Whew!

So, it's May.

Summer is sneaking up on me again. And, as of today, my beautiful little girl has only one month left to be three years old! I have not planned a party. I have not planned a gift. I have neither designed nor started work on this year's birthday shirt. We haven't decided what we're going to do this year - usually on the day of, we take her out for breakfast (pancakes) and a day of fun. She's much better in the car now, so we have been thinking about daytripping out to one of the NC aquariums.

Piper and I spent most of her spring break with friends in Nashville. It's about a 7-hour drive, and she did very well. On the way there, she was a bit squirrely for the last hour, but here's the thing: she didn't sleep during the drive. At all. So I am perfectly willing to give her a hour of boredom and seat-kicking. We went to visit some friends who moved in the fall, friends who have a little boy about a year younger than Piper. The two kids were buddies before the move, and picked up right where they left off. There were a few squabbles over toys and cranky hours after missed naps, but on the whole they did very well together.

For my part, I tried to be as good a houseguest as possible. My friend has only made a few new friends since moving, and I know only too well how lonely it can be when you're alone with a kid all day in a strange place. So we talked. And talked. And talked. We played with the kids, she took me out to see the hipster district of Nashville (where we went shopping for vintage books and vintage clothes, eee!), we ate some kick-ass food from Cafe Rakka, and we talked some more. It was so nice to have company all day long, and her son is such a sweet little guy that I didn't have to worry about him whacking Piper over the head with things, or playing games involving guns and killing. Piper's sharing skills were not always up to par, and that is something we need to work on, but I think both kids had fun. She is already asking when we're going to visit again.

She's out of school in a few weeks, and after her birthday we will probably go visit relatives in Michigan for a while. We have to be back before the end of June because I've signed her up for some dance lessons this summer, which I am pretty excited about.

I am also excited about my almost-finished knitting projects. I am thisclose to finishing the dress I'd planned for Easter - only a week late, that's basically "on time" for me - and most of the way done on her sweater as well. The sweater was supposed to be a surprise, but she came out into the living room one night long after she was supposed to be asleep, saw me knitting away on it and asked "Mom! Is that for ME?" So much for the surprise. But she loves it anyway, and keeps asking if it's done yet. Soon, kiddo...I hope.

Student Ghetto Revisited

This was the neighborhood we lived in while we were in college in Kalamazoo, MI. Street after street of ramshackle Victorians, hacked up into teeny apartments, with umpteen mailboxes on the front of each one and couches on porches and cars always overflowing the driveways. It was a great neighborhood, despite the noise and general college-student dumbassery. It's still my favorite place we've ever lived.

In November, I took Piper there, to see some friends and poke around town. We spent two nights at the apartment my adorable sister shares with her adorable boyfriend. They live smack in the middle of the student ghetto, so I was more than pleased to be within walking distance of all the stuff I wanted to re-visit.

Piper and I went to the park on Davis St., and we walked past the apartment where I lived when I met Ryan. I told her about our life there, and about my life before I met her dad. I showed her all the places I'd lived on Vine Street, the mere mention of which is synonymous with student-ghetto living to Kalamazoo dwellers.

When I lived there, I couldn't imagine living the life I have now. And now? I can barely remember the person I was then.

NOT on Vacation.

Mmm, yes, about my recent slowdown in posting...my in-laws were here.

It was not a horrible visit, but sort of stressful, as always. My MIL is just so intense about things, particularly pertaining to Piper, it's sort of exhausting to be the referee between her and my daughter. MIL did much better this time at just hanging out and playing with her, and since Piper is old enough to say flat-out "Hey, let's go play puzzles" or "No, Granny, I don't want to paint right now," it goes much better than it has in the past. Usually MIL would show up with an agenda of stuff to do, and when Piper did not want to read this book at this time and then sit quietly on the couch listening to Granny's stories and then go fingerpaint before having a snack...well, MIL would be upset, and mad, and in a roundabout way, accuse us of influencing Piper to not like her. This time they pretty much hung around the house (and especially the playroom), with Piper choosing activities. MIL was sort of crazy about some things, like picking up every toy as soon as it hit the floor (look, I did just get the whole house neatened up and organized, but insisting on 100% organization/clean 100% of the time is just going to wear you out) or totally freaking out when Piper drank some of her bathwater.

