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.

While people in my home state wait anxiously for spring, we are in near-summer here. It's 80 AGAIN today, and I am irritated. Partly because warm weather brings out the hordes of asshole teenagers in my neighborhood, but also because I want my seasons. I don't like to skip. I don't want to go straight from 35 to 85, which is exactly what happens down here, and every year I forget and every year I get annoyed.

I would happily swap my northern comrades; I could use a few more days of cold and moisture. My yard needs it, my handknits crave it, and more than that, my soul needs it.

There is an ease and a joy to warm days after cold ones; a feeling of renewal and promise that is lacking in warmer climates. After so many dark days, the tiniest sunbeam brings a smile. 55 degrees is now shorts-and-no-coat weather, even though in September 55 degrees made you break out the parka. The air is fresher, washed clean with chilly rains. When summer comes, it means fireflies, lounging on porches, lemonade, slowing down to savor every warm moment. Sitting in the warm dark holding hands and enjoying the feel of your skin against the air. Flowers bloom and you have time to appreciate them before they're gone.   The warm days are so fleeting, so welcome, that you want to suck every drop of fun out of them before winter returns.

Here - and to a lesser extent, also in California - I feel like summer is something to dread. It's not a time for open windows and running through sprinklers, it's a time when you race from one air-conditioned environment to another, because between ozone alerts and sky-high temperatures playing outside means health risks. Southern summer means you damn well better get up and be at the park by 9:00 am, or you're going to pass out on the monkey bars by noon. It means you swim in the morning and spend the afternoon laying on the living-room floor with a popsicle because it's too hot and still to play. Summer here lasts so long, and it's so hot and fierce, that you wonder why the first settlers to this area ever dragged themselves out here in the first place. The baked clay earth hardens and the grass dies. Everything wilts and melts. It's not a lot of fun, honestly.

I miss that transition, each day a little warmer and brighter than the last. I miss smiling as I watch the weather report and see the numbers creep just a little higher each week. I miss rush of gratitude for the return of warm days and checking each patch of grass for tiny flowers. I miss looking forward to summers, to planning treats and trips and I miss lounging on porches with my lemonade.

23 March 2011

83 degrees, dry as a bone and ultra-windy. I spent part of my childhood in Southern California; this weather spooks me worse than tornado sirens.

Home is Where the Hurt Is.

Sunday I spent about  nine hours in the yard, tearing out the front flower bed we put in last year, moving all the rock somewhere else, straightening the stone border, putting in new dirt and planting flowers. I removed the ghosts of last year's hostas and dug down into the clay soil to put in some flowers that Piper had picked out. Things much more sun-loving than my pretty but doomed hostas - violas, pansies, some pink thing that starts with a d. 

I used all the huge chunks of clay soil I dug out to make room for the flowers to fill in some low spots in the front yard, which involved lots of hacking at damp chunks of brick-red (and brick-like) clay with a broken shovel in order to break them up. I put some garden soil over the fills, and grass-patch stuff over that. Between the orangey-red clay and the bright-green grass patch, my yard looks like a faded vintage Christmas card. 

Now I am watering the ever-loving crap out of everything, hoping that the 80-degree-plus weather and super-dry winds we've been having don't kill everything before it gets started. In order not to bust our budget (plus, we live in drought country), I've become the Water Marshall of the house, collecting every spare drop and dumping it on the yard. I put buckets in all the bathrooms to catch the water that we inevitably run before it gets hot enough to shower in; I dip out dishwater that's not too grimy and truck it out to the yard. It's pretty labor-intensive, but I desperately want a nice yard this year. If we were staying in this house, I'd love to install some fancy Dwell-approved graywater system, but something like that would cost more than our entire house is currently worth.

I am also nursing full-body muscle aches from my afternoon of toil. Ye Gods, I ache. And it's worse today than yesterday. My legs, my back, my arms - everything I could possibly pull or strain or max out, I did. I could go soak in a nice, hot bath, but I'd probably guilt myself into dumping the water on the yard after.

