OmegaMom

That’s what I am.

To the mosquitoes.

OmegaDad, on the other hand, is not.

This is hugely frustrating.  I can remember, as a child, the same thing occurring with my father.  My mother and I would be eaten alive, and dad would be bite-free.  Now, as we hang out in the yard, the mosquitoes find any nook and cranny that isn’t slathered with Off, and take yet another step on the journey of life, sex, and death.

I suppose it’s a small consolation that I am providing the seed money, as it were, for yet another generation of voracious insects.

We’ve been quietly (or not so quietly) enjoying the yard this Fourth of July weekend. 

First, there was the Quest for Lilacs.  One of the things I remember most of growing up in the Chicago area is that springtime was a time of lilacs.  You’d walk down a street and encounter a huge old lilac plant, and the scent would be strong enough to make you stop, close your eyes, and lean into it, breathing deeply through the nose.  Sometimes, it was so alluring that you’d walk right up to the lilac bush (almost a tree), and bury your head in the blossoms.  With the eyes closed, your senses would focus on the scent and the soft caress of a springtime breeze and the hypnotic sound of the bees hovering around the flowers.

It turns out that this area of Alaska is prime for lilacs.  This does not surprise me, as–aside from the mountains, which are, admittedly, kind of hard to ignore, and aside from the spruce, which are also hard to ignore–the surroundings here remind me most of the Midwest.  So early summer is Lilac Time here, and I’ve been wisting after lilacs, yearning for some of our own.

The morning of the fourth, we ventured forth to nurseries.  Closed, alas.  We finally went to Home Debit, which was open and had lots of lilacs for sale.  The problem was that they were labeled “various”.  I had a plan; I wanted a lavender lilac, a pink one, and a white one.  After examining all the lilacs in search of some label related to color of blossom, I finally sent OmegaDad off on a quest for a helpful sales associate.

The helpful sales associate quoth:  “Anything that says ‘syringa’ is going to be purple.”

The helpful sales associate was full of shit and we knew it.  For evidence, I give you a Google image search for syringa.  Note all the different colors.  We debouched to Lowe’s.

Lowe’s didn’t have any lilacs at all.  Pout.

So we went off to Freddy Myers, not expecting anything at all.

Lo and behold, we found our pink, purple, and white lilacs.  All, by the way, labeled as “syringa“, which is not surprising, given that syringa is the Latin name for…lilac.  (I am still rolling my eyes at the clueless sales associate at Home Debit.)

Then OmegaDad and I spent a while working on the chicken ark.  A chicken ark is a portable coop for outdoors.  More on the ark in a later post.

Then OmegaDad and the dotter headed off on a search for fireworks, and we did some observational research on less-than-noisy fireworks for next year’s celebration.  Why get quiet fireworks?  The neighborhood is full of dogs, including our own dawg, who I discovered, when I returned inside after our relatively quiet fireworks in the backyard, cowering under my desk, as far back as he could go.

On Saturday, OmegaDad and I spent quite a while with his newly constructed soil sifter, him digging dirt where the garden is going to go and sifting it, and me ferrying the wheelbarrow full of rocks over to the veggie garden pathway.  Over and over again.  And picking up rocky detritus.  And exposing my skin.

Did you know Off wears off fairly quickly?

I do now.

I spent most of today doing laundry and scratching.  Hands?  Check.  Feet?  Check.  Arms?  Check.  Neck?  Check.  Scalp?  Check.  Even one quick bite in a previously undiscovered hole by the pockets of my sweats which some swift, incredibly fit mosquito found was not covered with Off.  There were enough bites and enough of a reaction that I spent half the day in a haze of light fever and misery.

OmegaDad claims it’s because I’m sweet.  Har.  Very flattering.  I’d rather not be sweet; frankly, at this point, I’d like to be poisonous as a virper to mosquitoes, and watch them fall, twitching in insect misery, at the slightest penetration of my skin by a proboscis.

Just a moment to thank all those who have helped to protect our nation.

Our veggie beds are all filled with dirt and planted with seeds and plants.  OmegaDad, realizing what a tasty treat he had just set out for various varmints, is off to Lowe’s or Home Debit to get some orange construction fencing, which is reputed to scare moose.  Or he may end up with moose repellant.  (I never thought I’d be googling that phrase, but life is full of interesting surprises.)

