OmegaMom

So yesterday was the first time I was able to see the dotter at one of her gymnastics meets.  Her first real meet was two days after I headed off to Arizona to help take care of mom, and she had a second one while I was still there.  Being a doting mom, I just have to show off her beam routine:

Her handstand was a thing of beauty.  Everyone around us commented on how long she held it and how straight it was.  Alas, her landing wasn’t that good, which ended up moving her from a 9.0+ to an 8.9, and a red ribbon on the beam as opposed to a blue.  Wah!  And, yes, her split jump isn’t very good, but everything else she does on the beam is generally great.

Of course, since she had filled my camera card up with videos of Newman the cat encountering Wooly the cat, when I went to record other routines, the video card was filled up.  After gnashing my teeth at the small capacity of my memory card, I investigated, and promptly deleted two videos of yowling cats rolling around on my office floor, and was able to record her bar routine, too:

So she may be going up to Level 4 this summer, which is honest-for-goodness’-sake team level.  IF she stays focused and works hard, and doesn’t goof off with her buddy K. all the time, which she tends to do.  Doesn’t matter to me, but she and K. have been bitching and moaning about not moving up to Level 4 and how they want to and, gee, they can do their back handsprings and a Level 4 dismount, and blah, blah, blah.

In the meantime, the planet is blasting onward towards the spring equinox.  Tonight, the sun will set at 8:00.  This throws our entire dinner-time zeitgeist off—OmegaDad spends the winter with dinner being cooked after the sun sets (most often long after the sun sets), and the rapid shifting of the seasonal light takes a while to mesh with his cooking brain. 

All the light does not mean warm weather, alas.  In fact, we had well above average temps for two months—mostly while I was in Arizona—and as we move towards official Spring, the temperature has plunged below normal for the past two weeks.  This leaves me generally grumpy.  I managed to rant and rave and cry at OmegaDad this week about how I HATE Alaska and I just WANT TO GO HOOOOOME!  Um.  What can I say?  Seeing all the pictures around the intertubes of people’s swiftly growing snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils and what-not, and reading about bike rides and lovely weather…well, it just makes me mighty damned jealous.

::OmegaMom walks into the blog space, blows some dust off the furnishings, looks around…::

Hey there.  It’s been long enough for a post from me that BlogHer advertising sent me a “tsk, tsk” email and turned off the ads.  Hah!

Oh, well; I’ve been busy and tired and uptight enough that blogging (and Twitter) has taken second (third?  Last?) place in the scheme of things.

The good news is that my mom is so, so, so much better.  We moved her into assisted living yesterday; she has all the furniture she needs and today’s chores include moving some plants and paintings and photos so that her space is even more her space.

Every day in the past two weeks has been jam-packed with things related to getting her better, getting the move coordinated, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, vacuuming, cleaning.  Twenty-five years at one location does tend to make one accumulate stuff…and much of it, as mom says, “Nothing precious”.  My main learning point–aside from the need for retirement funds, and how expensive assisted living is–is that the investment in a weekly cleaning person is a Must for those who do not have the cleaning gene.  All the dust and the stress has combined to give me a lovely cold with a dollop of super-duper sinus infection on top.  Hah!

Arizona has been irritatingly sunny and beautiful, all the while I have been unable to rest and enjoy it.  Grrr.

My brother arrives today–yay!  Someone else to take the burden!  And I head home on Sunday, to a dotter who finally last night broke down during our nightly phone conversation to say, “I want you to COME HOME!!!”, with her voice cracking into tears on the last two words.  Oh, yes, OmegaDad wants me home, too, but he hasn’t cried–it’s been me bursting into spontaneous tearfests on his long-distance shoulder every few days.  He’s a good dude, y’know?  I’ve done something right to have the Kozmik All let me find him all those years ago.

My main focus with mom’s move–aside from, well, the move–has been to create a colorful and welcoming space for her in her new place.  One of the things I did was taken directly from a blog that my commenter and long-time virtual friend Kaz pointed me to named Attic24.  The lady who writes Attic24 is a lover of all things bright and colorful, and her January 21 post made me re-assess my inward sneer at tulips.

I have always thought that tulips are just too, too niffy-naffy and snooty for words.  Stiff, formal, upright–ptooey.  But in the midst of her posts filled with bright mixes of color, A24 showed a vase jam-packed with multi-colored tulips.  It was bright, springy, the furthest thing from “formal” you could imagine.  So I started searching the local florist shops for tulips.

Of course, none of the local florist shops had gotten the word:  tulips in arrangements meant all one color, all stiff, semi- to very formal, and very little variety in color.  Red was big.  So was white.  And pink.  Never in the same store, though!  Bah.  But Monday I was at the local grocery store, struck by the “manager’s specials” of leftover Valentine’s Day bouquets and tchatchkes, and was lured into their flower cooler.  There, in the corner, was a bucket of tulips, gathered into groups of five stems, each group one color.  But they had orange.  They had red.  They had purple.  Pink.  White.  Yellow.  A riot of colors.  So I cornered the young lady who was putting “for sale!” signs on the manager’s specials, and described what I wanted.

She came through!  One of the nicest things about the move was walking mom into her new place and having her delighted with the (beginnings of) big splashes of color…one of which was a small vase jam-packed with tulips of all different colors, sitting on her dining table.

It’s the small things that make me happy sometimes.  That vase of colorful tulips was a symbol to me, a symbol that mom’s life is not going to shrivel up into a blank nursing home stare, that she’s going to have spring and life and color for time to come.

Science fairs will be in late March, so OmegaDad decided to get started with some experiments with the dotter.  Unfortunately, the experiments are daddy’s ideas, but, hey, get the kid used to doing it, right?

Firstly, she was very possessive about “MY lab!”  In other words, I had to explain to her that real scientists these days were very open about their research (see PLOS) and, if they’re excited about their experiments, they’re very happy to have people in, show them around, tell them what the experiment is about, etc.

Anyway.  Since OmegaDad has been Doing Bread this past year (and very nicely, too!), and trying out sourdough starters with wild yeast, he thought it might be fun to see if you could get a sourdough starter from varying fruits.  He selected grapes and blueberries because both fruits have a blush on them; apples, because they don’t have a blush; and then we had a control of just plain ol’ flour and water.  Herewith the ingredients:

Then there’s the scientist herself:

Note that she is wearing “goggles”.  She was very concerned that everyone in her lab wear goggles, because, as she explained, “You never know when you’re going to get an explosion!”  Then she demonstrated how things would blow up:

Please note the “lab coat”.  Folks!  Let me tell you about this amazing new costume for your kids!  It’s a chef’s coat!  It’s a lab coat!  It’s two—two!—two coats in one!  OmegaDotter received a chef outfit for herself plus a matching chef outfit for her Karito Kids Ling doll, and has since taken to wearing the pink striped black pants as pajama pants or loungewear ever since, and when time came to do the experiment set-up, she decided it would make a fine lab coat.

What followed:  Placing one cup of blueberries into a Mason jar:

Mushing grapes before putting them into a Mason jar (an action shot!):

Explaining what comes next, and how you need to be careful (note the goggles again!):

Adding flour (we got a lot of flour all over everything, including the floor.  There were also a grape or blueberry or two on the floor, sigh.  Not that I really want you to look at our floor; please edit those shots mentally.):

Adding water:

Stirring (please note that we used different spoons for each jar, so that we had no intermixing):

She has the Evil Scientist pose down perfectly—“I have created LIFE!!!  Bwahahaha!”

And then, the finale, a “Ta-da!” pose:

And then she signed off with, “Thanks for watching Weird Science!”

We are home in Alaska.  It has been an interesting few weeks, with its major ups and downs, which I may or may not discuss later.

When we got on our flight home, OmegaDotter was more than ready to be home.  I was, frankly, more than ready for OmegaDad to do some high-quality one-on-one with the dotter; she is high-maintenance at times, very touchy-feely, needing attention, bouncing, chattering, “on” all the time.  I was not looking forward to six hours of her trapped in an airplane.

We didn’t get a window seat.  We were both very sad about this.  We settled into our seats, and I was hoping (hope-hope-hoping) that the last seat wouldn’t be filled, though we had been informed that it was a full flight, so that seemed unlikely.  And then he showed up, with his tattooed arms, his leather jacket, his bald head, and jocular “I don’t follow directions very well!” comment about carry-on luggage stowage.

We took off, OmegaDotter chattering all the way.

He took out a notebook and began sketching.