01 March 2011

A little peek into how our month is going:

I'm trying very hard not to snap and snarl at her, but I just hate our life here so much it spills out every time I open my mouth. So I find myself annoyed and near hysterics because she needs so much, and destroys so much, and talks so much, and demands so much. The warmer weather means I am in tears every time I hear the thump thump of a basketball on the sidewalk, and that's not her fault. The health insurance is costing us more than we have, and that's not her fault. I despair of ever getting this house in shape to sell, and that's not her fault. Nor is it her fault that the minivan mafia at her school managed to hurt my feelings AGAIN, even after I swore I was done. All of this and more has me wallowing in a pit of despair, and it's not her fault, but we are together so much that she gets to face my fury constantly. It's not making me feel like a very good parent lately.

Anatomy of a Snow Day

 6:55 a.m.: My husband comes in and shakes me awake to tell me that the local school district has canceled school. This means Piper's preschool is also closed. I roll over and think about going back to sleep but instead jump out of bed and ask him if he got some coffee.  "No, I didn't," he says. "There's coffee? Cool." We get to the kitchen and discover that although I loaded the brew basket, put water in the reservoir, and programmed the timer, I did not actually turn the timer on. There is no coffee. I feel terrible, but my husband just shrugs. He can't wait for it to brew, and goes back out to scrape the ice off his car and go to work. I feel guilty about the coffee after he's gone, even though I know he only drinks it when I make it and he doesn't notice when I don't. I watch his car pull out of the driveway and wish he could stay home with us.

7:05 a.m.: I crawl back into my lovely, warm bed, pull the covers up to my chin, and sigh.

7:06 a.m.: I hear Piper wake up and start yelling for me. She comes into my room and I ask if she'd like to snuggle in my bed for a while.

7:08 a.m.: Her version of "snuggling" involves sticking her fingers in my eyes. Over and over.

7:15 a.m.: I get up and after a brief disagreement about the appropriate sugar content of a 3.5-year-old's breakfast, pour her a bowl of plain Cheerios. She eats it and is allowed a bowl of one of my husband's super-sugary snack cereals. The snow outside swirls in the wind.

7:30 a.m.: I turn on the news and watch the coverage of the huge! snow! storm! Coffee in hand, I wander around the house picking things up and paying bills. Piper drags out various toys and scatters them across the living-room floor.

9:30 a.m.: I start wrestling the kid into real clothes and layers of coats so we can go play in the snow.

10:00 a.m.: We go outside and play. I teach her how to make snow angels. She keeps eating snow and I keep telling her to at least get some from the middle of the yard instead of off the car bumpers. We try to make a snowman, but this snow isn't good for packing. Tiny flakes fall as we run and yelp.

10:30 a.m. We are wet, cold, and freezing. We stomp through the front door, strip out of our soggy, muddy, chilly clothes, and hop into things made of fleece and jersey. Hot chocolate and a load of laundry. An episode of Kipper while we play with the dollhouse.

11:30 a.m.: Lunch. More snow outside.

12:30 p.m.: Naptime. For her, anyway. She's out like a light in less than five minutes. The house grows quiet and I try to deal with the heaps of laundry in the dryer.

1:30 p.m.: The neighborhood kids are coming out for the day. I hear noises and go to the back door. There are twenty teenagers and three smaller kids milling around my back yard, shouting and wrestling and posing and kissing. The eventually move into the soccer field and woods, throwing snow and howling. I smile a little bit, and force myself to think well of them. They're just kids, I tell myself. Kids with a snow day.

3:00 p.m.: Piper is awake. She does not want to go back outside, which is fine with me, since it's starting to look slushy out there and the freezing rain is supposed to start any minute. More hot chocolate, some Dr. Who, and an attempt to clean up her play room. We don't do much cleaning, but instead have a play-food picnic and a birthday party for her stuffed cat.

