Chesed

When I was a little girl and started saying things that weren’t nice my mom said, “If you can’t think of something nice to say, just don’t say anything at all.”  Driving with my friend’s family one night, I realized I had it easy.  She started in on her twin brother and after a few pretty vicious remarks her dad said, “ok, Melanie, I want you to say three nice things for every mean thing you said.”  WHEW!

So, I’ve been quiet.  Because there just haven’t been many nice things to say around here.  And certainly not enough to come up with three for every not so nice thought.

Today is a nice day.  In fact, other then the fact that I am a whopping forty weeks pregnant, it’s been a really nice day.  So maybe I can at least find something to say as long as I don’t start in on the negatives and have to redeem them.

After too many cloudy, cool, rainy days, it is gloriously sunny with rich blue skies and a few puffy clouds.  That in itself lifts my mood about twenty notches.  (My body is solar-powered.)  Thank God I am not nine months pregnant in January.

It’s Saturday.  That means David Lee is at home.  I stayed in bed until almost ten with my depressed little self while he took care of Adam.  It would have been even better if I would have remained oblivious to the rather unhealthy breakfast they consumed. 

Since we couldn’t birth a baby, we birthed a flower bed.  There is something about plants that feels life-giving and hopeful.  Except that we only had one of the plants here.  But the ground is well-prepped and there are little flags stuck in the ground to mark what goes where as soon as we get them. 

Mostly today I continue trying to keep my brain on auto mode.  To not think about much of anything besides sterile thoughts such as “lift arm to complete next task.”  Which isn’t so difficult as you might think because by now my brain and body are both so wearily on overload it’s difficult to hold a normal conversation.  Adam and I both do well with things like Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and Rummicube right now.  Brainless work.  And then we get to laugh hysterically at things like going ice skating or getting into the cookie jar AGAIN.

Sigh.  But underneath it all there is a strong mental undercurrent that goes like this.  “Baby, baby, please come soon.  Mommys running out of room.”  And mommy is getting scared, too.  About certain logistics.  Baby?

Quote of the day:

Inside me lives a skinny woman crying to get out. But I can usually shut her up with cookies.   (Unknown)

Yesterday morning I hosted the young married ladies book study.  About an hour and a half before it was scheduled to start, Emily called to see if she could use my washer.  Poor girl has been pushing her limits almost over the edge of sanity trying to get her spring cleaning done between trips and family house cleanings and moving days and more trips.  It’s a terrible allergy year and Demetrius is miserable.  Read: unhappy baby.  She was on to lead the discussion, they’d had the youth there the night before, and Demetrius got up at 6 after not sleeping well with red, puffy, pussy eyes.  Durlin gave him a bottle and tucked him into bed with Emily where he proceeded to drink his bottle and then throw it up all over the bed, pillows, blankets, and his mommy.  Yummy.  Since I have a front loader, she wisely thought to bring them along as opposed to running to the laundromat. 

Last week I bought an enormous 96 load bottle of HE Tide thinking the more stuff I stock up on, the less I have to go shopping soon after the baby gets here.  I used it Monday and really liked having the dispenser kind again.  I’ve had trouble with the bottle flying off my washer before when I did too large a load of towels or jeans; but since I’ve sort of learned that things come out better if I don’t cram it to the gills and then use weights to stuff more stuff in, I thought it would be safe to leave it on the washer.  Plus, Mom always does that and has no trouble.  It worked beautifully Monday and I loved not having to reach up on the shelf for that heavy bottle every time I started the washer.

The rest of the ladies got here and we had a lovely time chatting, then discussing our chapter, and sitting around and talking some more.  Emily ran down to get the pillows out and put the blanket in; but when she came back up the steps she said (rather quietly  — BTW, how did everyone else in life learn not to scream except me?), “Michelle, can you come here?”  I followed her down the steps.  Um, the laundry smelled good.  I’d been using Gain for a one bottle scent switch and just love Tide so much better.  Oh.  I rounded the corner and as Emily was finishing explaining saw just what she was talking about. 

The washer threw the bottle off.  The cap broke.  3/4 of the Tide contents were now on the laundry room floor, under the washer, splattered on the walls and over the trash can.  Special.  Two rolls of paper towels and mop buckets of water later, the floor was cleaner then it’s been since David Lee laid it in January.  Meanwhile Jo and Julia were upstairs sweetly washing up all the snack dishes and getting the house cleaned up.  (I felt loved.) 

Would anyone like to guess what the next unnatural disaster will be at our house and how many days it will be until it happens?  This is the kind of stuff that happens to my mom.  Not to me.  Water.  Soap.  I’m thinking maybe the closet rods will fall down for some unknown reason on Monday.  All I can do is hope there will again be someone here to help me clean up.  Lucky me.