Of course, the entire week before they came, I was involved in a grueling endurance test of cleaning and organization. We still hadn't recovered from the room-swap Ryan did while I was gone in November; nothing had quite gotten to its final resting place, resulting in a lot of chaos. So I put it all to rights. My husband, despite his assurances that he would "take care of it" and "pull his weight," either took extra shifts at work, played video games, or stood around waiting for me to hand him a list of things to do. But I persevered, and now there is only a single closet left un-organized. One closet in my entire house in need of attention. That's all that's left.

I also left him in charge of planning meals and activities this time, since I was tired of doing it. Every time they come, he takes a "Stop stressing out, it's fine!" attitude before they get here, and I'm the one frantic with cleaning and shopping and cooking and planning. Over and over he told me not to worry, he'd take care of it, I didn't have to do anything. So I didn't. His planning went something like this:

"What are you doing?"
"I'm making a list of stuff to do, days they'll be here and what restaurant to go to and things we can do that day."
"Ummm...you know Zack's isn't open on the weekends, right?"
"Oh, really? Huh." He scratched something out.
"Sunday is still the weekend."
"Oh. Right" Another cross-out.
"And they close at 6:30, so we can't go the day they get here, either."
"Oh." Scratch scratch scratch.

That is as far as his list ever got. Consequently, I found myself defrosting chicken in the microwave, reminding him that it was 12:30 and he should probably make a plan for lunch soon, suggesting restaurants when we were out, and, because his mom found a recipe in one of my books she wanted to have, buying $60 worth of groceries on Monday evening. My husband just basically asked me "So, what's for dinner?" and suggested frozen pizza every single time I told him that dinner was his problem. I then had to explain why he would serve frozen pizza to houseguests over my dead body.

He also failed to plan for the entertainment, and boy howdy do they like to be entertained. When not playing with Piper, they were constantly looking through our DVD collection, with FIL pooh-pooing pretty much everything because he refuses to watch any movie more than once. Not kidding. Then of course they insisted they couldn't learn to work our DVD player, even though all you do is press "open" and put the disc in, so someone had to be there to switch movies for them because they could not allow even twenty minutes of everyone hanging out and quietly doing their own thing.

I had suggested a couple activities to Ryan before they came, which he ignored or forgot about or which got pushed aside because they don't like to walk very much and, on Tuesday at least, FIL's main priority seemed to be getting someone to take him to the BMW dealership 35 minutes away so he could buy a t-shirt.

It wasn't even like we had lots of free babysitting time, because we don't let them babysit. They are not comfortable enough around Piper, neither one of them can get around as well as she can, and they drink too much for me to feel good about leaving them alone with her. We relented and went to hang out with some friends for a few hours on the last day of their visit, but we had to hurry home to finish the afore-mentioned recipe that MIL insisted on having. I tried to get her to pick something that didn't take six-plus hours to make, but she was quite insistent. She was also quite insistent that we have Merlot with the dinner, because Heaven forbid they eat a meal without alcohol.

A tiny, not very nice part of me is grudging about paying for dinner when we go out with them, because they cannot eat without a minimum of two beers apiece, and while they drink crap (Natural Light, Bud Light, Milwaukee's Best, and this horrible concoction) at home, in a restaurant they tend toward the $3-$6 a glass stuff, and their liquor tab often ends up costing as much as Ryan and I usually spend on an entire meal. Also, we ride in their car a lot, and although I know FIL's tolerance is pretty high, it makes me extremely uncomfortable to put my family in a car driven by a man in his 60's who has just had three glasses of microbrew.

They are nice enough, and polite enough, but they were here for five days and stayed with us the entire time, and it was just a bit much. MIL made me nuts either trying to pick up everything as soon as it hit the floor, or piling her stuff on my dining table (and in my fruit bowl). She kept circling the house picking things up and piling them on the table, the counters, wherever. She helpfully put away the stuff in the dishwasher one day, but a lot of it went in the wrong cupboards and the rest she left piled on the counter, so it was not that big a help.

Piper had fun playing with her grandparents, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a small relief to wave good-bye. Unlike when my parents, visit, however, it only took me a couple hours to put the house back to normal, which was nice. For some reason, when my parents visit, they completely destroy our house and it takes weeks to clean afterward. Something to look forward to, I guess, since my family is coming for a visit next month.