OmegaDotter, on the other side of me, peered at his sketchbook and whispered, “What’s he drawing?”

I said, “I don’t know.  I think he’s trying to figure it out.”

She whispered excitedly (and loudly), “I think it’s a flower!  See how it swirls and goes around?”  I looked again, and said to her, “Hm.  It’s beginning to look like a rose…”

She got out her travel art box, and her latest version of Pippi Longstocking on her horse, then leaned in and whispered very quietly to me, “Can I show him my picture?  What is he drawing?”

“Maybe you should ask him?”

She squirmed, shyly.  I chivvied her on (I am trying to get her to ask her own questions, request her own interactions).  Finally, she leaned over me and asked, “Do you want to see my drawing?” 

He said he’d love to.  She handed it over, saying shyly, “It’s—“ and he finished, “Pippi Longstocking!  She’s the one with the pigtails that stick out, and the monkey, right?  That’s very good.  You’ve got a lot of detail going on there!”  She pointed to the sign and said, “It’s Villa Villa Coola.”  They talked Pippi for a short while, then he handed it back.  She asked what he was drawing, and he told her about using light blue as a base for sketching, then coloring over it, any mistakes in the light blue being hidden by the darker colors.  He said that he had started out drawing something else, but he heard her say it was a flower, and he went from there.

Both went back to their artwork.  OmegaDotter added a second story.  He added some wording and shaded in the rose.  She handed him her picture again.  He looked at it, and asked what was around the windows.  She replied, “Wood”.  He asked her what color the wood was.  She quickly began coloring in the window frames, then handed it back to him.  He asked what color the gate was.  She said light blue.  He handed back the picture and she quickly filled in the coloring…this back and forth went on for a few more iterations, with him asking what this area was, and what color should it be, and her making decisions and completing more.  He lent her some of his coloring pencils when she was short a color; he helped her figure out how to make new colors when she didn’t have a particular color.

When she was done, he offered a trade:  His picture for hers.  He wanted hers, he said, so that when she was famous, he could say he knew her when…

I want an art teacher like that for her.  Someone who—rather than prescribing or describing—asks questions and guides her.  She was in heaven.  He was patient and inspiring.

So, to Shane Ruggle, aka “Rug”, the Phoenix tattoo artist:  Thank you.  Thank you, thank you.  Love is a gift, yes, and so is the sharing of your knowledge of art.

I bought a Very Special Gift for OmegaDotter this Christmas.  It was very small.  So I decided to do the box-within-a-box-within-a-box approach; I wrapped the VSG, put a bow on it, and a note saying it was the last box, dumped it all into another box, gift-wrapped that one with bow and note, etc.  The end result was nice and big.

I was actually rather nervous about doing this:  either she would think it was funny, or she would get horribly frustrated, and I had no idea which way she would lean.

Anyway.  Since she opened it first, I wasn’t ready with the camera, so the settings were wrong for the first box:

Second box—she was kind of perplexed:

Third box—she was getting the hang of it, and was amused.  I have a picture of her laughing, with the box already unwrapped, so we’ll use this one:

Fourth box—she’s giggling:

The VSG revealed—I think she likes it:  she screamed!

What was it?  An iPod nano, filled to the brim with songs I knew she liked.  She has since wandered the house with it connected by umbilical cord, belting out various songs—in particular, Fireflies by Owl City, which has been an earworm for both of us, as well as various Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus songs. 

Now, onto the consumer review:  OMG.  Apple has the “user-friendly”, ergonomic approach down to an art.  Or a science.  When I was setting it up for her, I pulled it out of its little box, plugged it into the computer, and *boom*, it hooked to my iTunes and started walking me through it.  Once it was loaded with music, *boom*, I was using it.  I am truly, truly impressed with the ease-of-use of this gadget—the dotter had figured out all the buttons (in particular, how to replay Fireflies over and over and over again) within a short time.  Now I want one…or maybe an iPhone, which does all the same stuff, plus.

Then:

Now:

It doesn’t seem possible that seven years have passed.  Seven years ago, right now, we were on our way to Nanning after a lovely dim sum breakfast in the Guangzhou airport.  We actually signed the papers around 5 p.m. on December 8 in China, which would be around 7 a.m. here, and we met her around 6 p.m., which would be 8 a.m. here.

She’s pretty amazing.  We’re pretty damned lucky.

I’ve got a little list of music to buy the dotter for Christmas, to go with her Big Present from me.  We’ve got some Don Henley, Elton John, Trisha Yearwood, Tom Petty, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, Feist’s “1-2-3-4″, Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, Taylor Swift, Kidz Bop, a Beyonce, some Chris Rock, a Sean Kingston, some High School Musical and Shrek…and to fill in the Chinese pop section, we have some Wilber Pan, Angela Zhang, S.H.E., and Jolin Tsai.

But I need some suggestions for classic or older rock, more C-pop, and new American stuff.  So, parents of 8-9-10 year olds:  What are your kids listening to?

Peach said, in response to my Dear Diary post:

I have to admit that when I read your response to her questions (maybe not given to her, but the ones you expressed ~ about it being unlikely that she could find her first parents, or her poster could get her parents in trouble?), it bothered me.
As adoptees we grow up completely believing what our adoptive parents tell us about the circumstances around our adoption. But when we become adults and find out more information (more than our parents said was available) it brings with it emotions that “just is” ~ nothing our adoptive parents could say or do will take them away or keep us from having to walk through the grief, no matter how hard they try. And it even more invalidation when we sense our adoptive parents are trying so hard to do this for us ~ to take away our pain, through their answers, honest or not.

It’s a hard balance.  I admit that I am a glass-half-empty person a lot of the time–one way of looking at it, though I prefer to think of it as “pragmatic” or “realistic”.  I do think it unlikely that, given what information we have, we could find anything, due to the fact that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.

Or at least, the information we were given says that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.  Which is one of the problems:  that information could be made up of whole cloth.  And we don’t know.

How do you carefully get this across to an almost-eight-year-old?  We don’t know.  Anything.  For sure.  How do you tell a child who hasn’t experienced a really big city just how many people there are there?  How do you explain that what information we have is a grain of sand on a big beach?  How do you say, “Even what we know, we don’t know that it is true”?

I have been very careful, all along, to say, “We think” or “we were told” or “the orphanage says” about these things.  But what one person says, another person may not hear, or may hear through a filter.  I say, “We think it must have been very hard for your birthmother to leave you.”  OmegaDotter may hear, “Your birthmother was devastated.”  I say, “The orphanage says you were left at the gates of XYZ.”  She may hear, “That is where you were left.”  How do you tell a child that adults lie about things like this?  She’s still at a stage where hearing me say “Bullshit!” accidentally when we’re playing B.S. (a card game–quite fun, taught to us by Aunt L. and cousins K. and I.) makes her gasp and say, “Oh!  You said the b…sh… word!  That means cow poop, but you’re not supposed to say it!”

Yes, I want to protect her.  Yes, I know it doesn’t help, in the end.  But the things that are wrapped around these questions are…well, more mature issues, questions of honesty and decency in adults, questions of the general ethics of international adoptions, questions of the problems of involving large amounts of money in the transferrence of responsibility for a small human being, questions of “human trafficking”.  I want her to know about these things, but in an age-appropriate manner.  So I start small.  I use weasel words, semantics…”we think”, “we were told”, “the orphanage says”…all of which are true, and all of which mean “this is information but it’s not the biblical truth”.  I have, in talking about her birthmother, told the dotter about the one child laws, and how they have changed; I have also mentioned that it’s possible her mother was young and unable to raise a child.  As she gets older, the more nuanced versions come out more.

Youngsters are concrete thinkers.  But as the dotter is getting older, she is becoming more aware that black-white thinking doesn’t always fit the world around her.  International adoption–hell, private domestic adoption, even adoption through the state–all of these have shades of grey on all sides.  So as she becomes more able to shade her own thinking about the world, so can we start offering more shades to her own story.

There are people who have searched for Chinese birthparents, with some successes.  Brian Stuy, of Research-China, has interviewed some birthmothers, and in Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China, Kay Ann Johnson also found and interviewed a number of Chinese birthmothers.  So birth families can be found, and some people have located their own children’s birth families.  Then I have heard tales of birth parents who have anonymously contacted people trying to locate them, pleading with them to not continue, because they are afraid of the repercussions.

There have been tens of thousands of children adopted from China in the past 15 years, and the number of located birthparents is still very small.