6:00 p.m.: Dinner is soup and fresh bread.

8:00 p.m. Daddy's home. Time for a story and some blocks before bath and bed.

11:00 p.m: I watch the news and discover that tomorrow will also be a snow day, and we will do this all over again.

Falling Around

Yesterday was one of the rare days when I am actually glad to live here. The weather was perfect and classically Fall - low 50's, light rain, just breezy enough to make a cup of hot chocolate sound good. The neighborhood was quiet and peaceful for a change, and we went outside to take advantage of it.

I took lots of pictures of leaves. 

Her raincoat, boots, and umbrella made happy reappearances.

Her favorite splashing puddle was back, and she greeted it by riding her tricycle right through the middle.

We even went for a walk in the (slightly soggy) woods.

And then it was back inside for hot chocolate, followed by a nap. As we roamed around the quiet and deserted field behind our house, I was extremely grateful to live in a place where we can pull a perfect Fall day out of early November. Sometimes I forget that a lot of people are battening down the hatches against Winter right now, whereas we can still do hours of outdoor exploration wearing jeans and sweatshirts.

On the Mend

I think, providing whichever deity is responsible for toddler sickness doesn't read this and smite me for my hubris (probably a Greek one, those gods were bastards), that we are getting better over here. It's been a scary, scary week for me. It started with a little cough last week and progressed into violent hacking, 103+ fevers, and all sorts of digestive pyrotechnics. I learned a few things:

1. True love is hugging and cuddling your kid even though she's got salsa-and-ice-cream puke in her hair.
2. Front-load washers really suck at getting bodily fluids out of bed linens. Especially white duvet covers.
3. I really need to find a pediatrician who will take me seriously.

My vivacious and chatty little girl turned, over the course of two days, into a sunken-eyed, hollow-cheeked child who was too weak to even sit up and play puzzles. I pestered the doctor about the fact that Piper was exhibiting signs of extreme dehydration, but got the same "it's a virus, it'll pass" response I get to everything. Even when Piper lost over a pound in two days, I was brushed off. I was freaked, because for a kid who only weighed 29 lbs to begin with, that's a pretty big loss. She wasn't eating, she wasn't drinking. I had to sit with her in bathtubs full of cool water and pump her full of ibuprofen to keep the fever at a reasonable level. All she could do was lay on the couch glassy-eyed and watch cartoons or listen to stories. I was freaking the hell out. I followed all the instructions I was given to the letter, trying to coax her into drinking Pedialyte or eating crackers, bananas and rice. I kept weighing her and so far she's lost about 3 lbs, 10% of her body weight. I ran her into the pediatrician's office both last Friday and again on Monday, making the 40-minutes-each-way drive only to be told that it was no big deal, not to give her too much medicine (I got yelled at Monday for giving the antibiotic the doctor had prescribed during the Friday visit) and not to let her have any juice. I ground my teeth and tried not to panic as my baby got sicker and sicker.

Finally, on Wednesday, I couldn't take it any more and when, on the way back from a grocery run, she asked to have "chicken and fries" for lunch, we hit a drive-through (like I needed an excuse to get Chick-Fil-A). She ate more at that meal than she had in the past five days put together, and I started to feel a little less anxious.

She was well enough yesterday for a quick trip to the big children's library (I was looking for a book they had weeded out, so I could buy it, but no luck) and a treat from the French bakery. I am letting her watch just a little more TV right now, and then I'm shutting the damned thing off. She has watched more TV in the past week than in the past six months, and I suspect there's going to be some withdrawal. I did get to introduce her to a couple new things (I love Kipper, but four hours in a row is enough), like:

- The Last Unicorn, a beloved movie from my childhood. She loved it and now asks to watch "the beaunicorn one" every other day.
- Shaun the Sheep, which was new to me too. I adore Nick Park (creator of Wallace & Gromit) and Aardman Studios*, so I thought we'd give it a shot. It totally cracks me up, and I love that the sheep are always using their brains and cunning to solve problems.
- Hocus Pocus, which is one of my all-time favorite Halloween movies. It's silly and ridiculous and features Bette Midler camping it up like only Bette can. The storyline is still a little bit over my 3-year-old's head, but she enjoys screechy witches on brooms as much as anyone.

