VirtualSprite

solitary

2012-01-26T22:39:00.001-06:00

I didn't tell any of my friends that I had the day off today.

Not my friend Chee who's been begging me to meet for lunch.

Not my friend Bean who I haven't seen in forever and usually has Thursdays off.

I didn't even run to the store because then I would have to deal with people and that was the last thing I wanted to do today. Just because I was crabby for a random reason -- maybe PMS, maybe stress, maybe just lack of sleep -- but crabby I was.

Instead, I put Goober on the bus and then went snowshoeing through the woods.

Then I came inside and crawled back in bed and took a nap.

Nature Boy was gone when I woke up, so I did some dishes, I played on the computer, I folded laundry and I had lunch. And I enjoyed the quiet of the house. No one was asking me for help with their homework, no one needed me to update a website, no one needed me to cook something, no one needed me to fix something. I just enjoyed being alone.

So when I finally dragged my ass to the archery shop, Nature Boy was surprised.

"I thought you'd be here earlier," he said.

I shook my head. "Nah, I stayed home."

"But I thought maybe you'd bring me lunch and we could spend some time together?"

"Too bitchy. I thought I'd spare everyone."

"Good choice."

village people

2012-01-13T16:30:00.001-06:00

I was reading something this morning from a mom who was trying to help her child get the education she feels he deserves. Which is admirable. I think all parents should take an avid interest in their children's education.

But there was one thing she said that struck me. She said, "I am the only advocate for my child."

Only.

And I thought, how sad.

How sad that she does not have anyone else to speak up for her child, to make sure her child is getting everything he needs, to make sure he's doing the best he can do and being the best he can be, to help him up if he falls.

See, I'm pretty lucky. I have Nature Boy, my co-conspirator and my co-parent. I have Ty and Sam, who will tease their little brother to no end, but will kick the ever-living shit out of anyone who tried to hurt the Ubergoober. I have my parents and Nature Boy's parents, who spend a lot of time with their grandchildren and make sure that they all are getting what they need to be productive humans and then yelling at us - the parents - if our kids do not have everything they need. I also have a wonderful extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, out-laws and friends who are there whenever Goober needs anything at all.

And at school, I have Goober's classroom teacher, music teacher, social studies teacher, phy ed teacher, art teacher and principal all watching over him, making sure he gets what he needs to be successful. I'm especially blessed because they all, every single one of them, will call me if there is ever a concern. I once got a call late in the evening from Goober's social studies teacher because he had been struggling to finish his work and he told her his parents couldn't help because they were too busy. So she called to see what was happening, if there was anything she could do to help, if there was anything we could do to help her, if we could work together to figure out what was going on in Goober's enormous head. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this, that she took the time to talk to me, to listen to me, to involve me in my son's education and then follow through on the plan we created together.

This poor woman, though, she has none of that.

Or maybe she does, but she honestly believes that only she can do what's best for her child. And I don't think that's good, either, because then you miss out on all the things that all those other people can do for your child.

Like Nature Boy, who makes Goober unload the dishwasher, even though I think he's too young for that kind of responsibility. Or like my dad, who took the training wheels off Goober's bike a couple summers ago, even though I thought surely Goober would fall and bust his head open. Or Ty, who taught his brother how to play tackle football, even though I was sure both of them would get hurt. Or his teacher, who gives out spelling words so difficult I can't even use them in a sentence. Or the swimming instructor who put Goober in a more difficult swimming class than I signed him up for, even though I thought he'd drown.

All of these people understood something about Goober I didn't -- he was ready for these things, even if I wasn't. But because they did all this, Goober is a better person. He can ride a two-wheeled bike like a pro. He can spell "neighborhood" without pause. He can do the front crawl for the entire width of the pool. But he's still my baby, and sometimes I forget that he's growing up and becoming his own person, so it's good that I have all these people to remind me that. See, I'm lucky that way. I understand that it takes a village to raise a child. Pardon the cliche, but it's true.

And I'm thankful for every last person in my village.

advised

2012-01-04T23:53:00.001-06:00

From my mother: "Good skin is better than good make-up, but would it kill you to put on some lipstick?"

From my dad (as he was teaching me to drive a beat-up Ford pickup with a flatbed and a snowplow): "Learn how to drive on the worst vehicle you can, because then everything else will seem easy."

From my grandpa: "Be game for anything."

From my grandma (as she was teaching me to bake a pie): "You can measure your ingredients, but eventually you'll learn to eyeball it. It just takes practice. And a lot of mistakes."

From my husband: "Just wear sweats. It makes getting to third base much easier."

From my best friend: "A good friend is someone you can talk to once a year, but it feels like you talk to them every day."

From my former coworker: "Don't marry the one you love the most, marry the one who irritates you the least."

From my viola teacher: "Sometimes you just have to start over with the basics before you can master the hard stuff."

lesser known

2011-12-20T13:24:00.001-06:00

A few of my friends have been asking me to recommend classical music for them to listen to. They're not familiar with classical music and they want to be. So, since I am a classical musician and I listen almost exclusively to classical music, I suppose I'm a good source for suggestions.

Only I really don't like all the common compositions you hear from composers. To me, these just aren't a true representative of their talent. So this list is a recommendation for all of you who either want to start listening to classical music and don't know where to start or for those of you who currently listen to classical music and want to dig a little deeper. You're welcome.

Peter Tchaikovsky

What you know: "The Nutcracker" or "1812 Overture"

What you should be listening to: Symphony No. 6 in b minor "Pathetique"

Oddly enough, given Tchaikovsky's penchant for depression, "pathetique" here does not refer to pathetic, but rather passionate and emotional. And it is. This symphony — if you listen to it in its entirety — is a festival of deep emotions. Rollicking and fun one minute to slit-your-wrists depressing the next. See, that's kind of how Tchaikovsky is. His violin concerto is a similar festival of bi-polar issues. But he was a purportedly gay man living in pre-Soviet Russia, married to a woman but having affairs with soldiers. You can't tell me he didn't have some emotional issues and all of them show up in his music.

Ludwig van Beethoven

What you know: Fifth Symphony or "Ode to Joy"

What you should be listening to: Symphony No. 7 in A major

Speaking of bi-polar, this symphony is chock full of it. Yes, we all know about the "Ode to Joy." It's a very small part of the monstrous Symphony No. 9 that's been bastardized for hymns and simplified for all beginning piano students to learn and then say they can play Beethoven. And the Symphony No. 5 in c minor — just try to get that opening motif out of your head. But the second movement of the seventh symphony — a marche funebre for those of you keeping score at home — uses fewer notes and is even more powerful. It starts out softly in the low strings — the cellos and the violas (HOLLA!) introduce the theme — a tragically slow dirge of prolonged quarter notes in the relative minor key. Eventually the upper strings join the mournful strains, followed by the winds and brass. But then! Just when you least expect it, a jaunty little tune enters in, almost giving you aural whiplash. It's like you're at home, calmly tying a noose to hang yourself with, when the urge to dance a jig comes over you. The whole symphony is kind of like this. Just when you think you know where Beethoven is going, he switches direction completely. Also, this symphony was used extensively in "It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown," so if you need a pop culture reference, there you go.

Edward Elgar

What you know: Pomp and Circumstance

What you should be listening to: Cello Concerto in e minor

I think all of us marched to our high school graduation to the strains of our high school band or orchestra bumping along the Pomp and Circumstance. But Elgar is so much more than this. Elgar's music is reminiscent of the Romantic composers with an overlay of 20th century simplicity. Elgar is subtle and his cello concerto is a perfect example. The first movement is a wonderful ballet between the solo cello and the orchestra. My favorite part is a quiet timpani roll leading to the pinnacle of an upward scale run on the solo cello that introduces a tutti section for the orchestra. When the cellist hits that last note, up in the stratosphere of the instrument's range, it's a moment and the rumbling of the timpani is the anchor. If you can, find the Jacqueline Du Pre recording with the London Symphony. Amazing.

Samuel Barber

What you know: Adagio for Strings

What you should be listening to: First Essay for Orchestra

Yes, we've all seen "Platoon." We've heard the Adagio heralding death and that is a good example of Barber's work — achingly simple, slightly atonal but still melodic. The First Essay has all that and more. The piece is set up like an essay — you start with an idea, you expand on it, you introduce different ideas and a counter argument, but you eventually come back to that original idea to conclude the piece. It worked in your high school English class and it works here. The Essay starts off like the Adagio — the violas (HOLLA!) introduce the melody before it moves through the orchestra. Then the counter melody is introduced, but that original melody keeps showing up where you least expect it. It goes on like this for a few minutes, the sections exchanging arguments and themes, until the trumpets herald the end and the strings fade into nothing.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

What you know: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (Serenade for Strings in G major)

What you should be listening to: Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola

If you didn't know, Mozart played viola (HOLLA!). It was his preferred instrument in string quartets. The original score calls for the viola to be tuned in scordatura, so it's tuned a half-step sharp, which lends the instrument a brighter tone. Modern violists, however, eschew this practice and play the piece in E-flat, leaving that dark, velvety tone to come through and contrast to the bright sound of the violin. It's a wonderful example of Mozart's hallmark scale runs and bouncy eighth notes, but there's something darker here, too, especially when the soloists come in with a haunting melody after the orchestra has been gaily dancing around. It's like the viola is there to show the deeper side of Mozart, a contrast to the happy hyper Mozart we've come to know and love. My favorite version of this is with Pinchas Zuckerman on viola because that man is way too large to play the violin.

Antonio Vivaldi

What you know: The Four Seasons

What you should be listening to: Gloria RV 589

Vivaldi was known as the Red Priest because of his red hair and religious past. Legend has it he studied to be a priest, failed to take the last step and became a virtuoso violinist and composer instead, but he still wrote a lot for the church. In fact, the Gloria is a section of a Mass. It's in Latin, but that just makes it better. Hearing the contralto soloist in the Agnus Dei repeating "miserere" over and over, you get a sense of just how miserable you're supposed to be. And the two sopranos singing in thirds in the Laudamus Te is sublime. And those big choruses are so lushly scored, they seem to belong in a Romantic Italian opera instead of an early Baroque Mass. Vivaldi supposedly wrote this for a choir of orphans, the bastards of Italian nobility. But this is the score that inspired just about every other mass in the Baroque period. Seriously. I dare you to listen to this and not hear themes Handel stole for Messiah. But if you're going to steal, steal from the best, right?

Johannes Brahms

What you know: Lullaby

What you should be listening to: Any of his four symphonies

Johannes Brahms was very reluctant to publish a symphony because he was afraid he would be compared to Beethoven. And he was. His first symphony was lauded as "Beethoven's 10th." But Brahms deserves more. These works stand on their own. If you listen to them back to back, you can hear the evolution of his musical prowess. The first symphony is almost Mozartian in its classicality (what? I have an English degree. I can make up words) and utilizes the minuet and trio in the third movement rather than Beethoven's scherzo. But the horn solo at the onset of the fourth movement? It's like he's announcing his release from Beethoven's legacy. That solo sounds like freedom, rising above a mire of muddy string passages. The fourth symphony is the one you really want to listen to, though. Brahms hits his Romantic stride here. It is lush, emotional and deep. And, yes, if you listen closely to the fourth symphony, the lullaby is in there. Hiding.

Jean Sibelius
What you know: Finlandia
What you should be listening to: The Swan of Tuonela
Yes, Finlandia is spectacular and bombastic, but The Swan is dark, brooding, mysterious and haunting. The inaccurately named English horn — because it's neither British in origin nor a horn — has the lead in this tone poem, which tells the story of a dying swan. You can feel the water in the muted roiling string passages, the smooth passage of the swan over the lake in the legato solo line, the crisp arctic air, the moment of death.

Camille Saint-Saens
What you know: Carnival of the Animals
What you should be listening to: Danse Macabre
Yes, we've all heard the children's masterpiece with musical representations of the animal kingdom, but it's the musical representation of the dead that is really fun. This is another example of a solo instrument scordatura, this time in the violin. The E-string is tuned down a half step to E-flat, which makes the solo line seem just a little... off. There's something truly creepy about an out of tune violin and Saint-Saens makes good use of that. Saint-Saens takes advantage of instrumental stereotyping in this piece — the xylophone sounds like bones rattling together, the harp brings light, Satan's playing the fiddle — but it's all in good fun. After all, what kind of party doesn't have dancing corpses?

So that's my list. What are you listening to?

renewal

2011-12-02T14:49:00.001-06:00

I renewed my driver's license yesterday.

The clerk at the DMV told me to hang on to my old license and to put it in a safe place. Just in case I lost my new license, I would need my old license to get a new one made up. I looked at my old license, at the photo, and I almost didn't recognize myself.

It had been eight years since I last renewed my license, but those eight years seem like a lifetime ago. In Wisconsin, your drivers license is good for eight years and expires on your birthday.

So eight years ago, on my birthday, I was at the DMV arguing with the clerk. I remember it clearly because I was just there to renew my license, but there were some obstacles. My license had been suspended because of a speeding ticket I didn't know I received because it had been sent to my ex-husband's house and he saw no need to forward it to me at my new address. Ironically, I had paid the speeding ticket, but they suspended my license anyway because I... well, I honestly don't remember now. But after my license was suspended, I was supposed to do something to let the DMV know that I had done the things appropriate for getting my license unsuspended but I didn't know that because my ex-husband had thrown all of my mail away. So that took some time to sort out and I could have been in a lot of trouble for driving without a valid license.

I also had to change my name and address on my license and my vehicle title, so I needed proof of my new (old) name and address. Which, luckily, I had brought that along without knowing it. Thank goodness I hadn't mailed my electric bill before I went to the DMV. Also, I happened to have my divorce papers in my glove compartment, which was a remarkable stroke of luck. But this was an usual occurrence for me. I didn't normally have my shit together.

See, because of my divorce my life was kind of up in the air. Granted, my divorce had been final for almost two years at this point, but as happens with divorce, shit was still going on.

Also, I was pregnant with the Ubergoober. Goober's biological father (BF) was in treatment for alcoholism and his drug-addict mother was living with him. Us. Kind of. I was half living at BF's house and half living at my house. We didn't know where we were going with our relationship yet. We only knew we were having a baby and at that point we were playing it by ear. It was all we could do. I was still an emotional wreck from my divorce and he was still a drunk.

I mention this now because I remember screaming it at the DMV clerk at the time. I was trying to get all of this sorted out so I could just renew my drivers license and nothing was going right. So I burst into tears and shouted, "And I'm pregnant!"

"No, you're not," the clerk said, eyeing me up and down. "You don't look pregnant."

I looked down at my belly, which was just starting to show. I've mentioned before that I am skinny, but unless you've seen me in person, you probably don't understand how small I am. I make hobbits seem tall. I am the size of a diminutive woodland elf. At the time of my birthday eight years ago, I no longer fit into my jeans. I was relegated to wearing elastic pants and the skin on my belly constantly itched because it was stretching so much and so fast and all I wanted to do was go home -- to BF's home -- and take off my pants so I could put lotion on my belly. And did I mention that I fainted a lot when I was pregnant, too? Every time I stood up. So I was uncomfortable, dangerously close to passing out, BF had just called to tell me he had forgotten my birthday and the DMV clerk was yelling at me. Not the best day of my life.

See, my plan for my birthday had been to get my license renewed and then go home and spend time with my growing family - BF and our baby. Maybe get dinner. Maybe catch a movie. Nothing big.

It didn't end up happening that way. I'll spare you the details, but it was a lot of yelling, a lot of crying and a long winter walk to the restaurant because my car was stuck and BF didn't have a license. I cried myself to sleep that night, and for a lot of nights after.

So when I went yesterday to the DMV, I was surprised that I was in and out of there in less than a half hour. I had all the paperwork already filled out, I had my checkbook and I was ready for the photo. There were no surprise license suspensions, no expired license plates and no extra fines. In eight years, I had gotten organized. Well, as much as one can be with three children, a full-time job, a part-time musical career, a family business and a husband.

And later, Nature Boy asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday on Monday.

"I don't know... I have concerts Friday, Saturday and Sunday and a late meeting on Monday," I said. "I really don't have much time for anything."

"Maybe I could take you to lunch?"

"Nah... how about dinner?"

"We'll have to take Goober with us," Nature Boy said.

And I thought for a moment. It sounded just perfect to me. Dinner out with my family. My legal family, who wanted to spend time with me. Who want to make me happy.

I think it's going to be the best birthday ever.

postmodernist ideals

2011-11-30T11:54:00.001-06:00

Back in college, I took a lit class centered around post-modernist literature. Specifically, the use of post-modernist ideals in 20th century science fiction.

Please note that classes like this are exactly why I was an English major. Sit around for hours and discuss minute detail in obscure books? Sign me up! This has also become an effective parenting tool because no kid can stay awake through a discourse on paradigm shifts in 18th century epic poetry. Just sayin'.

One of the books we read in this class was Donna Haraway's epic collection of essays "Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature." I still have my copy around here somewhere. But the gist of the collection basically is that nature is a construct, not a discovery, and as such is changeable.

So when Goober and I were talking about what he could take to school when he is the "Class Celebrity" -- this is what his teacher calls the child of the week feature present in all elementary school classrooms -- I couldn't help but go back to that book. See, when he is the celebrity, he is supposed to bring something that is important to him and, if appropriate, demonstrate its function. Although Goober's celebrity week is in April, he is my child and therefore is going all Type A anal about it and working out a plan months in advance.

I suggested his bow. Well, technically his new bow. And, yes, normally one wouldn't bring a deadly weapon to second grade show and tell, but this is Wisconsin and he does go to a rural school and his principal was telling me how she and her husband have a "Top Shot" challenge course set up in their backyard. I figured if ever there was a school that would allow a bow at show and tell, this would be it.

Goober said no.

"That was a thing at my old school. I don't do that at my new school," he said.

And it was his thing at his old school. In fact, the birthday cards his classmates made for him all had illustrations of Goober shooting his bow. All Goober talked about was hunting and shooting. Again, this is northern Wisconsin. You're weird if you don't kill things in your spare time.

But now that Goober is at the *special school* he's reinventing himself. He's reinventing nature. Which, according to postmodernist theory, is entirely acceptable. At the *special school* he reenacts scenes from Harry Potter books with his classmates at recess. He gets to be Harry. And I'm excited for him, because he's really having fun and he's using his imagination and he's playacting. Not his usual pursuits, but things I really like seeing him do. He still shoots his bow and he's an amazing shot, but he no longer wants to be known as "the boy who shoots bow." He wants to be the boy who reads Harry Potter and the boy who is good in science and who is really good in gym. He doesn't realize he can still be all these things and the boy who shoots bow, and I think that troubles me a little bit.

But he's young yet. He'll figure it out. If not, I can find my copy of "Simians, Cyborgs and Women." Something tells me my Ubergoober will understand it far better than I ever did.

finally!

2011-11-22T16:46:00.001-06:00

After two years of growing and months of bitching, I finally was able to chop off my hair today!

Please keep in mind, this is the after. I intended to take a before and a during, but there was a snafu at the eye doctors that made me almost late for my hair appointment and, well, life just never goes as planned.

BUT! My hair is now 10 inches shorter, my head is about 6 pounds lighter and there is a whole lot of red hair on its way to Locks of Love. Yes, I know some of you probably have issues with that organization and that's okay. My hair grows crazy fast and I wanted to use that power for good for once, so that's where I sent it. Also, I probably should have gone shorter, but Nature Boy was freaking out that I cut it this short which makes me think that I need to have the "no hair, no opinion" discussion with him again (as in, you have no hair, therefore you are not entitled to have an opinion about mine).

UPDATED: I successfully used a curling iron! This is monumental progress.

turkeyed

2011-11-21T21:59:00.001-06:00

I'm on vacation this week so I went to the grocery store late in the afternoon to get all my Thanksgiving meal necessities.

Have I told you how much I love Thanksgiving? It is, to me, the perfect holiday. All you have to do is cook and eat a shit-ton of food and be thankful for what you have. So not only do I get to go all Food Network and cook all day long -- no, really, I enjoy this -- but there are no presents to buy. No one gets mad because you got them a medium shirt instead of a small or because the Pokemon cards were the black and white and not legends or some shit. And if someone does complain? You heap another pile of mashed potatoes and gravy on their plate and tell them to stuff it. Also, there's wine. Lots of wine. And pie. Lots of pie. And I get to kick everyone out of my kitchen unless they have a written invitation. So I get to cook, I get to assign sous chefs and I have absolute and complete control over the dinner. It is awesome.

So today I ran to get my sweet potatoes, mashing potatoes, carrots, celery, onions, fresh herbs, dressing, rolls, whipping cream and turkey.

Only when I got to the meat section, there were two elderly women blocking all access to the turkeys. So I pulled up my cart and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Woman A - lets call her Florence - was trying to figure out what size of turkey she would need. She had her list, written in flawless Palmer script on an envelope, but nowhere on that list did it tell her how much her Thanksgiving turkey should weigh.

Woman B - we'll call her Hazel - was doing her best to help, but it was clear that Hazel was not in a position to help.

"I just don't know. How much turkey do we need?" Florence asked, fingering the tags on a few turkeys, trying to find the weight.

"Well, what did you have last year? Are you having the same number of people?" Hazel replied.

"I just don't remember. I think we had a 20-pound turkey, but that can't be right. We didn't have 20 people and I remember..."

This is when I decided to make my way to the dairy section. These women obviously needed more time with the poultry. So I gathered my whipping cream and my eggs and my milk and my butter and I headed back toward the poultry. Hazel and Florence were still there.

"I'm looking at this 16-pound turkey and it doesn't look much different than the 18. Maybe I should just get the 18."