This week is Ballet Recital Madness.  Tuesday evening is the full run-through.  Thursday is the dress rehearsal.  Friday and Saturday are the performances.  Luckily, the schedule is not as bad as I originally believed; someone in charge had sense enough to tell the littlies to come later.

I signed up as a backstage mommy for dress-rehearsal day.  That was before I knew that it was the Longest Day.  I will know better next year.

And if I ever complain about one of the dotter’s teachers, please remind me of this story and ask me whether it’s as bad as that.  I am far too mellow today to take that one on, but just let me say it left me speechless.

Yes, life is a circus around here.

The new vet, who was doing emergency surgery on a bird when OmegaDad arrived at 10:30 p.m., immediately dissected the lumpy thing the dawg had thrown up.  It turns out it was a piece of toy rope.  A large chunk of toy rope, actually.  They did x-rays, they hooked the dawg up to an IV, and kept him overnight.

The thing is, the chunk of toy rope was all white; the latest toy rope we have is blue and white.  The last time we had a white toy rope was many years ago back in Small Mountain University Town.  We are stumped as to where the dawg got this thing.

He’s home, but still very unhappy.

Onto the real circus, the kindergarden circus.

To get you in the mood, clowns abound:

The kiddies do their songs, en masse:

Dancing bears:

Prancing horsies:

The mighty elephants:

Roaring lions, who also jumped through "flaming" hoops and went "RAWR!":

Send in the clowns:

I missed pictures of the strong men and the acrobats.  The strong men lifted "weights" made of aluminum-foil-covered paper plates attached to picture tubes.  The acrobats did (dreadfully lousy) cartwheels and walked across a balance beam.

The dotter afterwards:

Too bad you can’t see her truly elegant mane and tail!  Note her horsie shirt, claiming "Best Friends 4-Ever".  If I remember correctly, this was a Christmas gift from OmegaGranny.  Also note the gap-toothed grin; her two front top teeth are missing.

A good time was had by all.  I decided not to blur out features because all the kiddlies were covered in make-up and not really recognizable at all.

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…

…the dotter is getting better.

The pediatrician (nice lady!) thinks it’s an adenovirus, and it just has to take its course.

I’m hoping to the Kozmik All that she will be all pink-eye-free by Monday, so she can go to school when it starts up again.  As she is still pink-eyed, even after five days of one eye prescription and a half-day of a different eye prescription, she still can’t go back to her out-of-school care place. 

Am I a bad mommy if I just say:  AGGGHHHHH!!

The dotter has been out of commission for just over a week now.  Today’s visit to the pede was graced with OmegaDad’s presence because I pretty much informed him that I was burned out, I was tired to the bone, and it was his turn to help.  Anyway, luckily the illness never reached Dotter Stage 3, but has chugged along at Stage 2 forever. 

Can I say that I am really really looking forward to next Monday, and a healthy child??  I had all this time off, and didn’t get to use any of it as planned.  Wah!

In other news:  The planned mural in the dotter’s bedroom has been languishing in my fertile imagination for months now.  See, I was looking for horsie coloring pages or silhouettes or pictures that I could dump into my photo/art program and manipulate into all being about the same size.  But the pics I kept finding were…well, some were small, some were large, some were fuzzy, some required lots of fiddling…The end result, alas, is that the horsie mural stayed in my head, rather than showing up on the dotter’s bedroom wall.

However!  Since one of OmegaDad’s shameless bribes incentives for the dotter to take her medicine (which she has had copious amounts of) is a dip into the "goody bag" filled with cheap (aka less than $2) toys-n-things, he has had to replenish the stock a few times this week.  Today…today the dotter pulled out…

…a horsie coloring book!

A veritable bonanza of all things horsie!  And all in more or less similar sizes and styles!  And we have a scanner!  So after I post this post, I will be diligently scanning coloring pages so I can create templates so I can paint that damned much-anticipated mural!  Woohoo!