Isolationist Tendencies

I hadn't realized, until we were traveling in Michigan, out of our little bubble of home/park/mall play area/Ikea how much we've shielded Piper from most popular culture. It wasn't (entirely) deliberate; we only have network TV (and used to have HBO, but my $@$(@*%^*^ feelings about Time-Warner are irrelevant to the topic). We rarely actively expose her to the things that are considered "kid stuff" in American culture - no jangly just-for-kids music, no 23-minute commercials for toys cartoons on broadcast-TV. I, for the most part, can't stand that stuff, and she doesn't seem to miss it. I actively dislike almost everything Disney has put out in the last 15 years and I really disagree with the values their animated features present, so we avoid those too. I'm too dweeby to keep up with whatever the hipsters' kids are listening to this week, so we just skip it all.

She knows a few of them, of course; short of cutting ourselves off from the outside world altogether it's hard to keep them out. She knows who Strawberry Shortcake is, thanks to a box of my old toys. She loves the dancing monsters of Yo Gabba Gabba, the British dog Kipper, and her best friend is an 18-inch fully-jointed Spider-man action figure from a thrift store. All of this is stuff she figured out on her own, from watching or listening. We try to keep the rest of it away from her attention, because we feel that there's no reason for her to know the name of every single cartoon character out there (and because she can't ask for what she doesn't know about).

When we are out somewhere and she sees one of the many, many licensed-cartoon characters on some piece of plastic crap from China, sometimes she'll take particular notice, but it's only in a general way. She doesn't know the word "princess" (she calls them "costumes"), let alone the name of each and every specific Disney one. My MIL tried for a long time -and still occasionally does- to refer to Piper as "our little princess, what a princess, she's such a pretty pretty princess" and I nipped that shit in the bud. Every time my MIL said it, I got queasy with visions of frilly pinkness and incessant demands for toys.

Piper has her own names for the things she sees, and we are happy to let her keep using her imagination on them. She calls Elmo "that red monster," Barney is "big purple dinosaur" and she thinks Dora is Strawberry Shortcake (except she says "Straaabery Portcake and it's so cute I want to punch myself).

Which is why I felt uncomfortable A LOT when we were hanging out with people who would correct her words for things, would say "No, that's Dora" or "that's not just a monster, that's Elmo" in a store. If she asked "who's that?" or "what's that?" about something instead of asking her back "Who do you think it is?" or "I don't know, what IS that?" like we do, they'd say, "Oh, that's Dora and here's Diego and here's 17 other characters from some cartoon..." or "That's a princess costume, princesses wear pink sparkly dresses and tiaras and look really pretty..." I cringed a little and wondered if she'd soon be asking for every toy Nickelodeon currently licenses. My dad let her watch an hour of Wonder Pets and the very next time we walked into a store, she started pointing at the toys and asking for the toys by name.

More than that, it saddended me. When she pointed at Sponge Bob and said "Hey, look at that weird yellow monster guy!" and she got "No, that's Sponge Bob Square pants, and he lives in a pineapple, and here let me sing his theme song for you..." back from the adult she was talking to, I almost cried. I wanted to hear her thoughts on "the weird yellow monster guy." I wanted to hear what she had to say. And now it was gone, lost because someone felt the need to correct her imagination.

I know I can't keep this up forever. I am certain, when she gets to pre-school or kindergarten or playgroup or whatever, that some other little girl will give her a strict crash-course in The Ways Of All Things Princess, but for now I am pleased that she prefers the toys others have made for her and wooden blocks to tv-based toys with flashing lights and noises. She likes monsters and coloring and loves the giant bin of our old Duplo Lego pieces my mom brought down from Michigan. She likes dolls, but I don't call her "little Mommy" or assume that it's something coded into her cells because she's female. She likes to carry dolls and stuffed animals around, take all their clothes off, and give them drinks from her cups. She gives her babies a bath by holding them down in a bucket of water. I'm not ready to assume she's a nurturing soul just yet.

I am also certain that whatever little child gives her The Princess Lecture will also educate Piper about activities are "for girls" and "for boys." No matter how much we fight it at home, I'm sure what other kids think she should be doing will seem more important to her. So just as my heart fills with joy to see her playing equally with trucks, dinosaurs, dolls, and blocks, I've started to feel a sort of pre-sadness for the day when this innocence slips away. I know that one day soon I will bring out her dinosaurs and trains, and she will look at me and say scornfully, "Mom, those are for boys. I can't play with those. Now, where's my princess dress?"