It seemed high time for some positive input in life.  Jo, Emily, Adam and I headed downtown for lunch at Cafe Europa.  Tomato-Basil soup.  Ahh.  The stuff dreams are made of.  We ordered our food and sat there silently (happens every time someone gets that soup.  No talk.  Just mmmm.  Another bite.  mmmmm.  Another bite.) slurping up one spoonful after another.  True comfort food.  Towards the end of our lunch I wondered aloud if they ever sell it by the quart to go.  I mean, this place is 45 minutes from my house.  I feel deprived.

The proprieter who was so nice to us the other time wasn’t in.  Or so I thought.  Then as we were leaving he appeared.  I chased after him as he headed behind the counter.

“I have a question for you,” I said.

“Sure,” he said, “I’m rich, young, and single.  What do you want?”  (Yeah, right.  He looks old enough to be my dad!)

We both laughed.  “The tomato basil soup,”  I said.  “I just go crazy over the stuff.  Do you ever sell it by the quart to go?”

He thought a little.  “I could give you some mix.  You’d have to freeze it……oh, baby,” he interrupted, gesturing towards my now even more hugely distended abdomen now that it was chock full of a Barcelona and soup.  “Boy or girl?”

“Boy.”

“Aww, we need more girls around here.”

“I know.  But we’ve got two boys now.  So the mix.  How much would you charge?”

“I”m not going to fight you,” he said.  Tell me the next time you’re going to be in here and I’ll have some ready for you.”

“Well,” I stalled.  “My baby is due in three weeks and I live 45 minutes away.  But all I can think is more tomato-basil soup.”

“Give me a minute.” and he disappeared through the back door again.

I walked to the front to join Emily and Jo not quite sure what to expect.  He reappeared in minutes with a HUGE container 3/4 full of awesome, awesome pesto, explained how to make it and told me to freeze what I don’t use right away.  He stuck it in a bag as he talked. 

“But what do I owe you?” I asked, wondering how in the world this stuff was going to get priced.

“Nothing,” he said.  “It’s for the baby, not for you.”

“But I’ll gladly pay you…”

He waved me off.  “Remember, it’s for the baby.  Not for you.  And see, I made another customer (looking at Jo).”  Anyone else want to join us next time?

Too bad xanga doesn’t let me upload scents.  Except you’d all be knocking down my door and I think I only have enough pesto to make soup for about 40 people.

Oh, and just for the record.  Three hours of sleep in one night is terribly insufficient. 

A million simple pleasures in April

ice cold water  

moments with friends                  

working outside with family                                                              

watching the trees turn green through my windows (even if it seems we have more rainy days then sunny)

watching Adam delight in life 

a picnic at the park with Beth and co.

“Playing chef” as Adam calls it, (known to boring grown-ups as “working in the kitchen.”)

To experience Spring is to experience Life

Really and truly, what next?  After the events of yesterday I was certainly looking forward to things going better today.  You know, you go to bed and the next morning things are just so different.  And after eight loads of laundry, cleaning the house, and putting six more meals in the freezer (can you tell my first baby didn’t rank very high on the most contented baby list the first two months), I was completely exhausted.

I woke up soon after three for that uterine induced bathroom trek and couldn’t go back to sleep because of contractions.  No, not the “good productive, wow this is here” kind.  The “annoying, bring you back when you’re just about to drift off to sleep” kind.  So I lay there in bed thinking a million thoughts not the least of which included huge grattitude that I’d slept at all after pulling something wrong in my shoulder yesterday during the escapade with Goldi.

Around 4:15 I heard a pop downstairs that didn’t sound like the normal sounds our house makes.  I woke David Lee who went to check it out while I lay in bed feeling really dumb for waking him.  You know, women hear everything and think every bad thing imaginable.  But then as he went down the steps I heard other sort of shuffling noises.  He calmly came back upstairs and asked me what we should use to clean water off the floor.

Water?  What water?  “The line to the ice maker burst and there’s water all over the kitchen floor,” he said.  He grabbed towels.  I decided it must not be too big a deal; but grabbed another armful and headed down after him just in case.  Water all over the floor.  No kidding.  I mean, you could have sloshed, not just slipped.  The towels barely touched it.  The pop I heard wasn’t the line popping, it was the floor shifting from the moisture.  And the shuffling wasn’t shuffling at all.  It was water hissing.