Onto more topical things:  Johnny wrote a post about New Year’s resolutions, in which he states, "I just believe that the best resolutions are those you keep to yourself."  This is something that resonates with me for a different reason:  I fear stating my resolution and then falling flat on my face.  Julie, over at Using My Words, had a post about resolutions, too, that ended up essentially saying her resolutions this year were more "general goals" than specifics with action plans–which fits right in with another blogger’s approach, to unify your resolutions under one word to direct your life for the coming year.  (I thought Julie had pointed me to the Christine Kane post, but it wasn’t her, and now I don’t remember whose post I read about her post on…)

Anyway, I think I have a goal this year.  But, like Johnny, I’m not going to talk about it.  Neener, neener.  It is, for me and for us as a family, a breathtaking and exciting goal.  Goodness knows if I will succeed.

As you drive the highway between Small Alaska Suburb and Austin, AK, the sides of the highway are peppered with various signs. 

There’s the "Watch for moose" signs, and the accompanying tally of how many moose have been hit by cars on the highway since (date).  And, yes, that truly does happen; while we were stuck in the Shoebox and I was doing laundry at the laundromat, I managed to overhear a lady who was still recuperating from a broken back and leg from when she had hit a moose in March–and OmegaDad’s boss and wife hit a moose last year while driving to see their son (who lives in our neighborhood).

There are the requisite "don’t trash Alaska" signs.

Speed limit signs, of course.

Then there are the never-ending "No fireworks allowed in Hataniska-Satsuma Borough", followed by a list of borough regulatory paragraphs that cite this.

But as you enter Austin, AK, on the highway, you are greeted by HUGE signs.  Gorilla Fireworks.  Hippopotamus Fireworks.  Buy Your Fireworks Here CHEAP!  And more.  When you drive out the other side of Austin, once again the highway signs admonish you:  No fireworks allowed!

I figured that the Austin fireworks stands–which always look deserted when we drive by, but we haven’t driven by in a long time–were legal by Austin’s regulations (thus avoiding the problem with borough regulations), and were probably jumpin’ joints around Independence Day.

Um.  I need to be thinking of those daylight hours again.  Because around Independence Day, the sun doesn’t officially set until midnight.

But on New Years’ Eve…?

In the deepest, darkest depths of winter…?

The sun sets very, very early.

And the "not allowed" fireworks start at about 8 p.m.

And keep going.

And going.

And going.

Until about 1 a.m.

This is a major culture shift for us, folks.  We’re used to living in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods…in the tinderbox-dry woods…where the municipal July 4 fireworks display has been canceled mere days before the date three out of the last four years.  Back there, anyone who was insane enough to fire off lots of private fireworks around July 4 were fined huge amounts, and shunned and scorned by anyone with any grain of sense.  New Years’ Eve?  Eh.  We’d have one or two neighbors who would fire off firecrackers directly at midnight, and that was that.

Last night, in our area, it was like a freakin’ war zone.  Fireworks.  Firecrackers.  Roman candles.  Streamers.  Bang!  Bang!  Bangity-bangity-pop-pop-pop-pop.  Quiet.  Bang!  Whiiiiiizzzz-Bang!  Quiet.  Pop!  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!  Bang!  Boom!  Quiet.

I have never, ever, in my life, lived in a place that did this.

Our dog was, luckily, not frantic, but definitely perturbed, and he kept following me or OmegaDad around the house and startling when a particularly loud (read:  direct neighbors) bang sounded.  Our cats were missing in action.  The dotter was both enchanted (when she could see the fireworks from the bedroom) and terrified (when all she got was the bang-bang-bang-BOOM! effect).

I was able to see fireworks from the porch next to the kitchen, looking northwest.  I was able to see them from our living room, looking southwest.  I was able to see them from our bedroom, looking northeast, and looking southeast.

We decided that the borough police department must make its yearly income from all those fireworks, that they’d be able to just cruise around almost anywhere and hand out tickets left and right.

Here it is, almost 6 p.m. on New Year’s Eve.  As usual, we have a sick child (who is getting better), and besides we’re not really party animals, so we’ll have pot roast, toast each other with eggnog, and fall into bed early.

It’s been quite a year Chez Omega.  The main event was, of course, the move to Alaska and associated upheavals.  The dotter had her first recital, started "real" school, and lost two teeth.  OmegaDad is finding his new job challenging and filled with responsibility.  I’m slowly getting accustomed to the lack of light, with the continued promise of more light (woot!  Today we gained 1 minute and 30 seconds!) lifting my spirits.

