waking to the intestines of a dead mouse on the patio. the dogs ignore it, though once moby steps in it. all day it’s been there, drying out.

rosie was going down to watch a movie and came back up and got back on the computer. steve asked her why and she said that the projector’s broken. the $600 projector. wouldn’t you think i’d want to know? steve asked, but she’s already been absorbed. he goes down and turns it on no problem.

moby is suckling the blanket that steve threw in the trash bin yesterday because he keeps suckling it so hard he rips out the batting inside. i washed it last night and gave it back to him, so here he is at my feet.

we tried to go to church this morning but when i got up and tried to sing i felt too dizzy and kept trying anyway because the song was beautiful. then i had to sit down because i was too dizzy at a point when it’s just about a mortal sin to sit, but i’d been trying not to pass out for all three readings and steve was oblivious, on the other side of rosie. i flagged him, he helped me get some water, but i was turning green and feeling ready to vomit up the water so we left. i sat on the stone stoop outside the church, then i put my head to the cool stone, right where the homeless people often sit and do the same.

we visited a friend who is 74 years old, and we took rosie with us, who made roaring sounds or yawned or picked at her feet or stuck her hand down her pants to get some itch at her thigh repeatedly. when she was picking her toenails and i whispered to her that it wasn’t polite, she repeated it back to me in a question: really? it’s not polite?

i asked rosie to shuck the corn, desperate to get her off of the computer with its silly cartoon video game (the game that flashes through my mind each time she insists that she’s mature). she yelled from the front door with a question: could she give the dogs some corn? these random questions, my mouth always wants to say no, but i stop and ask myself what the harm might be. i ask her if she just means some corn kernels, since i suddenly picture the dogs barfing up husks. she says yes, so i say yes. she comes in with seven ears of corn instead of nine that i sent her out with. she had given up two ears to the dogs. she told me she would eat those for dinner, the half-eaten ones, and she did.

jack has woken us two sundays at 8:14. he says he doesn’t wake us up early now, and it’s true, for at least two years he woke us at sunday mornings at 8:00 exactly. he starts some monologue about chess and how he can’t believe i don’t know how to play it and i should really learn how to play it. fifteen minutes later he’s saying it again, and then at the breakfast table he’s saying it again. i find myself so often mumbling something i don’t mean with him, just to fill the space where a voice should go. really? i say. wow. that sounds crazy. i know. wow.

jack helps me make pancakes until i tell him that there is sour cream in them, and then out comes the food critic. he tastes the batter and tells me that it’s just awful. he tries to help me for another minute but then abandons his post.

i make pancakes and sausage, and jack eats half a pancake and two pieces of sausage and then says that he’s full. i ask him what it means to him that he’s full and he says that his stomach hurts. but then rosie offers up one of her pieces of sausage and he says no, so steve says yes, but on its way to steve’s hands jack says that he actually wants it. i mention that there’s another piece of sausage on his plate, and he says that he can’t eat that one, he’s full. (the pancakes were delicious.)

we are driving home from church and we all agree that it is a beautiful day. the air is this perfect temperature, and there’s a breeze and the world feels inviting. it’s a perfect day to go to see a movie, steve says, and rosie agrees. i ask them how they can be outside and love it and then agree to waste the day in the theatre, which sets steve off that i’m nature high-and-mighty and what do i have against movies. i tell him i’ve never seen the purpose of going into a theatre on a perfectly beautiful day, but this doesn’t answer his question. but we’re not spending anything in september besides for food, and so the next half-hour is devoted to thinking of ways to make $20 real quick — returning the bottles for dimes? could rosie have a lemonade stand? they ask jack to borrow $20 but he doesn’t have it.

no movie to watch, rosie gets a pillow and a quilt and lies on the kitchen counter, literally sprawled across the entire counter, her toes touching the sink, knocking over the pepper, listening to four episodes of ‘this american life’ all afternoon. i can’t decide if this is sanitary, though it’s definitely absurd. i get tired of saying no.

there is basil cut and fitted into a flower vase, centered on the dining room table.

i am trying to have a real adult bedroom, with a bed that’s made, no clothes on the ground. but the dogs keep jumping on the bed and making nests out of the comforter, pulling the made bed apart.