So:  How to say, “we will help you look” without it turning–in a child’s magical way of thinking–into “we will find your birthmother NOW”?  How to instill a realistic view of the probabilities?  How to find that balance?

The subject of international birth parent searching has also recently been discussed on This Woman’s Work and today on American Family.  Let me know what y’all think, too…

The real estate agent who helped us find our house (and is a dear, close, personal friend of our ex-governor’s) is a relentless saleswoman.  We get letters in the mail with helpful tips and tricks!  We get–at irregular intervals–a coupon to a local ice cream store or dollars off on purchases at a locally owned business.  And, this Thanksgiving, we were given a pie, apple or pumpkin.

So, we now have a store-bought pumpkin pie for free, sitting in our fridge.

We have a turkey thawing out, alternately in the sink and in the fridge.

We have lemons and rosemary and garlic to stuff the turkey with.

We have taters, parsley, and cheese for OmegaDad’s trademarked Green Smashed Potatoes.  (Om nom nom!)

Somewheres in there we have a vegetable.

All that’s left is for us to put together the feast.  I will provide chopping and dicing; OmegaDad is le chef and I will do only his bidding in the kitchen.

It is time to list the things in life that make us thankful.  Really, it would be a good idea to do this on a regular basis; maybe the world would be a better place for it.  So long as it’s quiet and private and not trumpeted to the world.  My tidbits of thankfulness wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the world; they’re all small and personal and, face it, pretty damned selfish.  What I am thankful for, someone else may find picayune, and vice versa.

Number one on my list is OmegaDad.  This guy is an endless font of incredible spoonerisms and malaprops that leave me laughing at the same time as I am left in gaping awe at his inventiveness.  I have asked how he does it, and he shrugs:  it just sort of “comes out–I don’t do it on purpose…”  We have been together for almost 16 years, and I still find things to talk with him about, still find him gentle and sweet and thoughtful and intelligent.  And, dayum, he cooks up a storm, dontcha know!  This year’s focus has been bread, and we have been the recipients of yummy flatbreads, lavosh, pizza dough, challah, plain white bread, breadsticks, French bread, tortillas, and homemade hamburger buns.  Wow.

Next is OmegaDotter.  She’s just amazing.  OmegaDad recently challenged her to finally pin down her back flip, offering a differing amount of money depending on how long it takes her to get it solid.  In the course of a week, she has managed to reach the point of always flipping over and 75% of the time ending up on her feet again.  (The practice is on our bed.)  She is reading by herself, and we alternate nights when I read to her with nights when she reads to me.  Every once in a while she will bestow a piece of artwork on us that makes my jaw drop.  And she’s beginning to bring out more and more unasked-for flashes of empathy and moral grounding.  Yee-haw!

Then there’s GrannyJ.  She’s 82 and still going strong, walking her small town, taking photographs, blogging and nourishing a local blogging community, and challenging me with new and interesting science fiction authors all the time.

We have our health.  We have our house.  We have friends and family.  We have a standard of living that would make 70% of the world gasp in awe.

We had Kai for eleven years–that’s good.  We’ve discovered that chickens, though they may be pretty damned dumb, still have a lot of personality.  Our garden overflowed with vegetables, even though we were moosed at times.  We have long, lovely hours of sunshine in the summer to balance out the cold dark months of winter.

There’s a lot to be thankful for.

A very happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. friends and readers, and generally thankful warm fuzzies to my non-U.S. followers!

One of the joys of Teh Intarwebz is that you can hover on the cusp of current culture, dip in and out like a hummingbird, and still live your own old boring everyday life.

For example:  I have taken to watching shows on Hulu.com.  Alas, I am also aware that Hulu.com is talking about becoming a subscription-only (that means $$) service come sometime in 2010; having found Hulu, I am about to lose Hulu.  Anyway, enough grief; I have found that I can watch Glee and Stargate: Universe on Hulu if I miss those shows the night before, and am happy.

In addition, when brouhahas such as Kanye West’s drunken outburst disrespecting Nice Girl Taylor Swift at the MTV Music Video awards occur, I can scour the web the day after to (a) see what actually happened, and (b) get down with all the nominated music videos.

Which leads me to my headline.  Actually, “led me to my headline”–I watched the nominated videos and found…

There’s a new Star (use your joisey accent on that:  “Stah!”) in the pop music firmament name of Lady Ga-Ga.  Lady Ga-Ga sings catchy pop songs that drip sexual innuendo in music videos that are pop art celebrations of out-and-out (::gasp!:: ::OMG!:: ::catch me while I blush and faint::) lewd sexuality.  She wears nude body suits.  She feels herself up.  She feels up guys.  They feel her up.  She wears outre makeup.  She wears outre clothes.  It is a wild Warholian act; it’s also a wild dionysian act.

And damn.  I love her.

I am aware that some of my readers absolutely positively thoroughly despise her.  (I’m talking to you, PAgent!)  I am aware that my cachet as an intellectual pseudo-counter-cultural ex-almost-hippie is tarnished beyond repair by saying it, but there it is.

I think she’s hilarious.  I love her over-the-top persona, her over-the-top hair, her over-the-top makeup, and her over-the-top music videos.  (I will admit, however, that these are music videos I do not want the dotter seeing.  When the dotter arrived home one day humming the tune to “Poker Face” and saying she had to show me a video, I practically plotzed.  Who the #@!& was showing this smutty stuff to my seven-year-old daughter?!?!  And then she started singing the words, and I realized that she was smitten by a parody video.  Whew.  Crisis averted!)

Then I discovered some interviews of her.  And I loved those–she’s snarky and snotty and playing the interviewers and leaps upon sexism.  And I discovered plenty of YouTubery where she’s doing her hit songs in live venues, small clubs or radio stations, one-on-one, just her and her piano.  I loved those, too–she sings like a torch singer, then switches off into a staccato singing silliness, then back to the torch singer.

Lady Ga-Ga is a mix of early Madonna, Elton John at his most flamboyant, and…and…oh, damn, give me a name of a torch singer from the forties, please.  She is a character and a half, and I go ga-ga over her.

Here’s the parody:

Here’s the original–no embedding, bah.

And here’s a live version:

Mid-day yesterday, my back started hurting right beneath my bottom ribs.  I have no idea what I did to it, though given the location worry about kidneys and stuff like that.  It kept on hurting throughout the day.  When the dotter came home from school, I grumped about it…the next thing I know, she brings me an ice pack from the freezer and asks where to put it.

Later that night, in bed, I was still hurting.  Half asleep, half awake, middle of the night, I sort of mumble an “ow!” or two.  The dotter has been sleeping in our bed while OmegaDad is out of town, in a nest of sleeping bag, her favorite “Chix rule!” blankie, a down comforter, her roll-up pink fake-fur kitty cat pillow, and a stuffed duck.  So there I am, dazed and asleep and hurting, and suddenly a hand reaches out, pats me three times, strokes me gently, and she whispers, “There, there.  It’s okay.”  And I go back to sleep.

Aw, man.  She’s a Good Kid, dammit.

November keeps going, and I keep posting.  But by this point in time, it starts dragging.  I open up the blogging software and stare at a blank page, thinking, “There must be something interesting to blog about!”

Oh, there is.

I have my little list of questions to answer, from earlier in the month.  There’s still the “did you ever think of a sibling for OmegaDotter?” and the “There are people who deliberately cut off the culture of heritage?!?!” questions.

There’s also the comments on my “Dear Diary” post, which I do mean to respond to.

I also have a “great ladies of the family” series of posts in mind, talking about my great-aunties and how really nifty they were.

Plus a few more book reviews.

But right now, here’s the reality:

OmegaDad is out of town, at Chena Hot Springs (very cool place, by the way!), doing a work retreat/training/study combo.  I am left at home, holding down the fort.  This makes me realize just how very nice it is to have both of us here, together, functioning as a family, each of us (including the dotter) doing different things to keep the family rolling right along.  Not necessarily a lot, mind you, but each of us contributing enough to keep the rest from feeling like there’s just too much to do and not enough time to do it.

For instance, when OmegaDad is at home, I can take an hour earlier in the evening to putter about, think about things, and have something to start with when I face that blank page.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the parenting schtick, which takes time away from the blogging schtick.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the pet schtick.  Right now, that means checking on the chickens to be sure none of the other girls are coming down with The Chicken Plague.