I wheeled around and headed to the frozen foods, baffled by this discussion. This clearly was not their first rodeo. I'm guessing each woman was in her 70s, and not the sprightly, sassy 70s. These women were wearing sensible shoes from the 1970s and wool dresses. They probably go to Mass every day. Just ballparking a guess here, I'd say each woman was easily on her 30th Thanksgiving. Not knowing your turkey needs? Rookie mistake.

See, I'm on my 10th round hosting Thanksgiving. I've been hosting Thanksgiving for more than a decade, except for that one year my mom scheduled the meal during the Packers game. It's the holiday I volunteer to host. I don't have to decorate, I don't have to wrap presents and I don't have to dye eggs. I just have to cook. But I've got it down to a science. I take a poll, I gather recipes, I calculate my turkey and then I head to the store. I do this the Monday before Thanksgiving, so the turkey has time to thaw. (Well, except that year Nature Boy went out to the yard and killed a wild turkey because he thought we'd run out. We didn't have to let that one thaw.) I'm darn near a pro at this. Almost. I can't make my grandma's Parker house rolls. That's my last hurdle before I clear my semi-pro status.

By the time I returned from the frozen foods, Hazel and Florence were gone. I'm assuming they finally figured it out and heaved a bird into their cart. Or they had the nice man from the meat counter do it for them. Or maybe they decided not to get a turkey after all. I'm not sure. I just hefted my 18-pound bird into the cart and headed out.

pure snow

2011-11-10T23:18:00.001-06:00

So Nature Boy has been in Kansas now for almost a week, trying to kill deer. He's failed at every turn and has been having a generally miserable time of it. I'm trying not to give in to the overwhelming schadenfreude I've been feeling about the whole situation. See, with him gone I still have to work full time, be a parent to our children and run the archery shop. Only he got some of his friends to help me the archery shop and they are not doing a very good job, but they won't listen to me and it generally just sucks because this shop is our life and all of our money and, dammit, I know what's going on and they don't.

Anyway, my life is shitty and I feel a little better knowing that Nature Boy's life is shitty, too.

But! Yesterday it snowed, so today the Ubergoober did this:

Pretty cool, huh? We used rose leaves for the eyes, some beaded garland for the mouth and a carrot for the nose. He did everything but the head, which required my assistance. And then we watched "Harry Potter" movies and drank hot chocolate and ate popcorn. It was just a nice day. We needed that.

halloweenie

2011-11-04T02:17:00.001-05:00

Now that Goober is in the "special class," he seems to be making more friends. Every day he comes home to tell me about what he did at recess with his classmates and another phone number to add to his rapidly expanding rolodex. (Do we still use those? I mean, I have one in my office, but I seem to be the only one and I'm pretty sure we're not using them because we can store two million contacts on our phones, but there isn't an app to transfer them all to my smart phone, which doesn't seem so smart now, does it?)

Anyway... this year for Halloween, he made a trick or treat date with one of his classmates, a little girl that lives about a mile up the road from us. This was a new development. Most years I was his trick or treat date and a disappointing one at that. Apparently, moms aren't cool even for first graders, much less the older and wiser second graders. But he was so excited to trick or treat with his friend, so I went along with it. I made the arrangements and we were good to go.

(A side note... Goober wanted to be Garfield for Halloween this year and as much as I tried to talk him into getting a third year out of his Harry Potter costume he would not be swayed, so I gave in and bought him a rather expensive costume online, which was still $15 cheaper than the version I found in a store, but since this is the only child we have trick or treating this year, I thought I would splurge. So when he came home and said he wanted to be Harry Potter for a third year in a row because Miss C was going to be Hermione, I kind of lost it. In a moment of inspiration, however, I said he could be Crookshanks so that would still work with Hermione. He bought it, thank goodness. Also, Miss C turned out to be just a witch, so it all worked.)

But the kids had a ball. Miss C and Goober tore around the neighborhood at Mach 3 and made a absolute haul. And it was kind of fun for me to see him with a friend who was... well, on his level.

See, most of the time in preschool and in first grade, Adam had friends, but he didn't ever really connect with them. He would play along side of them, he would run around with them, but they didn't really talk or share or have things in common. Sometimes when I would eavesdrop on Goober and his friends, I would hear Goober talking and then the friend talking and they never seemed to be having the same conversation. Or Goober would talk and his friend would look at him funny. I know parallel play is perfectly acceptable for kids of a certain age, but at some point you wonder if they're ever going to make real friends, true friends that they can talk with and do things with and share things with.

And then they do. I don't know why it's working now, why he's suddenly making close friendships. I know he's maturing and he's learning more about how to deal with people in general and maybe that's just it. Maybe he's just growing up. But whatever it is...

I'm just glad he's having fun.

normal

2011-10-14T15:01:00.001-05:00

I've been telling myself for months that once the social worker visit was over, my life could return to normal.

Then it was once the adoption hearing was over, my life could return to normal.

Then it was once our editor returned from vacation, my life could return to normal.

Then it was once I got the child support order changed, my life could return to normal.

Then it was once Goober got accustomed to his new school, my life could return to normal.

Then it was once my mother returned to her house, my life could return to normal.

Right now, it's once this outdoor sports trade show is over, my life could return to normal.

And I'm coming to the conclusion that this is the new normal. This massive mess of stress and obligations is what my life will be from here on out. Mostly because this week I came down with a massive bladder infection and nothing makes life more pleasant that peeing lit matches and razor blades. And then the subsequent antibiotics that give you raging diarrhea. (And I'll just stop there because I'm pretty sure you don't want to know the rest.)

But that's what it's been. Goober is not adjusting to his new school and the pace of his schoolwork. I can understand this. Last year, he was in a class that was well below the grade level he was working at. His teacher did her very best to challenge Goober -- and I am more than grateful for that -- but still... the work he was doing was first grade work and he was testing at fourth grade for reading and math. So he was able to do his work quickly and not have to think too hard, which gave him plenty of time to goof off and daydream. Now, he's working at his grade level and he has to work hard and he has to think hard. It's been very difficult for him to adjust.

As a result, Nature Boy and I have been pulled into a few parent-teacher conferences, had several back-and-forths over email and received a few phone calls at home. Ironically, he's doing well socially, which is the last thing we expected. We thought he'd do fine academically but struggle making new friends. Goes to show how much we know about our own child.

The upside of this all is that the Goober is grounded from TV for life. I'm loving it. No more arguments about what he is allowed to watch, no more begging to watch cartoons that are not parent approved, no more TV during dinner, no more distractions while homework is being done. It's beautiful.

Business at the archery shop has picked up quite a bit, but that means Nature Boy isn't home as much and I have a shit-ton of bookkeeping each night. So hooray for money coming in, but boo for not seeing my husband ever.

And the newspaper. We're gearing up for a big fifth-anniversary edition and it's eating up a lot of our time and brain power. The good news is we go to press with this on Oct. 31. The bad news is that we will be redesigning the paper and reevaluating the content once that edition hits the streets. Yippee.

The truly disturbing thing for me is that there is no expiration date on any of these crises. They will keep going, which means the current stress level of my life will keep going. So I will just get used to the new normal. Or go crazy.

I'm pretty sure it's a wash either way.

cheese ground zero

2011-09-27T13:52:00.001-05:00

I live in Wisconsin, which is proudly known as America's Dairyland. At one point, there was a serious movement to have our state motto be the 'eat cheese or die' state.

So when this kerfluffle started, I was a little amused. Apparently, a physicians' group is taking issue with our cheese consumption so they put up this billboard in Green Bay:

The PCRM said they chose Green Bay deliberately. The company that makes the cheesehead hats, as seen on the grim reaper there, is pissed. The mayor of Green Bay was less than amused when the organization asked if he would put a junk food warning label on everything sold with cheese. I mean, that's pretty much everything in Wisconsin. We once had a law that required restaurants to serve butter or cheese with everything.

I think the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel said it best when they called Green Bay "cheese ground zero." Cheese makes up a significant part of our economy. We all eat cheese. Even my lactose-intolerant sister. I was talking with a fitness-instructor friend about our high-protein pre-workout snacks and it turns out both of us turn to cheese - she goes for the cottage variety and I snack on the Babybel light variety.

But I can certainly understand the concern a "physicians" group might have. (Quotes intended based on this article.) Most processed cheese is high in fats, chemicals and other icky stuff. We shouldn't eat it. But real cheese? The stuff made from milk and bacteria? Not so bad.

Maybe I'm biased because I was born and raised in Wisconsin. I come from a long line of dairy farmers. At one point, my grandparents had the largest farm in the county. And I like cheese. I am especially fond of very sharp cheese and bleu cheese and mild white cheeses, depending on the application and almost always with wine.

So where do you fall? Is cheese good or bad? Really, I want to know how people in other parts of the world feel about cheese, because I live in cheese ground zero.

finally

2011-09-20T21:18:00.001-05:00

So we had the adoption hearing this morning and you know what? It's all good.

We are now the proud parents of a 7-year-old boy. The only parents of a 7-year-old boy.

The guardian ad litem? Turned out to be a champ. Apparently, Sunday was just an off day. She handled the hearing like she was Perry Mason in a floral-print dress. But both Nature Boy and I had to testify about our relationship, our families, our history and our income. And let me tell you, that kind of messes with your mind. Because you start to question things you know. Like how long you've lived in your own house (me) and when you got married (Nature Boy).

I was still so flustered that when I had to fill out the forms to have the Ubergoober's birth certificate changed I couldn't do it. Seriously. I messed up six forms trying to get it done. I messed up Nature Boy's birth date, the county we live in, my ex's name... everything. Nature Boy finally had to do it, which proves how much he loves me because that was one of our wedding vows. I vowed to fill out any and all forms, legal or otherwise, and he vowed to put the registration sticker on my license plate every year. Well, not our real wedding vows that we made in front of the judge, but the vows that you make before you get married, the promises you make to each other so that you can get all your personal shit sorted out before you get married.

Anyway, forms. They're all filled out. Correctly.

Goober was remarkably placid about it all. When I told him that the adoption was final and he had a new name (at his request - he has Nature Boy's last name now) he just nodded.

"So Daddy is your daddy legally now," I said.

"And my only daddy," Goober added.

He's had remarkably few questions about the whole thing, except for wanting to know why Nature Boy didn't adopt him sooner. And, to be honest, I wasn't terribly honest with him on that front, because the reasons we didn't do this sooner aren't all that good. To wit:

1. We didn't know where my ex was. He disappeared about five years ago and we didn't know where he went. But eventually he stayed in one place long enough to show up on White Pages.

2. We live in a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business, so everyone knew that even though Nature Boy wasn't Goober's real father, Goober thought of him as Daddy, so they'd play along.

3. There are very few things you need to use a birth certificate for when a child is small. As they get older, however, you need a birth certificate for everything. And when the name your child uses doesn't match the name that's on his birth certificate, well...

4. If you want to take your child out of the country, you need both parents to sign for a passport. It's much easier to obtain a passport if you know where both parents are and they are both sober. We didn't plan to take Goober to Europe anytime soon, but he's been asking to visit England someday.

5. To get a drivers license, the name on the drivers license application must match the name on the social security card. Also a problem if the name on the social security card matches the name on the birth certificate that the child does not use. But that's a long ways away.

6. We were cowards. We didn't want to have to deal with my ex and it was just easier to live as if he didn't exist. But, as you can see from the reasons listed above, at some point we do have to acknowledge his existence. And we didn't want the Ubergoober to have to live with that, either.

So we did it. We jumped in because we finally realized that it would just be better to do this now.

And now... now it's over. We have our boy and he is ours.

Goober, with a special "adoption day" present from Grandma.

really?

2011-09-18T14:12:00.000-05:00

So after the social worker's home visit last weekend, we thought we were home free. After all, when I went to file the adoption papers at the courthouse a month ago, the clerk there (who knows these things) said we'd just have a home visit and that would be it.

It wasn't.

The other day - Friday - at 3 p.m., I got a frantic phone call from my mother, who was at home. There was a message from a lawyer and I needed to call her right away. This is not a phone call you want to get at 3 p.m. on a Friday. Hell, it's not a phone call you want to get ever, but it's especially bad late on a Friday afternoon. My mind immediately went to all the horrible things that could be happening - my ex decided not to give up his parental rights and was going to contest the adoption; my ex's parents have decided to contest the adoption; I didn't fill the papers out correctly. Lots of things.

Turns out it was the court-appointed guardian ad litem. The attorney that essentially represents the Ubergoober and makes sure what we're doing is in his best interest. And she needs to do a home visit, too.

Before the hearing, which is scheduled for first thing in the morning on Tuesday.

She wanted to do it right away Friday afternoon, but that was impossible. I was at work, Nature Boy was at work and Goober was at school. Plus, I had a parent teacher conference after work and archery season was opening the next day and Ty was coming home after work to get ready to go hunting.. things were just hectic.

So we scheduled the visit for this morning. Frankly, before the visit, I was a little... I suppose stressed would be the best term. Here we had a lawyer who has had the termination and adoption papers for about a month and she just now realized she had to do a home visit to make sure we are appropriate parents to our child. Well, since we're all technical here, I should say it's my child and the child Nature Boy has been raising as his own for more than six years. Ahem.

I got up early and baked muffins and made coffee. Nature Boy rushed out to the barn to do a few chores and the boys slept in but were ready in plenty of time for the visit. Thankfully the lawyer showed up more or less on time.

In a tie-dyed T-shirt, a Hogwarts jean jacket and bedroom slippers. She may or may not have combed her hair for the occasion.

Seriously.

She looked more like a hippie biker chick than an attorney, but since I'm not one for stereotypes, I didn't want to judge too harshly. Until she started complaining about lawyers. (What do you call 700 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A start! *guffaw*.) Then she informed the Ubergoober of his rights. He was being adopted. There would be a court hearing, which he would not need to attend. He could get a lawyer and contest the hearing if he wished.

Because, of course, a 7-year-old boy would totally understand all of this. And of course he'd know where to find an attorney.

But that's okay because she immediately complimented us on our home and began a litany of complaints about her own home, which was currently uninhabitable because there was some water damage and mold and the contractors have been there for two years so she was currently living in her office with her four children. And all the personal treasures she had stored in the basement are now ruined. Including her ice-fishing tip-ups, which was truly devastating. Also, did I have a copy of the report she was supposed to fill out? She didn't find one in the TWENTY PAGE PACKET OF PAPERS I MAILED HER A MONTH AGO. I flipped through the packet of papers I had. I did not have a report, nor was there one listed on the checklist of papers I was supposed to have. It was my fault, I guess. I should have anticipated that the guardian ad litem, the person responsible for representing my son's best interest in this whole thing, would have major home issues and was living in her office with her four children and had completely forgotten about our pending adoption hearing.

The visit lasted more than a half hour and only about five minutes of it were spent on the pending adoption. She did tell us that during the hearing, both Nature Boy and I would have to testify about our relationship, how long we have been married, why he wanted to adopt the Ubergoober. And then she left.

We didn't feel the relief at the end of her visit that we did with the social worker. We just felt confused and a little frightened. The social worker reassured us. We are a good family and everything will be fine. The lawyer offered no such reassurance, except for the fact that she was impressed we weren't raising our children "in a chicken coop with a dirt floor." Yes, that is a direct quote.

So I just keep telling myself that in roughly 36 hours this will all be over. I'm sure everything will go well. I'm sure we will come out of this as a family again. We're going in as a family, after all.

To distract myself, I'm trying to imagine what the guardian ad litem will wear to the hearing. Anyone have any guesses?

well, that went well...

2011-09-13T21:18:00.000-05:00

So the social worker came on Sunday and she was nice enough to give us two weeks notice before she did our home visit. Which means I had exactly 14 days to ~~give myself an ulcer~~ clean my home. And I tried. I did. But I'm not that good of a housekeeper and, well, let's just say it's a good thing she didn't go beyond the family room.

Anyway, the social worker was very nice. She just asked us a lot of questions about us, about Goober and about our family.

She's going to recommend the adoption at the hearing.

After she left, Nature Boy and I just looked at each other and almost melted with relief.

And I hadn't realized how much Nature Boy had been stressing about this. I knew that I was one big walking ball of anxiety -- my face was breaking out worse than my teenage son's, I had eaten every morsel of chocolate in our county, my mood was swinging like a monkey from a vine. But Nature Boy was cool. He was completely unfazed by the prospect of a woman coming to our home and maybe deciding that we shouldn't have our child. He soothed my crazy and made sure our lives went on as normal as they could.

But then we got the verdict. We were worthy of our child. We could keep on being a family, in her opinion.

He hugged me. I hugged him. We both hugged the Goober, who still doesn't quite understand what's going on, but he understood this was a happy moment and tolerated our unbridled affection with a stoicism that would make Winston Churchill proud.

And the hugging and smiling and laughing went on all day. It was as if an enormous weight had been lifted. We had broken through one more obstacle on the way to becoming a legal family and life is good.

easier than i thought

2011-09-07T21:22:00.002-05:00

On Sunday the social worker is coming to interview us and see if we are family material. As part of the process, she needs to talk to the Ubergoober, which kind of surprised me. But he is of an age where he can - and does - speak his mind.

The only problem is that we really hadn't told the Ubergoober about the adoption. We've always told him that Nature Boy adopted him and we explained what that meant, but we never bothered to tell him that the adoption wasn't legal.

So tonight I sat Goober down and had a talk. I told him that a social worker would be coming to the house on Sunday to talk to us because Daddy was going to be adopting him legally.

"So what does that mean?" he asked.

"Well, it means that Daddy loves you and..."

"He wants to be my Daddy and love me forever?" Goober asked.

"Exactly. It's just that right now even though he's your daddy now, there was someone else who was your daddy before..."

"What was his name?"

"That's not important right now. He was sick and couldn't take care of you. So he left..."

"Where did he go?"

"Umm... he moved to a different town."

"Which one?"

"Again, not important. So Daddy came and now we're going to make it so that everyone knows he's your daddy and he's going to be your only daddy."

"Okay."

"Any other questions?"

"How long will the social worker be here?"

"About an hour."

"Can we go for a bike ride after that?"

"Umm... sure."

"Okay. Can I read until bedtime?"

"Absolutely."

Man, I love this kid.

head games

2011-08-31T10:40:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow is the Ubergoober's first day of school. His first day of *special* school in his *special* class.

Last night we went to the school for an open house. This to me is the most brilliant idea in the whole world. Open the school up for an evening shortly before the first day of school and allow parents and students to come in, find their classrooms and desks and talk with the teacher to find out if there is anything special the kids might need on the first day, thus avoiding all the crap at the end the first day of school when all of a sudden you learn your child needed to bring a ferret or something and he was the only one who didn't and now he's going to fail second grade and it's all your fault because you're the mommy and you should damn well know that rodents are necessary on the first day.

Or something like that.

So we came, we saw, we filled up his desk with school supplies.

And he's feeling a little better about going to a new school. He knows some of the kids in his class from summer school and I know some of the parents and, in general, I think we all feel better.

So tonight we have some homework to do, a "getting to know you" exercise that his teacher likes to do with the kids so she can understand their personalities a little better.

We also have to clean a skull.

This summer when Goober and Nature Boy were discing the cornfield, they came across a raccoon skeleton, presumably from last year when we left a fruit and poison cocktail for the little buggers so they would leave our food crops alone. Did you know those little bastards can pick, peel and eat and entire cob of corn in the dark? Also, if the cob isn't quite ripe, they'll pick it, peel it, take a bit and then leave it on the ground in disgust. It's true and it's rather disgusting to go out in the morning to pick corn and see that all the ripe corn is gone and the ground is littered with perfectly clean cobs and the unripe corn is lying next to it with a bite or two taken out. Usually next to a nice pile of raccoon poop.

Anyway, raccoon skeleton. Goober latched on to the skull and made it his pet. It doesn't have a name yet, but I'm suggesting Yorick. I think it's the only choice when you have a skull for a companion. So he wanted to take it to school for show and tell, which actually fits in well with the second grade science curriculum which starts with a paleontology and fossils unit. But if one takes a skull to school it must be safe for all students to touch and not just the hick student whose mother and father have given up trying to keep a level of safe sanitation in their home and yard.

My first instinct was to use bleach, but I was wrong. Apparently, hydrogen peroxide is the cleanser of choice for animal skeletons. You soak the skull in peroxide then use a soft brush to get in the nooks and crannies. At least this is the prescribed treatment as related by Nature Boy, who knows these things.

So we're starting off the year by bringing an animal skull to class along with the assigned homework. I'm going to think of it as extra credit.

fun at the office

2011-08-26T09:20:00.002-05:00

Recently we've had some fly issues at the office. The production and circulation departments leave the loading dock doors open and, being that fall is approaching and all the insects are looking for warm hidey-holes, we get a lot of flies coming in. A lot.

And these aren't regular flies. These are gargantuan behemoth flies that move slowly but are still hard to kill.

So when my co-worker and I managed to kill three of the suckers, we were ecstatic. But also a little grossed out. So we kicked the carcasses into the hallway.

When I came in this morning, someone had added a cross. We think it was Jerry in advertising, but it's hard to say.

Then Cyndi up front had some flowers. And more flies. Next thing we knew, we had a full-blown insect memorial going on.

The cops and courts reporter made a good point about it, though. He said if we ever cleaned it up, we'd still have to be careful where we walked. Kind of like when you build a house on a sacred burial ground.

UPDATED: One of the copy editors wanted me to share this with you. Apparently I'm not the only one who finds dead insects humorous.

UPDATED AGAIN: The memorial is growing. Our photographer wanted to contribute to the memorial fund. Then the receptionist thought the flies should not just have a mass grave, so she made headstones for them. Some days, I love coming to work.

traditional family

2011-08-24T10:44:00.000-05:00

When one gets married, the next logical step is usually to start a family. Some people are lucky and they can get pregnant right away. Others struggle with infertility and others adopt. And more others choose not to have children.