For the next 45 minutes we sopped water with the mop and towels, wrung them out, and did it again.  (Those mop buckets with the wringer thing on them are an awesome invention.)  I didn’t realize how bad it really was until we took the towels downstairs to the washer and saw water steadily dripping down into the basement.  Which means tearing insulation out of the ceiling tonight. 

About every ten minutes I keep thinking, “thank you, God.  thank you, God.  thank you, God.”  Because of a lot of things.  Like:

I was awake and heard the pop.  By the time David Lee would have come downstairs an hour later things would have been significantly worse.

The water didn’t go into the living room where it is carpeted.

The basement area below the kitchen is unfinished and so, unharmed except for the insulation.

With all Adam’s issues yesterday, I couldn’t be grateful enough that he was in bed and didn’t see the mess and disruption.

I have a trim carpenter husband who wisely took the toe kick off the island so we can dry it out underneath.

It happened at night when David Lee was home.  I would have despaired with that mess on my own.

It did NOT happen while we were at the hospital and gone for days.  I’ve always said I’d rather build then remodel and having to redo hardwood flooring and kitchen cabinets with a newborn would be enough to make me move out. 

The “last will and testament” of David Lee and Michelle were in an envelope on the floor by the door, not three feet away from the frig so that I would remember to take them to a safe deposit today.  Unharmed.  The island is heavy enough to have pulled the gallons of water that way instead of toward the door.

Only a few low places on the cabinets are already cracking from swelling.

By 5:15 I was laughing.  I mean, it’s just all so bizarre.  If anyone would have told me I’d sit down and drink coffee with David Lee at 5:30 this morning I would have scoffed.  I fell in love with him all over again this morning.  I love that he stays so calm in a crisis.  He just calmly and efficiently takes care of things.  None of this tear around, freak out about how the house is going to be ruined and the island is going to be ruined and we’ll have mildew in the house and iyiyiyiyiyi this and iyiyiyiyiyyiyiy that.  Not even with it happening on a morning when he has a deadline at work that had him at the office an hour early yesterday and supposedly again this morning.  He’s off to get fans from his family since we don’t have a portable one in the house.  And I am wondering if maybe, just maybe, we’ll get to have a good night of sleep tonight.

Today is the day for bizarre things. 

Adam, who normally refuses to cry even when he hurts himself, is crying over the silliest things.  Like the fact that I ate a bite of his lunch and heaven forbid, my bite included a bean instead of just rice and hamburger.  Or the fact that I moved the nightstand to the other side of the bed when I was cleaning our room so that David Lee and I can switch sides of the bed so that I will be closer to the baby.  If it ever comes.  Furthermore, he’s been asking for a nap all day.  What is up with that?  And now that I tucked him into bed I hear ridiculous thumping and bumping that can only mean one thing: “mommy, I just can’t sleep.”

Two of the chickens jumped the coop and Goldi ran off with one in her mouth.  I raced out the door screaming like a hyena sure she would kill it and then somehow manage to eat all the rest in the next three days.  Adam was screaming and crying in the house.  After a dozen spankings and every slight stick (at least, the ones close enough for me to grab while holding on to her collar for dear life) broken, she finally relinquished her grip.  The chicken was, by all appearances unharmed, just, well, quite slobbery.  Michelle no want to touch.  I dragged the huge dog down to the barn for the second time in three days (the first time so she wouldn’t get “praygnant” as Adam calls it), switched out her collar to the non-shocking kind and dragged her into her kennel.  The two chickens, well, let’s just hope they’re still around when David Lee gets home.  I’m just not up to chasing them, too. 

Dear God, can we please get done with today soon and start on tomorrow?

Boys and their toys

(no, I’m not bored.  I’m trying to distract myself.)

My son is four.  Apparently I am an atypical mom.  I haven’t once thought, “I can’t believe he’s four,” although I think I remember doing that at his first birthday. 

I love this age.  I loved three, too, for that matter.  Even though Adam did his terrible twos long before he turned two, there is something about three that is magically more grown up.  And four is just a step better.  At his annual well-child check-up Thursday his pediatrician was asking me about some of the concerns I’d mentioned last year.  I’d almost forgotten them.  “You know,” I said, “he’s just really a much more well-rounded kid anymore.”  And he really is.  Especially in the last few months he’s trying to do more grown-up things … like eating vegetables and emptying the dishwasher and getting himself dressed.  Now, if only he could learn to eat without making such a mess at the table (when does that happen?). 

We celebrated his birthday by inviting both our extended families for supper and the evening.  Hopefully someday Adam will appreciate how lucky he is to have his grandparents and all his cousins except Zachary close enough to do this sort of thing.  We girls grew up with no extended family less then eight hours away.  I never knew my grandparents in the same way Adam knows his.  And though we loved our families and had a lot of fun with them, I distinctly remember feeling very shy the first part of every encounter with my cousins.  Now, I love watching Adam race to see his cousins and yell, “HI!” in that, “I’m so glad to see you,” tone. 

