your names, but I looooooooove you!"

OmegaMom is a happy, happy camper right now.

I sit here typing this at my new desk.  In my newly painted office, painted a bright and cheery duck yellow color with white trim.  Filled with nice, new, white office furniture from The P0ttery B@rn.  With lots of study, well built filing cabinets.

All of which made me happy enough, because now it actually looks like an office, and I feel like it’s my space now, and I can actually try to organize things and keep things clear and clean in at least one room of the house.

But the creme de la creme…the thing that is making me dance on air tonight…

I don’t know if I mentioned this in the blog at any point; I know I’ve mentioned it in a comment or two on other people’s blogs:

We had lost all of OmegaDotter’s adoption paperwork except for the original official red folder containing the adoption certificate.

Birth certificate?  Vanished.  Abandonment decree?  Vanished.  Registration of adoption?  Vanished.  Chinese passport?  Vanished.  Long since.  We had become resigned to the idea of having to spend many dollars and much time trying to recreate these items.  I was too embarrassed to talk about it on the blog.  What kind of devoted mom of a Chinese adoptee was I, anyways?!

But tonight, filled with the Urge To Organize brought on by the new (sturdy!  attractive!) office furniture, I delved into the ratty old chintzy falling-to-pieces filing cabinets and started going through files, tossing out ancient insurance certificates and owner’s manuals for things we haven’t had in our possession for years.  The bottom drawer of the first filing cabinet had been jammed shut for quite a while by the aforementioned owner’s manuals, but some determined digging and reaching and yanking out jammed pieces of slick paper finally undammed the jam.

And there, in the midst of some totally unrelated stuff…

I found the buried treasure, the Ark of the Lost Covenant, Shangri-La itself:

Birth certificate, abandonment decree, registration of adoption, and Chinese passport.

Woot!

Next weekend we put up curtains and put in bookshelves, and I will post pics.

I love cauliflower.  Tender, delicate, tightly woven off-white buds covered with butter or shredded cheddar cheese…yum.  However, we don’t eat it very often.  Mostly, we just don’t think of it.

OmegaDad got a hankering for tempura recently.  So he purchased mushrooms and broccoli and zucchini and cauliflower, hauled out the boneless skinless chicken breasts, did some research on Teh Google, and prepared a luscious tempura meal last night.  The batter, alas, was somewhat starchy, so only the zucchini (being full of H2O) came out with the perfect tempura crust; everything else was slightly chewy rather than crispy.  But add some sweet-and-hot sauce, some teriyaki or char sui sauce, and we were dipping fiends.

Then tonight we had steak and noodles and plain ol’ cauliflower with butter.

An hour later I came to the realization of just why we don’t eat cauliflower very often.

Actually, if I had been thinking, that realization would have struck me last night, when I was wandering around the house wondering just what was causing my unusual bloatiness, with disturbing thoughts of how the maternal side of the family has a tendency towards uterine cancer (one symptom of which is sudden onset of bloatiness).  Yes, I do have a slight leaning towards mental hypochondria–why do you ask??

But tonight, when my abdomen distended outward like a taut balloon within an hour after dinner, my brain finally acknowledged the two-by-four that was thwacking against my head.  I knew the eternal truth:  I love cauliflower, but cauliflower does not love me in return.

Believe me when I say "distended outward like a taut balloon", I am not exaggerating.  OmegaDotter, when presented with the evidence (see photo), gasped and said, "Omigod!  Mom!  You look like you’re pregnant!"  Then she poked at my tummy and watched with interest as her fingertip bounced off.  OmegaDad made a smart-alecky remark about how he wanted to know who the parents were if I were pregnant.  I merely marveled at how quickly those lovely, tender florets of the veggie had transformed themselves into a veritable explosion of gas in my gut.

As the dotter and I did our normal bedtime routine, first she asked her "one question" (why did the cauliflower make me look like I was pregnant? entailing a quick discussion of food, digestion and gas), and then she kept bouncing up from her pillow to look at me and ask me if I was going to fart or burp now.  When I did, she’d bounce up again to ask if all the gas was gone yet.

She thought it was hilariously funny.  It took her a while to go to sleep.  She kept snickering.

As I sit here hours later, still producing copious amounts of gas, I don’t think it’s funny at all.

Which is, of course, why I decided to share my intestinal distress with the myriad of intimate strangers who will arrive here guided by Teh Google when they search on "cauliflower gas" or "cauliflower farts" or "cauliflower burps" or some such combination.

I’m sure they (and you) will be happy to know that someone has done a scholarly mathematics paper all about the fractal factor of cauliflower and broccoli.  What the hell is a "fractal factor"?  I’m not quite sure (I think it has to do with how many times the patterns repeat themselves, and I leave my readers to dig through the various references to figure it out), but this delightful piece of information is a mighty testament to the wonders of the intertubes and the weirdness that can be scholarly mathematics…

Wouldn’t that be a great title for a blog?

My brother and I spent the time at mom’s ferrying her around to appointments, grocery stores, phoning banks and brokers to learn the procedures for establishing death, purchasing various technical toys and gadgets, and taking her out into the woods to look at water flowing over dams.

At one lake, there was a sheet of ice covering one end, with a hole in the middle of the icy expanse.  The ducks and geese who like to hang out there, eager for handouts from visitors, congregated in the hole and made occasional forays outward when they saw suckers visitors who might throw food stood by the shore.  At which point, the ducks would start waddling towards the suckers visitors in a single file line across the ice.

One boy out on the frozen-in dock kept yelling out with wild enjoyment, "Mom!  Mom!  Look!  It’s a mob of angry ducks!"

They weren’t actually angry, nor were they a mob, but they made for great pictures.  Unfortunately, all the pictures I took were with mom’s camera, and are now happily ensconced on mom’s (new!) external hard drive, rather than here, so I can’t provide illustrations.

So.  I am home.

I have a cold, which my body determinedly held off while we were at mom’s house.  I have one of those horrid itchy noses that keeps saying "I’m gonna sneeze!  I’m gonna sneeze!" and then, moments later, "Gotcha!  Hah!  Pwned!", leaving me with sneezus interruptus.  The scratchy throat and cough are par for the course, but the I-really-wanna-sneeze feeling is the worst.

When I finally pulled up to the house last night, after an interminable day of traveling, the dotter came barreling out into the garage, clad only in her gymnastics leotard, dancing around, jumping up and down and screaming, "Mommy!  Mommy!"  When I walked into the garage, she flung herself at me, jumped into my arms, wrapped her legs and arms around me, and said, "I missed you.  A lot!"  Wow.  A person could get used to a greeting like that.

Apparently, while I was gone, she informed OmegaDad that while he was allowed to travel, she didn’t like it, but that Mommy Was Not Allowed To Travel.  At all.