When Nature Boy and I got married, we already had children. He had his two and I had my one. So we thought that we were going to skip that family-building step. After all, we had really done things out of order and had children before we even met.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I absolutely support that practice if that's what is right for you. And it was right for us. We certainly weren't going to give up the children to make new ones, especially since I'm broken and Nature Boy is fixed.

But we did feel that void where a child belonging to both of us would be. In our ugliest of fights, we'd throw around the fact that I'm not Sam and Ty's mother and he's not Goober's father. It always stopped us cold because when we got together, it was with the understanding that the children were ours. Yes, we also had our exes to contend with, but in our home we were mom and dad and one big happy family. Still, it just kind of nagged at us. We were missing that bond a couple has when they make children together - biologically, scientifically or legally. It seems that going through that process seems to cement a family together in ways that just saying you will be a family doesn't. It's like a trial by fire.

So now we're going through that trial. Truly and actually. We have a court date and we will step up in front of a judge and say we will be a family. The Ubergoober's birth certificate will be changed to show that Nature Boy is his father, thereby making everything the government believes about us to match what we already believe about ourselves.

In the process, we've had to have some difficult discussions - many of the same discussions couples have when they start a family. We discussed names because we are changing the Ubergoober's last name and middle name. We talked about how we were going to afford things without the very minimal child support I received from my ex. We talked about how we would afford the court fees for the adoption process. We talked about how difficult it was to wait for things to happen. How we wanted things to happen now, when we were ready for them to happen.

We have a timeline now, though. In 30 days we'll be a family. We'll be a mom, a dad and a child. Plus two extra children. We're still the same family we've always been, just a little bit more so.

hours

2011-08-23T08:54:00.000-05:00

Today I will try again to file the papers which will make the Ubergoober Nature Boy's child legally.

Illegally he's been daddy for more than six years, but it turns out that that will only get you so far.

So for the next two hours I will be trying to remain calm. This will be my third try at the courthouse. The first time I thought I had everything together, but I didn't. I was missing half of the papers I needed. The second time I was missing signatures. But this time. This time I think I have everything.

Except checks. Dammit. Good thing I remembered now. That would have been embarrassing to try and file papers without paying the court fees.

But third time's a charm, right?

I've been so stressed about this that I've broken out in a rash. My arms and chest have had various degrees of unsightly bumps that itch like an infected mosquito bite. The bumps go away, but the itch remains. I feel like a mental patient trying to scratch the evil out of their skin. The other night I took a soothing bath with lots of Aveeno, which helped. Tonight I took a fistful of benadryl, which also seems to be helping.

And I cannot even imagine what it must be like for other families who are waiting on an adoption. At least we already have our child. He lives with us and he has been with us from the beginning. There is almost no danger that he will be taken away by a birth parent who has changed their mind, or a social worker who feels we are not fit to be parents or a government who disagrees with Americans taking their babies. We are very lucky for that.

bitchslapped by fate

2011-08-18T15:23:00.000-05:00

The adoption is going. Forward, at least, and not backwards, but there was a setback today that knocked me flat on my ass.

See, because we didn't have all of our ducks in a row, my ex forgot to have witnesses sign the affidavit that says he does not want to be Goober's dad anymore. And, yes, that sentence does seem sad, but really... it's not. I promise.

So when I went to the courthouse today, with my reams of court forms filled out in triplicate, we noticed that some signatures were missing. Actually, I noticed it last night, but went storming ahead certain that this small omission would not be an issue.

It was.

I could not file the papers. I would have to contact my ex. Otherwise, he would have to come to the hearing and resign all the papers. If he didn't, well... there were options, but it would have meant a lot more time and a lot more energy and a lot more money.

So I did what any rational, educated woman would do. I burst into tears.

"It will be okay," the court lady promised.

"No, it won't," I blubbered.

So I gathered up my papers and my folder and I headed out of the courthouse. On my walk back to my car, I was thinking about all the ways I could get this done without having to talk to my ex. After all, the last phone conversation we had was less than pleasant. There were some words, a threat of extortion, there may have been some alcohol involved. I'm not sure. It was disturbing to say the least.

But nothing came to mind. Nothing legal, at least.

You can only imagine my surprise when my ex called my office a half hour later. I think if ever there was a time when one could have actually shit a brick, that would have been it. The last time we spoke was almost a month ago and the time before that was seven years ago.

He had some questions about the paperwork he had to fill out. He apologized for our last phone conversation. I accepted his apology. He was sober. I explained the most recent problem, we came up with a solution and we can now move forward. It was... almost pleasant.

It also gave me hope. Not hope that he would want to be part of Goober's life again, but hope that this will all be over with soon. Hope that the rest of our lives will be more peaceful. Hope that if anything came up in the future, we could be adults.

rated x

2011-08-11T10:27:00.000-05:00

Scene: Our bedroom
Time: Last night

Nature Boy and I are enjoying some adult recreation, having waited until the Ubergoober was firmly asleep before getting busy. We learned our lesson. We are closing in on the finish line when Nature Boy stops suddenly.

Nature Boy: Goober, go back to bed.

Goober: But...

Nature Boy: Go lay down.

I dissolved into laughter, as I do when I'm in difficult situations. Nature Boy got up. I assumed he was heading to the Ubergoober's room to field any questions, but he headed for the bathroom.

Me: (Still laughing) Aren't you going to do something?

Nature Boy: Hell no. You go deal with this.

Me: Why me?

Nature Boy: I don't know what to say. You're the one who usually deals with this stuff.

(I hate to admit it, but he's right. When it comes to having "the talk," Nature Boy always wimps out and makes me deal with it. When Goober asked where babies came from, I found him a book and read it with him. When Sam became a teenager, I was the one who bought the feminine hygiene products and showed her proper application — granted, I was more qualified for that than he was, but still. I also had to talk with Ty about condoms.)

So I pulled my pajamas back on and walked down the hall to Goober's room. I found him in his bathroom, washing his hands after obviously using the toilet.

Me: Hey, buddy. What's up?

Goober: Nothing. I just wanted to say thank you for my new bike.

I checked my watch. It was after midnight. Also, the new bike was the old one his brother had grown out of. I had just pulled it out of the barn that evening. Exciting, I suppose for a 7-year-old, but still... he had just witnessed his parents in a very compromising position I understand is illegal in some states.

Me: Are you sure that's it?

Goober: Yep.

I tucked him back into bed and went back to our room.

Nature Boy: Well?

Me: Well nothing. He didn't say a word.

Nature Boy: Seriously? He didn't wonder what... (he trailed off)

Me: Nope.

In retrospect, I probably should have broached the subject with Goober, but it was late and I was tired.

Besides, it was the perfect out for me. Now Nature Boy can deal with it today.

courtroom drama

2011-08-09T13:13:00.000-05:00

I used to love "Law & Order." I loved the legal processes, the investigations, the gritty nature of the show. Since having children, however, I have eschewed dramas in favor of sitcoms and romantic comedies.

Why? Because having children is gritty and real enough and, goddammit, some days I just need to escape into a happier world where problems are solved in a half hour and everyone is happy.

Especially lately.

For several years, I have been wanting to terminate my ex's parental rights to the Ubergoober. It's something he's wanted, as well. But it's something that we haven't pursued because, well, I had no idea where my ex was. About six years ago he disappeared and it was only recently that I found him. So papers have been exchanged, courthouse meetings have been set and the wheels have been set in motion.

It's stressful. It turns out even if both parties are willing, the courts won't just terminate parental rights. But we're working through it. Nature Boy will be adopting the Ubergoober and everything will be okay. It has to be.

So if I'm MIA for a bit, I'll be in a courtroom most likely. Working to make my family legal, because before we were just... well, a little illegal.

Wish us luck.

run

2011-08-03T11:53:00.000-05:00

Last night I went for a run for the first time since Nature Boy's birthday party where I broke a toe hiking through the woods in flip flops. Yes, I should have known better. I absolutely should have gone in and changed into boots or at least tennis shoes. But I did not. So I was grounded for a few weeks while my toe healed.

So when the planets aligned, along with my bones, and I laced up my running shoes and headed out.

It was wonderful.

I had forgotten how nice it was to run. To just head down the driveway and down the road with no particular route in mind, just an idea of the streets and trails that would take me as far as my lungs, legs and heart could go.

I plugged in my MP3 player and blasted Aretha and Joe Cocker, each note propelling me farther, my feet hitting the road in time with the drum beats. I took a few breaks to walk, to catch my breath a little before picking up the pace again, but not as many as I thought I would.

On my cool-down walk back up my driveway, I picked fresh raspberries and sang along with Aretha, belting "Freedom" out at the top of my lungs and being exceedingly grateful we don't have neighbors. Because that's what it felt like.

Freedom.

It reminded me why I exercise. It's not just so that I can continue to fit into my pants, although that is a big motivator. It's not just so I can be healthier, but that does help me get off the couch. It's because it's fun to be out there, just me and the road and the music. Because it's just 30 minutes out of my day that lets me sweat out all the crap and work through my shit before I go to bed. Because it tires me out enough that my insomnia can't override my need for rest. Because there's no one telling me where I should go, how fast I need to run or that I'm not doing it right. It's just me. My music. My feet hitting the road.

connected

2011-07-26T15:15:00.000-05:00

Somewhere in my closet I have a collection of postcards my grandparents sent me from their travels around the United States. They never left the country -- except that one time when they drove through Canada to get to Alaska -- but they visited every corner of the continental U.S. and Alaska. At every stop, my grandma would purchase two postcards from the hotel or restaurant or gas station and send them off to my sister and I with a note on the back, penned in my grandmother's elegant yet irreverent Palmer script, letting us know where they were and what they saw.

I treasured every postcard and often brought them to school for show and tell. For a little girl in a small town in Wisconsin, those glossy images of California redwoods and the Best Western in Piedmont, North Dakota, were as exotic as the Louvre or the Westminster Abbey.

So I was thinking of this today when I got an e-mail from my mother. She has kidnapped the Ubergoober and will be taking him to Florida for a week to visit my sister.

The subject line of the email was "Ubergoober's Project." Attached:

And I was glad to get this email. But I'm also a little... well... nostalgic for those postcards.

I know that while Goober is with Grandma and Grandpa, I will get many more emails like this. And phone calls. And text messages. When they go to Sea World, I'm sure my mother will snap some quick photos with her iPhone and ship them through cyberspace so I can see my son with the dolphin only minutes after it happened.

It's wonderful that we have this technology and it's even more wonderful that my parents have embraced it. They have email accounts, smartphones, digital cameras, Skype and Facebook. But it has also changed the timbre of vacations, at least for me. I miss those postcards. Those quick handwritten notes, one for me and one for my sister, highlighting the things that we would each find interesting.

But I also know that my son would not understand. He'll encourage my mother to e-mail me. He's grown up with computers and email, digital cameras and video chats. He's never waited by the mailbox for the mailman to bring a letter. He's e-mailed the president and received a response. He Skypes with his cousin and his grandpa. He has always been able to preview a photo on the camera's view screen and he's never picked up film from being processed.

It's fate, I suppose. After all, I used an electric typewriter to do my papers and my father only had a manual. I used an electric mixer and my mother used a hand whisk. I just find it impossible to imagine what things will be like when my own grandchildren are born.

piehole

2011-07-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

A few things I've learned over the past week:

1. Showing solidarity with a coworker who recently quit smoking should not include eating all of the snacks she brings in to distract herself from the fact she does not have a cigarette.

2. If you are going to be tromping through the woods, there are better footwear options than flip flops. Wearing flip flops will mostly likely result in a broken toe. Or at least a very sore toe and several cuts on the bottom of your feet. And deer shit on your feet. Which is probably the very worst result.

3. Doing 100 crunches in one evening does not give you permission to eat a half a bag of Pirate's Booty. The resulting bloat will immediately destroy any positive results from the crunches.

4. A headache will not get better if you go to work.

5. Nor will a sore neck.

6. School supply shopping is hell because every other parent needs the same special folder that you do and local stores will only supply enough for six of you. It is best to come prepared for mortal combat because that is what things will come down to.

41

2011-07-17T20:37:00.000-05:00

Today is Nature Boy's birthday. He is 41 years old.

Yesterday we partied like rock stars. Technically, we partied like Ted Nugent, but he is a rock star. We had an outdoor archery shoot on our property and then we grilled some wild animals and sweet corn. It was exactly what Nature Boy wanted to do.

Nature Boy, taking aim

Our good friends' kids. Everyone shoots.

Me and the girls.

Davey. Plaid shorts, for the win.

They made it out of the woods alive.

Mixed grill.

So happy birthday, babe. I love you and I'm so glad you had a good day.

carrying the one

2011-07-12T18:31:00.000-05:00

As we inch closer and closer to the next school year, I'm starting to get a touch nervous for the little Ubergoober. He is, after all, going to the "special school" next year. And we say it like that, sotto voce with elegant air quotes hovering about our heads.

My main concern is that he won't be up to the challenges that his classmates have already mastered, having a year in the program under their belts already. Heck, last year they learned French in the second-grade gifted class. French. I can speak German a little, mostly profanities, and I can read some Latin. Please note these are all skills I learned post-elementary school. I have a vague memory of my mother signing my sister and I up for a German class when I was in second or third grade and I could speak well enough to talk to my Irish great-grandmother (don't ask... it's really quite a long and convoluted story), but it was extra-curricular and now I'm thinking my mother had it right and why haven't I been shuttling my Goober off to learn French already?

I suppose I should be comforted that he was well beyond grade level in all subject matters, except cleanliness and organization. That he remained stubbornly average at. But... well, you just don't know. I don't know where he should be, despite repeated assurances by his teacher for next year that he will be just fine. Just fine. He'll do well, she promises.

So Nature Boy and I decided to do some homeschooling this summer. Just some extras to help Goober get ahead. He's been reading voraciously and has returned to his non-fiction roots, sucking down books on space and math theory like most children suck down milkshakes.

Today I brought him to the archery shop with me, so to entertain him I printed off a bunch of math worksheets, mostly adding two-digit numbers together.

"Come on, Goober. You need to know this. Do you know how to carry the one?" I asked, shoving the sheets at him.

He just shrugged. "I'd rather play on Carrot Sticks." So he sat down at his computer (an old laptop we let him play on) and started playing. It's a website his first-grade teacher recommended for him, so we let him play on that site almost whenever he asks. I monitor it slightly, but it's just math games where you get carrots for correct answers. I don't think there's much I can object to. So I'm cooking my books and he's playing on his game and it's a while before I think to check what he's doing.

Adding three sets of four- and five-digit numbers together.

And getting the answers right.

Sometimes he uses a piece of scrap paper to work the problem out, but mostly he's doing it in his head. And I realize, I'm freaking out over nothing. He will be fine.

And from now on, I'm giving him the checkbook to balance. If he can get those problems right, I'm guessing my personal finances should be no problem.

blues

2011-07-10T20:27:00.000-05:00

This summer instead of taking a vacation, we decided to build a path from our house to our fire pit. Well, not so much "we" as Nature Boy. I'm not sure why. It was something of a man project. But the end result is... well, very nice.

Huh... that's a little crooked. You'd think I was drinking when I shot that. Oh, wait... I was. Celebratory dacquiri.

I still have some progress to make on the flower beds, but I think they turned out very nice. Nature Boy insisted on not having any "girly" flowers, so we did a blue-themed garden accented with celosias, commonly known as "cockscombs" (right). Can't get more many than that, right?

We also added foxgloves, larkspur, delphinium, creeping phlox. Lots of blues.

It was interesting for me because we don't do much with flowers at our house. Most everything we grow has food value for us. We plant apple and cherry trees so we have fresh fruit. We plant raspberries and strawberries for the same reason. We do more than an acre of vegetables and three acres of food plots, which serves as food for the deer which become food for us.

Unfortunately, I'm horribly allergic to flowers, so although I love flowers and I love flower gardening, I avoid it because of my allergies. Fortunately, I have some kick ass allergy meds that allow me to function even when I'm hauling trays of pollen-dripping flowers in my SUV.

So now that project is done. We can move on to the next man project.... converting Nature Boy's old construction trailer into a camper. Stay tuned.

revolutionary

2011-07-05T10:26:00.001-05:00

Growing up, I always had a very strong sense of family. We lived just a mile from my maternal grandparents, who we visited at least three or four times a week and there was that time in junior high when I lived with them. My aunts and uncles all lived within 10 minutes of our house and every holiday and every birthday was a great big family gathering of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, great-aunts and uncles, shirttail relation and usually the neighbors. Family stories were always shared and old photos passed around and analyzed.

Nature Boy, however, did not have the same experience. His parents divorced when he was 6 and he lost touch with his dad for several years, until about junior high. He was acquainted with his mother's family, given that that's who he lived with, but his mother lived about an hour and half away from her parents and siblings, so visits were few. And his dad's family... well, he couldn't pick them out of a lineup. He didn't have that same sense of family that I did, mostly because, well, he didn't really have that extended family experience.

So when we got together, I offered to do his genealogy. I've been working on mine for about 20 years now, and the thought of working on someone else's family seemed... well, exotic and intriguing. My own lineage is a mix of German, Irish and Danish and I've traced most of it back into Europe. (Hooray for that accidental German minor in college.)

But Nature Boy's genealogy is a wonderful mix of Russian, British and German -- a different German from mine. One line of his family traces back to the Revolutionary War.

This weekend, Ancestry.com had free access to the Sons of the American Revolution records and last night I finally got to log on and peruse the records. I love these records, mostly because they're in English and much easier to read than Danish, and because they have gobs of information. But the best part was I found the original application for a descendant of Isaac Cady, which is Nature Boy's great-great-great-great-great grandfather on his maternal grandmother's side. The application gave me a place of birth and death for Mr. Cady and gave me the location of his Revolutionary War service records. In short, a major find.

As I squealed with delight, Nature Boy was in the kitchen, doing dishes.

"Geeking out?" he asked.

"Check it. Revolutionary War records for Isaac Cady."

"Is he the guy that built the Cady House?" The Cady house is a (locally) famous house in Birnamwood, where Nature Boy grew up, a small town of mostly dairy farms. His parents moved there shortly before they divorced and his mom stayed but his dad moved back to his hometown.

"His father. This is so cool. I know when he enlisted in the army and where he was born. This is awesome. He was born in Massachusetts, so I'm not even back to Europe with this line yet."

"So? Doesn't everyone have an ancestor that fought in the Revolutionary War?"

I shook my head. "I don't. The first ancestor that I have coming to the U.S. is in the 1860s, maybe 1850s. Yours were here before 1760."

"Really? I go that far back here?"

So I showed him the excerpts in the local history books, stories of his family coming to the area and settling there, serving on the local government and practicing law. I hauled out the lineage charts and traced the line for him, from father to mother to mother to father and back. He was silent for a long time.

"You know, I can't believe they came to Birnamwood. I had family there even before we moved there and I had no idea. I had roots in the area and all my life I felt like I was an outsider," he said. "I guess all these years I really did belong there."

how i met...

2011-07-01T14:03:00.000-05:00

One of the things I like to collect are stories of how people met. H and his wife have been together for more than 30 years. They met in college. This is his story:

"We had a class together, and it was one of the first classes I took in college. She sat next to me. One day, there was a bee in our classroom and the professor was trying to get it out. I watched the bee and I saw it land on her head.

"I didn't even think twice. I grabbed my book at I hit the bee. I killed the bee, though. I didn't realize what I had done until the professor was asking if she was all right. I kept saying, 'I killed the bee.' I thought he'd be glad that I'd killed the bee."

H shakes his head. "Well, at least that got our first conversation started. She's forgiven me, but she hasn't forgotten."

already?

2011-06-29T10:25:00.001-05:00

Wow... June is almost over. I swear summer was just beginning, and here we are almost halfway through.

A lot has happened this month. We celebrated Father's Day by going out for lunch and then catching frogs in our pond. It wasn't my idea of a holiday celebration, but Nature Boy enjoyed it.

All frogs were released back into the pond. No frogs were harmed in this holiday celebration.

Nature Boy and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary. In 2008, on the Summer Solstice, we got married under a tree in our yard.

You can see here that the Ubergoober is not happy with us. I don't know if I ever told this story, but when we were preparing for the wedding, Goober was a little confused as to what was happening. So I did my best to explain it to him a day or so before the big event.

"Well, Daddy and Mommy love each other very much and we are just letting everyone know that we are going to love each other forever," I said.

He promptly burst into tears.

"But I want you to love ME forever!" he wailed.

So at the wedding, he tried to make a break for it.

We caught him before he could get too far, but he was not in a pleasant mood during the ceremony.

But he's much better now and he's forgiven us. I think. He seems okay at least, three years later. He doesn't hate us anymore for getting married. Now he hates us because we limit his Wii and make him play outside.

So now we're making preparations for Nature Boy's big 41st birthday bash. His birthday is in mid-July, but apparently there is landscaping involved in the preparations. I'm not sure why, but it's improving the look of our yard so I'm just going with it. We're adding a path from the house to the fire pit and that's been taking up all his time. Well, that and obsessing about his hair. After his initial freak-out about going bald, he seems to have decided that he just might as well embrace the state of affairs and has been researching different razors to take things to the next level. He landed on the Head Blade. Have you seen this thing? It has wheels and looks rather much like a race car or a go-kart, which I think is part of the attraction for him and why he believes it will be better than a regular razor. I'm not exactly sure how this is all going to work, but like the path, I'm just going with it.

