Love Hotel

Little John

In a total Daddy coup, Paul has succeeded in teaching Betty to say "HuWhat!" Like in the Little John sketches by Dave Chapelle. She says it to her toys, to me, to daddy. There's nothing like getting up in the morning, wrestling a diaper onto her, wrestling her into some clothes, getting her downstairs:
"Do you want your bah (our word for bottle)?"
"HuWhat?!"
"Mommy's making you a bah."
"HuWhat?!"
"Okay, Mommy's getting a bah."
"HuWhat?!" (starts to cry and crawl into the kitchen after me)
"Your bah."
"Yeah. Yeah. (cries) MOM! DAaaaiii. HuWhat?!" (cries until the bah is ready and Mommy sits in the rocker and feeds her while we watch 'It's a Big Big World')

To recap: Betty's words are "Mom" meaning me and only used when things have gotten very serious. "Daaaiiii" meaning Daddy and used frequently. The first word she obviously understood the meaning of. She'd say it and look around for Paul. "Yeah" meaning usually yeah. "HuWhat" she has no idea what it means but it often makes Mom and Dai laugh. "D'Go" her version of "There you go" which Mom says all the time when giving her something or finishing dressing her or diapering her. She says it to Mom and Dai and to her stuffed animals. It's her version of "OK" or "All done". "Gooooo" means she's ready to go or finished with something.

We're off to see the Wizard

I love "The Wizard of Oz" movie. I love "The Wiz" movie. Love 'em.

When I was five I went many months refusing to reply to the name Jennifer, and would only turn when my mother gave up and said "Fine. Dorothy, you need to come inside now!" Imagine my betrayal when Fairuza Balk was cast as Dorothy in "Return to Oz" in 1985. Why not ME?!!! I quickly moved on to "Camelot" at that point.

I'm reading "The Wizard of Oz" the book for the first time. I think if I had read this book and loved it, I would hate the movie and all its iterations besides.

L. Frank Baum's intention in writing his children's books was that there would never be a point at which the child would be in serious danger or become seriously frightened. He hated it when dwarves, demons or witches showed up in fairy tales when he was little. I have to say he sounds like a particularly anxious child. I always found the evil ones terrifying but thrilling. I think of the Skexis in "The Dark Crystal" or the Wicked Witch in "The Wiz" in particular. Even the strange discomfort and worry I had about the Mummenshants. I actually saw them at a live show when I was a kid. Mummenshants weren't evil...or were they?

I think Frank Baum failed. But his attempt has made for incredibly uninteresting reading.

At least the type is big and the books are short.

What's that smell?

"We have to wash the sheets and stuff."

"Okay."

"They were funkadellic. Now they're funkadellic mixed with salmon/formula puke."

"Right."

"Ugh."

Schnee

I love snow. Love it a lot. I even don't mind driving in it. Once you get the trick of it, it's really no big deal. (note: your brakes are completely useless unless you are going 2 miles and hour or less.)

It's the light and the silence. I went outside last night and it was a meditation in an instant. No tricks to quiet the mind. No counting or breathing properly. Just instant and immediate silence and beauty. I realized I think of heaven as blanketed in snow. Silent and cool.

In other news, Betty is sick. She is sick in such a person-like way. Babies are sick in a sort of preternatural angelic way. They fuss and cry and then go alarmingly silent. Staring, pale with pink rimmed eyes.
Betty is just sick and feels like crap. She has a fever and while it isn't an alarmingly high fever (100.4) it won't go down. She lied around today, slept for four and a half hours this afternoon, won't drink anything. She just sat on my lap most of the afternoon and evening. She sucked her thumb, played vaguely with an old rattle she likes, and moaned "Uuuuuuuuuggghh. Aaaahhhhuuuuugggh." She'd turn around to be held to my shoulder and rocked a bit and then would sit down again to futz with her rattle and "Uuuuuuugh."
I have the rare experience as a mom of knowing EXACTLY how she's feeling.

Finally! A Cure!