Tomorrow, OmegaDad and I will wake up to our 10th anniversary.  He and I stared at each other the other day with deer-in-the-headlights looks, realizing that it was our Big Tenth and we hadn’t done anything to prepare.  Hopefully in a few more months, we’ll have cemented some budding friendships, so will be able to dump the dotter beg the new friends for some babysitting help and actually go out.  Like maybe even overnight?! 

Here’s to the passing of 2007 and a wave "hello!" to the new year of 2008.  May the year to come be filled with joy and excitement for all my readers.  Don’t set yourself too many resolutions, and make sure one or two are the kind of resolution that will be easy to fulfill.

 Happy New Year!

ETA:  Sorry, everyone!  I really didn’t even consider that the last post was my "Stoned Cold" one.  I’m fine–I did toss out the Bad Drugs, I haven’t had a single twinge from my foot (though that will have to wait until I spend a day at the computer, working again, to see whether All Is Well), and I did not fall into a ditch or spin out in the snow or plunge down the stairs or any other disaster that may have popped into people’s imagination.  Thanks for asking, though!

I spent the entire week planning to write a post.  But each time I sat down at the computer and actually thought about a post, my mind would go wondrously blank.

Totally, completely tabula rosa.  Pure, pristine white.

So I’d shrug, read my bloggin’ peeps, and then return to the Bosom of My Family.

Unfortunately, part of the Bosom of My Family has decided, as usual, to get sick.  If it’s the New Year, dotter gets sick.  Really!  Go look at my previous end-of-year posts; you’ll see it’s true.

So my original plan was a wonderful, restful week off, with me being able to tackle a bunch of projects while the dotter was at her all-day after-school care place.  This went to hell in a handbasket as of Thursday, when we decided her constant crying over the sore throat (but no fever) warranted a visit to the doc, who posited a sinus infection and non-feverish tonsillitis.  When she seemed better on Friday, I sent her off to ADASCP, only to have them call an hour later requesting us to take her back because she had pink eye.

Then Friday night she started running The Fever.

Another visit to the doc’s today, and the dire news is that whatever it is is viral, because the slew of antibiotics that she was put on by the doc on Thursday are actually doing their job vis-a-vis the tonsils, and are broad-spectrum enough to hit anything bacterial.

Bah.

The dotter’s illnesses have a three point scale:

1. Temp between 98.6 and 101 - generally just fine, happy as a clam, but unable to go to school or other places if the temp is 100F or greater.
2. Temp between 101 and 104 - miserable.  Whiny.  Bitchy.  Petulant.  Any touch hurts.  Die-away airs…she can’t sit up to get her milk, she must have anything liquid handed to her, medicine is a major PITA to administer.
3. Temp over 104 - More than miserable.  Wants to spend her entire waking time on top of mommy.  No whining, no bitchiness, no petulance, just plain quiet misery.

She’s been at stage 2 for three days now, and it looks like she’ll be there for another day or two at least.

Christmas was a blast.  Dotter and daddy made sugar cookies on Christmas Eve to leave for Santa Claus; mommy and daddy duly ate bites out of the cookies and drank all the milk, which just blew the dotter away.  She’s at a stage where she suspects that it’s me and OmegaDad, but she keeps reassuring herself that it isn’t, but she keeps asking very practical questions that indicate she thinks it’s all a bit unbelievable.

We went cross-country skiing on Christmas Day, had a great time, and took the dotter out too far and too long.  The end result:  OmegaDad had to carry a sobbing dotter back after her plucky attitude gave out entirely.  Turns out she had sprung a leak or two or a thousand in her ski boots, and her socks and feet were entirely soaked and cold as ice.  Bad Mommy and Daddy Score:  -1000.

Some pics–First, OmegaDad and dotter showing off the wreath we made:

Next, the dotter as the chef, taking down orders (okay, so the waitress takes orders; she has the chef hat courtesy of Christmas).  Note, also, the array of horsies on the floor behind her; of course she got some horsies for Christmas.

Me, looking more like a fixture for St. Patrick’s Day.  The hat was because I had not showered, so my hair was stuck up in a mohawk.  The bow had topped off one of the dotter’s presents; we wanted to see what I would look like with it.

Skiing across the bridge in the foggy snow:

It was really a great skiing expedition, but generally too much for an almost-six-year-old.  We’ll be more cautious in the future; I was actually scared that we weren’t going to be able to get her out unless we dragged her behind us.