With OmegaDad away, if I have a sick headache (like I did this afternoon), there are only two choices:  suck it up and deal with things while I’m feeling like puking and crying, or else (which I did) retreating to the bedroom, napping, and (a) letting the dotter play ToonTown and (b) letting the dotter watch TV until I wake up feeling better.  The dotter was a dream, making sure that she only did ToonTown for an hour (the Rule) and making sure that, when she turned on the TV, she turned it down and closed our bedroom door so it didn’t bother me.

It all boils down to one word:  Wah.  Or a command:  Pity me!  Har.  As if.  The world is full of single moms, and I salute them, because I don’t think I could do it all on my own, all the time.

Okay, not the dark.  But definitely the cold.

The local school district had H1N1 vaccinations for registered students.  Having read tales of people waiting in lines for three, four hours to get the shot, I determined we should get there early.  We got there, not the first, but close to it, and waited inside the outer doors, but were not allowed inside the inner doors until it was Time.

In the meantime, more people came with their kids.  And more.  The airlock filled up with people.  And then still more came.

And these idiots propped the door open.

It was 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gah.

But once the time came, we got in and out within ten minutes.  The dotter and I went off to lunch together, then off to her gymnastics class, and then home again.

Not a sign of pain in her arm, not a whiff of fever, not a single side effect.  She was happy as a clam all day long.

OmegaDotter has been gifted over the past year or so with many, many notebooks.  Each of them has been christened “my diary”, with great plans to write in it every day, and then, usually the day after, *poof* goes the idea, floating away with the wind.

Recently she dug up one of those notebooks and started actually writing in it.  Every day.  She has been writing at bed time, after I read (or she reads), and after we play the Feeling Game.  She stashes it under her pillow, and earnestly tells me that “it’s secret!”

Yesterday, she decided to make me read her entry.  It was about how Buffy died.

Tonight, she made me read her latest entry.

It started out:

Dear Diary - I relly miss my birth mom.”

She told the story of how “I became separated from her”, how her birth mother had not been able to keep her, because in China you can’t have more than one child.  (Okay, I have told her the whole “one child if a boy, two if the first is a girl”, but I guess it hasn’t sunk in yet.)  And how her birth mother kept her for a week, then left her by the side of the “rode”, and a policeman picked her up and took her to the “orfinije”.

There was a little drawing underneath, a framed picture with “I ♥ my birth mom”, sort of scrapbooking style.

So I climbed into bed with her and snuggled and talked about how it was okay to miss her birth mom, and it was okay to talk about it.  That we would be taking her to China for a visit when she was 10 or 11, and maybe we’d try to take her there every few years.

Our little lawyer immediately tried to negotiate the visit for 8 or 9 instead.  Ahem.

Then she wanted to print out posters with her picture on them, with the Chinese for “lost girl” on it, to take with us.  At which point…sigh.  How to explain to her that something like that could get her birth parents in trouble?  Or that it probably wouldn’t do much good, because, face it, where she was found is a city, a big city with 1.34 million in the urban area?

I suggested we could write a letter to the orphanage.

Then she made me read another entry she had written, about a dream about Kai, where I had taken his bones and made him come alive again.

Deep waters.  Each of these entries has dealt with “loss” in some form or another.  I told her I thought that writing down what she was feeling in her diary was a good idea, and that she could always talk to me or OmegaDad about her feelings.  And I told her that it was her diary, and I wouldn’t read it unless she wanted me to, and that she didn’t have to let me read it if she didn’t want to.

I must point out that there was a great deal of (normal, accustomed) squirming and twisting on her part, and some teasing on my part, wherein I told her that her birthmother would make her do her chores and her homework.  Plus some tickling, and, interspersed in the midst of it all, her trying to put her ankles behind her head.

(Once upon a time, I was able to do that.  I was able to put both ankles behind my head.  I told her ages ago.  She has tried to do it ever since.)

But still.  Deep.

Remember this?

It happened again, this evening.

So, instead of relaxing and watching some nice dark science fiction (aka Stargate Universe), OmegaDad and I have spent the past 40 minutes dealing with OmegaDotter’s social life–or, currently, lack thereof.

Once again, she started making plans with A.–as in, “We’ll pick you up at…”–without sitting down and asking us first.

It’s not a lot to ask, I think.  I’d like to have her request that a friend can spend the night, and actually talk about it with us, before she starts making plans with that friend.

Not to mention, she had already asked a different friend to come over tomorrow afternoon.  (A friend whose phone number we do not have, by the way, so we can’t call his folks and say “It’s off, sorry!”.)

Not to mention, she had already asked me if she could do “Parents’ Night Out” at her gymnastics facility.

The result:  No friends over at all tomorrow.  No overnight.  And “Parents’ Night Out” only if (a) they have space, and (b) she behaves supremely well tomorrow.

I wanted to talk about other things in my post today, but I’m grumpy and tired and about to head off to bed to wallow in being Mean Mommy.

Our neighborhood is filled with dogs.  Big dogs.  Little dogs.  Dogs that go on walks with their humans.

On the whole, I find myself thinking of Kai less and less, though when the dotter brought home “Our Daily News” (in which the kids write a snippet, it gets compiled into a sheet, and the teacher copies the sheet and sends it home with the kids) where she had not one, but two snippets, about how our dog died…well.  That one made it suddenly come back again.

Anyway, I see the happy people walking their dogs and am wracked with jealousy.  “How come he still has his dog, when our dog died?!”

Totally irrational.  But it reminds me of how I felt in the throes of infertility:  “How come she gets to get pregnant, but I can’t?!”

The dotter’s friend A.’s mom is a veterinarian at a no-kill shelter.  The other day, she called to say they had a schnauzer that needed a home, and did we want him?

Right away, it was a gut-level, “NO!”  Too soon.  Still. 

Maybe next year it won’t be too soon.  In the meantime, there I am, jealous of people with their dogs.

When the dotter becomes a famous artist, I am going to go around being such a mom.  “Did you see that new painting she did?!  Isn’t it awesome?!”  “You need to buy that sculpture of hers.  Did you know she was making sculptures out of construction paper when she was a tiny girl?  It’s only $3,000!  C’mon!”

Really.  I am in awe of her talent.  My mom, GrannyJ, is very artsy; she was always doodling and drawing and making hooked rugs and making psychodelic creatures out of papier mache.  I, however, find drawing hard.  Hard, hard, hard.  At my ripe old age of *cough* *ahem*, I have the patience to be very careful and do an okay drawing of a horse if I really, really try.

But the dotter…give her paper and scissors and tape and pencils or markers, and she’s off in a dream world, concentrating so hard that she doesn’t hear you.  (Of course, that’s no great feat:  she doesn’t hear you most of the time, anyway, so you end up getting louder and louder until she finally gets all huffy and says, “I’m going!” or “I hear you!” or some variation thereof.)

A few weeks ago she purchased a SpongeBob SquarePants book at the fall book fair.  She’s been reading bits and pieces of it, under duress–she still hates to read on her own.  (Wah.)  (I keep saying to myself that someday it will kick in; my gorgeous niece also hated to read at this age, but now devours novels.)  But I discovered the other day that she has also been…well:

Mind you, these are copies of pictures in the book, so it’s not original work.  But, dayum.  I can’t do that!  Any kid looking at these pics would (a) know who the characters are, and (b) think that some grown-up had drawn them.  Heck, I thought some grown-up had drawn them…someone who snuck into our house, used our paper and pencils, drew them, then snuck out again after leaving the pictures behind.

Did I mention she’s only 7 years old?  And that this wasn’t tracing, but free-hand?

She is so artistic.  It is so amazing.  And it has been there from the beginning; she has always wanted to draw, color, paint, create things.  I’m leaving her to it, letting her figure her own way around–the school has no art classes (none), due to the reading, writing and arithmetic scheduling resulting from NCLB edicts.  They’re lucky they still have recess and their one rotating “special” class.  I’m hoping that middle school will include art classes, but if it doesn’t, by that time she will have full confidence in her abilities and we will have to find an artist mentor for her.

Because art is like breathing for her.

OmegaDad has become quite proficient with building edifices out of gingerbread over the years.  And his dexterity with piping royal icing has become quite deft.  And, frankly, anyone who can figure out how to color icing dead black and bright orange deserves an A+ for ingenuity.

(Actually, it turns out that the way to do it is to buy the expensive food coloring at the local gourmet kitchen store.  Alas for my shattered illusions!)

He found out how to make ghosts out of fondant on the internet.  He came up with a way to make tombstones out of Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano cookies and white chocolate chips.  He is a dab hand at outlining windows and creating spiderwebs out of icing.