I'm reading a book that's not that great really about death. Hmmm. Interesting you say. Well, like I said, it's not that great. However! She has one of the best footnotes I've seen in while about a book she read on Talmudic medicine:

"Here were detailed rabbinical opinions upon 'whether or not a cattle breeder whose animal caused damage by knocking something with its penis must make restitution"; upon the inadmissibility of cleansing the anus 'with the snout of a dog'; upon 'the misconduct in which a woman places into the vagina of another woman a piece of meat from a fallen animal'...and treatments for chronic uterine bleeding ('take three measures of Persian onions. boil them with wine, make her drink it and say to her, "Cease your discharge!")

Three things come to mind:
1) What manner of ...?
2) "Cease your discharge!" is like my most favorite thing to say right now.
3) I need to, have to, must must must read this book.

It's the New Math

There was a huge windstorm here in Western Washington last night and bunch of towns completely lost power. The reporter covering this on the local news says "Washington Public Utilities has stated that they have restored power to 2/3rds of all outages. That's 75% of all outages have been taken care of at this hour."

Hm.

In other news, I bought Betty this snack cup for her Kix with this top that looks kind of like a heart valve. The top keeps the snacks from spilling everywhere even if she turns it upside down. Well, she doesn't want to put her hand through the valve thingie, so she figured out she could pull up one of the leaflets of the valve and dump the cereal out onto the floor.

Awesome.

The Water Is Rising

I had no idea it had been so long since I last posted. Since I was last online Betty has had shots; we've been to Dorsey Illinois and had Betty baptized (yeah, shut up you); and we came back home on a train. I'd never been on a train before. It was pretty cool.

Paul's way of thinking is slowly infusing me with odd attacks of paranoia. There was a crazy christian lady on the train and I decided I had to humor her in case she decided I wasn't christian enough and she was compelled by god to take Betty away from me. She really wasn't that crazy, but I couldn't help thinking it.

So the Snohomish, Carbon, Puyallup, Skykomish, and a bunch of other rivers have burst their banks due to heavy rain and are flooding towns, sweeping away whole houses, cars and dogs.

Fortunately for us, the Duwamish remain unaffected as rain bursts into flames as it nears the river's surface and instantaneously transforms into evil thoughts. You can hear particularly large raindrops make a sort of spang as their molecular nature is pulled apart and recombined.

Death and Taxes and then Death

My brain is imploding. I ran out of insurance and then I ran out of money and then I applied to the Pfizer program to get my medicine and then they threw out my application, not because I didn't qualify, but because my doctor put a dash between her name and her medical license number.
Ugh.
I've been out of my medication for about a week and I feel like I'm walking through mud. Fortunately, I'm a danger to no one, not even myself, when I'm off it. I just want to die. Do nothing. Sleep for days. Check all the doors and windows in case someone is trying to get in and kill us all. For hours. Until five in the morning if my anxiety so decrees it. I cry because the weeds in the garden are too high. I cry because the Peoples Court is too intense and people are yelling.
Fortunately, Betty thinks this is hilarious. Mommy is making funny sounds! That's Awesome!. I'm going to poop again!
My saving grace is that Betty still likes napping. She takes a two hour nap in the middle of the day, which is also Mommy nap time.
Hooray for naps!