I realized this week that once again, my Fall is whizzing away. How is it almost Halloween? We haven't done a single fun Fall thing yet. No hikes, no apple-picking, no cider doughnuts. No pies, no vats of homemade applesauce. I made pumpkin bread, apple-pumpkin muffins, and sweet-potato chilli, but that's been it. We have scheduled a visit to the pumpkin patch Sunday morning. I am trying to work on knitting, but I just can't settle down and get to it. I feel like the summer dragged on forever, and now my favorite months will be over before I can blink. I think it's because October is so warm here (still 80+ most days), I just don't realize what's going on until it's almost over. The leaves have barely started falling from the trees. Yesterday Piper was feeling well enough to play outside for a while, and I attempted to rake up a leaf pile for her and her little neighborhood friend to jump in. The result was pretty pathetic, even though I raked up everything I could find from our front and decent-sized back yards, and a little from the neighbor's yard as well.

*When my siblings and I were kids, my dad used to watch the Angry Kid cartoons with us and he laughed just as hard as we did. Now that I'm older, I understand why he laughed so hard. I totally love the geniuses at Aardman, because the same is true of Shaun the Sheep. Piper and I laugh in the same spots, sometimes for completely different reasons. The original Creature Comforts was much funnier than Creature Comforts America, though.

In Which I Whine A Little More About The Heat

I have been completely exhausted since summer set in, and I'm starting to think it's not my fault. Every one of our houseguests so far this summer has also been exhausted. Some of them required a nap every single day of their stay with us, even though none of them were toddlers. The lone toddler/preschooler in the house (that would be mine, natch) has fought her naps with a vehemence I find admirable, since I have to drink two glasses of ice water and mentally steel myself just to swim walk into the kitchen and get some grapes.

The cats are pretty miserable. Piper is really sweaty. I am drinking so much water I feel like I could float. I have stopped cooking for the most part, and we are subsisting on cut fruit and cottage cheese and yogurt and chopped vegetables and pita chips with the various dips I concoct from whatever happens to be in the fridge. We're making our own popsicles and smoothies quite a bit.

We have the air on, but most of the day it's just enough to take the edge off, and even that is getting pretty expensive. I also have a sneaking suspicion our A/C unit is about to crap out on us. It's five years old, like the house, and was doing an okay job until a week or so ago. I've noticed it seems to be working less well, not cooling quite as effectively. One more thing to add to the to-do list.

I bought her a little plastic wading pool*, but every time we use it, we are immediately chased inside by huge black wasps**. With the dry summer, they quickly flock to any water source, and although we knocked down a few colonies during the spring, I can't figure out where these huge, aggressive ones are coming from. I am allergic to bees and many other stinging insects, so I was pretty freaked out to see no less than EIGHT enormous wasps hovering over the wading pool as my daughter splashed away. It's been the same thing every time we have any water outside. As soon as I find them, they are toast, but until then we have to find something else to do around the house.

*Let me tell you a story about this: several weeks ago, when presented YET AGAIN during the late afternoon with the tease of oppressive cloudcover that made everything hotter but did not result in any rain, I actually shook my fist and howled at the sky, "RAIN, already, would you?!" The clouds apparently heard me, and paid me back by dumping the only 45 seconds of rain and fierce winds we got all day on me at exactly the moment I exited the store pushing a shopping cart containing a flat plastic wind-catching wading pool and a three-year-old doing her best to climb out. We were all soaked, the pool almost blew away, and I ran the shopping cart into my ankle pretty hard, which caused a bruise that, over a month later, is still fading into ugly browns and yellows.