Mom spent the whole day with us and we had a delightful, relaxing day … fixing food for the party, reading stories, playing truck, and talking.  I was so glad she was here.  It’s just so nice not to do that “stress out, fly around, am I going to get it all done” thing until you create a cranky little person and afterwards you wonder if you took more away from them then you gave. 

Monday night I gave Adam his first short hair-cut ever.  I’ve always loved his hair and could never bear to cut it down short.  He gets so hot and sweaty in the summer-time and somehow, this year I was ready.  Plus, with a new baby, I didn’t think I’d mind giving one less hair cut for awhile.  He was so excited about having “short hair.”  He looks completely different.  Poor Lawrence came flying the door for the party and tore around the corner saying, “A’am, A’am, A’am.”  He walked right past Adam without recognizing him.  Even when Adam came and talked to him, he still looked bewildered, checking out all the Beachy strangers in the living room and, a little quieter now, “A’am?”  Soon I heard him upstairs, “A’am, A’am, A’am?”  I felt so sorry for him.  But after playing together for awhile, he seemed to know it really was Adam, just a different version of him.

I haven’t missed his hair … yet.  He’s definitely cuter with long hair in that looking grown-up way of his.  But I love how his head feels when I kiss him and how endearingly “little boyish” (don’t tell him that!) he looks.  I get this nostalgic, innocent, “I’m still a little boy instead of a big man” feeling when I look at him.  Oddly enough, he’s declared himself to be “Adam” more instead of insisting he’s actually David Lee.  Probably in part because we keep asking where Adam went to.  He loves when people ask if his mom is babysitting!

 It’s history.  Funny how you think and plan and talk about an event for so long and suddenly, it’s over.  Darius and Ro had a beautiful wedding.  Vibrant colors.  Gorgeous music.  And superb food. 

And I had an incredible gift from God.  After all the “should I or shouldn’t I” mental debates, I decided to try it.   After a week with some good moments and some really rough moments, I was hoping I was prepared for the worst.  We left at 4 in the morning since that’s the most pain-free part of my day.  And would you believe, I travelled in relative comfort for the first seven hours.  I could not believe it.  All I could say was, “this is God.”  It was just such a gift to be able to be there.  Yesterday, well, that wasn’t so great.  Especially not the last half of it.  But at least we were coming home.  

Adam was an incredible traveller both ways.  Every time we go somewhere, I can’t believe how different it is to travel with a four year old as opposed to a baby.  He loves to watch the semis and listens to his Bible story CD’s over and over.  We stayed with John and Karen Hostetler.  I think they re-defined the word hospitality.  From the moment we stepped in the door dripping wet they were so gracious and accomodating.  “Our house is your house while you’re here” they kept saying and it was so obvious they meant it.  And then there were all the special things that went so far beyond what anyone would have to do.  Karen had a child’s size tent just right for Adam to sleep in.  And best of all, they had a little toy airplane, just the same size as the one Dan and Frieda have that he always remembers and won’t put down.  He played and played with it and Karen said it was fine for him to take it along to the wedding.  I was afraid we’d lose it; but I shouldn’t have worried.  He could barely lay it down for the ceremony and begged for it as soon as we were done for the reception.  Family pictures were supposedly at 10:30; but didn’t happen til 10 til 12 and what a lifesaver that airplane was. 

That night I got Adam ready for bed and sent him out to tell John and Karen goodnight and to thank them for letting us stay there.  When he went out, Karen gave him a brand new little airplane just the same size as theirs for him to keep.  I told him we’d open it in the car the next morning and he wanted to hold the box in bed.  We got in the car at 10 after 5 the next morning and he squinted around, “Mommy, can I have that airplane now.”  And for the next eight hours he barely put it down long enough to eat.  I didn’t even read one story the entire trip home.  I’d say he likes it!

And now, a “few” pictures for those of you who wanted to be there and couldn’t..

How is it that the same child who can accurately pronounce and use words like “position” as in, “well, I just need to position my trucks,” and “information” as in, “this is just a lot of information I need to read to the other people,” can have such trouble remembering simpler terms.

The other night it was raining and apparently something didn’t look right with the windshield wipers.  “Hey, mommy,” he said, “that’s crazy.  Those whimpers are just wagging.”

 (don’t you love his reflection?)

These days I don’t know what I’d do without Adam.  If laughter is the best medicine, he must be what’s keeping me off Prozac.