Home, home on the range - er, subdivision

I am home again, grateful for some nice time spent with my family but really, really glad to be back in our quiet little house. We actually got back really early last Tuesday morning (like 2:00 am early), but then my mom was here all week so computer time was almost impossible to come by.

Because of the trip, I did NOT meet my goal of 30 posts in 30 days for November. I did pretty well until that last week and then it all went out the window. Oh, well, I tried, right?

I am still playing catch-up, a week later. While we were gone, my very nice husband took three of our more troublesome felines and got them shots, then took them to a no-kill shelter. He then had our carpets professionally cleaned, and moved our daughter's stuff from the den (which had been her bedroom because it was the biggest room with a closet) to the two back bedrooms. So now, instead of a giant room full of her stuff, a computer/guest room, and a room full of cat boxes and assorted junk, we have a playroom, a toddler bedroom, and a office/guest room.

He did not, however, balance the checkbook, pay bills, sort the mail, or attend to any of the other regular household-upkeep stuff that I do. My mom was here, and she played with Piper a lot, but somehow this did not translate into free time for me. I find that this happens a lot with my family. I spent three weeks at my parents' house, where there were plenty of people to play with my daughter and keep her occupied. Somehow, despite a roster of adult playmates, I did not complete a single one of the three knitting projects I brought with me (or the four that I added while I was there). I barely got to sit in front of a computer or check my e-mail on my phone. I didn't cook half as much stuff as I had planned.

Not only did I not get to the cooking and crafting that should've come with some kid-free time, I barely took any pictures, didn't get to visit everyone on my list, and didn't even make my requisite Michigan-visit trip to Belle Isle. There just wasn't time to do it all.

I do not know why this happens. It just doesn't add up, and I can't figure it out. I suspect that it has something to do with my mom, for the same reasons that it takes three hours to leave the house when she is with us and we never manage to get anywhere on time, or the mysterious force-field surrounding her which somehow means I never get one usable photo of Piper when she is in the room. There is some sort of warp in the time-space continuum surrounding her, and it throws a big monkey wrench into all my plans.

Piper, however, had a blast playing with her grandparents, aunt, and uncle. So far she seems to be re-adjusting fairly well. I thought she might freak out when we came back and all her stuff was moved around, but really she's quite pleased with the bedroom + playroom arrangement. It doesn't seem to have helped her sleep any better, but hey, I can hope, right?

Rootless

It's so odd to come back and visit a place where I once lived. I told my husband once that as much as I love seeing all our old friends, I find it difficult and a little unnerving to come back and hang around Kalamazoo.

"When I'm here, I like to see everyone and hang out and go to all our old favorite spots...but then I want to go down the street and home to my bed and curl up under a blanket and wake up in our little apartment and walk across the back yard to go get fresh bagels for breakfast. But I can't do any of that, because it's not our apartment anymore, and we got rid of that blanket two moves ago, and tonight we're going to be crashing on someone's sofa bed because we don't live here anymore. We're in this place that is so familiar, this town we once loved and called home, but we have nowhere to go. It makes me feel so rootless and unconnected, like I could just fly off the spinning planet."

He laughed and called me silly, until a few years ago when we came back for a wintertime visit and found ourselves driving down our old street in the dark a few weeks before Christmas, looking at all the ramshackle Victorian houses with their crooked strings of lights. There was a light on in the apartment that we had once lived in and loved so well, and we knew the radiators would be gurgling away, making the place toasty warm.

"Okay, you're right," he said as we slowly cruised past our old building. "I want to just pull into our driveway and go home, but I can't. It feels like I ought to be able to just park in our old spot and go right upstairs. But I can't. Our stuff isn't there; it's 3,000 miles away, in California. That sad little fake tree you used to put up isn't up there, or those pine candles you got that smelled like toilet cleaner. Our super-comfy bed with the sad old comforter isn't there, either, even though my body wants to go upstairs and tumble into it. Even though I almost just pulled into the driveway out of habit, we don't live here anymore. It still feels like home here but it's not home. Oh, I don't like this at all."