Although I really can't throw stones since I've been obsessing about my own hair. It's finally long enough to donate — and definitely long enough to be serious pain when it comes to combing, washing and generally dealing with — but if I donate it now, I'll have to cut it so it's too short to pull back. Which I usually don't mind, but now that I'm running and working out more, it's nice to be able to throw the mop into a ponytail so it's out of my face. Because my hair likes to get in my face. It's defiant like that. You can see what an unholy mess my hair becomes when it's long. Oh, it doesn't look so bad in the photo, but you have to trust me here. So... anyone swimming with me in the shallow end here? Any thoughts? I'd love input because I'm pretty useless when it comes to fashion and beauty.

easier

2011-06-14T09:13:00.001-05:00

There are 10 years between Ty and the Ubergoober, and 8 years between Sam and the Ubergoober.

That's a decade and nearly a decade, and when you're talking about child development, it's a lifetime.

Which made Goober's first five years pretty damn difficult for us.

Oh, he wasn't a difficult child. Not really. I mean, he had his moments, to be sure, but as far as children go, we could manage him.

What made things difficult is that we had two children who could do one thing and one child who couldn't and two parents who had to decide which one would go with which child.

Meaning we didn't get to spend a whole lot of time as one big happy family.

We could do some things, like go to the zoo or go on bike rides. But we couldn't all go to the water park and go on the same rides -- one would have to go in the kiddie pool with Goober and the other could go down the really fun water slides with Ty and Sam. Guess who usually had to stay in the kiddie pool. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Or one of us would take Ty to his baseball game, the other would take Sam to her volleyball game and the Goober would tag along with whoever had the shorter time obligation. And if one of us had to work on a weekend - often necessary in our lines of work - we were screwed.

But now that the Ubergoober is 7? It's like a whole new world has opened up for us.

He can ride a two-wheeled bike by himself. He can play kickball and baseball. He's tall enough to go down the waterslide and he can swim across the pool by himself. He can brush his own teeth and take a unsupervised shower. He can shoot bow better than his brother.

And he's no longer the annoying baby brother that wants to do everything his big brother does, even though he's not old enough to do it. He's now the little brother who worships his older brother and will throw and kick balls for hours just so his big brother can get in shape for baseball and football. He'll also listen to whatever guidance his older brother can give him, making Ty feel important and loved.

So as a family, we can go on that bike ride, we can go swimming and we can play in the yard and no one feels left out.

It's pretty wonderful.

vegetables

2011-06-12T20:38:00.003-05:00

The gardens are finally in. We got the pumpkins and potatoes and all the rest of the kitchen garden in, which is a huge relief, especially since the seedlings were taking up valuable real estate in my breakfast room and dining room.

But this weekend, it was finally warm enough to put the plants in the ground, and they were happy to be out of their pots and into the ground.

The kitchen garden (above) came together nicely. We're trying a different format this year. For the last two or three years, we've done beds separated by mulched paths, so each vegetable had it's own little home. However, when it came to tilling, those beds and paths... well, it wasn't easy. So this year we bought a great big tiller and did away with the mulch and the paths and just did rows. So far, I like it better. Much easier to put in, although some of the rows look like I was drunk as I was planting.

The pumpkin/corn/potato patch out in the hinterlands of our property went in good, too. We didn't intend to put corn in there, too, but I didn't plant as many pumpkins as I usually do. Also, our cornfield is, well, kaput. For some reason, we can grow all the weeds we want but corn... not so much. So this year, we're scrapping the corn and planting a cover crop and next year we'll swap the pumpkin patch with the cornfield and...

Holy cow... I'm even boring myself.

Anyway, as I surveyed our acres of vegetables, clutching my lower back as it spasmed, I chastised Nature Boy for not helping me plant in the kitchen garden.

"This was your idea!" I said.

"No it wasn't. The corn was my idea. The vegetables were yours."

"How was this my idea? You're the one who put vegetables in my landscaping because you wanted fresh peppers."

"Well, you agreed that you wanted to have a garden. I just made sure it was big enough."

Ummm... yeah. Not even sure how to address that logic.

Now the only thing I need to do is clean up the herb garden and replant some of the ones who didn't make it through the winter and we're good to go.

Now, if you need me, I'll be out doing a rain dance.

a few things

2011-06-09T10:41:00.000-05:00

My sister moved to Florida last week, but she stopped in for a night to say goodbye and let the kids hang out.

The Ubergoober loves his cousin, mostly because Baby G is three years younger than he is, so Goober can be the elder, wiser kid rather than the pesky baby brother he usually is.

We shot in an archery tournament as a family a few weekends ago, which was a lot of fun. I took second in my division, Goober took first and Nature Boy... well, he looked really good.

This wasn't actually at the shoot, but you get the idea.

Goober got a new bow for his birthday in May and he's been loving it.

We've been gardening in full force. Over the weekend, the peas started to make an appearance and the onions were standing at attention. On Monday, the beans put forth a mighty effort and shot three inches out of the ground. The corn managed to evade the crows, who like to eat the seed before it can sprout, and started popping up yesterday as well. Of course, so did the weeds and it looks like we may have to scrap the whole crop and do some soil amending.

Goober and I planted an apple tree, my mother's day gift from him. Then, as he was mowing, Nature Boy took out one of the existing apple trees so we had to plant another. We're trying to make the best of our 40 acres, so we're establishing an acre of apple orchard. It's more of a free-form orchard, though, so the trees are rather scattered about. But it will fit with the wild nature of the rest of the property.

Yesterday was Goober's last day of school. I would have taken a photo, but he's been rather sensitive about it all. He's spent the last two years at our neighborhood elementary school. It's a wonderful school with wonderful teachers and helpful staff and a kick-ass playground. But next year, he'll be going to a different school, one that's in a neighboring community about 20 minutes away from our house. Why are we shipping our newly minted second grader out to the hinterlands for school when we have a perfectly good one just three miles from our house? Because that's where the smart kids go. Our school district has a special program for advanced students and Goober tested in to the program. It's really cool because he'll be with kids who are on his level and he can read more difficult books and do more in-depth projects. Ironically, I was in the pilot class for this program way back when, so it's kind of cool that my kid is going there, too. To help make the transition easier, Goober's new teacher let us come out for a classroom visit and we went on the day they had a picnic to finish out their French unit. (I totally took pictures of this and then deleted them off my memory card before I could download them. I'm really upset with myself.) He felt okay after the visit, but as it came time to say goodbye to his friends at his old school, Goober got a little maudlin. I know he will be fine once he gets there, but the transition will be difficult.

So now it's summer vacation and life is moving at a different pace. A little slower, a little less hectic but still busy.

barking mad

2011-05-23T09:26:00.000-05:00

It's finally been warm enough here in Wisconsin that we can sleep with the windows open. I love this time of year. There is a chill in the night air, but it's a bracing sort of chill, a welcome chill after the closed-in warmth of the furnace.

So on Saturday night, we opened the patio door in our bedroom and settled in for a restful sleep with the night breezes blowing over us.

And then the dog started barking.

And barking.

And barking.

Now, we don't have a dog. Also, our closest neighbor is a quarter mile away. That's going through the woods. If you want to actually reach our neighbors' houses in the least obstructed way possible, you're looking at least at a half-mile drive. Probably more, depending on the neighbor.

Which made the barking even more irritating. I was hearing this trough dense woods and it was like the dog was in our front yard. And, really , there was no way for me to know which neighbor had the vocal beast unless I drove around the village with my windows open.

After three hours of constant barking and abandoning several plans of canine eradication, I finally reluctantly closed the patio door, taking a last deep breath of cool night air, hoping it would tide me over to morning.

So last night Nature Boy and I were getting ready for bed and I opened the door, pausing to see if the barking was still going on. Nature Boy noticed my hesitation and questioned it. I told him about the dog and his eyes got wide.

"I know that dog. It only barks when the deer are moving. I bet the deer were moving last night."

He leapt across the bed and pulled the curtains back from the patio door, pausing to turn to look at me, arms crossed across my chest, tapping my foot in annoyance.

"But, yes. Very annoying when you're sleeping."

"So I shouldn't call the humane society?" I asked.

"Maybe wait until after hunting season."

seven

2011-05-21T10:12:00.000-05:00

Seven years ago on May 13, I was sitting in my entry way, waiting for my mother to take me to the hospital. I was in full-blown labor -- water broke, contractions every 15 minutes and panicking. She was doing her hair and makeup. True story.

In her defense, we really weren't sure I was going to have my baby that day. We'd had a few false alarms already and he still had a month to cook.

But out he came. A little blue and not really breathing that well, but otherwise pretty darn healthy for a preemie.

Now he's getting to be a big kid. A tall kid. He's only a foot shorter than me. Which, given my elven build, isn't staying that much. But still. He's getting bigger.

He's a good shot. We celebrated his birthday by having a party at the archery range so he could shoot with some of his little friends.

That's Goober in the middle.

We had cake and ice cream and trick candles.

Goober was mildly amused.

But what truly amazes me every day -- just as it amazes every mother -- is how much he's grown. Not just physically, but emotionally and mentally. Nature Boy and I were looking through old photos the other day and all the kids just seemed so... small. And young. Life was so different just a year ago.

But it's also better. So much better now. And our little boy is seven.

driving

2011-05-04T10:05:00.000-05:00

Ty got his drivers license a few weeks ago. So we gave him one of our old vehicles and we've hardly seen him since.

I know this is typical. I understand that. But it still scares me to no end.

Mainly because I know this kid. He is a good kid and a lovely boy and all those things a mom says about her (step)son. But he's also a boy who can't remember to brush his teeth every day. Who forgets that he has baseball practice. He can only manage to get one sock to the laundry at a time and if you ask him to do something, he will forget about it five steps on his way to complete the task.

"Ty, strip your bed and I'll wash your sheets," I'll say. Ten minutes later he returns from his room, empty handed.

"Ty, sheets," I'll repeat.

"Oh, yeah." And he'll disappear down the hallway, to return with his sheets. As I load them into the washer, I'll notice a few things missing.

"Ty, I need your pillowcases, too," I'll yell.

"Oh, yeah." He'll disappear back down the hallway and come back with one pillowcase.

"Both of them, please," I'll say, tapping my foot in annoyance.

"I only have one."

"You a have two pillows on your bed. Bring me both pillowcases, please."

"No, I only have one."

At this point I'll walk down to his room with him and see that, yes, he technically has only one pillow on his bed. The other is wedged under the chair. I'll pull it out, hold it up in front of his face and he'll say, "Oh, yeah."

So you can understand my trepidation in allowing this creature to operate a motor vehicle. I mean, I'm sure he'll do fine, but...

Seriously... two pillows.

return

2011-04-26T22:39:00.000-05:00

Well, we had a lovely Easter celebration here at the homestead. My parents were there as was my youngest child. We had brunch, which is my very favorite meal because I love breakfast, fancy tea, little sandwiches and consuming alcoholic beverages before noon. And, as luck would have it, brunch encompasses all these things.

So I made a ham, fruit salad, caramel pecan rolls, asparagus quiche and cheesecake. Oh, and mimosas.

As I was making the cheesecakes, the Ubergoober asked why I was making cheesecake for Easter. Because he doesn't like cheesecake.

"The Easter Bunny likes cheesecake," I said. "Like Santa likes milk and cookies."

He looked at me skeptically and lodged another complaint about the cheesecake. I shrugged.

"It's for the Easter Bunny. Do you really want to upset the Easter Bunny? The bringer of chocolate?"

Goober huffed off. So I went about my business and baked the cheesecakes. And then, because it's really not good to serve food that hasn't been tested yet, I helped myself to a piece. As did my mom and my dad. To cover up our crimes and foster the Easter Bunny myth, I did this:

The "green one" was a key lime cheesecake. The other was an amaretto cheesecake. And they were delicious.

I sent Goober down to the refrigerator in the basement where the cakes were kept and waited. Pretty soon he came running up with a cheesecake in his hands.

"Mom! Look! The Easter Bunny liked the cheesecake!"

I loved it. He was so excited that the Easter Bunny would leave him a note. I was excited that I had pulled off sampling the Easter desserts before they were served.

Everybody wins.

territory out of state

2011-04-23T10:19:00.001-05:00

Me: "So, tell me again why you need to go to Kansas over Easter?"

Nature Boy: "It's the only time Big Zak can get off work before hunting season."

"But hunting season is in November."

"Yes."

"And this is April."

"Yes."

"So tell me again why you need to go to Kansas over Easter?"

"So we can mark where we want to hunt in November."

"So you're going to go to Kansas to pee on trees?"

"We're not peeing on trees. We're using a GPS."

"You're virtually peeing on trees."

"You're not funny."

knocking

2011-04-22T22:36:00.000-05:00

The other night after we put the Ubergoober to bed, Nature Boy and I decided to get busy.

We failed to wait until the Goober went to sleep, though.

The next day, Goober and I were making supper and he asked if Daddy and I were fighting.

"No, why?"

"I heard you yelling last night. And then it sounded like Daddy was slapping you on the back."

"Oh."

"Are you sure you weren't fighting? You were yelling really loud."

"I'm sure."

So new mental note... make sure small child is sleeping before knocking boots.

great expectations

2011-04-21T14:21:00.000-05:00

For the most part, my expectations of people are pretty low.

At McDonald's, as long as they get my order correct and give me sweet and sour sauce for my nuggets, I'm a happy camper. As long as my kids are doing well in school and not misbehaving too much, that's great. If my husband can get the dishes done once a week, I'm dancing in the streets. When my coworkers not only do their jobs but can help me out a little with mine? I'm over the moon. See, it's my way of dealing with the world. Low expectations = simple joys and a happier me. Everyone wins. Well, I win and I guess that's most important. Right?

So I've been reluctant to push the Ubergoober too hard. Which works pretty well most of the time because he pushes himself harder than we would push him. After all, he's taught himself addition. We just encourage him and praise him when he does well.

But lately we've noticed that when we push him harder, he goes even farther. Like swim lessons this week. They overbooked the class that Goober was supposed to be in -- level 2 in the scheme of things -- so the pool manager, who is a friend of mine, pushed him up into level 3 lessons. When she told me, I just shrugged. Nothing really I could do about it and, frankly, I'd rather have him moved up than down.

I watched Goober in swim lessons and I have to say, I was astounded. He was right there with the other kids who had one more session of lessons than he did. He front crawled, he backstroked and he floated with the best of them. Because that's what was expected of him in that class. I was duly impressed. It was sink or swim and that little boy swam.

So all of this made my next parenting decision much easier.

Our school district offers a gifted and talented program for, well, the smart kids who aren't being challenged in their regular classes. They get to go to special classes and have an advanced curriculum and generally just pushed a little harder. Goober was tested this year and accepted to the program.

Of course I had every intention of sending him because this is a great opportunity. But I was a little apprehensive, because what if? What if the work is too hard? What if he's not smart enough? What if he gets frustrated?

But now I'm thinking this will be good. It's an academic sink or swim and I have every expectation that he will swim like a little champ.

hair and teeth

2011-04-19T13:43:00.000-05:00

So the Ubergoober lost another tooth this week. The one just to the right of his front bottom teeth. If I had any interest in medicine or dentistry (aside from how to get the really good painkillers) I would know exactly which tooth this is. But I don't. It looks like this, though:

I'm not sure if that helps you or not, but there it is.

Nature Boy pulled it out, like he's pulled out Goober's other teeth except for that one that fell out when he was eating lunch at camp last summer and bit into a hamburger and came back with one less chomper.

There's the dentist in action. He prides himself on his amateur dentistry skills and does well for the most part, except for the time he pulled one of Ty's teeth out with the fishing pliers and flung it across the kitchen. We still haven't found it.

If you look closely you'll notice that the dentist here has far less hair than he used to. A few months ago, Nature Boy freaked out about looking bald. Which seems a little... well... moot. Because he is mostly bald. Which is fine. So Sunday evening -- the same evening the tooth came out -- he asked me to cut his hair. Short. So I did. Buzzed it down to 1/8 of an inch.

"That still feels long," Nature Boy said. "Can you go shorter?"

"Are you sure?" I asked, still remembering the freak-out from nearly six months ago. "I've only got one shorter guard."

"Go for it."

I think I failed to mention the guard wasn't so much a guard as the tapering mechanism on the clippers, so it was pretty much the bare blades. So now he's almost completely bald again. But he's happy, so that's fine with me. Also, he's going camping over Easter weekend, which is fancy talk for "bunking down in the bed of Big Zak's truck on the side of the road in Bumfuck, Kansas" whilst he and the boys figure out where they're hunting in November which is fancy talk for "peeing on trees to mark territory and stuff." So the less personal hygiene he has to worry about, the better. I've seen the back of Big Zak's truck. It's no Ritz-Carlton. It's not even habitable for most wildlife.

So we're minus one tooth and minus a head of hair. Well, half a head of hair. Otherwise, things are normal.

100 percent

2011-04-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nature Boy and I have been battling colds these past few weeks. Not unusual for this time of year in Wisconsin, since the changing temperatures from Siberian labor camp on the river to something a little more temperate sends everyone's immune system into a tailspin.

So he spent the better part of last night coughing, which I'm sure you probably heard in Canada.

"Why do you have to cough so loud?" I asked, rubbing my ear and trying to assess whether the noise had caused my eardrum to burst because holy hell did my ear hurt.

"I don't cough loud, I just cough."

"That's how opera singers cough when the back row needs to hear that their character has consumption."

"We'll I'm not going to do it half-assed. When you do anything, you have to give 100 percent. When I cough, I give 100 percent."

"Seriously? You don't care that my ears are bleeding?"

In response, he belched, calling up digestive gasses from the very depth of his large intestine.

"Think I almost puked a little on that one."

"Is this another example of giving 100 percent?"

"All for you, babe."

spring broken

2011-03-30T13:04:00.001-05:00

About three weeks ago, the Ubergoober and I were driving in the car and he said, "Mommy, I think I need to talk to your boss because I think you need a week off work."

Oh, he was so right. I was stressed and overtired and just generally bitchy, so I decided to take off the week that the Ubergoober had spring break so I could spend some Mommy time with my little guy.

I also had these simple goals for my vacation:

1. Master the hooched-up cupcake.
2. Clean my office at the archery store.
3. Balance all family and business checkbooks.
4. Clean the five bathrooms in my house.
5. Go snowshoeing at least once with the Ubergoober.
6. Finish a chapter in my novel.
7. Find my wedding ring.
8. Work out every day.

So far, I have:
1. Locked Nature Boy out of the house because he was being an ass.
2. Mastered the hooched-up cupcake.
3. Contracted a sinus infection.
4. Lost all control of my bowels due to antibiotics for the aforementioned sinus infection.
5. Levelled up in Farmville.

So one out of six so far. I still have a few days left of vacation, but I don't see that as a good ratio.

On a positive note, Nature Boy and I did work out some issues in our marriage thanks to the locking-out incident, but it took us two days and those two days were the first days of my vacation. Really, not the best way to start time off work.

Also, the first full day of my vacation - Saturday - my ass was knocked down with a massive sinus infection that was slowly taking over my body, starting from the top down. By Monday it had traveled to my ear and I went to the doctor and got massive ass-kicking antibiotics. And, boy, that's exactly what they're doing. So I'm tired and cranky and cold and the only workout I'm getting is when I run to the bathroom.

But I did get some baking in and I made the most awesome cupcakes ever. Tonight I'm going to bake brownies with the Ubergoober and I will clean at least one bathroom. And I get to sleep in every morning, which I am really enjoying.

So it's not all bad, this vacation. And, really, it has to get better from here, right?

hooched up cupcakes

2011-03-27T21:16:00.001-05:00

It occurred to me that I haven't done a Food Friday post in a long time, but this weekend I made these amazing cupcakes and I think it would be wrong to keep them to myself.

(Please note, I'd love to post a picture of the cupcakes here, but they were eaten before I could get my camera.)

Ingredients:
1 french vanilla or white cake mix
1/4 cup Chambord liquour
1 can raspberry pie filling
1 8 oz. brick cream cheese
1 stick butter
2 lbs. confectioners sugar
1 tsp. vanilla

Make cake mix according to directions, but replace 1/4 cup of the water with 1/4 cup of Chambord. Fill cupcake pan and bake according to directions.

While cupcakes are baking, make the icing. Using an electric mixer, cream the butter and cream cheese together. Add 1/4 cup raspberry pie filling (save the rest of the pie filling for filling the cupcakes) and beat until combined. Add vanilla. Slowly add confectioners sugar until icing starts to stiffen up and comes to a good spreading consistency. This does not get really stiff, so don't try. You probably won't use all of the sugar.

Fit a large tip onto a pastry bag and fill the bag with pie filling. When cupcakes are cool, use the pastry bag to fill cupcakes by shoving the tip into the top of the cupcake and squeezing about tablespoon of filling into the cake.

When cupcakes are filled, frost with the raspberry cream cheese icing. Then stand back to avoid the stampede. These are good.

restless

2011-03-24T20:59:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we got dumped with a whole lot of snow. Maybe a foot. Or seven. I'm not sure. Everything was white and they cancelled school.

It's especially rough because Sunday was supposed to be the first day of spring. An important season here in Wisconsin because it means we can start to peel off our outermost layer of clothing. In a month, we can remove the next layer. And we keep going until May when we can start to show skin without getting frostbite.

But we're still languishing under this thick blanket of snow, which is just cruel because blankets are supposed to be warm. And I'm struggling, because we had a few nice days where the temperature got above 40 degrees and we were all running around with sweatshirts on instead of our heavy winter coats and insulated pants and fur-lined boots so we felt free instead of encumbered.

But there's hope because inside my peppers are sprouting. Goober and I started them a month ago. Soon we'll plant them and nurture them and then have stuffed peppers every night for dinner.

In the meantime, though, snow sucks.

i should be banned from hospital rooms, too...