Later than planned, but here it is:

OmegaDad makes a sad face because he has never made a gingerbread house in his life.  A deprived childhood, obviously.  (We’ll leave aside the fact that OmegaMom has never made a gingerbread house, either, shall we?)  Anyway, it made a fine excuse for him to insist on making a gingerbread house with the dotter.

But he didn’t get too carried away.  None of this make-it-from-scratch silliness, for instance.  Nope, he scoured the local grocery stores for a gingerbread house kit, which you see over to the right.  It comes with walls, roof panels, icing packets, geegaws to decorate with, and a little gingerbread man to put out front.  The knife doesn’t come with the kit; it is a special OmegaFamily tool for opening shrink-wrapped gingerbread house components…

Dad and dotter examine the kit and decide how to approach things:

Note the dotter’s pink T-shirt.  Note the holes in it on the shoulder.  Note that OmegaMom was firm in her demand that the dotter wear a sweatshirt over that old thang when she wanted to wear it to school the other day.  Note that when OmegaMom picked up the dotter at after-school care, the sweatshirt had been long since pulled off, and the dotter had been rampaging around the classroom in the gnarly, holy old thing without a care in her heart.

Starting the construction:

Three walls up:

Raising the roof:

Holding down the roof (you have to get the icing to “set”):

Making the front door:

Dotter decorating with dots.  This is serious work, y’know…:

The finished product!

The purple-y thing by the sidewalk is the gingerbread girl; the purple is her hair.

Of course, once the gingerbread house was completed, the dotter wanted to eat it.

What?!?!  Gads, no! sayeth OmegaMom, wanting a cute little gingerbread house gracing the top of the glass-front bookcase as part of Christmas decor.

Well…yesterday, I succumbed, and told the dotter she could eat the gingerbread girl to see whether she liked it or not.  Thus, if she didn’t like it, the house would be saved.

Alas, she liked it.  The house still stands, but I don’t know how much longer.

For your amusement:  The TRUTH about wireless devices!

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

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

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

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

…are…

Well…urg…they have heels.  ACK!

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

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

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

Thank heavens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lemming-like, I follow suit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, dear?”

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

…is the loneliest number.

We had ONE trick-or-treater here at the house.

Which makes me the more glad that OmegaDad scoped out the local Halloween scene with one of his coworkers, who has a 5-year-old also, and was invited to her house to trick-or-treat in her neighborhood, the Place To Be for Halloween.

Having suddenly come down with the collywobbles midday, I sent father and dotter off on various Halloween-y expeditions and stayed home.

And got ONE trick-or-treater.

Bah.

We have a few cute pics of dotter-as-kitty-cat, but they are on the other computer, which OmegaDad is playing with.  Tomorrow.

While we purchased our (very expensive) (medium-sized) pumpkin a few weeks ago, we only got around to doing the carving this evening.

This Halloween, in fact, has been characterized by a slew of delays.  We have the dotter’s costume–but I still need to iron it.  OmegaDad is out buying milk and tights–tights for the costume.  We have no idea whether people do trick-or-treating here in our cul-de-sac, or anywhere near our neighborhood.  Since everyone lives on one-acre lots, and the houses are set back a bit, it means a bunch of schlepping to-and-fro, enough to cause the dotter to wear out quite early on.  In addition, from what I can tell of our neighbors, we don’t have anyone with kiddos nearby.

I suggested to the dotter this evening that we might want to do a Halloween party or two instead.

You might have thought I was dissing the Pope or some such thing.  She gasped.  She wailed.  The words, “I don’t want to go to a party!” emerged from her shell-like lips for the very first time ever in her life.

I dither.  We shall see tomorrow.  The dotter’s general 5-year-old pillishness at the dinner table had her father threatening her with no trick-or-treating this evening.

All that aside, like I said, this evening was pumpkin carving time.

First, we had design work.  Note the intense look on my face, the laughter on the dotter’s.  The bit of white showing beneath the child’s knee is her notepad, on which she was drawing various jack-o-lanterns as design ideas.

Me at work some more:

The dotter wanted a “princess”.  Now, normally I’m quite good at doing evul looking pumpkins, but I originally bowed out on the princess design.  The dotter tried.  She didn’t like it.  OmegaDad was called upon.  After about fifteen minutes of him hemming and hawing, I offered.  I had a plan of almond-eyed Betty Boop-dom, with curvaceous lips and arching eyebrows.  This is what we ended up with:

First, the annual OmegaDad-as-psycho-killer picture:

Alas, the pink bottle brush standing upright on the counter sort of (a) blocks the knife work and (b) just doesn’t fit the mood of pyscho-killer.