But there's nothing to be done about it, is there? I'd love to win the lottery and buy our old apartment building and turn it back into the gorgeous pre-war duplex it once was. I'd love to live in our old neighborhood, close to our friends and right in the middle of a vibrant and diverse community. But those things wouldn't change us back into the people we were then, or give us back the life we used to have here. We're different, the town is different, some of our friends have moved away and those that remain also have very different lives from what used to be.

I know all this, but every time I'm here I am filled with longing, because I think it is the last place that truly felt like home.

LOUD.

This was originally written after I got back from our last visit to my parents' house. I thought I'd dust it off and actually post it, since I am in the thick of Loudsville again.

May 1, 2009:

Piper and I spent two weeks in Michigan, staying at my parents' house. It was two weeks of pretty much constant traveling and bustle, as we careened around trying to see everyone and do everything. I think I managed to hit everything on my list, squeezing in a few hours at Belle Isle on Monday. I was glad I got to go, since a trip out there with my swanky D60 was at the top of my to-do list. I LOVE it there. Practically everything is old and abandoned and crumbling and beautiful. I got a lot of shots of the abandoned zoo this time. I did not get to stop at all the spots I wanted to, since my mom and Piper were with me. It was nice to have my mom along to distract the kid, but she was ready to go after about 45 minutes. My mom, that is, not Piper. Piper was cool with it all, she would've happily played on the giant playground, splashed in puddles, and chased geese until she dropped in her tracks.

It was nice to be around people again, to have friends to hang out with and playmates for Piper. It was also nice to come back to our little house. I needed some peace and quiet because I always feel like my parents' house is so LOUD. The TV is always on and the volume is cranked up. Everyone is always talking, and instead of turning the TV down they all talk over it. And then over each other. The phone rings constantly, and since they got Caller ID a few years ago they refuse to answer the phone most of the time, they just stare at the display and ask each other "Do you know that number?" "No, do you?" "It's a telemarketer." "Well, I'm not going to answer that!" "I'm not either!" while the phone rings and rings and rings.

My mother's younger brother calls at least three times a day. Her work calls at 5:00 almost every morning, and then again at 6:00 to ask if she's really, really sure she doesn't want to come in today (she's an on-call nurse and picks her own days). The phone ringers are all cranked up to maximum volume because my mom says she can't hear it ring when she is outside gardening. Never mind they've just had six months of snow and she told me that since she had no time for gardening last summer, this year she's going to let it all go. Apparently doing absolutely nothing but watching the snow fall or the flowers grow in her back yard still requires a ringer volume of 11.

Her cell phone plays an irritating, hokey country song - also at maximum volume - whenever she gets a text message, which is about every 20 minutes since several of her siblings got cell phones this past year. She learned how to download songs and ring tones onto it, which play at ear-splitting levels whenever anyone calls. Her computer speakers are turned up to max, too, and she is constantly playing YouTube videos of my cousins' Christian band or those crazy animated "You're a great friend!" forwards with the tinny music.

Their next-door neighbor has a machine shop in his garage and mechanical noises issue from it until the wee hours. While we were there, not only was he running loud machines, he pulled up a semi truck with what appeared to be a portable Army barracks attached to it - camouflage and all - and started cleaning out his house. They recently sold it, but somehow get the keep the garage (with noisy machine shop intact).

When the phone isn't ringing, my mom is talking to one of her siblings or her mother or numerous friends, re-telling the same stories (mostly about how much she hates her job) over and over. Loudly, of course, bellowing into the receiver over the sound of the TV, the computer, the stereo, and ten people talking.

My brother comes over and puts on music and cranks the volume up; he shows my dad stuff on the computer, video clips that I can hear when I am upstairs at the opposite end of the house. My sister comes home and watches Food Network, turning the volume steadily upward to try and drown out the rest of the house. Which, of course, makes everyone get louder.

And whenever I say anything, they all act like it's my problem. In the car, my brother put a CD in and immediately turned the volume up to 35 before it even played. Piper and I were in the back seat and nearly got blasted out the window.