2011-03-11T12:48:00.000-06:00

So when we realized that my mother-in-law (The Patient from the previous post) would be in the hospital longer than we initially thought, I did what any good daughter-in-law would do — I marched my butt to Target and bought her toiletries, magazines, crossword puzzles, a robe and the most hideous pajamas I could find.

Please note... I tried to find a photo of it so you could bask in the gaudy glory of this abomination of fashion, but I could not. This is a close representation, however:

You'll just have to imagine that the blue is brighter and the butterflies are polychromatic in unholy neon colors. Also, it's loud. Like louder than the last Metallica concert you went to. You can't hear yourself think over these pajamas.

My thought was that this would be better than the ugly ass hospital gowns which, ironically, show off your own ugly ass. Also, it was damn funny. I laughed out loud when I saw the pajamas in the store.

The Patient? She was appropriately horrified.

"You don't seriously expect me to wear that?" she gasped.

"Why not? It's comfy. The fabric is really nice and soft and your ass won't hang out."

"The nurses will laugh at me!"

"Exactly. You'll be spreading joy and goodwill throughout the hospital."

So yesterday I got a call from The Patient.

"All the nurses are laughing at me. It's your fault and I love it."

I stopped by the hospital last night and, sure enough, she was wearing the hideous pajamas. When the nurse stopped in, she took one look at The Patient and started laughing.

"This is the daughter-in-law who did this to me," The Patient cackled, jabbing her finger in my direction.

Later, The Patient was talking to her sister and describing the ugly pajamas. Her sister was horrified.

"How can you say that? Sprite did something nice for you. She bought you those pajamas so you wouldn't have to wear the ugly hospital gowns and you can't say anything nice about them. I'm ashamed of you!"

"She bought them for me because they're ugly," The Patient insisted.

"Come on, it's funny!" I said. "I bought them because they were the most hideous pajamas I could find. Also, they were on clearance."

"How much on clearance?" The Patient asked. She's a sucker for a good deal, just like me.

"75 percent off."

"I don't believe you two," The Sister said.

The Patient, ironically, is doing much better. I like to think the ugly pajamas are helping.

inappropriate

2011-03-10T14:10:00.000-06:00

And now, for your reading pleasure, a few things not to say in the emergency room:

Cast of characters:
Nature Boy
VirtualSprite
The Patient, my mother-in-law, who hates being sick

Scene:
The emergency room at our local hospital, where The Patient was taken with shortness of breath. She is tired and hungry and has been at the hospital for almost three hours. Her loving son and his beautiful wife also are tired. All three possess the same inappropriate sense of humor, which has been on display in emergency rooms elsewhere in the state.

Male nurse: (Trying to retrieve heart monitor nodules from The Patient's ample bosom) I'm so sorry, but...
The Patient: Oh, go for it. It's been a while since I've gotten to second base.

Radiologist: (Examining x-rays) Well, her heart looks fine.
VirtualSprite: She has a heart? That is good news.

The Patient: I feel better. I want to go home.
Nature Boy: Your oxygen levels are still very low. You can't go home.
The Patient: Yes, I can.
Nature Boy: If you go home, you'll die and no one will be there and it will be weeks before we find your body because we're uncaring children who don't visit.
The Patient: Well, so what?
VirtualSprite: Your cats will feast on your remains. They'll eat you and there won't be anything left of you, and that's just gross.
The Patient: At least they won't starve for a while.

Respiratory therapist: (Teaching The Patient how to use an inhaler) You press down here, inhale, hold your breath for three counts and then release.
(The Patient tries unsuccessfully to use the inhaler)
The Patient: I just don't get it. What am I doing wrong? I can't make it work.
VirtualSprite: Ma, it's just like taking a hit off a bong.
The Patient: (Looking accusingly at the respiratory therapist) Why can't you explain it like that?

The Patient: (After Nature Boy lets loose some particularly noxious gas) Oh, my god. That's horrible. How do you live with him?
VirtualSprite: Bad sinuses. I can't smell anything.
Nature Boy: Oh, come on, Ma. It's just gas. It's natural.
The Patient: I can't breathe it's so bad. I think that's why my oxygen levels are so low.

In short, my mother-in-law is in the hospital. She's not doing terribly well, but things are getting better. She has a respiratory virus and possible lung damage, but we're hopeful she'll be released soon.

oops

2011-03-02T15:05:00.000-06:00

I'll be honest here. I haven't read Motherhood Uncensored for a while. But something made me go there tonight. Perhaps it was a need to read another mommy blog. Or just the fact that I'm totally procrastinating my bookkeeping. And I don't feel like doing dishes right now, even though I totally need to.

Either way, I stumbled on her other site, Accidents Happen. And if there was ever a site that described how I became a mother, this was it.

See, I love being a mother. I love my kids. But I certainly didn't expect to have them. Especially the Ubergoober.

I always thought I'd just be a great aunt or a great friend. I taught preschool at my church and I babysat for everyone who asked. During my first marriage, I even tried to get pregnant. When I was unsuccessful I took it as a sign. I was not having children of my own. My doctor even said so. Not a problem. My life was plenty fulfilling.

So by some weird, random miracle, I got pregnant and had a child. It wasn't something I planned and, if I'm completely honest, it surprised the ever living shit out of me. The timing certainly wasn't convenient and my significant other at the time was, well, not cut out to be a parent. But I had the Ubergoober anyway.

Now, I'd like to say I suddenly found meaning and purpose in my life and my path was paved with rainbows and sunshine, but I can't. I had meaning and purpose in my life before and those purposes and meanings are still very valid. Also, having kids is hard. It's a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of money. And things don't always work the way to need them to. As a parent, you walk a very delicate line between duty and honor and nurturing and working and being yourself.

Instead, I added another layer of meaning and purpose to my life. I'm still a musician, I'm still a journalist, I'm still a writer and a gardener and a lousy housekeeper and a foodie.

I'm also a mom.

perspective

2011-02-23T14:46:00.000-06:00

By most definitions, Nature Boy and I are still newlyweds. After all, we've only been married for two years. We're still in the honeymoon phase.

Well, maybe if we didn't have kids.

But I've been thinking about it a little more often because I have some acquaintances who were married about the same time Nature Boy and I were.

And all she can talk about is how happy and in love they are. Blog posts, Facebook updates, Twitter, you name it. Oh, and the photos. Look! They totally wore the same color and didn't realize it until they met up for their daily lunchtime kiss. And how adorable is the bottle of wine he got for her that has their wedding photo on the label? They're just so much in love. Soul mates, if you will. Life was not complete until they said, "I do!" and she was wearing the big white dress and he was wearing a tux and everyone cried tears of joy.

And I just couldn't help thinking, let's see how romantic she feels the first time she has to lance a cyst on his ass.

balancing

2011-01-22T09:42:00.000-06:00

The Ubergoober is playing Wii right now so I can get some work done. It's sad, really, that I do this, but one does what one must when you have to work the weekend. Already today I've talked to four police officers, three fire department officials and a cranky secretary. Fortunately, I can telecommute so I'm doing rounds happily in my pajamas from my couch.

The balancing act we've got going is becoming more and more difficult. Nature Boy left for the archery shop at 9 a.m. today. I'm weekend reporter, so I have to report to the office at 3 p.m. today and work until evening rounds, somewhere around 8 p.m. Tomorrow I'll be working pretty much all day doing local coverage of the Green Bay Packers game, an event I could truly do without.

Did I mention that the Ubergoober is off school on Monday? Fortunately, the shop is closed, so he can hang with Daddy, but my work schedule will be roughly 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Special issues and all that.

As a family, we've almost become ships in the night. Nature Boy and I trade off Ubergoober duties and sometimes even have time for a kiss as we race past each other. But we have to keep the shop open so we can make money. And I have to keep my job so we have health insurance. And we definitely have to keep our kids because we love them and they're also a cheap source of entertainment.

But this morning I can work from home. I can make pancakes and do laundry and do all those things that a mom should do on a Saturday morning. Thank goodness. I miss being a mommy.

fashionable

2011-01-07T00:19:00.001-06:00

Nature Boy worked construction for 20 years. Which means for 20 years, when he dressed for work, the only consideration he had to make was is his clothes would keep him warm enough that day. Also, that they would hold up to things like hammers hanging from them, close proximity to big saws and that his pants wouldn't fall down when he was going up a ladder.

But now he's working retail. As the owner of said retail establishment, he normally wears a polo shirt with our logo embroidered on it and a pair of jeans. Or something along those lines. Still not fancy dress, but there are new standards for his appearance. For example, holes and mysterious stains are frowned upon in a retail setting, whereas they were commonplace on a construction site. So, he's adjusting well and having a uniform of sorts is helping.

One factor we did not take into consideration was the possibility of social events like trade shows and industry parties. This week Nature Boy traveled to the ATA show and, being an archery professional, was invited to several parties. Which led to a long discussion about what to wear.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I'm no Stacy London. Most days, I can barely dress myself. Although one very solicitous coworker told me today I look far more elegant than a journalist should, so maybe I'm doing better than I thought. Regardless, fashion is not my forte. But I'm still slightly more in touch than Nature Boy. So it was up to me to help him put together a wardrobe that would accommodate miles of walking and wild archery-themed parties.

Maybe this is where I should remind you, my gentle readers, that Nature Boy and I are madly in love with each other and our marriage is quite solid. Because, as this tale unfolds, you may not believe me.

So Nature Boy splurged and bought himself some new clothes, including some "performance" t-shirts. I'm still not sure what this means, but the shirts were very form-fitting and made of a material that created some kind of static charge with Nature Boy's chest hair. He showed me. But, much to my surprise, he looked good in the shirts. They showed off his construction-worker muscles and worked well with his coloring. Also...

Did I mention I was "live tweeting" the event on Twitter? And, just so you aren't wondering if Nature Boy was offended, he stuck out his gut and said, "How about now?" before stepping in front of the mirror and engaging in a little gut in - gut out dramatics.

Next came the new jeans. Normally, Nature Boy wears construction-worker jeans. Cut loose through the hips and thighs with straight legs that fit well over steel-toed boots. Also comes with the loop for hanging your hammer, which he routinely used for exactly what it was meant for. But his new jeans were more fitted, slightly lower-rise with gently-flared legs. They worked on him, until...

Yes, he was tucking his shirts in and then blousing them out slightly. Just like we did in high school in the 1980s and early 1990s. So we could still wear our oversized t-shirts and show off the "Guess!" patch on our butts.

The untucking became even more important as he put on a casual button-down oxford-style shirt over his t-shirt. Very much like this:

Well, except that he had a t-shirt underneath, which was important because, like most men with male-pattern baldness, Nature Boy has the incredible superpower of being able to grow hair everywhere but on his head. However, Nature Boy did wonder if maybe he should go without the undershirt. But...

He did consider it briefly, and even rummaged through my jewelry box to see if I had any suitable necklaces for his foray into player mode. But in the end he couldn't bring himself to wear the chains. Not surprising because the only jewelry he ever wears is his wedding ring and there's a special reason for that.

unsolicited

2011-01-03T21:58:00.000-06:00

A coworker of mine just announced that he and his wife are expecting their first child, due about June. Another friend of mine is due in February and yet another friend is now four months along. So, in honor of this occasion, I'm going to share the best unsolicited parenting advice I ever got.

1. The reason kids are so cute between the ages of 6 months and 4 years is so you won't kill them. Because you will want to. They are loud and you are so sleep deprived. You will go crazy. You will fantasize about putting a pillow over their screaming little faces, but you don't, because as soon as you get close to them with that pillow, they look up at you with those wide eyes and they smile and you just melt. Instead, you give them a big hug and a big kiss.

2. You might be a lame mom, but you're the only mom they have, and it's not like they know any better. For the first few years, until they have friends, your children worship only you. You can sing Meatloaf to them and dress them entirely in plaid and they're okay with that. Because you like 80s power ballads and Scottish attire and kids learn fast that if Mommy likes it, it must be good. Because it makes Mommy happy and when Mommy is happy, everyone wins. So go ahead and wear legwarmers and quote Monty Python. Your kids won't care until they're in middle school.

3. You will make mistakes and that's okay. My friend fed her kids formula and let them watch TV. A lot of TV. And now they're these attractive and funny guys who are getting straight As in college and can build computers using only a screwdriver and superglue. I can't even tell you all the mistakes I've made as a mother and my kids are fine. As long as your mistakes aren't life-threatening -- and feeding your kids formula is not life-threatening, no matter what those boob nazis tell you -- chances are it will be fine.

4. For the first few months, you really shouldn't expect too much. My friend was talking about this today. She said that when her daughter was born, it was a huge letdown for her. She didn't know what to expect, but she thought for sure there would be more to babies than eating, sleeping and dirty diapers. But there isn't. She said she kept waiting for something earth-shattering to happen, but it didn't. So eventually she just learned to roll with it and figured out that for the first few months being a mother just meant meeting basic needs and giving love.

5. Kids don't make things better. A baby will not fix the problems in your marriage, but it will magnify them because you're exhausted and you haven't slept and your nipples are bleeding and there is some horrible goo leaking out of your pelvis. But if you get past all that, and you will, having a child will be one of the most amazing -- and stressful -- things you do.

So that's what I've got. What I've learned so far. How about you?

in review

2010-12-30T14:24:00.000-06:00

It's that time again. The end of the year and time for every blogger out there to post their year in review. So here's mine:

The archery store
We started construction on an archery store in January and opened in May. To say this has been a challenge would be understating it slightly. It has also been a tremendous time suck for me, meaning I don't have time for things like blogging, reading blogs, reading books, cooking, bathing or socializing. But it has been fun and I've learned a lot.

The big 4-0
Nature Boy turned 40 in July, which he claims doesn't bother him. I, however, have noticed a few changes that may indicate an impending midlife crisis. Aside from the treehouse, that is. For one thing, he's become very sensitive about his lack of hair and threw a fit the last time I cut it. I asked him how short he wanted it, because recently we've just been shaving it all off. He ranted about how he didn't like that because he looked bald and he isn't. Well, not entirely. Just mostly. I just shrugged and cut it a little longer. He's also been looking for a new vehicle and has settled on a K5 Chevy Blazer, ca. 1970. Just like he had when he was 20. Oh, and a motorcycle.

Minus One
We're still short a child, but life has been chugging along. Things are actually a little calmer without a teenage girl around and, I'll be honest, I'm glad not to have to deal with the anger. The Ubergoober is still losing teeth and Ty is still struggling in math. But Goober's teeth are growing in as fast as they are coming out and we found an excellent math tutor for Ty. So, children are fine.

And that's about it. It's sad, almost, that after a whole year that's about all I can think of. Mostly, we just chug along, taking one day at a time and doing our best.

So here's wishing everyone a happy new year! Hope it's a good one.

trying

2010-12-15T21:58:00.000-06:00

The kitchen is cleaner than it was when I came home tonight. Now there's only two dirty dishes on the counter next to the sink and I cleaned up the butter that melted on the kitchen table. But the stovetop is still crusted with burned on goo and I'm not exactly sure what that stain is next to the stove, but that's still there, too.

I emptied one laundry basket, but there are still three more to go, and the recliner is piled with clean laundry to be folded. I have a load of towels in the washer that needs to be transfered to the dryer and I need to bring the hamper back upstairs so I can clear the closet floor of dirty clothes.

I've been mostly keeping up with bookkeeping for the archery range, but that's like saying I'm treading water in the middle of the ocean while a bunch of sharks circle me. I just now remembered that I need to calculate the sales tax for November by Monday or we'll go to jail. Well, maybe not directly to jail, but I'm sure there will be dire consequences. This is the government, after all.

There are cookies to be baked, candies to be made and dinners to be cooked. Homework to be checked, books to read aloud, snowpants to repair and snacks to pack.

This is my life. I'm so stressed that some days I want to cry. But it's still a pretty good life and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Well, maybe a clean house.

arithmancy

2010-12-05T13:29:00.000-06:00

When I was in high school and taking advanced math classes, I always wondered when I would ever use these skills again. I had planned to major in music and English and, as far as I knew, nothing but basic addition, subtraction and a few fractions would ever help me out in these fields.

So I went on to get my degree in English and, for the most part, I haven't ever had to use the quadratic formula or geometric theorems. Oh, some division and multiplication came into play, especially when I became a journalist and had to cover school and municipal budget hearings.

But this week, I learned why teachers always told me that I'd need this someday.

Someday I would have a child who struggled in math and I would need to know algebraic concepts so I could help him.

It's probably not the reason my teachers had counted on, but it's definitely a good enough reason for me.

So now, when my kids say, "I'm never going to use this!" I can tell them without question that someday they will.

Someday they'll have kids, too.

nonstick

2010-11-27T22:43:00.000-06:00

A few days ago I was watching Food Network, as I am wont to do, and I saw Michael Symon's commercial for calphalon pans. Now, I like Michael Symon a lot. I think he's one of the sexiest men on television, after Jason Hawes, of course. But this commercial just didn't do it for me. I mean, I'm okay with chefs promoting things - one has to make money, after all - but it was just the whole thing. I mean, a dinner party for seven hot women and no men? Really? It's a little obvious, if you ask me.

Although, I will admit that the whole dishwasher safe thing got me a little hot.

So I posted this on Twitter:

And thought nothing of it, until I got a little blinking alert on my phone that someone had mentioned me in a tweet. I thought it might be one of my friends or a fellow blogger or something, but I did not expect this:

Yep. Michael Symon replied to my rather innocuous tweet, defending his promotion of nonstick pans. Which I thought was a little interesting. I mean, I'm a farmwife in Wisconsin who cooks things like tater tot casserole and whose husband kills all the meat they eat. I have a few followers on Twitter, and I love them all dearly, but I don't normally have nationally recognized celebrity chefs paying attention to my snarky bits. Hell, I didn't even know Michael Symon twittered.

So I have to wonder what prompted this. I didn't say that the product was somehow inferior - I'd love to have some of those pans, actually - I just thought he was a lot sexier when he wasn't using his celebrity to convince women who probably would never been seen dead in a working kitchen to use pans. Also, I'm sure Symon gets a lot of tail, but I don't need to see it happen. Frankly, I thought it was rather gratuitous to show the "dinner party."

But, like I said before, I'm a farmwife in Wisconsin. I'm a journalist for a mid-market paper and the principal violist for a rather small community symphony orchestra. My closest neighbor is a quarter mile away if you cut through the woods and he doesn't have electricity or running water. My sphere of influence is rather limited. So why care what I have to say? Why take the time to comment on a tweet that maybe 100 people saw and probably only five cared about?

I don't know. Any thoughts?

turkey

2010-11-26T21:18:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was Thanksgiving here in the States and I will be posting, in great photographic detail, our feast. But first, a few words.

I love Thanksgiving. It is, by far, my favorite holiday.

It's a holiday about food and being happy for what you have. And food. Did I mention the food?

I love that I get to spend the whole day cooking - I love cooking - and then we sit down and we gorge ourselves until we burst. I don't do a whole lot of fancy dishes, but I bust out the traditional turkey day staples.

I roast a giant turkey - at least 20 pounds - no matter how many people are coming over. I roast it with lots of butter, carrots, celery and onions stuffed up in its cavity. I toss in a few fresh herbs - thyme, rosemary and sage - and bathe it in more butter. Then into the oven, suspended over a pan of broth by a v-shaped rack. In a few hours I flip it over, so the breast can brown.

I let the giblets simmer to make gravy. I mash potatoes. I glaze carrots. I bake pies from pumpkins I grew in my garden. The carrots come from my garden, too. I've tried baking my own dinner rolls, but they never turn out right, so now I let Sara Lee bake them. But there's also cranberry sauce and sweet potato souffle and dressing and whipped cream.

But to me, all the work is worth it. At night, when we sit down to eat, drink and be merry, that's all there is. Food and family. No gifts to buy, no eggs to dye, no candy to hide. The stress is only that day, making sure that all the food gets cooked. I don't have to decorate a tree, I don't have anything to wrap. The day after Thanksgiving, we're snacking on leftovers and not trying to figure out what we're going to do with the gifts that don't fit or the tree that's starting to wilt or all the hard-boiled eggs rotting in the fridge.

And after dinner, when we're drowsy with tryptophan, we watch TV. And laugh. It's good.

history repeating

2010-11-15T20:28:00.000-06:00

So Sam called yesterday. She wants to hunt at our house. It's the first time she's reached out to Nature Boy since she walked out nearly four months ago.

Of course, Nature Boy said she could. I'm furious.

See, when I was growing up I had an evil stepsister and an evil stepbrother. Actually, I had two evil stepsisters and two evil stepbrothers, but they were too old to be a bother by the time my mom married my adoptive father.

But my evil stepsister did the same thing. She decided she wanted nothing to do with my dad, until one day when she needed money. Then she called him up and came over for a few hours, walked away with some cash and didn't call again until she needed money again. Every time my dad thought she was coming over to see him, to spend time with him, to return the love he felt for her. But every time she was just coming over for money. My dad was heartbroken.

And now I'm having flashbacks. I see Sam behaving like my stepsister did. It's hard. I don't want to think that she's capable of the same evil my stepsister was, but I don't put anything past anyone.

The thing is, it was always going to be a tough situation. Always. I'm their stepmother and I'm with their dad all the time. Nature Boy adopted Goober, so he's Goober's dad full time. He's not their dad full time anymore. But we do our best to make sure that when the kids are here they are loved and cared for and nurtured. So when Sam decided she didn't want to be with us anymore, it hurt. It hurt because I love her, because I've spent so much time with her, because I was always there when no one else was.

So I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do this weekend. How I'm going to deal. Any suggestions?