Two heads are better than one, especially if one has a knife protruding from it:

Scoopage was next.  The dotter actually scooped some stuff herself this year, instead of being staged with pre-scooped stuff from OmegaDad. 

Here, OmegaDotter channels sixteen-year-old Muffy–”Ooh!  This is like, so totally gross!  I can’t believe how gross it is!”:

OmegaDad then took pity and took over the scoopage.  Of course, there was the obligatory “threaten the dotter with ooey gooey pumpkin innards” which resulted in much squirming and hilarity:

Just call her Priscilla Pumpkin, please:

After the carving was done, and the candle inserted and lit, this is the end result:

Not quite the sexy lady/Betty Boop look I was aiming for, but more like an evil djinn.  This is OK.  To get the sexy lady, OmegaDad would have had to do a lot more fiddly curly stuff, with eyebrows that arch more and trail off more, and a more bow-like upper lip…all of which would require a much more delicate pumpkin-massacring (sp?) instrument than our ancient and rusty drywall saw.  Every year, I flinch as he does the carving, praying to the Kozmik All that his hands don’t slip and we don’t end up at the emergency room with geysers of blood and tetanus shots galore.

OmegaDad has returned with tights and Halloween candy.  Luckily, there are no KitKats and no Reese’s Stix.  I will have to be content with the Hershey’s Special Darks…

Pumpkins.  At this time of year, in Small Mountain University Town, every single grocery store is knee deep in pumpkins.  There are pumpkin corrals out front, with cheesy scarecrows at the corners, and pumpkins of every size possible, from teeny-tiny to ginormous, spilling out in carefully orchestrated abandon.  Pumpkins are sold by the pound, and tend to run about (if my memory is correct) 30 cents per pound or less.

Today, one of the items on our shopping list was a pumpkin.

Actually, two.  One small, for school.  One pumpkin-sized pumpkin for the carving and scooping and candles and all that Halloween stuff.

So the dotter and I went to Carrs.

No pumpkins out front.

No pumpkins right inside the door.

Helllooooooo?  Pumpkins?  Where arrreee you?!

I finally found the pumpkins, up front but in an out-of-the-way area.  An itty bitty teeny tiny display with maybe 15 pumpkins total.  The pumpkins were eighteen dollars for two pumpkins.

No.  I am not shitting you.

Eighteen dollars for two.

There was a slightly bigger display of pumpkins at Three Bears.  They also had some ginormous ones, and their pumpkins were being sold by the pound.  Forty-nine cents per pound.

I thought this was the land of big veggies…

Wah!  I wanna go home!

In another “wah!” item.  OmegaDad finished painting the bedroom.

We had hemmed and hawed at the hardware store when purchasing paint.  I wanted a sage-y color.  The one I pointed out, he said, dubiously, “Looks awfully dark…”  So we picked out a lighter shade of the same color.  (Or so we thought.)

The paint is wet.  The pink paint in the dotter’s bedroom was much darker when wet.  Maybe greenish paint doesn’t behave the same way?  Maybe when it dries out, it’ll be darker, instead?

Because right now, it’s a pale celery color.

Celery?!?!  WAH!

(The above was written earlier.  OmegaDad, seeing my downcast face and hearing my, “Is that what it looks like??” said we should go get more paint…after all, everything is already masked off, and we can paint over.  So it looks like we’ll be getting an honest-to-goodness “sage” color after all.  The paint, much dryer now, is still looking like pale celery.  Or pistachio ice cream.  Not what I wanted at all!)

Spring has definitely sprung in Small Mountain University Town.  This weekend was the annual kite festival, so I took the dotter off to fly a kite.

There were stiltwalkers.  There was a kiddy carnival–complete with games such as “knock the bowling pins off the table with a ball”, and the classic “fishing game”, and the one where you toss beanbags through holes.

The weather was flawless, except for just one thing:  there was hardly any wind.  So those of us who had brought kites to fly were rather disappointed.