The piece de resistance was the roof, a square slab of homemade sugar candy, colored orange.

Behold!

We have ghosts.  We have tombstones.  We have little pumpkins on the steps.  We have spiderwebs.  We have gables.  Also, notice the way the side looks like a face…

I am most satisfied.  This one came out way cool.

A close-up of the path (made of rock candy) and front door (made of chocolate wafers):

Tombstones and a ghost:

The “ground” is Cocoa Crispies.

The “tree” is some twigs blown down by the incredible winds we have been having yesterday and today, anchored in a squished up caramel.  (We’re supposed to have gusts up to 75 mph tonight; when I took the dotter off to school this afternoon for “Trick or Treat Town” the mountains across the inlet, over by Big City, were obscured by what could have been fog, except that it was coming down through the passes, rather than up from the inlet.  The pseudo-fog was, in fact, dust being scoured from the various glaciers by the winds.  Big City was under an air quality advisory as a result.)

Some fun Halloween links:  The very best Mrs. Incredible costume…jelly jar candle jack-o-lanterns…a real-life Transformer costume (watch the video!)…an incredibly punny Halloween tale from Miss Cellania.

Enjoy your spooky day!

OmegaDotter long ago decided that she wanted to be a Rock Star for Halloween.  This would be, thankfully, a generic Rock Star, not, say, Miley Cyrus or Lady GaGa or anyone in particular.  We tossed around ideas for a while, finally settling on a long-haired wig, an electric guitar, camouflage pants, and a jacket.

All, of course, in the dotter’s favorite color:  PINK.  (Oy.)  (But, hey, someday she will decide that PINK is, like, so totally boooring–like her mother–and come to like some other colors.  There are hints that she will welcome other colors beginning to burgeon, so I have hope.  Maybe by the time she is 13 or 14…)

I had seen pink camo pants on Target.com, so assumed they would be available at our local Chez Target.  We set out for a shopping trip.  Much to my dismay, there were no pink camo pants to be found.  So we scrounged around the store and finally settled upon a pink and black leopard dress, and the Rock Star transitioned from a hard-rocker (though PINK) to a more glam-rocker.

The dotter had been hankering for months after a Barbie play electric guitar; I sniffed.  Barbie.  Humph.  Play guitar.  Humph.  So, to counteract this, I told her she had to buy it herself.  Our shopping trip was her chance; she raided her money jar and quite happily purchased this plastic faux confection.  Much to my amazement when we got home and I had liberated it from its multiple-tie-down jail, it turned out to be fairly cool–once one got past the huge Barbie logo and the PINKness and the whiteness and the daintiness.  It has pre-loaded tunes.  It has the ability to do some rockin’ screamin’ guitar noises.  And it has a “wa-waaaa” lever to emulate the guitarist sliding her hands up and down the guitar strings.  All in all, much more tolerable than I had expected.

Then there was the wig.  We purchased a wig, even though I knew it wasn’t what she wanted.  But it was blonde and it was curly and it had some Disney princess or other on the package, and the dotter oohed and ahhed.  Hey.  It was nine bucks; what harm was there in purchasing the darned thing so that she could try it on and discover it was…well, not the look she wanted.

So the question remained:  what to do about the wig.  Amazon, of course, came through with a long-haired hot-pink wig with bangs…but I forgot to order it.  The dotter kept reminding me at the wrong time–say, as we were getting out of the car at gymnastics, or as she was doing her daily homework, or while we were out shopping.  Since my mind is a sieve these days, these reminders didn’t do much good; she would tell me, I’d nod and say “Yeah, will do!”, and then, a few minutes later–Oh!  Look!  Something shiny!

Somehow I managed to remember it last week; I believe the dotter wised up and reminded me as she was falling asleep, so that I would get online afterwards.  So after getting her down to bed, I wandered down to the office and ordered the thing, paid for it, and then figured all was well.

Until I bothered to actually read the confirmation email, which mentioned, rather nonchalantly, that the delivery date was anywhere between October 27 (good) and November 3 (ooops!).  I read the email on Tuesday, when I was wondering when the darned thing would arrive.

I didn’t tell the dotter about that November 3 date.  Nope, nosirree.  I figured if it didn’t show up, we would figure something out.

But today it arrived, and as soon as the dotter arrived home from school we went into full-fledged dress-up mode.

She tried it on first, of course, in her school clothes, then I had to try it on while she dashed upstairs to get the rest of her outfit:

And then she pulled everything together, like so:

The pink flannel pants are more orange-y, so we’re considering whether leggings might work instead.  Anyway, there you have it, the Saga Of The Rock Star.

We have also carved the pumpkin, OmegaDad and the dotter have been putting together a gingerbread haunted house, we have made fondant ghosts, and it seems that A. is on for Trick-or-Treating again, thus allowing me to avoid the whole K. question.

(Oh, yes.  The dotter did deliver her apology notes this evening at gymnastics, which went over very well.  She got an approving nod from Coach John and a hug from A.  Afterwards, while she was starting her session, I saw them comparing notes and chuckling over the idiosyncratic spelling…”Couch John”, and she was sorry she “heart A.’s arm”…)

The questions that trouble a parent shift and change as the child grows.  At first, the troubles–though they seem huge and insurmountable–are actually pretty straightforward:  kiddo cries, you figure out whether she’s wet or has pooped or needs Orajel or is tired or sick, take care of things, and voila, the problem is solved.  Then you move on to “why is she waking up two or three times in the middle of the night??” and the concurrent “Oh.  My.  God.  I am soooooo sleepy I think I may just collapse right here in the hallway at work and take a little snooze; I’m sure no one will mind.  Right?”  You’ve got the kid biting…or being bit…or both.

Then it’s time to worry about just how soon the kiddo is going to realize just what the words she is singing to the song on the radio mean.  You wince when “Greased Lightning” is playing while she’s watching Grease, and hope that she never turns to you and asks, “What’s a ‘pussy wagon’?” or “That’s weird:  why would anyone say ‘the chicks’ll cream!’?”

Ahem.

(As she gets older, she will start singing more popular songs from the radio, and you’ll realize, after waxing nostalgic for the good ol’ rock songs of your yout’, that you’d have to go back in time about 100 years to find songs that you don’t find yourself casting the hairy eyeball at…It’s amazing the amount of slang devoted to sex and violence, and the amount of popular music of many eras devoted to sex and violence as well.  Just look at all those folk songs.  People are having sex and dying violently all over the place in those.)

Anyway…

To get back to my original subject:  Trouble.

These days, I find myself worrying about friendships.  The dotter has, for some reason, decided she doesn’t want to visit her best bud A.–who OmegaDad and I find absolutely charming.  She’ll hang on the phone with him for hours, playing (ugh) ToonTown, but ever since she returned from an overnight and immediately developed the Not-Flu, she has been avoiding his house.  (There is also the question of dogs.  A.’s mom is a vet for a no-kill shelter.  Their house is filled with dogs and cats.  I have wondered if she’s not subconsciously upset by all the dogs reminding her of Kai.  Then I figure I’m just overanalyzing things, and it’s just a phase.)

A. was supposed to come Trick-or-Treating with us.  Now A. is not.  The dotter immediately suggested K.  K. is the diametric opposite of A.  K. is female, a year older than the dotter, lazy, and snotty.  She’s also the girl who has her finger directly on all of the dotter’s buttons, including adoption issues.  OmegaDad and I don’t like K.

Ugh.

BUT.  That wasn’t really what I wanted to talk about; it just came pouring out in the stream of consciousness brought on by the word “trouble”.

My original point with the word “trouble” is that the dotter got in serious trouble this evening at gymnastics.  Coach Christina had given her group a water break, and they came barreling across the gymnasium floor in a thundering herd, led by the dotter, who was not looking where she was going.

At the same time, A., the oh-my-gosh-she’s-powerful-and-damned-good young gymnast whose team practices at the same time as the dotter’s, was starting a power sprint aimed at a rolling dive flip into the foam pit.

The two paths intersected right by the side of the foam pit.

The inevitable bad and painful collision was only avoided at the very last minute by some extremely quick thinking and movement on A.’s part, with the result that, rather than her normal perfect flip into the pit, she angled into the pit and came crashing down on her arm.