"Hey, can you turn that down?" I asked. "It's really loud back here."
"I can barely hear it up here," he said.
"Well, turn the fade all the way to the front, then. We're getting blasted." I showed him where the appropriate knob was, but it didn't make much difference so I asked him again to turn it down.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with it. The fade is all the way to the front now and I can barely hear it up here!"
"And I am telling you that it is too loud. It is too loud for me. It is too loud for Piper-"
"-look at her, she doesn't seem to mind. Your ears are just too sensitive. You have a problem."
"I am her parent, and I think the music is too loud to be good for her hearing."
"Loud music is awesome, I don't know what your problem is. Why are you teaching her to be an old fogey? Turn it down! Psh!"
"Listen," I said, "you claim you can't hear it up there. But you started talking louder when it came on. So at least some part of your body acknowledged that it was beyond normal conversational level. The volume control is at 35 right now, that is more than loud enough."
He made some crack about me being an "old fart" and turned the music off entirely, saying again that I had some kind of ear problem.

This exchange is pretty typical of my family. It's not me, it's you; it's not my fault; I didn't do it; you're the one with the problem, not me.

I was upstairs putting Piper to bed when and I heard the TV blaring from the living room downstairs. Upstairs and across the house, I could still hear every word of the annoying car commercial. I went downstairs and asked my mom why the TV was so loud.

"What?" She said. "It's not loud. I don't think it's loud. I mean, I didn't turn it up. It was just that way. The commercial came on and it was loud. But I didn't set the volume control. I didn't do it. I didn't make it loud. It wasn't me."
"So you couldn't, say, turn it down?" I picked up the remote and turned the volume down.
"Well, I didn't turn the TV on. It wasn't me, I didn't make it loud. I didn't know, maybe somebody wanted it that way or something. But I didn't make it loud, it's not my fault. It was the commercial that was loud."
"Yeah, but it didn't occur to you to maybe turn it down when it got loud?"
"Well, I didn't turn the TV on. It wasn't me. And anyway, I don't think it's that loud."
I sighed. "I could hear it all the way upstairs. I was trying to get Piper to sleep and it woke her up."
"Well, I don't know. It's not my fault. I didn't do it."

This is the way they all react whenever I say anything about the TV being loud. It's the commercials, they're loud, it's not my fault you can hear it from the end of the driveway. I can't do anything about it, the commercials are just so loud. Then they have discussions and complain about how loud commercials are these days. It never occurs to anyone at any point during these discussions to turn it down when a program goes to commercial.

NaNoBlo...whatever

Isn't this the month where people try to post on their blogs every day?

I think I am accidentally doing that. Sort of. I missed a day. But since this is entry #2 today, does that count? I can take an average at the end of the month, right?

My husband took Piper out today for some one-on-one time, since Piper and I are going to be gone for a few weeks starting Saturday. This leaves me with a blissful block of uninterrupted writing/crafting/working/cleaning time.

I am finishing up some Pay-It-Forward swap packages, hoping to have them out before I leave. If you're still waiting for yours, I'm sorry about my slowness, but I promise to make up for it. Honest. You'll see.

I am also sorting through about 4GB of pictures, cleaning the kitchen, working on a short story, scheduling blog posts, and combing through the wall of unread stuff in my RSS reader. How's that for multi-tasking?

And all of this just to avoid packing.

Procrastinating.

Last week, I decided to go to Michigan for a visit. The cheapest tickets were, weirdly enough, for a Saturday less than two weeks away. Which meant that I had about 9 days to prepare for a nearly-month-long stint away from the house.

Because I am a masochist, I clicked "buy."

And promptly spent the entire next day re-organizing my yarn and updating my Ravelry queue. I did not pack, or clean, or do laundry, or any of the other things I should've been doing. I did take care of some book-keeping stuff, but that was mostly because I was already online.

I have also decided that before I go, I will finish two of my three remaining Pay-It-Forward swap packages, do a bunch of blogging, and re-arrange my bedroom.

We leave on Saturday - this Saturday - and I haven't started packing yet. I don't even know where three-fourths of the stuff I want to take is.

Procrastination is really an art, as far as I'm concerned.

Readjustment.

Oy, today was rough.

We had company the entire week of Spring Break, and then a two-week stay in Michigan, which means Piper has had grown-ups paying attention to her, playing with her, and generally catering to her every whim for three straight weeks. I was worried about how she would do when we got home and went back to our days alone. Today wasn't as bad as it could've been, but she went to bed early (by choice) and I heaved a huge sigh of relief when she did.