**I am so OVER the Southern bugs. It's always something down here. Ants, crickets, bees, flies, wasps, various kinds of huge and freaky beetles, earwigs, giant flying cockroaches palmetto bugs, ticks - some kind of many-legged critter is perpetually making its way into my house. They are all huge and aggressive and bold. It goes on pretty much year-round, and I am about ready to pack it up and go back to shoveling snow in the North just so I can be assured of a couple months where I don't have to worry about entomological invasions. This year seems to have been a good one for ants, wasps, and spiders, because I have been battling all three constantly and I am so SICK of it.

Just Another Day at Tragically Ordinary

Yesterday it was nice enough to go outside in shirtsleeves, so I battled the fierce wind, a curious toddler, and an unruly tarp to get the leaves raked up and and carted away from the front of the house. I was sweeping the front walk when I realized that Piper was awfully quiet. I dashed around the front of the house and found her standing in front of a bush we've never quite identified but which has recently sprouted clusters of tiny red berries. Piper looked at me and it was that look that every mother knows, no matter what form it takes: the I Have Done Something look.

"Did you eat one of these berries? Did you eat these?!" I asked, gripping her arms. She didn't appear to be chewing, but she was holding her mouth oddly, like she might have just swallowed really fast.
"I did," she said quietly.
"Oh, God. Did you really eat one?! Let me see inside your mouth!" she refused, and what followed was me trying to pry her jaw open and her shrieking and squirming away from me. I asked her twice more if she ate one, and every time she responded with the quiet and remorse-filled "I did" that usually means she did, in fact, commit the deed in question and knows she's in trouble.

I raced inside and booted up the computer.

While I was Googling "poisonous plants of North Carolina" and "NC Poison Control" to figure out what kind of berries Piper may or may not have eaten while we were outside (can you really trust the word of a 2.5-year-old?), Piper peed in her pants, took off all her clothes, ran around naked, then peed on the carpet.

While I was on the phone with Poison Control, she opened the fridge and climbed up the shelves, got some stuff out, and left the fridge door open.

30 minutes after THAT, she ate half the (cooked) bacon I was going to use for dinner sandwiches, and ran around touching everything with bacon-greasy hands.

And my husband wonders why I'm so irritable.

Back Yard View

Look! I'm even blogging on vacation (or is it "vacation"? Because this trying-to-cram-everyone-into-one-visit stuff is hard work, yo).

Here's the view from our back yard in mid-October:



As my friend who lives in Chattanooga puts it, "In the South, it's like Fall all Winter long." While the trees are bare up here in the Great White North, our trees in Charlotte only started coming into full, riotous color a couple weeks ago.

While there are many things I don't like about living in Charlotte, the six-months-of-Fall aspect isn't one of them.

Worn OUT.

Piper and I are in Michigan, kickin' it in the suburbs of Detroit for a couple of weeks. Well, more accurately, we have been here for a week and have one more to go.

And I am so TIRED.

I am always tired when I stay at my parents' house. Something about this place sucks all the energy out of me. I am always dehydrated; my sleep is restless; I wake feeling as though I were dragged behind a truck. Piper seems to be feeling it, too; the purple circles under her little eyes are growing larger every day, no matter what time she finally succumbs to exhaustion and tumbles into bed.

The trip (or maybe it's just the house) seems to be having some odd effects. As the days go on, she is getting more and more possesive of me, but it seems to be only at my parents' house. When we are out somewhere, she's okay exploring and wandering around, but when we're here, she freaks out if I leave the room. Yesterday I went to use the first floor bathroom - which is located not ten feet from where she was watching Yo Gabba Gabba! - and she freaked out, came running, and screamed "Mommy! Mommy!" while pounding on the bathroom door until I opened it and let her in.