After the gasps of horror and brief adrenaline rush was over for everyone, Coach John (the head coach at the facility) gave the dotter quite a dressing down.  Since they were a distance away from my perch on the bleachers, I couldn’t hear, but there was finger-shaking involved.  She proceeded to the water fountain.  When she was done, I gave her quite a dressing down, of the “Don’t you ever, ever do something like that again!  You need to pay attention to where you’re going and what’s going on on the gymnasium floor!” type.  There was some “You could have been seriously hurt!” and “You could have seriously hurt someone else!” mixed in there, along with some finger-shaking on my part too.

She was suitably subdued afterwards.

On the drive home, I told her she needed to write a note of apology to Coach John and to A., who spent the next half hour favoring her arm.  This worried me; A. is really very, very good and I’d hate for her to be out of commission for a few weeks due to this…total and absolute inattentiveness.

Much to my surprise and amazement, right after we got home, the dotter retreated to her bedroom, then returned a few minutes later, said, “I’m done!”, and handed me two very contrite notes for Coach John and A.

Now all that’s left is for the dotter to deliver them to the recipients herself, on Thursday.  (She wanted me to do it.  Har.  As if.)

Damned episode scared the snot out of me.  Someone could have been very seriously hurt.  At the same time, while one part of me is still seething about the aforementioned total and absolute inattentiveness, the other part of me is just slumgustered at the immediate note-writing and the well-written apologies.  Bit by bit, she’s growing up.

(I won’t mention the zits.)  (Maybe in my next post.)  (Yes.  Zits.  Not a lot.  But, still…)

…because the dotter is sick with something flu-like.  The test came back negative for strep, negative for flu, but then the ped chatted up some other ped friends to discuss the sensitivity of the flu test, and given the dotter’s tendency to segue into she-should-go-to-the-hospital type pneumonia, the ped decided to treat it as if it were the flu.

Normally, I wouldn’t go hauling her off to the doctor right away after she got sick.  But given that there was a 10-year-old boy who died of H1N1 within a day after developing the fever up the road in Second Biggest City a few weeks ago, coupled with that aforementioned tendency to pneumonia, I figured it was time to be cautious.

The upshot is the doc prescribed Tamiflu.

(Don’t read the side effects for kids.  Just don’t.)  (I’m hoping we’re not any of the folks who get those side effects.)  (I mean, really, “may be at an increased risk of self injury and confusion shortly after taking TAMIFLU and should be closely monitored for signs of unusual behavior” just sort of raises the hair on my neck.  How creepy can you get?!?!)

The dotter has never done pills (really!), just liquid medicines and shots.   So when the doc asked, I said we should make it liquid…at which point it turns out there is no liquid form readily available, and there is just one local pharmacy that prepares the liquid form.

That pharmacy is, according to OmegaDad, The World’s Least Competent Pharmacy.  This is the result of him showing up at the pharmacy hours after we saw the doctor only to have them take half an hour to figure out that they didn’t have the faxed prescription, and more time thereafter to call up the doctor’s office.  OmegaDad was fuming when he got home, and said, in dire tones, that any further interactions were up to me, because he didn’t think he could keep from blowing his stack.

I call the doc’s office.  I offer to use pills, to introduce the dotter to the concept, so we can avoid dealing with this pharmacy.

The doc’s office calls back:  All the pharmacies in town don’t have the pills in the right strength, so we’re back to The World’s Least Competent Pharmacy.  But TWLCP can’t get the preparation done before they close. 

Oy!

It’s quite the distraction from the oh-OmegaDad-isn’t-going-to-step-on-Kai-on-his-way-to-bed feeling (Kai liked to sleep next to OD’s side of the bed).  The we-don’t-need-to-close-the-downstairs-bathroom-door feeling (Kai would eat the cat food otherwise).  The ongoing reminders.  Sigh.  Thank you all for your sympathetic comments; it has been quite helpful, actually.

For the past few years, OmegaDad has raved to me about “his” sandhill cranes showing up in the spring and fall, his special viewing place, ooh-ing and aahhh-ing about being able to go out during his (short) lunch hour, drive a few blocks, and eat his lunch while communing with nature, aka the cranes, and how pretty they were.

Today, he called me from work.  “I’ve got a very flat tire.”  Instantly, Super OmegaMom springs into action:  faster than a speeding bullet, she whizzes through the garage, grabs the battery-powered air pump, leaps into the car, and–

…waits for OmegaDotter, who had no school today, to collect all her worldly goods and chattels in preparation for an overnight with A., her best bud.

At which point, Super OmegaMom grabs the Halloween artwork done by OmegaDotter for donation to A.’s Halloween decorations, flips the back seats down, rolls out the bicycle, manhandles the bicycle up into the car, schleps the dotter and all her worldly goods and chattels off to A.’s house…

…and then goes to rescue OmegaDad.

As I delivered the air pump, I suggested we go visit the dawg at the hospital…

Oh!  Didn’t I mention this?!  One night home, and the dawg was once again throwing up everything, we couldn’t get any meds to stay down, we were worried yesterday morning, we called the vet, we took the dawg back to the vet’s, we got a call from the vet mid-day, we drove back to the vet’s office under a low, black cloud of gloom, anticipating that we were going to be told that he needed to be put down…Only to find out, once we were there, that the vets had made a mistake during the first surgery, and they wanted to do a third surgery to correct it.  The good news was that the dawg was not needing to be put down.  The further good news was that they were going to do the surgery for free.  The bad news was…well, three surgeries in a week is an awful lot, and the vet wasn’t sure that this would do the trick for our poor puppy.

But, anyway, the dawg is recuperating from his third surgery, and I suggested we go visit the dawg, which we did.  And then OmegaDad was hungry for lunch, so we grabbed a burger for him from DQ.  And while we were there, he said, “Let’s take a drive!”

“Turn right here.  Turn left here.  Drive straight here.  Turn here.  Slow down.  Slow down.  Just beyond those trees–can you see them?”

See them?!  Holy moly, there were some of the prettiest birds I’ve seen in a long time, and they were right by the road.  We could practically have reached out and touched them.  They had red crests on top of their heads, perched on long, graceful necks.  Their bodies were mottled brown and cream from one angle, an iridescent blue-ish from another angle.  They were just…beautiful.

And I didn’t have my camera.

After taking the husband back to work, I drove home (12 miles), grabbed the camera, and drove back (another 12 miles) just so I could get pictures of these beauties.

Of course, by the time I got there, they had moved much farther back into the field, away from the edge of the road.  This meant I had to zoom in with my point-and-shoot’s all-of-3x-optical-zoom.  Which meant that all I was getting was lousy pictures.  I got out of the car, moved into the greenery by the side of the road–

–and the birds very quietly and gracefully moved an equal distance further away from the road.  It wasn’t like they were scared, or really noticing at all; it was almost as if it were a force of nature, like gravity or magnetism, except repelling rather than attracting.  I move forward, they drift backward.

Bah.  The pic at the top of the post is the very best I could manage.  I ache to have better pictures of those birds.

Obviously, I need a new camera, one with more oompf.  None of this twiddly, pixellated digital zoom, thankyewverramuch.  I want some STUDLY OPTICAL ZOOM, dammit!  So this is my new quest:  cruising CraigsList for a nice used 10x digicam.  The dawg has eaten up a lot of our PFD check, but I think I can swing a 2nd-hand good digicam…Just so that next year I can get better pictures of these guys.

So.  I have taken the dotter hiking Saturday.  And Sunday.  And today.

Ahem.

Well, look.  We live in an area where when it starts to rain, it rains and rains and rains and rains.  Not hard, mind you, just a continuous dingy gray drizzle that makes everything soggy and the moss grow and mushrooms thrive and my mood sink.  So when we get Nice Weather™, I feel duty bound to actually get out and do something.

Yesterday’s hike was on a trail alongside the Mamahuska River, starting out in Small Town Alaska.  Looked easy, looked interesting, so I printed out the file from the borough recreation site.  Then things started going wrong.  Firstly, I confused north with east on the map (no comments from the peanut gallery, please), so thought that taking Large Raptor Street to the end of the road was what I was supposed to do.  We did that, parked, got out, started walking towards the river beside the high school, only to discover that the path we were on just died out at the top of a very steep bluff.

Um.

Okay, so we head back to the car.  I get out the map.  I read the directions.  It says “the intersection of Large Raptor Street with The Big One Street”.  I drive back towards the highway on Large Raptor Street.  We find The Big One Street intersection.  There is no path leading off; there is, instead, a large 2.5 acre vacant lot that is for sale.  Riiiiight.  We continue on a block, and behold, a path leading off north.  We park.  We head off that path.  It leads up and into a beautiful meadow filled with tall grass covered with sun-ripened seedheads and fireweed fluff.  But the river–our destination–is far off to our right.  Surely this is not correct?  So I march us to our right…And we find ourselves at the top of a steep hill overlooking the aforementioned 2.5-acre lot, through which a faint track wended its way.  So we slid and tiptoed and bounded down the hill to the faint track and started following it.