i haven’t been able to sleep because i’m too uncomfortable, my stomach seeming to pull against muscles attached to my spine. each night i look at the bed warily, you again, and stuff pillows around me anywhere that might help.

the cat is on the kitchen table because the placemat is black and she only sits on black things. i didn’t think of this when i bought the placemats.

rosie took a bath, but then, like last week, she brought two wet towels to her room and left them there. which means that when i go to take a shower, i don’t have a towel. we used to have a towel system where we each had a hook and we weren’t allowed to use a towel on another’s hook, and her hook was always empty, her towel in her room. but in this house we don’t have any room for hooks in the bathroom, so the towels hang sadly and unidentified on top of the shower curtain.

jack rode his bike last night and left it out in the driveway. rosie’s bike got run over at her mom’s house and now it’s broken. the bike before this one was stolen because she left it out at a friend’s house. i put jack’s bike away. there’s a bike helmet on a patio chair and a bike helmet on the kitchen counter. this is what happens with kids, but this is what happens with kids who are planted in moveable pots instead of planted in the ground.

we just ate dinner (corn on the cob and zucchini pancakes) but i’m hungry.

the cat is meowing at the porch door, waiting for me to let him in. he has a cat door. he does this nightly, waits for up to an hour, before he finally resigns himself to the cat door. sometimes he has to walk past the cat door to get to the door where i might let him in, but i don’t, i promise i (usually) don’t.

September 6th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

We’d spent too much money with our babymooning through June and July, so we declared August spend-money-on-nothing-but-food month. We understood that one exception to this rule would be the preparation of Rosie’s new bedroom. Other than that, we promised to be boring.

But we got the credit card bill today and we did a horrible job.

It turns out we spent almost $200 at Blockbuster this month. I don’t watch many movies, but we did have a 30 Rock bonanza for a week (that show isn’t so great), and Steve watches a good amount, considering we don’t have a television. And we ended up having to buy a $70 movie that we had rented in June and didn’t return on time, though we so badly didn’t want it even in our house that we just gave it back to the movie store. That expense category right there is the worst I have to report. It somehow seemed at the time that we weren’t spending money when we rented movies because we weren’t going out at night, but that’s delusional.

We spent $1,000 in the category marked “miscellaneous.” That’s depressing. It included $200 for a new ipod for Rosie because she lost the one Steve had given her in June (sigh) (the new ipod was an arrangement that went along with her swimming all the way around the lake, and Steve didn’t have the heart to make her wait until September to get her prize). It also included a $550 hospital bill from an ultrasound in June that insurance didn’t cover. The rest was mostly parking downtown and mailing out a few packages.

We spent $1,050 on groceries, which, to me, is okay, though to others it must sound awful. We hosted a few gatherings of friends and cooked for them, and we have at times four people (five if you include the baby in my belly) who need to eat. One of the eaters is a high schooler who has swim practice twice a day, one is an adult male, one is a snacky nine-year-old, and one is pregnant, so no one around here is eating for less than one. And this bill includes some items that others might get at Target, like toilet paper and aluminum foil,  plus prenatal vitamins that cost $3 a day, and other vitamins, and Steve’s wine, which I longingly watched him drink. And we shop at a local grocery store that provides us quality organic food, we don’t buy Lean Cuisine or anything, we prepare everything from nearly scratch, and part of buying local quality food is it’s going to cost more than Kroger.

But if that sound like a lot, then how did we total $500 in eating out? Most of this is from our morning walks, where Steve will buy an Americano and I’ll buy a hot chocolate or tea at the (expensive, organic, local) co-op (whoa those drinks add up). Some of it includes lunches we ate out alone, he at his office and I at my studio. There are two family pizza dinners in there, but no fancy dinners out or anything.

I spent $500 on the pets: about $200 on pet food, which averages $50 a week for four pets, which really isn’t bad for quality food — plus $300 on vet bills. Both dogs were due for their yearly shots, Joon got an ear infection that still hasn’t cleared, and we go to a vet who also practices Eastern Chinese medicine on our dogs, so that costs more.

We had to spend $750 on our car: the oil change was due, we guzzled gasoline by driving up north and to Pennsylvania and back, and with all that driving we waited and waited but finally had to get three new tires.