I don't know if it's because she got used to having someone constantly there to play with, or if it's because I did. I don't know if it's because the trip wore her out (she didn't sleep very well last night, and her nap today was half what it usually is) or her schedule is all messed up or she's just confused and angry about where all the fun people went. Maybe it's because I am so exhausted (see post below) and I woke up stiff and sore from changing beds or because now that I'm back here I can't push the looming spectre of unemployment away anymore.

Whatever it was, I was grouchy today. I didn't feel like indulging her requests to nurse every 20 minutes, and when I offered drinks or snacks she came unglued. I spent more of the day than I should have catching up on email and my fat stack of unread Google Reader posts; she spent a lot of the day destroying the house Ryan cleaned while we were gone and whining. Dear Lord, the whining. Nothing was satisfactory to her today. She wanted mac and cheese for lunch and when I didn't have it on the table in two minutes flat she started to scream "MAC and CHEESE!! MAC and CHEEEEEESE!" at me and wrap herself around my legs. "Waaaaant mac and cheeeeeese!" she whined, and kept whining as I explained that it wasn't done yet. When it was done, she took about three bites and then demanded more of the strawberry-yogurt-covered raisins she had been eating all day. I tried unpacking our bags, but she took the things I unloaded and scattered them throughout the house. I tried to sit down and pay bills, but she wanted to sit with me. She wanted up on my lap to look at LOLCats, then two seconds later she wanted down. While I was wiping down the bathrooms (my husband's self-imposed "to do" list while I was gone apparently did not include items like 'clean up beard hairs I have sprinkled all over bathroom counter' or 'wipe out sink so that wife does not gag the first time she washes face after arriving home'), Piper unloaded the stuff from the cabinets and got really pissed when I told her to stop sucking on perfume-bottles or to stop dipping my toothbrush in the toilet. She didn't want to play with her new dishes and serve pretend coffee to me and her dolls; she didn't want to cook me any play-food eggplant-matchbox-car-doll-bootie pizza. She wanted to read books, but none of the ones I suggested. She threw herself on the floor and howled when I said that two episodes of Kipper was enough TV for one day and we were going to listen to music for a while.

When Ryan got home for a break between jobs, we went out for sushi and she was pretty good for about 20 minutes, eating a half a lemon wedge (she loves them, rind and all) and 1.5 potstickers before starting to shriek and demand to get down. After he went back to work, I gave up any hope of getting something useful done. I filled a bucket with water, gave her a soak-proof baby doll (naked, of course; she has decided that no doll in our house should ever wear clothes), and turned her loose in the back yard. 45 wet minutes later, she was muddy enough to warrant a shower and in a marginally better mood. That didn't last long, however, and she dissolved into whining, fighting, and sobbing. She put up a huge battle when it was time to brush her teeth; I'm sure the neighbors heard her screaming "NO NO NO! NO WANT BRUSH TEETH! I JUST DON'T WANT IT BRUSH TEETH NOOOOOO!"

She passed out around 9:15, which is totally unheard-of. She woke up after an hour, but settled back down. I am hoping that a night of good, solid sleep will cure both our grumpies. Which reminds me, I should be in bed...

Home Again, Home Again

We are back, in one piece and everything. Piper slept through the flight there and then, two weeks later, through the flight back. On the flight back, she was asleep before we left the grond and the seat next to me was empty so I laid her down and - get THIS - picked up the in-flight magazine and read it cover to cover. Then I browsed the Sky Mall catalog, ate a granola bar and drank the plastic cup of ginger ale the flight attendant gave me, and stared out the window. All without a child climbing on me and screaming, smacking me in the face with a toy/book/broom/cat/shoe, or smearing anything on my clothes.

It was over an hour and a half of quiet time, all to myself. I had packed my knitting in our checked baggage, because I thought that with a mid-afternoon flight and a curious 22-month-old, there would be no time. I had crammed my carryon backpack with toys, books, and goldfish crackers, expecting to need some sort of amusement or distraction about every eight minutes. And I didn't use any of it. I kicked myself for not at least stuffing a paperback or my new issue of ReadyMade in there. All the same, it was heavenly and relaxing and amazing to have time on my hands.

I am now considering flying to random destinations once a week, just so my kid gets one good nap in every 7 days and I can finish a knitting project some time before the next Ice Age.