We worked on potty-training before the trip and have kept it up during, but she has a very high number of accidents when we are at my parents' house. Since we've been here, I took her on a 3-hour jaunt to Ikea, an all-day excursion to my in-laws' house (complete with an hour-long car ride there and two-hour ride back), an all-afternoon trip up to Troy (1.5 hours each way because of #@!@#!$ traffic), and an afternoon play date at a friend's house. She remained dry throughout all the excursions. The only problem we've had was when I took her to the park, and that was my bad - 45 minutes of playing outside where there's no bathroom is just asking for trouble. But here at the house, she has managed to pee on the livng-room carpet at least a dozen times. I don't get it.

It's been nice to have this little trip - the closest thing I've had to a vacation in a loooong time - but I think Piper is ready to go home. I'm getting there, too - no matter how many days I stay when we come here, there's never enough time to go everywhere and do everything I want to do. And usually I can get a lot of the people to come out here to the house, but for some reason this time they all want me to come to them, which has meant a lot of running around. It is making me sort of sad and bitter about our life in Charlotte (well, more sad and bitter, anyway) because it seems so empty compared to all this. I have friends here who want to spend time with me, things to go and do, places to walk around and playmates for Piper. We have none of that in Charlotte, and as much as I miss Ryan and my little house and the rhythm of my days alone with Piper, it is also like a very peculiar version of solitary confinement. I guess I am feeling a bit wistful about the life we could've had here but didn't. We did try, but the pieces just didn't fall into place.

Or maybe I'm annoyed that despite my parents' sweet digital cable setup, I have not managed to get up and catch my morning re-runs of The West Wing even once.

Snow.

We got a dusting of snow here last night, and my husband had a snow day today. It wasn't enough to take Piper out and build a snowman or anything, but this is what our back yard looked like this morning:

It Came From the Laundry Room

Piper and I were doing laundry after Ryan went to bed. I was sitting on the floor of the laundry room with a pile of dirty clothes, handing things to Piper so she could put them in the washer.* I grabbed a piece of clothing and something long, slithery, and many-legged tumbled off it. I jumped up, shrieking, and the Thing slithered back into the laundry pile.

My shriek freaked out Piper, who echoed my "EEEEEEEEEE!!!!" noises while looking very concerned and then started to cry. I picked her up and called "I need some help in here!" across the house. Ryan hadn't gone to bed that long ago; I figured he was still awake. "I NEED SOME HELP IN HERE!" I yelled. No response.

So I charged across the living room, put down the wiggling baby, and together we threw open the master-bedroom door. "I need some HELP IN HERE!" I yelled.

Ryan's head emerged from the covers. "Whaa? Haa? Mmrefah?"

"Iwasgettinglaundryfromthepile and athingfelloutitwashuge OH MY GOD itwasbigitwasoneofthosethings oh my God, the thingswithallthelegs, ohGodoh- a millipede, that's the thing with all the legs, right? Centipede? WELL THERE'S ONE IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM AND IT'S HUGE! Killitkillitpleasecomekillit!"

He sighed. "You want me to come kill it?"

"YespleasebecauseitwasHUGE ohGod HUGE HUGE!"

"Can't you just...oh, never mind," he said irritably as he got up.

I went with him to the laundry room still jabbering about the SIZE of the THING and made him go through the laundry in the basket, piece by piece. He did, grudgingly, the whole time giving me a lecture on how I shouldn't get so "worked up" about the bugs around here, because giant bugs are just a fact of life in this part of the country, and getting upset and freaking out isn't helping anything. He was referring to the fact that the first time a giant flying cockroach palmetto bug got into the house I was screeching and running around like my hair was on fire for half an hour and spent the rest of the evening nervously jumping onto the furniture any time I saw a shadow move.

Personally, I think I have been pretty understanding about the bugs. I spend a lot of time cleaning, scrubbing, re-washing, and sterilizing things to combat the ants (swarms of which have lately been found in such locales as the linen closet and under the computer desk); I didn't have a nervous breakdown when I woke up with a tick on my eyelid and I didn't even scream the time I found an earwig in our bed. In fact, I didn't even wake him up that time, I just killed it myself.