But first, there were bubble wands to wave through the air with a trail of lovely shimmering bubbles…there was food to be had…

While I was in line trying to get my $2.50 burrito (this took forever because the burrito seller’s microwave broke), who should we run into but One And Only True Love and his mother!  So OAOTL’s mom purchased him some shaved ice while I was waiting, and the dotter went to sit with him and share the shaved ice.

Then off to the kiddy carnival area, where first the two spent an inordinate amount of time in the bouncy houses (a first!  The dotter has refused to do bouncy houses until now!), and then it was time for mommy to camp out in the line for getting faces painted while the dotter and OAOTL went running like madmen through the grass, encountering yet more kids we all knew.  It’s one of the delights of living in a smallish city–go to an event and you will always run into people you know.

Finally, the dotter was able to get her face painted–this is supposedly a horse.  It looks more like a cat to me, but, hey, what do I know?  The dotter was delighted.

We wandered on to the grassy area where people were supposed to fly their kites.  But first we stopped at the “Geology for Kids” booth, where a splendid fellow was inviting children to smash rocks with hammers.  He obviously had stocked himself with a goodly supply of fossil-rich limestone, because every kid who smashed a rock got a performance of this gent eyeing the split pieces and finding shells and snails and–best of all, for kids!–crab poop!

Then it was time to wrestle the kites out of their bags, put them together, and try flying them.

Bah.

 We have a couple of lovely dragon kites, purchased from Sam’s, that do wonderfully when the wind is up.  Unfortunately, when the wind is not up, a great deal of running can get the kite up into the sky for a few moments, after which it takes an ungainly dive to the ground, narrowly missing other families out trying to fly their kites.

When we finally decided it was an exercise in futility, and frustrating to boot, the fair was winding down and it was time to go.  The dotter, hot and tired and thirsty, slumped and whined on the way back up the hill to where we had parked the car, and then fell fast asleep on the way home.

So.  I have a vivid sunburn, and the dotter still has remnants of her horsie face.  A good day.

Technorati: Spring, festivals

Yesterday, while I was off ferrying OmegaDotter to a birthday party–the very first birthday party she’s been to where the parent of the b-day girl told me, “Go.  She’s fine.  Go and have fun!”–OmegaDad was having a terrible time locating makings for an Easter basket.  He confided in me today that it was hard finding anything that wasn’t “party pack” size.

So, while I was worrying about the dotter–would she be okay there by herself?  Would it be okay that she only knew the birthday girl?  Would she drop the bowling ball on her foot?–OmegaDad was building the basket.  (You’ll be happy to know that the dotter did just fine, loved the kiddie bowling, ate pizza, cake, and soda pop, played games, and had a grand old time.)

And last night, while the girlchild and I slept, he made pawprints out of flour.

So after the basket was opened and shared, the dotter leaned up against me in the office and said, “That Easter Bunny sure is messy!  Why would he be messy like that?”  Then she thought a moment or two, and said, “He must have put some flour on his feet.  It looks like flour.”

Earlier, while she was digging through the basket, I turned away into the kitchen to grab some zippies for the spillage of jelly beans, malted milk balls, and chocolate eggs, thinking to myself, “One of these years, she’s going to wonder why the Easter Bunny only brings baskets for kids…”

When I returned to the living room, zippies in hand, she asked, “Daddy?  Why does the Easter Bunny only bring baskets to children?”

Um.  Aside from the eerie reading-my-mind trick, it looks like we have only a year or two more before the dotter corners us and asks us if we’re the Easter Bunny.  Much too sharp.

We still have eggs to color, and then…

Well.  It’s my birthday.

Woohoo!  Another year under my belt.

Unexpectedly, OmegaGranny emailed me yesterday to say that Great Grandma, who recently purchased her a fancy digicam because she has been in the mood to share her money while she’s alive so she can see how everyone enjoys it, has kept asking her what I want.  Mom gave me a price range of $500-$1000, and said, “What do you want?”

Whoa.  So I thought.  And today, I get to buy myself another laptop, a wireless router, and a wireless card, and we’ll be able to set up a home network, with the wireless card going into our old, old computer, which goes into the dotter’s room.  Eeek!  A computer for the dotter!  OMG.  I swoon, thinking of things like hideous internet predators and accidental clicks on links to porn pages. Looks like I’ll be figuring out how to limit her to places like Nikolodeon or Disney or Barbie. 

Technorati: Easter, birthday