Love is a many splendored thing

I�ve been reading a book called �Love�s Apprentice�. It is (as the subtitle proclaims) a woman�s education in the art of love. What�s frustrating about books of this sort is that marriage is always some sort of disease that kills anything like love off with the scorching rapidity of MRSA sepsis.
I often feel like I�m missing something important about this. Like I�m swanning about my daily life happily, and then one day Paul is going to present me with a laundry list of things I�ve said, things I�ve done, inadequacies, horrors and meanness that I�m simply not tracking.
Once, I was dating someone (whom I should not have been dating at all, rebound and all that) who told me his therapist recommended that we stop seeing each other immediately. That I had been physically and emotionally abusive to him. I was astounded. I recalled nothing more than an intense discussion or two with him. Nothing that I would even consider and argument. When he laid out the facts to me, I remembered exactly the event that he was describing. I had sat on his lap, with my hands beneath his chin, which I tilted up, and looked him deeply in the eyes. What we had been talking about was his, as it turned out intractable, impotence. I was telling him that it was all right, that we could take things as slowly as he needed (Now! Dammit! Now! Fuck me Now!!!). It was intense, for sure. His therapist, so he told me anyway, had advised him that I was violating his physical boundaries by sitting on his lap and forcing him to look me in the eyes. I was violating his emotional boundaries by doing the same and forcing him to talk about his erectile dysfunction and humiliating him in the process.
Whuhuhuhuhut the Fuhuhuhuck?
We parted ways. For sure. I�m not going to be inflicting myself upon people and ruining whatever fragile sense of self they have. No thanks.
But maybe I just am by like living here with my baby and my husband. I got married at the excruciatingly old age of thirty two. At least by some standards. The woman in the book I just read was twenty seven. So here we are. No spring chickens.
I got married because I love Paul more than anyone or anything. I want him to be happy more than anyone or anything. (I�m sorry, I love you all and I wish the best for you, but seriously)
I�m not play-acting out some conversation with society or the world we live in, or my parents, or his parents, although I�ve had to have an extended conversation in action with people at work or at the store. �Let me see that ring! You�re a legitimate woman now! I never knew you were so conventional! What a cute baby! You need a bib to keep her from drooling!� I�ve just thought that I�ve finally found someone who I love and who loves me and who I am completely and deeply committed to sticking with for-like-ever.
I see the people I know who are getting or who have gotten married and I feel like they�re doing the same thing. If things get tough, we work them out. If things get too tough, we�ll get counseling and search ourselves tirelessly. If things get weird, we�ll ride them out. We talk. We get bored. We have sex, not often enough for either of us, but we have a baby and are tired, and know that it�s not enough for either of us. We are companions, and not like boring asexual companions but like ACTUAL companions, who accompany each other and enjoy each other�s company.
I don�t feel like I�ve given up love or happiness. I don�t feel like I�m waiting for the axe to fall because I never really wanted to engage in this institution in the first place. I think my sister did that. I remember her calling me to tell me she was cheating on her husband and never really believed in monogamy in the first place. She was twenty three when she married her first husband. Who believes in monogamy at twenty three, really?
So perhaps I should just say, Paul I love you. I think we and the others who we know now have started to redefine not only love as a long term sustainable happy fun thing, but we�re also redefining marriage. Marriage.
Marriage.
Marriage is awesome. And hot. And cool. And complicated. And I love it.

And I hope I�m not living in some dream. If Paul has a list I hope he�ll give it to me soon. Otherwise, I�m just going to be here all like loving him and Betty and being happy and crap.

God save the

Watching a show on restaurants a fellow said "We have served the Queen and Prime Minister of Canada."

I know what you're thinking: "There is no Queen of Canada!"

So I've decided to be the Queen of Canada. And in my capacity as figurehead I have to order that there shall be something the world has never known. Canadian Quisine.

A perfect Canadian dish consists of savory Calgary whole wheat flap jacks drenched in white Yukon Caribou sausage gravy. On the side is a darling bowl of Israeli couscous (the kind with those big bursting plump beads) soaked and then fried in Moose back bacon (a dish named after the most famous Candian Jew, as in "I'll take scrambled eggs and a side of Shatner."). For a desert we'll have a gooseberry tart with a thin layer of Saskatoon farm cheese whipped lightly with maple sugar on top, softening the tart flavor of the intractable gooseberry with a light fluffy yet rich creamy sweet topping. All of this served in minute servings with a tiny glazed flute of Molson reduction to dip anything in as you please.

Drip Drip Drop

I had a nightmare last night and it was well a nightmare.

I was myself and was being myself and I was at home and I was at the swimming pool and I was at the water park and I was diving and having fun and I was going home and being the Mom and everything was great and then my skin started to droop and then it would fall off in big drops when I was in water or near water. In the bath or at the toilet or in the pool. It would ball up like the stuff in a lava lamp and then dissolve. It hurt when the big drop of skin would pull off and I would have a little sore where it had detatched. I told my mom about it and she wanted me to go to the doctor and then my skin started to droop and stretch and it started to do the lava lamp thing even without water.
My mom decided it was because I was crazy and then there was a whole new dream about boats.
But honestly I've been dreaming HUGE about boats anyways. Cruise Liners. Ferries. Yachts. Dinghys. Speed Boats.
I'm sure if I wasn't hot in it sweaty and leaping salty and tugging twisty and baking it would all make quite good sense.
Right now I feel like a wet loaf of bread.