We ended up spending $850 on home improvement: $250 on tulilp bulbs (I think this was something Steve bought in July that didn’t process until August), and $600 on Rosie’s new room to make way for the baby (non-toxic wall paint, a shelf system for her closet, a new desk and a shelf, a lamp, and new pillows and bedding.

That didn’t include our mortgage, electric and water bill, the cell phone bill for three people, health insurance ($700 reluctant dollars a month), internet access, our student loans (between me and Steve, that’s $700 of student loans per month). Life is expensive like this. No one talks about money, no one gives numbers, but I am talking about it here because, one, I feel the need to confess our Blockbuster and to-go coffee sins, and, two, because I think it’s fair to show how expensive it can be to have a family, a home, and health.

Which brings us to September. We’ve decided to do a better job at spend-money-on-nothing-but-food in September. We’re not going to go to Blockbuster even once. We’re not going to eat out ever, and we’ll make coffee at home, and Steve’s cutting out alcohol. There are some things we have to buy in September and we’re allowing for those: plane tickets for a planned trip in October; to pay someone to sand the wood trim inside our house before Steve stains it (the wood needs to be stained or it risks water damage and warping); to pay for someone to fix the electricity in the laundry and storage rooms (the lights in there haven’t turned on for two months — I’ve literally been doing laundry in the dark [though this should not be compared with dooce's national laundry saga]); to pay for someone to deep-clean the wool rugs throughout our house (it’s been two years since we bought them, and you’re supposed to wash them at least once a year as part of their upkeep or else they’ll get ruined, apparently); gifts for Rosie’s birthday; and some big hospital bills that will be coming in from other emergency ultrasounds that insurance didn’t cover (that’s a whole other story). Here’s hoping we have enough for savings in October. Blah.

August 29th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

My brother gave me a book many months ago, Nature and the Human Soul, and I didn’t crack it until now. Partially that was because I was going through a phase where I needed fiction, and partially it’s because the title of the book made it something I couldn’t read in public. But the book is much smarter than the title belies. And in many ways it revives God to me in a way that I need to hear right now.

I’d say a year of wanting something badly, so badly, and having that want come from a place I couldn’t articulate, it just felt like a biological need, and then having to wrestle that something into my life in a painful, unintuitive way that by the way is banned by the Catholic church, that has been enough for one girl. All the while raising a teenager, who is chin-deep in a materialistic society and who half the time lives in a house that is wonderful but that has many different values than ours, and so watching her split more than most teenagers are. Raising a teenager, who by nature is questioning and defying and entering territory that sometimes conjures her darker side and sometimes turns her into a stranger to even herself, that right there is enough to experience.

Then those two together: wanting to believe I am meant to have a baby, then forcing it to be true, and then wanting to believe in the beauty of children, while also raising a teenager who is so done being innocent. When I’ve been thinking of having a baby these past five months, I’ve been very aware that what I’m having is a human being, a complicated person who will someday be a teenager.

But the book puts it all so beautifully. It believes in the necessity of all of us, and it puts the dark stage of adolescence in the greater scope of a purposeful life. The book posits that what we need is nature in order to be whole — in order to gather the wonder of this world as children, and to feel connected to so many mysteries as adolescents, and to connect to our creative purpose as adults. Yesterday, after reading the section of the book on the wonder of children, I felt truly excited about having a kid. It felt meaningful, and actually joyous, and like a powerful life lesson. I then spent the better part of the day researching elementary schools that could support this ideology — which is an absurd way to spend a day when the prospective student is negative-four months old. But that’s how excited I was; how much meaning and trust I felt again, finally.

August 27th, 2009 | Category: book, house | Leave a comment

We’ve begun moving Rosie to her new room, and two days ago I painted it a color she chose — a lavender-blue-gray. Seeing the color on my legs and hands, it looked like a bruise. Then going through each room of our house in my head, I realized that every color on every wall is the color of a bruise. Except for blood red accents. Closets that, when opened, are red like an open mouth; window trim like red-rimmed eyes. The skin of our walls is really skin.