The last days of warmth

2010-11-07T16:29:00.000-06:00

I put my sheets out on the line for probably the last time this year. It's a little sad because this means I have to start using my dryer again and I don't like to use the dryer. It uses electricity, which costs money and impacts the environment, but mostly because Downy dryer sheets don't smell as good as sunshine and gentle breezes.

Goober brought home a small flu. It's not too bad, but it's enough to leave us all sniffling and feverish. Maybe because we're all kind of trapped in the house now, instead of running free on 40 acres of woodland and meadows.

The boys are bundling up to hunt now. For a while they were going out in just their camo pants and shirts. Now there are layers. Long underwear, turtlenecks, sweatshirts, coats, pants and boots. They come back in the house with red faces and runny noses.

I have to wear a sweatshirt when I leave the gym. I used to wander around in my tank top and shorts, but now I have to put sweatpants and a long-sleeve shirt on before I step out into the brisk air.

We turned the clocks back last night and relished the extra hour of sleep. It's strange, though, because my body got used to daylight savings time and now my internal clock just feels off.

I talk a lot about the changing seasons, but it's important here in Wisconsin. Our seasons are extreme. In the winter, it's not unusual to have weeks where the temperature does not get above zero. Everything feels frozen, cold, immobile. The snow crunches underneath our feet when we walk, leaving footprints along our path. It's easy to see where we've been, but chances are we're still there because it's too cold to move too fast.

Spring is sodden, with snow melting and leaving the earth below muddy and saturated. But the leaves return to the trees and plants slowly rise out of the ground, waking from a long slumber. It's warmer now, and we can move faster now that we don't have layers and layers of clothing hindering ourselves. We can go outside now without the imminent danger of frostbite, and we do. No one stays inside in spring.

But summer comes too fast and too hot. We've stripped all our clothing off until we're wearing barely any, but it's too hot to move. Even the animals are slowing down. Still, the gardens need to be tended, so we reluctantly leave our air conditioning to weed and water. We may complain, talk disparagingly about the humidity, but we still love it. We're still outside.

Fall comes and it's comfortable again. It starts when the sweltering days start turning into brisk evenings. Eventually, the days cool down as well and we start putting our clothes on. First a sweatshirt, then long pants and finally a coat. We've hauled in the last of the vegetables and canned and frozen everything we can, preparing to hibernate during the winter. It's a transition, moving from outside to inside. Going from our yard to the house, trading fresh air for warmth.

But today was warm, a reminder to get everything done we can before the freeze comes. So I hung out my laundry and I played outside with my boys. Because next weekend I'll be inside with hot chocolate and a blanket, waiting for snow.

falling in pictures

2010-10-31T22:26:00.000-05:00

Autumn has officially arrived here in the woods. The leaves have changed and most are on the ground now, becoming valuable mulch for forest plants.

Hunting has started in earnest, and Ty brought down the first deer of the season. A very nice 10-point buck. Of course, he got it last weekend when Nature Boy was out of town, leaving Ty and I to muddle through on our own. Bless, him, though, because my teenage boy gutted the deer, dragged it out of the woods and loaded it up on the pickup truck before I was even out of bed.

I came downstairs and found the boys playing Wii. Goober was the one who told me about the deer and Tyler managed to hold it together long enough to pose for some photos. It wasn't until we went to register the deer that he fell apart -- he forgot the date and nearly collapsed as he got back in the truck.

Today was trick or treat and Goober went as Harry Potter again.

Nature Boy repeated his costume as well, going as a bowhunter and trick-or-treating from the tree stand.

Gotta love a man in camo face paint.

But other than the cooler weather, we are all well and starting to hunker down into hibernation mode. It's good that Goober made an absolute haul trick-or-treating so we can increase our calorie consumption for a long winter's sleep.

shoot!

2010-10-17T15:21:00.000-05:00

We've been working hard with Goober trying to get him back into the swing of school. Goober is rather socially awkward, see. We don't have any neighbors, his brother and sister are considerably older than him and he just doesn't have too many opportunities to play with kids his age. But he's learning. We had a few rough weeks at the beginning of the year, but his teacher is wonderful. She's very patient and she's very encouraging and she wants to see her students succeed.

But we have a rule in our house that good works get rewarded and bad behavior is punished. So we put Goober on a sticker system. Get so many stickers, you earn a reward. Get a note home from the teacher that you misbehaved, you lose something. So the reward was his bow, but if he got a note home, he lost arrows.

This week all the stars aligned and he had both his bow and his arrows. So all he did this weekend was shoot his bow.

He's getting pretty good.

This weekend all the stars aligned for me, too, and I got to play with my bow finally.

I was pretty proud of myself. I haven't been able to pull it back or shoot consistently since I got it. Until now.

So we played. Nature Boy got into it, too. Well, to be honest, Nature Boy instigated this.

Hope everyone else had a good weekend, too!

perception

2010-09-22T21:09:00.000-05:00

Most days I feel like I'm a failure at parenting. For some reason I can't find the resources to make a healthy dinner so I serve up whatever I can cobble together (one night it was macaroni and cheese doctored up with broccoli and cheddarwurst), I forget to pack Goober's lunch so he has to eat something gross for hot lunch, I work late, I don't read to Goober enough, I tease Ty too much about his "girlfriend." The list goes on.

But some days I do okay. Some days Goober tells me I'm the best mom in the world.

Like today. We played "I Spy" in the doctors office and read a book about sharks. We had pizza for supper. We had caramel corn for dessert. We watched "The Middle" and talked about how our family was like the one on TV -- certainly not perfect, but we love each other. We reasoned out the Encyclopedia Brown mystery together.

And yesterday. Yesterday I found the Holy Grail of Cool Momitude.

I got Goober his own library card. He can check out books all by himself.

I just had to do a little legwork, like filling out a form and plunking down my drivers license, so that my little guy can be in complete control of his library trip. This is, after all, his most favorite place in the world.

And to me, this is the best part of being a mom. The ability to perform little bits of magic. The little things that make my kids happy. And it makes me happy, too. I may not be able to buy them all the toys they want or enroll them in all the camps they want to go to or take them to McDonald's every night, but I can give them a library card and I can tuck them in at night and I can check their homework and I can wash their clothes and bake brownies and make scalloped potatoes.

I can be their mom.

because you've been dying to know...

2010-09-17T18:42:00.000-05:00

It's been a year and a half since I chopped off my hair. It's been nine months since I decided to grow it out. And eight months since my last update.

But here it is...

Now you can see why Nature Boy calls my hair the "wild red menace."

quickly

2010-09-16T21:56:00.000-05:00

I'm still here. We're all still here. Except Sam.

Nearly two months ago, Sam decided she no longer wanted to live with us. We're boring. We limit her time on the computer. We limit her phone use. We make her do chores. We don't allow her to be with her friends all the time and especially on school nights.

Madame X, on the other hand, is never home to supervise. She does not monitor computer use. She allows Sam to hang out in bars with her. She lets Sam spend every night with friends, if Sam wants, because then she doesn't have to be responsible for her own daughter.

We've been dealing. We're heartbroken, of course, and we're worried. We're worried about what is happening with our daughter. We're worried about the influences Sam has in her life now. We're worried about how she is doing in school and we're worried that she will make some really bad choices.

But there's not much we can do. Not yet. Not until Sam is ready.

I'm just hoping that it's sooner rather than later.

unfit

2010-09-06T21:01:00.000-05:00

Our local YMCA has been closed for the past few days for maintenance, which means I haven't worked out since last week Wednesday.

It's starting to get ugly. I'm jittery and grumpy - which isn't surprising because exercise and mood are related - and I'm just, well, weak and bloated.

But it's also made me think about why I work out. Aside from the obvious desire to stay in the same size jeans for more than a year at a time.

1. There's a whole lot of cancer and heart disease in my family. Exercise, apparently, is a good way to deter both of these things. Since a few hours of sweating on the elliptical trainer each week is better than the alternatives - lifetime of drugs, chemotherapy, etc. - I'll take the sweating.

2. I need to pull a bow back. It's part of the deal with the whole archery shop thing Nature Boy started. I get my own bow, but I also need to shoot it. Do you know how hard these things are to pull back? It's brutal. But, dammit, it's fun to sail an arrow into a target.

3. It's a good way to burn stress off. I've talked about this here before. I have a temper, a bad one. I'm Irish, after all. After a half hour on the treadmill, I'm a little less angry and a little less stressed, so I can go home and deal with my children and not be a raging maniac.

4. I can fit in my jeans and still breathe. It's a little thing, but money is tight right now. I can't afford new clothes every time I gain a few pounds. Oh, if I didn't have the Y membership I could, but who wants to have to buy bigger pants? Yeah, me neither.

So there's four reasons. Four ways I motivate myself to exercise.

What about you? What gets you out on the road or on the treadmill?

first day

2010-09-01T21:06:00.000-05:00

Today was the first day of school here. For Goober, that meant the first day of first grade. For Ty, that meant the first day of his sophomore year and the first day of drivers' ed. For Sam, that mean the first day of high school.

But for Goober, this was a really, really, really big day. See, he got to ride the big bus this year. Last year we had him in a before- and after-school care program that provided transportation for the kids in the program. So Goober rode a little white private bus to school. This year, he gets to ride a real school bus and walks to the end of our driveway to catch it. I was fine with this and was considering allowing him to walk by himself until my father-in-law reminded me that we have a pack or two of coyotes and a wolf and a bear roaming our property. Thanks, Dad. Now I'm thinking I should carry a gun when I walk him to the bus.

But today. The first day of school. We weren't mauled by a bear or eaten by a wolf. There was only a little non-wildlife related glitch. See, Goober has to transfer a bus at the end of the day. So he rides one bus to another school and then gets on a different bus that will bring him to the archery shop, where Daddy will be waiting for him.

So today, being the first day of school and the first day on the big bus, I wrote him a little note with the bus numbers so he would know what bus he needed to take when. Since I'm on vacation this week from the paper, I went down to the shop to catch up on some bookkeeping and wait for him. And wait. And wait.

At 4:00 my father-in-law, who works for us, was starting to get nervous. School gets out at 3:30 around here.

At 4:15 I started to get nervous.

At 4:30 Nature Boy started to get nervous.

At 4:40 I called my cousin, who rents our barn for his auto shop. I thought maybe Goober took the wrong bus and ended up at home. But he had closed up shop early, so he wasn't there.

I raced home, convinced that he had been eaten by the above-mentioned pack of coyotes. I had just pulled in the driveway and was winding my way to the house when my father-in-law called.

"Goober is here," he said, a note of relief in his voice.

So I started thinking. By my calculations, if this was the time that Goober would be coming home every day, that would put him on the bus for a hour and half every afternoon. Not good. I was preparing a scathing e-mail for the bus company in my head.

Fortunately, the answer was simpler than that.

Goober didn't transfer buses.

He just stayed on the bus he rode from school and got a tour of the western border of our school district. Fortunately, the very kind bus driver figured out what had happened and went out of his way to take Goober where he needed to go - across town from where the bus was supposed to go. He just had to do it after his regular route was completed, which is why Goober was so late.

So now Goober knows to get on a different bus once he gets to his first stop. Thank goodness. Everything will work fine from here on out.

As long as we don't get eaten by wolves on our way to the bus stop in the morning.

the last days of summers

2010-08-30T22:05:00.001-05:00

Well, we've survived. I've lodged several complaints about the camp counselor from hell and the school district (which runs the camp) refunded my money for the last week Goober was tortured there. We've spent a lot of time just recovering and spending some time together. Oh, and he got to spend a week with Grandma. That helped a lot.

But now we're at the end of summer. Tonight was the school open house where kids can come in, meet their teacher and bring all their school supplies so the kids don't have to lug giant backpacks on the first day of school. Goober got to pick out his desk, so he chose one next to one of his kindergarten friends. He felt better that he already had friends in his class.

Although he wasn't excited about his teacher - he was hoping for one of the other first grade teachers at the school - Goober was encouraged that she had a lot of books in her classroom and she had a butterfly house with a caterpillar already it.

"I was hoping for more," the teacher said. "But everything is so early this year and I could only find one. I've had my husband looking all week."

"We can look for you," I offered. I sucked up when I was in school, and I'm sucking up again.

So we trekked out to the cornfield and Goober investigated the milkweed, which is the best place to find caterpillars. And, lo and behold, we found one. Goober was so excited. We put it in a jar and gave it some leaves. Goober was hoping to keep it for a pet, but agreed that it would do much better in his teacher's butterfly house.

I'm glad. I'm glad he's looking forward to school and I'm glad he's not afraid of his teacher. I'm glad that life is moving forward. Tomorrow we'll go for a bike ride and we'll play at the archery shop. Then on Wednesday, Goober will start school and the cycle will begin again.

guilt

2010-08-08T22:37:00.000-05:00

Next week the Ubergoober will not go to camp and I could not feel guiltier about it.

Goober has been having some behavior troubles lately and decided to stop listening to the teachers. I couldn't figure out what was going on, because while he does have the selective hearing that all children and men seem to have, he was never a disobedient child per se. But every night when I went to pick him up, the teachers would tell me how bad he was.

As they talked to me, Goober would just look up at me with wide, fearful eyes.

So I did what every parent does. I talked with Goober about what was going on. He only responded that he didn't know. He didn't understand why the teachers were saying that. I asked if he'd done the things they had accused him of and, most of the time, he had. So I punished him appropriately. We took away his privileges, we made him write apology notes to his teachers and lectured him and talked with him until we were blue in the face.

Nothing worked.

On Wednesday, though, I got slapped in the face with the answer. When I picked Goober up, the teacher stopped me and told me how horrible he had been. So she threatened him. She told him that she was going to find out who his first grade teacher was going to be and she was going to e-mail her and tell her that he doesn't listen and what a problem he is.

I couldn't even speak I was so angry. I packed Goober out of there and didn't speak until we got out to the car. Goober was almost crying. He was shaking he was so scared. All the way to the archery shop, I told him it was okay. That the teacher couldn't do that. When we got to the shop, I told Nature Boy what was going on. He was even more angry than I was. We sat down with Goober and talked about some of the other things that were going on at camp. The teacher, who is one of four, apparently doesn't really watch the kids. She spends a lot of time on the computer, watching ball games and surfing the internet. The kids like to go over by her and watch with her, but she sends them away. We debated, but we decided to send him back to camp the next day. I would call the program supervisor and report the behavior. With any luck, they would take swift action.

So I called, he was horrified, but he was the program supervisor's supervisor, so he would talk to her and we would get this straightened out.

Only the supervisor, who was horrified, had to talk to the teacher first. But not to worry, she would not use my name. Everything would be completely anonymous.

Only the teacher guessed. And then the teacher proceded to tell the supervisor that Goober truly was a horror and, even though she shouldn't have threatened him like that, he was a problem at the camp. Which the supervisor believed because all of the teachers there were complaining about the children and all the behavior issues they were having. But Goober was a definite problem because he didn't come to camp until noon and the kids behaved until he got there. So he must be the problem. No, they didn't take into consideration that maybe the kids were picking on Goober because he had a different schedule or maybe because his social skills aren't as advanced as his reading skills. It was simple cause and effect.

Now I was beyond horrified. So was Nature Boy, but he was unsurprised.

"We're not taking him back there," he said. "He can come to work with me."

It would work. Nature Boy doesn't open the shop until 2 p.m. and Goober has his own desk and toys and books at the shop. I'm done with work between 4 and 5, so he'd only be there for a couple hours.

So I picked Goober up and got the usual litany of complaints from one of the other teachers. I endured it and packed him out of there and took him to a quiet park.

"Tell me what happened today," I said.

He did. When he got there at noon, he went over to play with some of the other boys. They wandered off into an area of the playground that they maybe shouldn't have gone to, but they had before and it was okay. This time, however, nightmare teacher didn't want them to go over there.

"I don't understand it. Everyone behaves until Goober gets here," she said. Right in front of Goober.

So he's not going back there. I'm trying to figure out how far I'm going to take my complaint, but for now I'm content just to have him out of there.

But I feel guilty. Horribly guilty. That I didn't see this when nightmare teacher was telling me how to run the newspaper. That I should have said something when she started lecturing Goober on the bible and taking the Lord's name in vain. That I should have spoken up the first few times they complained about his behavior. That I chose to send him to a place that thinks you can threaten kids and talk to them like that and think they're going to have any respect for you.

So this weekend we worked on letting the Goober have some fun, trying to undo the damage of several weeks of psychological torture. Friday I took him to the fair and let him play with the bunnies and fed him junk food for supper. Saturday we spent a lot of time talking about behavior and expectations and starting over. Today we took a nap and went to the pool.

And you know what? We only had two incidents of bad behavior. He listened to us, he was polite, he only needed a few reminders to bring his behavior back up to scratch. Kind of like any other soon-to-be first grader would need. It's like having my kid back.

Now we'll see how things go with Camp Daddy. I'm pretty sure it will be much better than what we had before.

bent

2010-08-04T11:12:00.000-05:00

Every night we start the same way. Mountain to forward fold to a lunge and then downward-facing dog. From here we usually do a modified sun salutation because it's a little easier, even though it's really not appropriate for bedtime in the yoga tradition.

We started it about a week ago, the Ubergoober and I, settling down before bedtime with a little bit of yoga. He had asked me why I like doing yoga so much. I explained that it helped me relax and it helped me to think about how I use my body.

"I need that. Can I try?" he said.

So we started slow. I introduced the poses and he copied me. Then we started moving from pose to pose, watching our breathing and paying attention to how our bodies flowed.

It's not a new concept for the Goober. I've been doing meditation techniques with him for a while now in an effort to help control the hair-trigger temper he inherited from me. But this adds a physical component that his little active body needs.

And it's something we can do together. So we go from mountain to forward fold to a lunge to downward-facing dog and then we go to bed, a little more relaxed.

rewards

2010-08-01T22:22:00.001-05:00

For the last week, we've been having some issues with the Ubergoober. He's just acting up at camp, talking back to the teachers, hitting and scratching kids and generally being naughty. He's had an attitude, too, that rivals his sister's. Whenever we ask him to do something, he grunts and scoffs and generally acts like we've asked him to don a hairshirt and push a boulder up a hill for 300 consecutive years.

So my mom sat down and had a talk with him. He confessed that he was feeling like Nature Boy and I were working too much and not spending enough time with him. That he wanted us to be more... well, present. Those weren't his exact words, but that was the message.

And, even though Nature Boy and I spend more time with him than ever - Goober only attends camp for half days when my work schedule and Nature Boy's overlap - we really haven't been paying that much attention to him. Plus, we don't spend a lot of time together as a family. Nature Boy is always working at the shop - we are trying to launch a business here - and I'm working my regular schedule at the paper and working at the shop in the evenings. When we do get home before dark, it's a quick trip out to the fields to weed and harvest and then it's back inside to cook and clean and keep the house at or below biohazard level 2. It's exhausting and draining and, many times, I just don't have the mental capacity to do more than the bare minimum required for effective parenting.

So this weekend I shirked some of my duties. I didn't volunteer for any weekend photo shoots and I made some time to sit down with the Ubergoober and have some real conversation. We talked about good choices and bad choices and how to tell the difference. We talked about why mommy gets angry sometimes and how much she hates getting angry. Even though she's Irish and it's part of her heritage.

Then today we celebrated my nephew's second birthday at Bay Beach. I went on the Scrambler and the Yo-Yo and even drove a bumper car, despite barely being tall enough to adequately work the accelerator pedal. We had so much fun. The Ubergoober was excited and happy and was so extraordinarily well behaved I thought for a moment that I had accidentally grabbed the wrong kid in one of the lines.

But I didn't. He's my kid. And we've reached a tacit agreement of sorts. I'll do my very best not to get angry and yell at him if he does his very best to listen to me and not to argue. We've started some new traditions - doing yoga at bedtime and visiting Daddy at the shop every evening before we come home - but mostly we've just discovered it's much better to just listen to each other and work with each other and try to muddle through.

notes

2010-07-29T22:53:00.000-05:00

To they guy at the gym in a white wife beater and gold chains: Despite your hairy back, you do not look like Tony Soprano or anyone who is remotely associated with cool and/or sexy. Also, the black socks? Not working. It's just adding to the whole Abe Vigoda vibe you've got going there.

To my youngest child: When I tell you to stay in your room, I mean stay in your room. I do not mean you can sneak out of your room and perch on the stairs to watch TV.

To my oldest child: See above re: black socks. They're for old men who wear plaid shorts and sandels with said socks. It's not a good look on anyone. Also, I've seen what you do to socks. I keep a barbecue tongs next to the washer for my own safety. With white socks I can bleach them and have a degree of security that I have killed most of the bacteria. With black socks, it's not that simple.

To my middle child: I'm sorry you're bored. But if you tell me you're bored I will find something for you to do and I can pretty much guarantee that you won't like it.

To my husband: I miss you. I miss having evenings together and I miss having time for conversations. That being said, I'm really enjoying my two hours of alone time at night.

why

2010-07-22T21:26:00.000-05:00

Nature Boy's parents divorced when he was young. By my calculations, he was somewhere between 6 and 10 when they separated. I'm not exactly sure, and I don't think he is, either. So, given that Nature Boy just turned 40 this past weekend, his parents have been divorced for more than 30 years.

In those 30 years, they have not spoken more than five words to each other. When they divorced, they meant it.

I've often wondered what happened that has warranted a 30-year silent treatment.

I asked Nature Boy once what happened, but he didn't know. He doesn't want to know. He remembers his mom packing him up in the middle of the night one night when he was young and leaving their home, but that's about it. He loves his parents and he didn't want to hear something that would change his opinion. See, he takes things as they are. He knows his father loves him just like he knows his mother loves him. Both of his parents are good people. They have supported him and me and they are wonderful with our children. They do everything they can to help us out and we would do anything for them.