It led us right back up the bluff to the other side of the track which we had just been on.

Luckily, as I was standing there wondering what we were going to do, and why the #@!$*% the borough recreation department hadn’t marked the damned trail, our dawg and another dog started getting close & personal, and I was able to ask the owner of the other dog where the heck the trail was.  Once we got our trails sorted out, he pointed us in the right direction, which turned out to be on the other side of the wide meadow down where we had been.

I loved the trail.  The dotter didn’t.  We thought it would be down by the river banks and sunny; instead, it was up on the bluff and deep in the shady trees.  It was mysterious and dark and smelled damp and rich and filled with greenery and vegetation that was mouldering away, and there were oodles of mushrooms and fungus.  We could see glimpses of the river between the trees, with the sun sparkling and dancing off the lacy braids of water zigzagging across the riverbed.  The excitement of the trail was when some horseback riders came along–I pulled the dotter and the dog off to the side of the trail, to avoid the dog getting over-excited by the horses, and this turned out to be a mistake:  the horses, thinking the dawg was a bear, went into a panic.  Luckily, all we had to do was step out into the trail so the horses could see that we were not carnivorous monsters.

The end result:  dotter wanted to be down there, not up here.  Sigh.  And, since she really, really wanted to be able to play in the water–any water!–I drove us down to the Kmik River for a bit of wading around in ice-cold water.

The view from the darkness:

Some bright white berries that caught my eye:

Some beautiful bright white mushrooms popping in the darkness (they were huge!):

A clump of mushrooms displaying their undersides and looking voluptuous:

The dotter playing in the water:

Today’s hike was to Eklutna Lake.  The lake is utterly gorgeous, and this hike was bright and sunny, and easy, and fun.  There were certainly a lot more people on this hike than our other two, because it’s so near Big City.  But I think I’ve overloaded the girl with hiking.  Maybe I’ve overloaded myself with hiking?!  Anyway, I think it’s time to do other things for a while!

The lake:

Some sunny autumn color:

And some more sunny autumn color:

Playing at the water’s edge at the lake:

Many thanks for all the compliments on my weight loss pics.  I must admit, I chose the least flattering pic of me from our summer trip, so that may have helped make the difference more noticeable.  And, as Blog Antagonist asked, I am petite–5′2.5″–so a small weight loss looks bigger on me.  (The converse is also true:  a small weight gain looks bigger, as well.)  I will keep plugging away at it, but will only update once in a while on the ol’ bloggeroo.  The goal is another ten pounds, I think.

Here it is, the fifth of September, and we are well into autumn weather and colors here in Alaska.  This is Labor Day Weekend, three days off, and the Kozmik All has graced us with beautiful sunshine, sparkly clear skies, and (relative) warmth.  The dotter wanted to spend her time today watching TV.  I said, “No way, Jose!”, and dragged her out into the backyard to kick the soccer ball around a few times.

And then I dragged her on a hike.

Lately, she has been quite down on the idea of hikes.  All summer long, at summer camp, she avoided most of the hikes because her gymnastics class was scheduled in the middle of the day, ending after the kids were bussed off to wherever that week’s hike was.  When she did go, she pooh-poohed the experience.  My heart sank each time she did that–I love to go hiking, and she seemed to be deciding that Nature, and walking, and looking at the beautiful world around her was just BOR-ing!

Well, bah humbug, says I.  That’s no way to grow up!

So there we were, and it was a glorious day, and I pretty much told her to suck it up, we were going on a hike.

We grabbed the dawg, motored on up to Margaret Pass, where the Little Lady River runs, parked by one of the trailheads, and headed up the lower reaches of Gummint Peak.  The trail was wide and open, alongside a creek that joins the Little Lady River, with many little offshoots of the trail leading to the creek.  The dotter paused to look for rocks to throw:

The trail crossed a neat wooden bridge; I’m not sure why it was built that way, with the two parts:

Then the trail suddenly became small and narrow and steep, heading up a ridgeline very quickly.  I warned the dotter that we would have to come down the trail on our butts because it was so steep, but that only made it more attractive to her.  I tried to take pictures of how steep it was, but none of them showed it properly.  Here the dotter is clowning around on a rock on the trail ahead (and above) me:

There were oodles of fireweed in full fluff, and with scarlet leaves:

The fireweed are splendid wildflowers.  They bloom bright pink flowers all along their stalk, above green leaves; then, when they’re all done blooming, the stems to the flowers turn dark pink, the leaves turn scarlet, and the seeds covered with fluff burst open.  When the wind picks up, the fluff from the fireweed dances off into the skies.

When we got up to a bench on the ridge, we stopped, rested, rehydrated, and took pictures.  First, a vista:

I took the landscape pictures, then the dotter demanded the camera.  First she caught the dawg resting, looking Noble:

Then she did a self-portrait.  Note the faint orange mustache from her Gatorade:

She took a picture of me, but I’m not putting it in here, ’cause it shows my impending wattle, yuck.

Then we turned around and slid back down the trail.  The dotter wanted to go back up and slide back down, but I nixed that idea; the butt of her blue jeans was getting pretty damned grubby by that time, and I was afraid that any more grinding action would engrain the dirt to the point where it was impossible to ever get out again.

On the way up and back down, I was constantly clicking the camera, grabbing shots of autumn colors.  Some more fireweed:

Some berries (not edible, I think):

Purty fall colors:

Once we were back at the trailhead, we crossed the road to the Little Lady River, and played on the rocks and in the water.  The dotter collected a large number of speckled rocks, which she proudly proclaimed were river dinosaur eggs, and that the eggs needed to be right at the edge of the water to hatch, so that the baby river dinosaurs could just swim away when they hatched.

Then we went home.  On the drive home, the dotter informed me that she just loved hiking, and could we do it every weekend?  Har.  My nefarious scheme is working!

The scene:  OmegaDotter picks up the phone, dials a number.

“Hello?  This is OmegaDotter, who is this?…Can I please speak with A.?”

“Hi, A.?  It’s OmegaDotter.  I blew it.”

“I made a poor choice.”

“You can’t come to the fair with us tomorrow.  I’m sorry I said you probably could.”

The backstory:

A.–OmegaDotter’s current best buddy–is coming over for a sleepover tomorrow night, as a result of some parental badgering on the dotter’s part.  The Big Fair is running from yesterday through September 8.  We were planning to go tomorrow.  The dotter asked us prior to dinner–while on the phone with A.–if he could come to the fair with us.  We said we’d make our minds up later, but it was dinnertime and time to get off the phone.

During dinner, she asked again.  And again.  OmegaDad said that he had been wanting a “just family” day.  I personally was leaning towards saying, sure, why not, let’s bring A. along, it’ll be fun, but said we needed to decide later.

Dinner was over, the dotter cleared the table, I stepped out for a smoke, OmegaDad stepped out with the dawg to do the dawgly duty.

When we got back inside, the dotter was on the phone with A., telling him that yes, he could almost certainly come to the fair with us.

Oops.  Big mistake, kiddo.  Don’t go making plans with someone else based on no decision from your parents.  We told her to say goodbye to A., that she’d call him back later, and to get her cute little butt back to the dinner table so we could Talk To Her.  At which point, we laid out the fact that (a) we had not made the decision yet, (b) she called A. and told him we had, (c) as a result, our decision was that he was not coming with us, even though I had been leaning towards taking him along, and (d) she had to call A. back, tell him she was wrong, and apologize.

Oh, lordy.  Y’know, sometimes being a parent is just a plain old pain in the ass.  Damn.  Chores need to be supervised, so it’s more work than just doing it myself.  We need to remind her to do the chickens.  We have to explain that not everything is going to go her way.  We have to explain courtesy, and patience, and junk like that.  (We also have to explain that talking in class is a Bad Idea, that while it’s polite to listen to someone who is talking (!!!  Yes!  She claimed she was listening and talking to A. in class because he was talking to her and it was the polite thing to do!), the teacher talking takes precedence, and quiet time in class takes precedence, and, and, and…)

Bah.

On the good side, though, we applauded her phone call (she was saying it all very quietly, in another room, so it wasn’t for show), we all played five-card draw, and B.S., and Crazy Eights, and I read another chapter of her Karito Kids book to her before bedtime.  I guess it all balances out.