But here he was, giving me a lecture on how I need to "just deal with it" when I find a bug. He went through everything in the basket. I hovered anxiously the whole time, emitting random freak-out noises, which Piper mimicked with astonishing accuracy. When no Creature of Doom appeared, I made him go through it again, which he did, although by now he wasn’t even pretending not to be annoyed at me. The whole time he lectured me in a patronizing tone about how I was going to have to learn to accept the bugs, and why did I have to make such a big deal, it’s not helping anything, blah blah blah. Then he said that since obviously there was nothing here now, he was done.

"You're not-not going back to BED are you? WE HAVE TO FIND IT!"

He looked at me, that patronizing, patient look you give small children, pets, and mental patients. "Well, Steph, I've been through everything in the basket and it's not here. I don't know what you want me to do. It's gone."

"What the fuck is the point of being married if I don't even have a husband who will kill bugs for me?!" I yelled. "I made you chocolate-bourbon-pecan pie from scratch, and you can't even kill a gargantuan prehstoric-size millipede for me? It was HUGE! You don't understand! It was on my UNDERWEAR!"

"Well, I looked through all of the laundry twice. It's not here. Where could it possibly go?"

"Move the basket. Maybe it went out one of the holes in the side of the basket."

He started to deliver more of his "My wife is being a hysterical sissy and should not be afraid of bugs and especially should not wake me up to kill them for her" speech, then stopped mid-sentence. His eyes got really big,and he backed up. "I need a shoe," he said in a flat voice.

I gave him a grungy flip-flop from the pile by the back door. He moved the laundry basket, then brought the shoe down like a hammer. He stood up and looked at me.

"I, uh, see how that could be alarming," he said. "I totally apologize, because you are totally correct, that was HUGE. I saw it, it was like this big-" he held up his hand and pointed to indicate the millipede's length. "Oh my God, that's like four inches. Maybe even six. So, um, yeah. I'm sorry. I could definitely see how that would be disconcerting. It's dead and I don't even want to touch it. I am very sorry I doubted you. It was, in fact, HUGE."

"I know!" I said. "And it almost fell on my LEG!" I shuddered. "And...thanks. For killing it. And for acknowledging that my reaction was in proportion to the size of the bug."

"Well, I expect to be faithfully represented on your blog," he said. "Both as a killer of large insects and as an apologetic husband."

I hope I have done him justice here.


*She likes to help, and even though it makes everything take two or three times as long, I really don't mind. Her little face totally lights up when I say "thank you very much!" as she hands me some laundry or clean dishes or puts something away for me.

Oh, Awesome. Now I Am Going To Freak Out.

Among all the other reasons to get rid of our cats, I just thought of a new - very big - reason. Several of them have decided they need to be indoor-outdoor cats and they kill things and leave them outside the house. Until I found a dead bat outside just now, it hadn't even occured to me to worry about rabies. Awesome. Especially since Piper will body-slam and wrestle the cats all the time and some of them have bitten her almost hard enough to draw blood over it.

Nobody is up to date on their shots because we can't afford to keep 9 cats up to date. We can't even afford the $18 rabies shot times nine. It wasn't an issue before, since nobody went outside. But now they won't stop going out. I think they are also bringing a variety of extra bugs in. I woke up this morning with a TICK on my EYELID. Oh, yeah. A bloodsucking bug burrowing itself into my ocular cavity. We had found ticks in the house before, but we weren't sure that's what they were because they were HUGE. We were under the impression that ticks were small and unobtrusively-sized, the better to surreptitiously suck your blood. Surely, we thought, these monster-sized pointy bugs MUST be something else. Until this one attached itself TO MY EYELID and Ryan had to use a heated-up hairpin to get it out.

Possibly the worst part is that I didn't even find it - he did. While we were kissing. He was giving me a getting-ready-to-head-out-the-door kiss when his eyes got all big and he said "You were right. I think those bugs are ticks. You have one on your eyelid." He scratched at it and it wouldn't come off. "Uh, yeah, you have a tick on your eyelid," he said. "And it's not coming off..."