Just as long as they never have to be in the same room.

So far it really has never been a problem. When it's a big event, like one of our children's birthdays, my mother-in-law will come to the party the day of and my father-in-law and his wife will come the next day. It works. For bigger events, like our wedding or Nature Boy's 40th birthday party, they just make sure to never be within 20 feet of each other.

But I'm a journalist. It's my job to find things out. It's my job to get people to talk to me. Still, I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

When I started hearing things I started getting nervous. My MIL told me how my FIL used to yell at her. My FIL told me how my MIL would come home drunk every night, having left him alone with two small boys.

And as I got to know them, I found I agree with Nature Boy. It really doesn't matter what happened three decades ago. That's between them. I love them both and I think they are wonderful people and, like Nature Boy said, learning something horrible about either of them might change my opinion of them and I really don't want that to happen. Because no matter how horrible it was, it happened 30 years ago.

So I listen and I try not to judge. But it's weird, you know? It's strange to be the keeper of this information. But I'll keep it. Maybe someday I'll have all the facts and it will be a damn good story to tell, but I don't want to know for a long time. I just want to love and accept them for who they are now.

accomplished

2010-07-18T23:00:00.000-05:00

Last night was Nature Boy's 40th birthday. We had a party at the archery shop, which was a lot of fun. I cooked up all of Nature Boy's favorite food - venison in mushroom au jous, cheesy hashbrowns, creamed chicken, magic mushrooms, carrot cake cupcakes. lemon poppy seed cupcakes and double-chocolate cupcakes - and we just hung out with friends, ate a bunch of food and shot some (fake) animals.

My friend P was there, who is just one of the most fun, wonderful people I have ever met. Her husband is easily one of the sexiest men alive and her daughter babysat Goober when he was a baby. P is in her 40s and beautiful in a comfortable way. She has an easy smile and a laid back sense of humor. She takes life in stride and can talk about anything to anyone.

At the party, she learned I played for the symphony. In the years we've known each other, it has just never come up. We've talked about parenting, being hunting widows, how to get the best price on beer and any number of subjects, but music was never one of them.

She also didn't realize I had cooked almost all of the food for the party. We were just talking and I was laughing about how Bill was teasing me about the cupcakes and, as I was clearly out of control when I was baking them, telling me that I wasn't on Cupcake Wars so I could be a little less anal about the frosting.

"You cook, too?" she asked, surprised.

I just nodded and told her how much I enjoyed cooking.

"I'm not much of a cook," she said, frowning.

Later, I brought out my camera and was taking pictures.

"I can't believe you," she said. "You're so accomplished. I can't do anything."

I didn't know what to say. She went on about how she doesn't have any skills. I didn't know what to say. Her husband jumped in and told her about all the things he loves about her, how she is unbelievably caring, can organize anything and can hit a deadline like no one's business. I agreed and mentioned how much I admired her ability to take care of anyone and everyone, whether she's known them for an hour or for a lifetime.

I felt horrible that I had made her feel bad. My skills can be measured, but that doesn't validate them. Her skills are less quantifiable, but that doesn't make her any less accomplished. Besides, we aren't made of what we are capable of doing, but what we actually do and who we touch in doing so. I have always thought P was just an amazing person. She's a nurse and a wife and a mother. She may not be the person who makes dinner for her family, but her husband loves to cook so it works out. Her daughter is getting married this summer and she is organizing a dream wedding. She is not afraid to call the hall owner an asshole, because he is. She can talk to anyone and she can not only get exactly what she wants, but she'll make the other person feel like it was their idea to give it to her.She has raised an amazing daughter who is a caring and successful person. I love her for the person that she is, not the person she thinks she needs to be.

Because we can't all play music, just like we all can't intubate someone who needs it to breathe. We all have our skills and we are all accomplished in our own ways.

honor system

2010-07-12T09:27:00.000-05:00

Years ago when Nature Boy was working construction he fell off the roof of a building and landed on his back. I'm not sure about the specifics of the fall - this was well before he met me - but it left him with this weird hump in his neck, which requires him to use a fairly specific pillow so he can sleep without pain.

So I was a little concerned when he discovered on the way home from our vacation that he had left this pillow in the cabin. I suggested we call the owners of the cabin to see if they had found the pillow and if maybe they could ship it out to us.

But Nature Boy disagreed.

"Let's just see if they send it out. That will tell us what kind of people they are," he said.

Nature Boy's opinion is that if the owners found the pillow and shipped it out to us, they are good people worthy of our continued patronage. If they don't, they suck. For him it was a test of sorts. A kind of sword-in-the-stone thing, only with a battered pillow instead of Excalibur.

See, Nature Boy has kind of high expectations of people. He thinks that everyone should have the same moral compass he does and when others fall short of these expectation he throws a giant holy fit. There are no second chances. The only problem with this is that he never tells anyone what those expectations are. Which to me is really stupid. How do you know what you need to do if no one tells you? Isn't it easier to communicate your wants and needs than to make people guess what they are and then punish them if they're wrong? It's just so much easier to tell people what you need. Then there is no confusion and very few hurt feelings.

When we got home, I called the owners of the cabins and asked if they'd found the pillow. They had. Would they mind sending it out to us? Of course not! They'd be happy to.

I put the pillow out of my mind. For me, the problem was solved.

The pillow showed up with Saturday's post. I fetched it off the front stoop Sunday morning and gave it to Nature Boy, who was very happy to see his pillow returned. So happy that he pontificated about his testing methods to all who would listen, regaling them with the story of the pillow lost and pillow returned, which soon turned into an Aesopian fable of morality and honor. He waxed poetic about his restored faith in humanity, how he knew the people would do the right thing and how rare it is to find business owners with this degree of moral fortitude and sense of customer service.

So now I'm wondering if I should tell him that the reason the pillow was returned was because I called? To be honest, I don't know if they would have returned the pillow. It's a pillow. I'm sure people leave hundreds of pillows at hotels around the world. It's not like we left his blood pressure pills or my wedding ring or something else that is difficult or expensive to replace. It was a $10 pillow. Maybe they would have returned it, but I just didn't want to take that chance. I have to live with the man.

What do you think? Do I fess up, or do I let him believe that humanity is as noble as he thinks it should be.

anger

2010-07-06T12:42:00.000-05:00

Our weekend in the woods was spent in the company of the most feared beast known to man:

The Angry Teenage Girl

You may be familiar with this creature. It snarls and snaps and whines when provoked. Common irritants include:

Little brothers
Big brothers
Parents
Inadequate access to Hannah Montana and Disney Channel movies
Having to eat regular meals with the family.
Being seen in public with her family
Shrimp from fancy restaurants that still have the tails on
Going to the beach and getting splashed. She didn't wear a swimsuit. She's not going to wear a swimsuit. We're going to the beach. We should know better than to think she would wear a swimsuit. GOD!
Having to go on vacation in the woods with her family where she can't get a signal on her cell phone and her brother can but he won't let her text her friends.
Going four-wheeling and not getting muddy. That's why she didn't take a shower in the morning, because she was going to get muddy. Now she didn't get muddy and she is all gross and why didn't we tell her we weren't going to get muddy so she could have taken a shower?
Having her picture taken.
Not having her picture taken.
Getting the chocolate waffle cone when she wanted the plain waffle cone, even though she ordered a chocolate waffle cone.
Walking.

We tried everything we could to make her happy, and then we just gave up. It's hard when your hormones are bigger than you are, but there is a point where you are honestly trying to be miserable. Granted, going four-wheeling in the woods is not every girl's dream vacation but we also spent two days at the beach and we had satellite TV in our cabin. We also went to a very nice restaurant for dinner and had Dairy Queen every night for dessert.

But I think back and I can remember being this angry harpy. I channeled my fury into feminism, before I really understood what feminism was. Before I understood what being female was. I read a lot of Russian literature and fueled my anger by writing passionate novellas that outlined the bleakness of the human existence. So I can sympathize, not that she wants to hear it. Because nobody ever has felt the pain of human existence as acutely as she has. No one, not ever. And no one ever will. Only her friends. They understand. I'm an adult. I'm the enemy.

I know she will grow out of this someday, but right now I'm struggling. I don't know how I can tolerate this attitude for the next four or five years, which is probably how long it will take before she's human again.

Until then, I'm trying to come up with coping strategies. Think she'll notice if I start putting Midol in her food?

vacation

2010-07-05T20:49:00.000-05:00

My little sister and I have almost nothing in common. We never really have. We don't look alike, we don't share any genetic markers (she is adopted), we have completely different interests and completely different lifestyles.

For example, we both went on vacation with our families. She and her husband and their child wen't to Chicago.

We went up to the woods.

We went four-wheeling in the rain through the Chequamegon National Forest in Northern Wisconsin.

And went hunting for agates in Lake Superior.

I'm not sure what my sister did in the city, but I'm sure none of these activities were included. Which is okay. We had fun with our stuff.

true love

2010-06-27T21:17:00.000-05:00

We have this guy that comes into the archery shop and spends six to eight hours there. And, just to dispell any illusions, he is not pleasant company. I can't say what exactly is annoying about him, but it is definitely an amalgam of several different qualities including a constant need to be entertained by whomever is closest even if they are neck deep in other work.

So I had a nightmare about him last night where he wanted me to run away with him and I, of course, refused. He demanded to know why I loved my husband and just would not accept that I just do.

But tonight, Nature Boy did something that reminds me again why I love him. He booked us a family vacation. Two nights in Bayfield at our favorite lodge. It's the lodge we always go to without the kids for our adult getaway. It's where Nature Boy proposed. It's the vacation I look forward to every year.

Only this year I didn't think we'd go. We're trying to get a business launched. We don't have a lot of money right now. We're struggling to find our new places in life. We don't have time to take off for a weekend.

But I was going through my photo archives and burning CDs so I could have room on my hard drive again and I came across the photos I took last year on vacation - well, not the ones from the hospital. Nature Boy was looking over my shoulder and reminiscing with me, laughing over the silly things we did and taking in the beauty of Lake Superior. He said, "Why don't we take the kids there this weekend?"

He planned on closing the shop anyway for the weekend. I checked our bank account. I crunched some numbers. He called for prices, which were lower than any other year we'd stayed there. We could afford it!

See, this is why I love him. He knows what's important to me and he makes sure I have it. He knows family time is important to me. He knows sometimes I just need to get away. He knows I love kick-ass fireworks. I don't get romantic cards or hearts and flowers, but I get a weekend in the woods with the four most important people in my life. It's like the Rolling Stones song. You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.

So I have a week to prepare five people for vacation. I can do this. I just hope my subconscious gives me some better dreams.

milestones

2010-06-22T09:47:00.000-05:00

A friend and I were talking the other day about milestones. You know, those moments in your baby's life that you carefully record in their baby book and use to compare your baby to others born at the same time. First time rolling over, first words, first tooth, first steps and so on.

I admit, I carefully wrote all those into Goober's baby book. But those weren't the milestones that I really looked forward to. I found that as a mom, those things were really cool, but it was the other skills that Goober picked up that I really got excited about.

For example, it wasn't his first words that I enjoyed. It was when he could tell me what the hell was wrong with him.

It wasn't his first steps, it was when he could walk by himself in the supermarket.

It wasn't his first tooth, it was when he could eat all the food we were eating without having it blenderized first.

It wasn't when he was potty trained, it was when he could go to the bathroom all by himself and I didn't have to be on wiping duty.

And other things, like when he could buckle his own seatbelt. When he could aim his vomit into a bowl instead of all over the carpet. When they can get themselves dressed. Those are the moments that mattered to me as a parent because although I didn't mind dressing the Goober and caring for him when he was sick, it just got a lot easier when he could do these things for himself.

So what about you? What are your milestones?

progress

2010-06-10T20:21:00.000-05:00

For whatever reason, 2010 has been a difficult year so far. We've just been struggling and stressed and overwhelmed at our house. But as sucky as things have been, it seems that the second half of the year is starting to turn around because we seem to be making slow but steady progress on all the projects we're working on.

The archery shop is getting busier every day. More people are stopping in to check us out and even more people are staying to buy things and to shoot at things. Nature Boy is in his element and we're finding that we can work together. Granted, we ran his construction business together before, but now we're dealing with a combination of retail and services and food and drink and, well, it's just a whole different animal and a whole different tax system. And I'm getting used to having my evenings to myself. Slowly, but surely.

The gardens are just about planted. All I have left to plant is the pumpkins and the potatoes. We've also had some really good rain here finally, so the seeds are coming up faster than any other year. The corn is about a half-inch high and even the carrots are poking through. It's about time. We've had such a strange spring, with abnormally hot weather, then snow, then rain, then hot, then rain.

I'm still working out at least four days a week and I've increased my time on the cardio and I'm lifting heavier weights. I fit into my clothes better and my thighs aren't jiggling. I realize that it's more about my health and blah, blah, blah. It's still progress.

The only thing that has been stagnant lately is my writing. My novel is suffering horribly and it's just not flowing. But I'm confident I'll start making progress on that too. I'm making progress everywhere else.

in her room

2010-06-05T11:19:00.000-05:00

Every night it's the same. We get home and Sam heads to her room, closes the door and is seen only when she wants something to eat or she wants our permission to do something. She's up there alone, texting her friends (on the cell phone that Madame X bought her against our wishes) and watching her favorite Tween shows on the Disney Channel.

It's strange to see our social butterfly become so introverted. She's angry a lot, too. Nothing is good enough, nothing is right, no one understands. She hates everyone and she's bored.

I get frustrated sometmies because I want her to let me in. I want her to tell me what's wrong, but I understand that she doesn't even know. She's 13. She's in teenage girl hormone hell.

But then I sit back and remember what it was like. I did the same thing. I would lock myself in my room for days, listening to music and writing intense chapters for novels that would be a mature observation on the human condition from the confines of a teenage girl's room. My hormones were bigger than me and I spent a lot of time trying to sort it all out in my head and getting angry with everyone that they didn't understand me and angrier with myself that I didn't understand it either. I was over it by the time I turned 22, but I didn't know that when I was 13. I didn't know that it got better. I just knew that at that moment I was in hell.

So I just keep a polite distance. I make sure she's not getting into trouble and that she knows she can talk to me when she's ready. Sometimes I go up to her room and just watch TV with her. Quietly. Just to be there. Next to her. Hopefully showing that I understand.

Because I do. Even if she doesn't think so.

changes

2010-06-02T21:13:00.001-05:00

It's been just about three weeks since we opened the archery store. Business is starting to pick up, which is good, and Nature Boy has been a lot less stressed. But the biggest change has been in our schedules. I'm still working my normal daytime schedule with the odd evening meeting thrown in, but Nature Boy is essentially working second shift.

Meaning we don't get to see him that often.

The way things used to work, Nature Boy got up and left for work about 6 a.m. Goober would wake me up shortly after and we would get ready to go to work and to school. In the evening, Nature Boy would pick Goober up from school and have supper started by the time I got home. It was nice.

Now I get up early and get ready for work. Most of the time I take Goober to school because Nature Boy is still asleep. In the evenings, I pick Goober up from school and we have supper and do homework and read books and he goes to bed.

And I wait for Nature Boy to get home.

It's weird being a single parent at night, but not really a single parent. Sometimes we take dinner down to Nature Boy and eat as a family at the shop. But most of the time it's just me and the Goober and Sam, if she's home. (Ty usually works at the shop with Nature Boy) And it's nice. It's nice to have this time with them, to talk to about their days, to cook dinners that Nature Boy wouldn't ever eat but that we like, to have time for girl talk with Sam after the Goober goes to bed.

It's a lot like when I was growing up and my dad worked a second job in the evenings. He ran a machine shop during the day and built race cars and pulling trucks at night. So from the time we got home from school until just about the time we went to bed, it was just me and my sister and my mom. I loved those times when it was just us girls. Talking to my mom now, she loved it too. But it was still hard sometimes for my mom - and now for me - not to have a break at night. Not to be able to go out with friends or to sneak out of the house without a kid or two. Not to have that time as a couple after the kids go to bed.

But I'm also learning to take advantage of it. I get some cleaning done and, for the most part, the house stays clean. I have time to work on my own projects. I can give myself a pedicure or facial and not have Nature Boy recoil in horror at the sight of my strange beauty rituals.

Still, I find that I miss him. At least I know he's only a few miles down the road, feeling the same about us.

another kid

2010-05-23T21:59:00.000-05:00

This weekend we were host to Sam's BFF PJ. We're often hosts to PJ, especially since teenage girls travel in packs. But I usually don't mind PJ being here.

See, I'm a mommy. It's something I became when I had children, though I understand it's not always an automatic thing. But I very much wanted to have children so when I did, I took their upbringing seriously. Not perfectly, but seriously.

PJ's parents recently divorced. I know her parents and I like them both, but as a married couple they really sucked. I can't say for certain if her dad was faithful to her mom, but I know her mom wasn't faithful to her dad. But it's not as if her dad was there to care. He drives truck over the road, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when you're married to a woman who needs constant attention, you might think about a career change. Anyway, PJ's dad got custody of PJ and her brother. Her two sisters are of age, but the younger of the two sisters still lives with the dad. Did I mention that the sister is unmarried and pregnant? Basically, PJ is left home alone. A lot.

It makes me sad because PJ is a good kid. She does well in school and she doesn't get into trouble. She works hard on the farm - I did mention they live on a farm, right? Well, they do - and she generally takes care of herself. But she really doesn't have someone to cook her dinner or help her with her homework or, in general, be a mommy. So when Sam asks if PJ can come over, I almost always say yes.

So when she's at our house, I do my very best to treat her like I treat my own kids. She has to do chores, she has to respect us and she has to do her homework. She gets no special treatment as a guest, nor does Sam get special treatment because she has a guest.

Today, for example, we were putting in the garden. Goober and I seeded the peas, beets and lettuce last weekend, but we wanted to get just about everything else in today. So we worked. PJ right out there with us, showing Sam and Adam how to put in onions and giving it her best. We talked some and laughed some and had some teenage girl hormones out there, but all in all it was a wonderful, albeit exhausting, day.

And it surprised me how natural it all was. I don't know if I'm just so used to PJ being around or if she's just that wonderful of a kid, but I never felt like I had an extra kid. She just blends so seamlessly into our family. She plays with Goober and teases Ty. She gives us hugs and she knows where our dishes are. She gives us just enough good-natured grief to let us know she doesn't really want to empty the dishwasher, but she does it anyway.

Which makes me wonder if she blends in because this is what she wants? Is this why she asks to come over to our house so much? Does she crave that type of family where we all pitch in, we all work and in the end we all have fun? I imagine she does.

But what really is cool is that I've come to love her almost as much as I love my own kids - step and otherwise. And I hope that she knows that. Because if I could have another kid, I'd want her to be like PJ.

rotten

2010-05-16T21:23:00.000-05:00

Today was a day for working around the home. After weeks of work, the archery store opened yesterday so we could finally breathe for just a minute today.

First thing I did was screen the compost. It's a new endeavor for me. I've been composting things for two years now, but I haven't used it yet in my garden. This year, though, I gave the pile a few experimental pokes early on in the season and found rich, black compost waiting for me underneath a layer of semi-rotten kitchen and garden scraps.

As I worked with the compost, pushing it through wire mesh, I thought about all the things I do now that I never thought I would. I play with rotten vegetables. I eat venison. I help Nature Boy make sausage. I rejoice when I see earthworms and I make deals with the farmer down the street to get his manure.

I never thought my life would be here, but I'm kind of glad it is. I like being this close to my food. I like knowing that the leftover vegetables will become fertilizer and not just a science project in my refrigerator. I like that there are no chemicals in my vegetables.

But I do wish that it was a little less gross to process.

low standards

2010-05-10T00:00:00.001-05:00

I've said before that I would be happy with just about any Mother's Day as long as there was no vomit.

I need to reconsider that.

I'm just coming off the second most horrid Mother's Day of my life. So far today, Madame X decided at the last minute that she wanted the kids for the day. The first Mother's Day in four years she wanted to spend with the kids.

See, normally Nature Boy and the kids always let me sleep in. Then they present me with a card and money to buy plants with. We go out for a big breakfast then we go shopping for plants. We come home, play outside and generally just have a calm, quiet day.

Instead of the breakfast out that I normally get, I got a gas station cheese danish on the way home from dropping the kids off. I'd been dropping subtle IHOP hints for two days, but a stale danish is just as good, right?

When we got home, Nature Boy did finally fix my washing machine, which meant I could finally tackle the six baskets of laundry that had accumulated in the four days the damn thing had been broken.

As I was weeding the flower beds, Goober finally brought me a card. A Wilma Flinstone card that said since it was my day, I wouldn't have to do all the drudgery I normally have to do around the house. I looked at my hands, stained brown and green from weeding, and at the mud stains on the envelope. I thought about Nature Boy draining the washer so I could fill it back up again. There was no way I was getting out of laundry, unless nobody wanted to wear underwear this week.

Inside the card was a gift card for Sears. Now, I'm sure Sears has a lot of good things for a lot of people, but I'd rather die than shop there. Our local Sears has the worst customer service ever. In December I bought a pair of boots there - with cash - and the transaction took 15 minutes. It was traumatic. I vowed never to shop there again, and said so to Nature Boy. What made it more insulting is that Nature Boy doesn't shop there, either. But he had been there yesterday to buy the TVs for the archery shop, so I put two and two together and realized that he must have forgotten about Mother's Day and just grabbed a gift card as he was checking out. A "Happy Birthday" gift card.