So what is the family doing with our spare time now that the dotter is back in school, in the second grade?  Are we doing Quality Time Things with her?  Teaching her great moral truths?  Helping her understand the principles behind basic mathematics?  Discussing the political situations of the day?

No.

We are teaching her to play poker.

At, I might add, her request.  I have no idea where she came up with the idea, but while OmegaDad was out of town on the East Coast, I gave it a (lousy) whirl.  When I concluded that I couldn’t remember it very well, and certainly couldn’t remember the ranking of the various hands, I copped out:  I told her to wait until Daddy came home, and ask him to teach her to play.

Which she did.  And he did.  And we’ve been having a grand old time playing five-card poker, not Stud, for pennies from the zippy full of one hundred pennies that the dotter took to school last year for the 100th Day festivities.  At the end of the game session, we check to see who has the most pennies to declare the winner, and then the pennies go back into the zippy.

Our first night, the dotter won just about everything, and wiped out OmegaDad’s funds.  Beginner’s luck!

The second night, OmegaDad won.  This will probably be the default, because he has been playing poker for many years.  (”Weyall…the boys and I was playin’ poker in Nebraska City one night…”, said in one’s best Western drawl, is one of our favorite family lines, because he was playing poker with the boys in Nebraska City one night, whilst on a business trip…)

Hopefully, one of these days the dotter will learn what a “poker face” is.

The chores proceed apace, which is making me happy.  OmegaDad discovered the Internet Bonanza of American Girl doll accoutrements, and the dotter is agog.  And eager to buy, buy, buy!  Which, of course, means money, money, money!  Which leads to chores.

Ahhhh.  So the dotter is sweeping, and vacuuming, and cleaning the catbox, and sorting laundry, and carrying laundry back upstairs and putting it away (I know I mentioned every single one of these things before, but it’s so damn nice to have it done, even if I do have to follow around and give pointers and make sure she does more than a seven-year-old’s slapdash job).

OmegaDad has been making bread.  He recently made two loaves of challah, one for us, one for our next-door neighbor, who just got married.  The late afternoon sunshine just made the warmth and goodness pop out in the picture.  Aren’t they purty?

Also enjoying the afternoon warmth was one of our cats, Wooly.  Piggy, the scaredy cat, rarely (if ever) ventures upstairs, but Wooly is everywhere.  Including on our laptop.  Which means that, after I took this picture, I spent five minutes closing obscure Windows windows and making sure he hadn’t accidentally switched screen resolutions, or turned on Armenian language, or shut off all the keyboard shortcuts.  For reference, this was what he looked like a few years ago, when he was only five or six weeks old.

Our new chickens are laying eggs now–yay!  So we get a wide variety of egg sizes.  The big one is from one of our older girls; the little one is from one of the new layers.  Our Silkies lay eggs only a bit bigger than the little one, but the new girls’ eggs will end up as big as the one on the left in a few months.

Another shot of Cinderella, posing:

She starts second grade tomorrow.  She’s been wandering the house shouting excitedly about school starting; that excitement will disappear very soon.  Right now, she’s upset that her second-grade teacher is male:  “A dude?!  I don’t want a dude for a teacher!!”  There is an implied “WTF?!” in there that she hasn’t taken to using.  Yet.  (I, of course, am quite aware that she tends to get ferocious crushes on young men who are coaches or counselors or teachers, so fully expect her to be [occasionally] sighing about Mr. Snows.  When she’s not complaining about the homework.)

Oh, yes, and in the midst of all the early/mid August stuff, I totally spaced out that OmegaMom, the blog, is now four years old.  Whoa.

After dinner, I was heading out to the kitchen porch for a smoke whilst the dotter cleared the table and chatted with OmegaDad.  While I was lighting my ciggie, I heard a crunch-crash-crunch noise; I poked my head out to peer in the direction the noises were coming from.  Lo and behold, we had a Mama Moose and Baby Moose chowing down on the cow parsnips in our front yard.

Of course, I had to alert the dotter and OmegaDad, and we spent much time “ooh”ing and “ahh”ing, and OmegaDad managed to dash down to the office, grab the battery charger, run upstairs with it, reload the batteries in the camera, and snap off a few pictures.

The colors are off because it is cloudy and dim right now; the second shot, I believe OmegaDad managed to get some flash into the ambient environment.

So we were delighted and amused (baby doesn’t look too very old to me).

But then…

…then…

THEN OmegaDad decided to check the veggie garden:

The moose had knocked off our veggie garden covering on one of the veggie beds (you can see the pipes and [just barely] some of the netting behind the bed), and they had mown our chard and beet greens down like machines.  Sigh.

They were very luxurious, leafy plants only a few hours ago!  The beets themselves are still okay; the moose and baby didn’t eat those.  But boy howdy, they really liked the greens!  And the big lettuce that we were letting go in the next-over veggie bed.  They didn’t touch the celery and carrot greens, though–the devastation stopped where the chard stopped.

I guess it’s time to get out the firecrackers again…

While we were at GrannyJ’s house, the dotter produced this piece of art:

I was truly wowed by this, and wanted to share.  See how the horse has knobby knees?!  And muscles?!  See how the house is all tilty?!  (It’s supposed to be.) 

I happen to know what it represents; I was wondering if others could figure it out.  Put your guesses in the comments!

This is Ling, from Karito Kids.  Ling is very expensive, like the American Girls dolls.

OmegaDad spotted her first, at the local fancy toy store (very Waldorf-y place…lots of wooden toys, silky dress-up, fabric dolls, that kind of thing).  So he showed her to the dotter, who swooned with delight:  “She could be my little sister!”  Then came the catch:  No, we wouldn’t buy it for her.  She had to buy it, with her very own money.

Then we hammered out the list of possible ways to make money:  Sweep and Swiffer the living room and kitchen twice a week.  Unload the laundry chute and sort clothes.  Put clothes away after Mommy was done washing and folding them.  Brush the dawg.  Vacuum the downstairs.  Clean the cat box every night.

Then she came up with her very own idea.

OmegaDad, you see, has this…problem…with using his turn signal.  In other words, he often forgets.  The dotter has noticed this, and is a regular little back-seat driver about it.  (She also gives me approval, because I don’t forget the turn signal.  Ah, little victories!)

So one or the other of them proposed a deal:  If she caught him not using his turn signal while driving, he would give her…

…A DOLLAR!!!…PER WHACK!!!

Um.  Now, if I had been consulted before this little dealio went down, I would have put my foot down, and proposed a quarter per offense.  However, the first I heard of it was after the deal was pinkie sealed.

The girl is destined to be a wheeler-dealer scam artist, fer shur.  Because she made sure that daddy would pick her up from summer camp almost every day–and this was a source of $2, $3, or more per drive!  (I told you he had a problem with turn signals!)

Every night, she and OmegaDad would count up the dollars in her Mason jar.  Finally, on Friday night, she came bouncing down to the office, where I was watching a YouTube of the Chinese Brittney Spears, Jolin Tsai, shouting out, “How can I make three dollars and fifty cents before tomorrow?!”  See, that brass ring was in sight.  She wanted Ling so much she ached.  She had already created a bed for Ling in her bedroom.  She had set up her pseudo-computer (gift from Grandma Jeannie) so that Ling could sit in front of it.  She had pulled out her biggest horse, ready for Ling to ride.  And all she needed now was $3.50.

So she spent Friday evening in a frenzy–she swept, she Swiffered, she vacuumed, she cleaned the cat box.  She got her extra money.

Saturday morning, she grabbed her Mason jar of money:

…and we drove off to the swanky toy store, where she got this huge bag:

And mommy spent half-an-hour releasing Ling from durance vile (aka the packaging).  Lemme tell you, this doll is pretty cool.  Her head tilts and bends.  Her arms and legs have ball-and-socket type joints, so you can move them in more natural style than other big dolls.  And, like the American Girls dolls, she comes with a book:

At which point, poor OmegaDotter had to schlep off to her previously arranged sleep-over with A., her best bud from school.  OmegaDad and I were instructed to make sure Ling got to bed–in OmegaDotter’s bed, since she wouldn’t be there–and get her up and put her in front of her computer.

I, in the meanwhile, am hoping that we can get more chore-work out of the dotter without major whining–it’s been nice to have her so motivated!  There are plenty of accessories for Ling, so we’ll probably be able to get the dotter into the habit of doing chores for weekly allowance.