August 20th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

We moved into our house three years ago, which is a ranch in a pretty normal neighborhood a fifteen-minutes’ walk from town. Two years ago Steve rototilled our front yard and turned it into a garden and a patio. Last year was the first year we really got to see the plants working with one another, and this year it really looks like a garden, with plants talking to one another, pushing up against one another. He’s mixed flowers with vegetables and fruits and trees, so it’s one big mess of color. He keeps asking permission to buy hundreds (and thousands) more dollars in bulbs and trees. It is where he always finds beauty.

We have pie pumpkins, giant pumpkins, lemon cucumbers, rhubarb, strawberries, raspberries, broccoli, tomatoes, basil, asparagus, carrots, blue potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets, and corn. In the pots on the patio we have bananas, lemons, and limes, as well as an avocado tree that probably won’t bear fruit. He’s also planted echinacea, gooseneck loosestrife, roses, crazy poppies, alium, tulips and more tulips, irises, and lilies. There’s so much other stuff I can’t name. In one of the pictures below, there’s basil lining the walkway to our front door. It smells so good to come home.

August 18th, 2009 | Category: house | Comments (1)

Walking into the dining room before I was pregnant did not cause the wine glasses to clink against one other. Walking into the dining room at one, two, three, and four months pregnant did not cause the wine glasses to clink against one other. Walking into the dining room at five months pregnant causes the wine glasses to clink against one other.

August 13th, 2009 | Category: house, the baby thing | Leave a comment

Isn’t everyone like this a little bit when they are little? There is nothing to control, you are learning the rules of right and wrong based on your house and then your school and inside yourself. And all that isn’t easy at all. Maybe it’s the hardest thing to be a kid. No say over even what’s for dinner or on which side to part my hair. Little ways, then: if I cross this street before the hand starts blinking, then I’ll get an A on my math test. If I hold my pencil like this and turn a doorknob like that, then the teacher will love me tomorrow. I will only eat this and only weigh this much. I will get grades that show I am in control.

Then maybe you leave for college, no longer under parental control, and you want to make decisions for yourself, and maybe some of them turn out badly and you feel a little scarred inside, wobbly. Your parents were right and you were wrong. And what good is intuition when it turns out like this. So you rebuild and rebuild, balancing what you knew with what you know, what you thought with what you think, or what you think you think.

Because I have learned to surrender so much: so as to make, to write, to parent, to love.

And then there’s a child born into a house full of all kinds of worldviews, every child is. Born into all kinds of histories and traumas, all our palimpsests of regret and enlightenment.

And with Rosie I have been given a situation where I have to surrender more control than probably any parent should. To not know where she is and to trust that the other house does, and to learn later that they didn’t; to not know what she’s doing and to trust that she’s doing okay, and to learn later that she isn’t. It isn’t good for my digestion, for my heart, for my ability to trust. But also it is.

My friend has the opposite situation: she’s raising her son alone. Every piece of food that enters his mouth is food that she bought and prepared for him. His allergies are severe enough that she watches him with a magnifying glass — if he laughs too hard he’ll get asthma; if I eat a peanut and kiss his cheek he’ll swell up. Don’t run too fast, don’t fall, don’t swim that deep, don’t eat this, don’t wear that. He bikes to the stop sign and stops — she knows that he will, her heart doesn’t hit her throat like mine does — I don’t know that Rosie will stop. I don’t even know where she left her bike — it transitioned with her to her mother’s house — and she doesn’t know where her helmet is, and she was surprised to find her bike lock in a bag she didn’t remember she had used.

Yesterday in the ultrasound, the baby wasn’t turned to give us its profile or a clear view of its heart. They took other measurements and waited for the baby to turn. They pushed against my stomach to try to wake it. My stomach growled; the baby moved its arms but didn’t turn. I thought turning thoughts. I talked to the baby silently. I jiggled from side to side. There’s nothing I can do, is there? I asked. The sonagrapher said no. They ended up making me pee to lower the uterus, which sometimes turns it, and it finally worked. The baby is connected to me, it’s in my body, part of my body, but already I can’t even control which ways it’s facing. It’s already its own person, and I have so much to learn.

July 30th, 2009 | Category: house, the baby thing | Leave a comment

I can’t imagine growing a human in the winter. These days I can’t keep up with the fruit and vegetables (help me with the squash).

July 30th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

July 13th, 2009 | Category: happening, house | Leave a comment