I did not freak out, though. I guess a tick on my eyelid sent me past hysteria into "oh my God, this cannot be happening" territory. I sat there calmly while he went to find something to get it out. I stood there calmly while he pressed a hairpin to a stove burner. I did flinch the first time he poked me with the red-hot metal, but only the first time.

Between the tick and the giant flying cockroach that found its way into our living room last weekend (also due to the outdoor cats), I think I am so over The Glorious South. And having pets.

A NC native friend told me that giant flying cockroaches are referred to as "palmetto bugs" down here, in order to make everyone feel better about the fact that (as our exterminator told me) they live in the trees and there is nothing you can do to avoid them.

I don't feel better.

Edited to add: Oh, and did I mention that fleas are a when, not if type of thing down here? I have been obsessively checking the cats and administering drops to the ones who go outside and vacuuming the couch every single day and the entire house every 2-3 days, but every time I see one of them scratch I want to rent a flamethrower.

Piper likes to run around the house naked (she's become quite the post-bath and mid-diaper-change streaker) and sits on the carpet like that; every time she does I pray pleaseletusnothavefleas please let us not have fleas pleasepleaseplease because if she is sitting naked on a carpet with fleas in it I will have to kill myself.

I can't wait until we can afford to have hardwoods put in.

Also, as I told my husband this morning: Screw camping. I am never going camping again, except maybe in Antarctica, because if I got a tick on my eyelid when I haven't so much as set foot in the backyard in two weeks, let alone gone near the (small strand of) woods behind the back yard...well, I just can't handle it.

Did We Get Our House?

Yes, we did. We closed last Friday (the 4th), a week after we were supposed to, but fine whatever okay great. A few notes on closing a house:

1. We were warned that there would be a lot of signing, but ye Gods! It never ended. I tried to count the times we put ink to paper and lost track somewhere around fifteen.

2. Hearing "no, she doesn't have to sign, her name's not on the loan" was one of the most humiliating moments of my life.

3. Being told "yes, you have to sign there, your name is on the title" was one of the strangest.

4. Ryan and I both got the distinct feeling that the lawyer conducting the proceedings was not terribly impressed with us. He was both older (I guessed somewhere around 60) and dressed in a very nice suit. He came off as being very old-school. One of the last names on the door was his and he probably owned the shiny new BMW parked right outside said door, so our raggedy broke-ass hippie schoolteacher married-with-different-last-names selves probably made him shake his head and wonder what the world is coming to.

5. I am also in the wrong business, because if I figured it correctly, Mr. Old School Lawyer got paid $270 to sit for twenty minutes speaking jargon and handing us things to sign. I'm quite sure he didn't even put together the thick sheaf of papers; that's what first-year associates are for.

6. Although logically I knew everything was on the up-and-up and that we had no reason to be paranoid, as I sat there looking at the long list of fees and terms which I only half-understood, I tried not to panic. Somehow I couldn't shake the feeling that we were getting screwed somewhere in all this. This was not helped when I realized that if we didn't have to pay all these people/agencies/firms to do...whatever it is they do...our payment would be about $200 lower every month. It was also not helped by the fact that most of these "processing" and "document research" and "title search" fees really amounted to paying some company's interns to do a couple Google searches and photocopy the results in triplicate. Our house was built in 2005; it's not like there was a lot of stuff to go through.

We are still not really unpacked, the cats are STILL in the basement of the other place, we have no furniture, and I can't find anything. We just got our own Internet connection, so I no longer have to truck around with my laptop looking for unsecured networks or keep the baby from eating electronics and getting bit by ants while I check my e-mail at the other house. Driving here is crazy, I still don't know where anything is. I am behind on everything, so if I owe you a phone call, email, cup of tea, pie, or anything else, just know that I will catch up eventually.