Unrelated!

On a completely unrelated note, I watched about a half hour of "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and here's the best line:

Josey Wales (to some hot chick he promptly makes out with): I hear in Kansas they got three types of suns: Sunshine, Sunflowers and Sons-a-bitches.

The Chronicles of Betty

I don't know if you've seen The Chronicles of Riddick, but if you haven't, well I can't say it's a valuable use of your time of anything but I saw the Director's Cut. Seriously. Apparently it's much better than the original, but honestly I haven't laughed that hard in a very very very very long time. There's a part where the surface of a cliff is being baked at like you know 3000 degrees Celsius and our hero dumps like two bottles of water on himself and swings to a cave opening across said rock face collapsing into it as his rope is incinerated and then he slowly...stands...up...STEAMING!!! AAAAAHHHHhahahahaha.

H. I. Larious.

In other news, Betty got her latest round of shots yesterday and she cried really hard but I didn't. There's a first time for everything. Betty got hurt and I didn't cry. I hope this is a development in the right direction. I mean you do want Mom to be like all cool in a crisis. It probably wouldn't be any good if she's like got a broken leg and I'm on the phone to 911 wailing and being all inarticulate.

"Yeah *sob* my daughter is like *sob* I dunno. *sob* She's so sweet and I love her and like then she just *sob* and she's like hurt and I dunno *sob* can you guys like come and help us or something *sob*"

Betty has her first cold. She's got it in her eyes as well so she has this little red nose and her eyes are all red and she looks like she's crying all the time because her eyes are all weepy. The killer is that she's all cranky and snotty and sleepy and bleary and she'll like look up and get this little smile on her face like "I love you Mom." It's one of those little things that makes me think I'm just going to die of love. My heart is just going to seize up and stop beating from the sheer magnitude of the love.

On a related note, in order to both increase my baby compassion and stop her from yanking out all my hairs, I have shaved my head.

As I shouted across the room to Paul while he was on the phone with his Lutheran Minister dad, "I look like a big ole Lesbian, George!"

GA Ga Ga GaaaaH!

So I'm in Georgia. Visiting my mom and everyone else in the frickin' world. Meaning that my grandmother is here. My sister and her husband and daughter and stepson are here. My dad and stepmom were here. My brother is here. My sister is coming with her boyfriend.

So how's the baby handling it? you ask. As if you didn't know.

Fucking. Hell.

Actually I'm being melodramatic because tonight she saved most of her fussing up for the right before bed and then there was a MELTDOWN. Like a serious China Syndrome MELTDOWN that occurred. There was acute radiation poisoning. People died. It was pretty awful.

It's the tears that kill me really. I know in my mind you know that nothing is happening to her. Nothing ACTUALLY bad you know. She's not in pain or sick or in danger. She's just mad. Like really really really reallyreallyreally mad. But just mad. And then I see those big giant tears rolling down her cheeks (yeah, lucky me I got one that actually produces tears)and I want to just rush out into the middle of the street and offer the next person who drives by my daughter. "Please take her. Take her. Because I'm pretty sure anyone would be a better parent than I am. I mean LOOK AT HER! TEARS!"

It's a feeling. You know. It passes. Whhheeeewwww.

My mom and I were alone in the kitchen and she said this:
"I wanted to let you know what a good mother you are. It's been really neat to see you transform like this. It's really amazing."

"Thanks. Well I love her. I love being her mom."

"I know you can tell."

Aaaawwww.

A little chat

Paul Gude: I just got back from a meeting!
jtothep716: hooray
jtothep716: bep* is happy and trying to roll over while watching Judge Judy
jtothep716: The people on right now are pretty spectacularly white trash which I think makes them look interesting to her
Paul Gude: She is observng the situation and judging it accordingly.
jtothep716: and she is wearing a pink and fuzzy dress
jtothep716: which is crucial to being able to make good decisions.

Amen.

*Note - Bep is our nickname for Betty. Etymology is as follows: Baby, Bay-py, Beppy, Bep. I am starting now to call her Bubby and Bub.