He claimed that they didn't have any other choices for gift cards, but when I went there today to see if I could return the card and get my damn money for plants, I noticed that there were several lovely cards that did not wish anyone a joyous anniversary of their birth. However, they don't issue refunds for gift cards. The manager suggested that I look around for something I might want. I informed him that I wanted raspberry plants or an apple tree. He was nonplussed. Apparently, some Sears stores offer plants. And they will ship! I explained that I preferred to get my plants whenever possible from local growers so I could support our local economy and also ensure that I would get a variety of plant that would grow in our very challenging climate. The manager suggested that I give the card to my husband so he could get some Craftsman tools. My Mother's Day present. Ill conceived though it might be, it's still mine and there is no way in hell that I'm sacrificing my plant money for more tools.

I suppose I could be thankful that Nature Boy took me to lunch at his favorite restaurant. Not mine. If I could have chosen, I would have liked a small bistro with interesting food. Instead, I smelled like a fajita the rest of the day.

Fortunately, Goober made me a card in school. He totally forgot to give it to me in his rage that I would not let him buy a globe at Office Max, where we went to buy supplies for the archery store, which is opening in a week. Because even though it's my day to relax, inventory still needs to be done and posters need to be designed and business cards need to be printed. This only added to Goober's rage because I had the audacity to use my computer for work when he could be playing on the PBS Kids Web site.

So I came home and drank wine. I'll be honest, I didn't even use a glass. I just went straight from the bottle. And in a way I'm kind of wishing for that vomit-filled Mother's Day because at least that day no one was in control of their facilities.

My day is over now and I'm lying in bed, ranting on my laptop, listening to Nature Boy snore. I read about the organizer of Mother's Day and how she ended up fighting it. I'm with her now. I'm not asking for much here. Just a little recognition, maybe one meal I don't have to cook. Maybe some plants or a tree. Definitely some relief on the chore front.

But I guess right now I just have to be thankful that I have three really great kids.

icing on the cake

2010-05-06T22:19:00.002-05:00

It's after 10 p.m. but I'm still up. I'm waiting for the cupcakes to cool so I can frost them. Vanilla cupcakes with chocolate marbling and chocolate icing. I'll admit I used a mix, but they're still my cupcakes.

I made them tonight after working a full day at work, meeting the amazing Ms. G at the gym for a pathetic, but still effective, workout, and then a few interviews out of town for some stories. Good interviews and good stories and good people, but still. It was time away from my family.

This week the Ubergoober is child of the week at his kindergarten, which means he gets to take a special treat and I get to deliver it to his class. I also get to read a book to the class - which I love. Goober has it picked out already. Uno's Garden. If you haven't read this book, please get it for your children. It combines math and ecology, so it fits Goober's criteria for fine literature with lots of math problems and also teaches a valuable lesson about having trees and plants, which warms my treehugger heart.

But the cupcakes. Goober wanted vanilla cupcakes with chocolate icing. Oh, and chocolate swirled in the cake. I can do that, right?

I can.

Even though it was 8:30 at night, I made the cupcakes and I loved every minute. I loved that a just a few tablespoons of cocoa could make my little guy happy. A few hours of my time, some eggs and water, and I am Supermom! Able to kiss boo boos and provide baked goods on a moment's notice. And tomorrow, I'm going to read to 20 kindergartners and I'm going to have them find the snortlepig on each page.

I love this time. It's time I missed with Sam and Ty. Not that I haven't loved visiting their classes and doing homework with them, but Sam was in third grade and Ty in fourth when I came on the scene. They were past the days of cupcakes and picture books. I still loved when I got to go to their classrooms, but it's just not the same as kindergarten. In third grade, you start to realize that maybe your parents don't know everything. By fourth grade you're sure of it. By fifth grade you don't hug in public and in high school you aren't even seen in the same room.

But in kindergarten, cupcakes equal love and a hug from Mom and Dad makes the world a brighter place. And for just an hour tomorrow I get to live in that world. I get to hang with the little people whose greatest social hangup is who won't share their fruit snacks. It's a far cry from my real life as a journalist, where distrust and cynicism are job requirements and deadlines are more important than love.

dirty

2010-05-02T21:44:00.001-05:00

This weekend was one of my very favorite weekends of the year. The weekend where we start working earnestly in the garden.

Goober and I dug in the vegetable garden - a 26- by 30-foot monster in our backyard - pulling out weeds and making sure the soil texture was still good. We will still add some compost - made ourselves with our kitchen scraps and yard waste - but it's good to know that the soil is still holding together like it should. In other years, I've allowed Nature Boy to till the soil, grinding it up with a gas-powered mini-monster that I'm no longer allowed to use, for good reason. But the last two years I've dug the beds in spring myself. It gives me a chance to see how much stuff I have to add to the soil - if any - and I also get to do a quick earthworm census. Oh, you may think counting worms is a little odd, but for gardeners, earthworms are worth their weight in gold. No, diamonds. They aerate the soil, they make their own compost and they are bird food.

As I sat there in the middle of my garden, taking an inventory of invertebrates and running soil through my fingers - I thought about how close to my food I've become in the past five years. It wasn't a step I felt I needed to take. I've always been concerned about what I eat. But in the past few years I've become less of a snobby foody and more of a Barbara Kingsolver.

See, I've come to love that I know where most of my vegetables and protein comes from. I love serving stuffed peppers that came completely from my yard. Well, except for the rice. That I buy from the grocery store. Granted, when Nature Boy and I first got together, I wasn't that keen on eating deer. They're so cute. And who doesn't love Bambi. I'll tell you who -- the woman who lost all of her daylillies and pumpkins to the thieving creatures! But regardless... we know where our food comes from. We know what our protein eats and we know where it's been. With our vegetables and fruit, we've nursed it from seeds and saplings. We've been responsible for its life. We've nurtured it without chemicals that could wreak havoc on our own systems.

Now, I understand that this style of life isn't for everyone. Even yesterday I had a very frank conversation with the Ubergoober about why we have to pull weeds and work in the garden. Because it's food. It's food that we eat and that will sustain us throughout the year. Not every kindergartner has to work for their food, but I'm glad mine does. But I think everyone should think about it. Think about where their food comes from and what that means for us.

After all, we are what we eat.

hard

2010-04-28T20:07:00.000-05:00

I wanted to write a happy, fluffy bunny blog post about how much I love my children, my husband, my job and my life, but things are just kind of sucky right now.

My kids are really pushing my buttons. Goober espeically. He just seems to know how to irritate me more so than any other of the children, even Sam who is in the throes of teenage girl hormones. Tonight was bad because he's just been hyper and me... well, not so much.

Mostly because my allergies have been really, really bad, which triggered a really, really bad asthma attack and diminished blood oxygen levels and, well, just generally feeling sucky.

And since kids can sense weakness that means they're ganging up to irritate me.

My husband isn't upsetting me too much, but beause he's starting a new business, he's not home a whole lot. So I get to deal with irritating children all by myself.

But I'm really not complaining. I'm not. Maybe just venting a bit because it's been a long week and an oxygen deprived week and I'm really not myself. So I'm just going to have a glass of wine and a little chocolate and then I'm going to go to bed and pretend today went well.

Because tomorrow will be better.

growing

2010-04-16T22:00:00.000-05:00

I've noticed lately how tall the Goober is getting. He used to come up just to my hip, but that was maybe two years ago. He would grab onto my leg, his arms wrapping around my thigh, and hang on for dear life.

Then his head was level with my waist. When he hugged me, he would press his face into my belly and I would hold his head there, enjoying how my body could cradle him once again.

Now he is a few inches taller and his head comes to my ribs. When he hugs me, his arms wrap around my hips and it, somehow, just fits.

Each year I think I'm going to miss how his body fits against mine, but each year he grows a few inches and he finds a new niche in me. It seems that no matter what size he is, there is a way we fit together.

And those hugs... there is nothing better.

dressed

2010-03-31T14:10:00.000-05:00

I see her on the step machine in the evenings. She is probably in her 50s, but could pass for someone much younger. She has a Mary Tyler Moore quality to her. She is graceful and elegant, but you know there's something silly and irreverant underneath.

What catches my eye is not her beauty, although she is very pretty. What I see is her dress. Every day I see her she is dressed to the nines. She wears yoga pants and expensive tops, the type that I would wear to go out for a fancy dinner. The tops are fitted, sometimes sleeveless, and understated, but still way more elegant than necessary for a gym. She accessorizes with very expensive costume jewelry that complements her tops. Her hair and makeup are no less than perfect. She makes Coco Chanel look underdressed.

She wears shoes with a slight heel, like one would wear to practice ballroom dancing and she steps gracefully and purposefully, watching Oprah on the television. She has a slight smile on her face as she takes each step, gently lifting each leg and stepping back down lightly.

I watch her as I strech and do sit ups. Me in my tanktops and worn capris and my clunky running shoes with the special inserts so my high arches and overpronated feet don't ache. By the time I stretch I am sweaty and panting from running, my hair escaping from its precarious ponytail. Even though I buy tank tops in special sweat-wicking fabrics, you can still see the dark spots running down from my neck and under my breasts. My workout partner and I swear at each other with each new exercise, laughing at ourselves and our efforts to beat the passage of time on our physiques. There is nothing elegant about our workout.

I wonder sometimes what she thinks of us, laughing at off-color jokes, talking about the latest ways our kids or husband have embarassed us, sweating like construction workers on a hot day and pushing ourselves to the point where the endorphins kick in and take away all the pain and frustration of our daily lives and then staying there for a while, enjoying the rush.

I wonder also if I could be that woman. Always appropriate, always dressed, always graceful. I know I probably can't. I trip on my own feet even wearing flats and I just never seem to have enough time to put makeup on. It's really not a big deal since I break out from wearing makeup anyway. And my clothes have always been more functional that fashionable, with my wedding band and diamond earrings serving as my only accessories.

No, I couldn't be her, but one of these days I will get up the nerve to ask her where she buys her clothes.

stronger

2010-03-30T20:48:00.000-05:00

Every year I make a resolution that I will ride my bike more, especially when I don't have that far to go. Like to Target or the grocery store or the library, which are all about two or three miles away from my home.

But every spring when the driveway thaws I haul my bike out of the garage and set off down the road and every year I make it to the next farm before I collapse in an aching, asthmatic mess.

This year, though, was different. Goober and I set off on our bikes, intending to head down to the archery shop to visit Nature Boy. We made it up the hill with little difficulty and I felt a surge of triumph as I passed Esker's driveway and then his north field and then the next forty up from that. With little effort, we biked the three miles down to the shop and then back home.

It was amazing to me. I have never met biking season head one like that and won. But this year, after countless gym sessions with the amazing Ms. G and a firm resolve to actually get up off my behind and move, I did it. I haven't really lost any weight and, aside from a little more definition in my abs and my arms, I haven't noticed a huge difference from my newfound gym obsession. But this bike ride was tangible proof that I've accomplished something, and I'm damned proud of myself for doing it.

Who would have thought that now, in my mid-thirties, I would find fitness? And better yet, I'm finding it with my son. I can go on bike rides with him! I can run around with him and climb trees and throw balls... well, maybe not that, I still throw like a girl... but it doesn't hurt anymore. In fact, it feels pretty good.

And who wouldn't want to play with that guy?

spring breakage

2010-03-29T15:43:00.000-05:00

Every night when I go to bed, I have several blog posts that roll through my head. It happens when I'm on the treadmill, too, or making supper.

Basically, whenever I'm nowhere near a computer.

So I haven't been posting because I can never remember what it was I wanted to post.

But I'm resolving to change that. This week I'm on spring break and I have time. Glorious time! Time where I can think and write and not be interrupted by the thousands of things I need to deal with when I'm at work.

Of course, now that I'm on the computer and I have a window open, I'm blank.

Nothing.

Good thing I have a week to figure it out.

bubbles

2010-03-21T14:12:00.000-05:00

All week I run.

On Mondays, Goober has swimming lessons after school. I work out while he swims and then we race home to have dinner before I have to race off to symphony rehearsal.

On Tuesdays the local school boards and city councils meet. Thankfully, they rotate weeks, but it still means that three out of four Tuesdays in a month I'm running to catch a meeting and then running to get back home and file a story.

Wednesdays are my free evenings, but that means Nature Boy is free to work all night at the archery shop so I hang at home with the kids, help with homework, supervise showers and clean up whatever mess was made that evening.

Thursdays mean another round of meetings usually, but it's also Nature Boy's night for archery league. So the Goober and I take in whatever municipal meeting is going on before we run back home to relax for a bit before bed.

Fridays are reserved for family. We try to eat dinner as a family every night, but on Fridays we do something special. We order in pizza, we go out for fish or we make up something special at home. Then we find a movie and just pile onto the couch.

Saturdays and Sundays we get caught up around the house. We do laundry, we clean the bathrooms, vacuum, dust. We work out in the gardens and we do our shopping. I get caught up on bookkeeping for the businesses and Nature Boy does the maintenance projects in the house.

But Sunday nights belong to me. Once Goober is in bed, I lock myself in the bathroom for a night of pampering. I fill up the tub with a hot bubble bath. I gather a trashy romance novel, wine and snacks. I give myself a facial and sand down the bottoms of my feet. I soak for at least an hour, letting the water wash away all of the stress and the running I've accumulated all week. Nobody is allowed to bother me.

It's only about an hour, but it's that hour that keeps me sane. Not only am I chiseling off all the make up and dirt that packs into my face, scrubbing off the calluses that accumulate from wearing dress shoes all week and deep-moisturizing my skin (an absolute necessity in northern Wisconsin's frigid climate), I'm taking back some quiet and some sanity. It's not much, but it's just enough to keep me from going totally postal. Also, it makes Sunday tolerable. I don't dread the last day of the weekend. I look forward to that time in the bathroom, by myself and whatever characters I'm reading about in a book.

I can't wait for tonight.

dragged

2010-03-16T21:46:00.000-05:00

Lately I've become aware of how many things we drag the Ubergoober to. Not just the usual things, like Little League and school concerts, but the out-of-the-ordinary family excursions that normally you wouldn't take small children to. Like his siblings' sporting events. All-day tournaments, doctors appointments, shopping trips for new shoes, everywhere.

We also take him wherever we go. To work, to meetings, to symphony rehearsals, to archery practice. Everywhere. The other night I took him to a local government committee meeting because Nature Boy had archery league and it was more suitable for him to travel with me than to be in a room with 40 guys shooting at things. And he was wonderful. He sat there, quietly, doing his science workbooks and listening to the discussions going on around him. At the end, the administrator gave him a balloon, which was just the best thing that happened to Goober all day.

It seems to be a trend with youngest children, though, espeically when there is a significant age gap. Granted, I wasn't there when Sam and Ty were Goober's age, but from what Nature Boy tells me they weren't subjected to government meetings like Goober is. But my friends who also have far flung children say they do the same thing. The baby always gets dragged along. Since they have to be where the older kids are and they can't leave the little one home alone, they just bring him or her along.

I'm still trying to decide if this is a good thing. I kind of think it is because Goober has had a lot of experiences that few kids his age have. He enjoys listening to classical music because he's had to come with me to rehearsals and he is forced to listen in the car to whatever I'm working on with the symphony. He's helped gut animals that his daddy killed because I was at work and couldn't sit with him in the house while daddy was hunting. He's seen police officers receive top department honors and he got to talk with a NASA engineer. He's shared his snacks with municipal leaders as I interviewed them about illegal land deals. He's helped build furniture and reside houses. He is comfortable in almost any situation you put him in and we know when we take him somewhere he will know how to behave.

And, in a way, it's fun for us to be able to share these experiences with him. It's really fun for me to see him experience the world this way and to understand how it works. Oh, sure, we still take him to Kindersports and swimming lessons, and all those normal kid things, but he's also getting a chance to preview the world, to see what it is adults have to do and why we do it.

And sometimes you get balloons.

the road to nowhere

2010-03-06T21:18:00.000-06:00

Recently I hooked up with one of Goober's classmates moms. (Did you follow that? I'm not sure I did.) It was totally by chance. I was at the Y on an off day and we ran into each other and started talking and one thing led to another and the next thing I knew I was running for 30 minutes on the treadmill.

Now I'm hooked.

The treadmill has become my go-to stress relief, anxiety balm and frustration get-outter. And Ms. G (see above re: classmate mom) is my supplier.

I've mentioned before that I wanted to get in shape, but now I know I can get serious. See, I've always been fairly haphazard about my exercise regimin. I have a friend who is a trainer and she keeps me supplied with new exercises and such, but she never makes me work out. She just encourages me to do it because it's good for me.

But now... now I have the treadmill. Now I have a partner that I can talk to and who is as insanely stressed as I am and who, in her infinite wisdom, pointed out that endorphins are good and they make you feel better. And when you pound out a half-hour doing interval training on a treadmill, you can get a whole boatload of endorphins.

Now when I'm having a bad day, I find a way to get on the treadmill. When the weather gets nicer, I'll be able to hit the gravel and the pavement (cause we live out in the wild and at least a half mile of my route is not paved.)

It's something I never thought I'd enjoy because I was never that physical of a person. I was always way more intellectual. It was rare that I would choose sports over books or music. Actually, it never happened. I was always reading and never running. It just seemed pointless. Why run? There's a whole world to be found between the pages of books and you don't get shin splints.

But now I know why people run. Becuase it makes you feel good. Because it makes your ass jiggle less. Because it makes your heart work better. Because it makes you blood flow a little easier. Because you can walk up a flight of stairs without wanting to die.

ketchup

2010-03-01T13:07:00.000-06:00

Goober lost his tooth last Tuesday!

In the end, he let Daddy pull it out. It got to the point where it was so loose it probably would have fallen out during the night and he would have swallowed it. Which we were okay with. Ty swallowed plenty of teeth and he's fine. But Goober was really looking forward to a visit from the tooth fairy, so he acquiesced and let Daddy yank on it. One swift pull and it was out. Goober was so happy.

I'm on furlough this week, which means no work! Also means no pay for the week, but after all the stress we've been having at work it's kind of nice to putter around at home.

The week off is especially welcome because Nature Boy and I are starting a new business. Last week we got the building and the financing secured, so in two months there will be a new indoor archery range in our area. Nature Boy is far more excited than I am since this has been his dream for years, but I'm starting to get enthused. Of course, this also means gobs more time working at another business for both of us while still trying to keep our current jobs and care for our children, our house and our rapidly expanding gardens, but hopefully it will mean Nature Boy can get out of construction before he's crippled for life.

amateur dentistry

2010-02-21T20:26:00.000-06:00

The Ubergoober has a loose tooth. Well, it's been loose for about a month now, but it's really, really, really loose. Like almost ready to come out.

He's panicking, though. Even though he's seen his brother and sister lose teeth, he's really nervous. Right now the tooth hurts because it's mainly out and when he bites down, the rough edges of the tooth poke against his gums.

For Nature Boy, it's all he can do not to yank it out. It's what he did for Ty, who couldn't bear to have loose teeth, but couldn't yank them out himself. Sam, on the other hand, really enjoyed pulling her own loose teeth out and would fight Nature Boy for the privelige.

Goober, however, is resisting. He's one of those kids who takes things at his pace. Nobody else's. He'll do it when he's damn good and ready and no one is going to sway him from his intended path.

No matter how big they are and how much they think they can be a dentist.

observations

2010-02-18T19:43:00.001-06:00

I cut the boys' hair last night and, in keeping with the messing of the seasons, Nature Boy had me shave his head. Which meant a fairly drastic haircut since it had been a while since I'd cut his hair. Goober, like always, just got a trim, although I did mess his bangs up a little and ended up cutting them a little shorter than I had planned.

When Goober got home from school, Nature Boy asked him if anyone had mentioned his haircut.

"No. Why would they?" Goober asked.

Nature Boy shrugged.

"Did anyone mention your haircut?" I asked.

"No," Nature Boy answered.

Which brings me to something I just don't understand. A woman gets her haircut and every other woman notices. Even a half-inch trim. We can just tell. If the haircut is drastic enough, men might notice, too. You can't walk down the office halll after a haircut without people stopping you and saying, "Did you just get your hair cut?"

But guys? Not a chance. They don't ever seem to notice each other's hair. Not even when a guy goes from having almost an inch of hair to, well, none.

I suppose I really shouldn't be suprised, but it's just one of those disparities between the sexes.

As for my hair, the growing out is going nicely and it's almost down to my shoulders. Yay!

sorrow

2010-02-13T21:05:00.000-06:00

There are parts of my job that I don't really like doing. Like anyone, I suppose. I love most of my job, though. I enjoy writing, I enjoy photography and I like being able to tell people's stories.

But I hate writing about fatal accidents.

We had one in our area recently. A young man, working at his father-in-law's factory, died when a chemical vat he was working with exploded. He was, from everything I heard, a quiet person. He was a chaplain for the National Guard, a father to two young children and, in general, a nice guy.

I know all of this because I had to call his friends and family after his death so I could write about him in the newspaper.

It's a hard thing for me to do because I remember what it's like to have someone close to me die. I know how you're just in shock for those first few days, when all your family and friends are around you, helping you get through your life.

Then you get to the funeral and you're going on autopilot. Thanking people for coming, smiling that smile that says you're happy to see someone but inside you're dried up because the only reason you're seeing them is because this person you loved and who was close to you is dead.

But when you get home from the funeral, after all the food is put away and you're alone again, your stuck wondering just how in the hell you can go along without this person. How are you going to do the things that they did? How are you going to fill the void that they left? How are you going to function without them?

It's during these days that we call people. We call them to ask them to talk about their loved ones. Sometimes they do. I cry every time right along with them.

But sometimes they can't. And I understand. I don't think that I could either. But then we still have to write the story and fill in the gaps and get things right. Only we really can't because we didn't know this person. And that's a disservice because, well, they deserve better.

So I make that call. I try to be nice. I try to be understanding. Because I've been that person receiving the phone call.

But, God help me, I do wish sometimes that I would never have to do that again.