Here I am, stuck in the middle with you...

I have been at home with the kids now for 2 years full time, 3 years if you count the year I worked part time before that, and I think that has finally been enough time to recover from the psychic scars of my first crack at a career. I'm done with that career, and now done having babies, and soon my babies will be done being babies and I am finally starting to really believe in life after this. I was beginning to think I would just continue to dither in relative complacency until the kids were grown and my husband retired, then call it a life and release whatever vestiges of ambition still loitered on the perimeter of my dreams.

I may be overdoing it, though, aspiring to a career that will take more schooling than I've already had, and that I don't exactly qualify for to begin with. There are a whole lot of ifs in the plan I'm formulating. If I convince the pre-med catch-up program to admit me (despite my inadequate grades), if I get straight As in that program and rock the MCATs, if I get into one of the only two medical schools in driving distance, if I don't just crack under the pressure and give up at some point or change my mind as is my wont, if I get my MD and can actually decide what I want to DO with it - practice or research or business? - well then, I'll be pretty damn happy. And old. I'll definitely be old by the end of all that. So, although I may seem a bit young now for this midlife angst, I won't be by the time it comes to fruition.

In the meantime, life is so the same here, it's hard to think of current events to mention. Everyone's mostly better, illness-wise, big boy is mostly hideous, behavior-wise, little boy is mostly odd, husband is mostly funny with a side of annoying. I'm eating mostly locally with splurges for avocados and chocolate. The twins are mostly sleeping and the weather has been mostly god-awful. Summer is a vortex of sameness, a slow seductive hiatus of a season. I think it may be just what I needed.

Funny things heard around my house today

My husband, to sobbing boy twin, after boy twin did a particularly clumsy move that resulted in a face plant: "I'm sorry, my dim bulb. We ran out of genes by the time we got to you."

The 3 year old, while playing a flute: "The music went that way and crashed against the wall."

The 6 year old, when confronted with evidence that someone broke into a verboten toy stash: "I don't even know how to use my brain any more" (he was referring to a time now past when he was convinced he could move things with his mind, but I like the more global applicability).

Me: "I think I want to go to medical school."

Oh, wait, that last one is real. Maybe. Who knows with me. I emailed a post-baccalaureate program today to clarify some things, and I'm having lunch next week with the kids' pediatrician and will grill her about med school. I'm not sure I'd want to be a practicing physician (because I kind of hate people), but there are lots of things one can do with an MD, right? Work on drug development? Lobby for health care reform? Give controlled substance prescriptions for Christmas presents?

Plague redux (is that the right usage for that weird word?)

After a couple months without seeing the pediatrician, we started missing her. We're making up for lost time now. Both twins have ear infections, the asthmatic three year old is wheezy and had a chest x-ray today and is starting a daily regimen of Singulair, and I made a late-evening trip to the pediatric urgent care because big boy had a headache all day and then his hand went numb and I freaked out and assumed he was having a 6 year old stroke. Fortunately, he is stroke-free, but he does have strep. Poor bug. Throw in the mystery infection I'm on antibiotics for and well over half of the family is under doctor's care. Lame.

I still hate George Bush

I hate the sick feeling I get in my stomach and the tightness in my chest when I read stories like this about the refugee situation in Iraq. The feeling of helplessness and complicity, that our country has perpetrated this horror on these poor people who did nothing to us. It's amazing to me that we have managed to make Saddam Hussein's rule the stuff of nostalgia - it was actually better to live in Iraq with him in charge than it is now. Yes, he was a bad man, an awful dictator - but now there are millions of displaced, hopeless people and tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) dead and those who remain in Iraq must live in at least as much fear as they did under Saddam. How is this better? And of all the literally millions of refugees, how many have been allowed into the US? 700. Our government is like a little child who breaks something for the hell of it and refuses to clean up the mess, preferring instead to keep beating the shit out of the broken pieces.

But hey, at least George is keeping the world safe for unwanted embryos. Fucking moron.

(Note to the NSA/CIA/FBI/NBC - if you're reading this (and I'm sure you are), I promise I'm all talk. I will not take any action against the president other than continued wailing and gnashing his teeth. You may resume surveillance of (other) suspicious looking/sounding non-Christians.)

Happy Father's Day

On Father's Day, it's standard to praise the mad parenting skillz of the father(s) in your life, but I would honestly say, any day of the year, that my husband is the best father I can imagine. My kids are so lucky. He is patient, fair, genuinely interested in each of them, and, above all, fun fun fun. Time with Daddy is like a trip to an amusement park for my kids. He will drop anything he's doing to play inane games or wrestle on the floor. He includes them in everything he does, and they learn so much from him. He's by far the nicer person in our relationship, but the kids respect him and will go to great lengths to make him happy, while walking all over me and never fearing my much-more-substantial wrath. He is more involved in my stepkids' lives than many fathers are with kids that live with them full time. I grew up largely without a father, and I love seeing the richness of the deep bond my kids have with theirs.

When I was pregnant with my oldest son, I thought I was going to be a single mother, and I (foolishly) thought that was just fine, that I could do it on my own. I'm older and wiser now (and fatter, though that's probably not relevant), and I know for certain that my world and my son's would be a far less secure and joyful place without my husband. I don't know how I could do it without him, and I know for sure I wouldn't want to.

I love you, sweetheart, best husband and father. I hope you have a wonderful day.


(Note: one of the kids in this picture isn't ours, for those of you who know us and are confused by the random blonde girl)

Teflon boy

I was just obsessing researching autism spectrum disorders, because my 3 year old had his first behavioral therapy appointment Friday and it's fresh in my mind, and I found this article. I just skimmed it, but it seems to say that some kids with PDDNOS "lose" their diagnosis in time with appropriate therapies. I was already feeling pretty good about the therapies we have planned for him (occupational therapy, a social skills group for similarly strange little people, language therapy, and behavioral therapy), and this makes me even more hopeful that he will be able to have a "normal" childhood and life. It further made me realize that although people comment on children's resilience all the time, this child is more resilient than most. If he does lose this diagnosis in time (not to count chickens before they're hatched or put the cart before the horse or any other farm-y metaphor/cliches), it will be his third time losing a presumably permanent diagnosis. He was born with a VSD (heart defect) that Hopkins thought at a year would be permanent and might even need surgery, and it inexplicably closed on its own at 18 months. He was diagnosed with asthma right around his second birthday and never had another attack after diagnosis. I choose to look at this history as a sign that he's an odds-beater, a statistical anomaly. I know it's going to take a lot of work to catch him up, but I feel like we're getting an early start and a lot of help, and I just love him so much. Is it stupidly optimistic to feel like it's all going to work out fine?

Today is lame

Nothing is terribly wrong, and I'm not even in an especially bad mood (although I'm getting there), but nothing is going smoothly today. The day started off well enough, with me getting everyone dressed and out of the house by 9:30. I found a farmer's market nearby that started today at 10am, according to its website. We got there at 10:15, just in time to watch one lonely truck pull in and start unloading, next to two signs - one said the market was from 10-2, and one said 11-2. I guess the rest of the vendors are following the 11-2 sign. No big deal, we were near Whole Foods, so we ran over there instead. The minute we got in the store, boy twin set up an unholy racket that persisted throughout our shopping and my big boy, who just completed kindergarten and consistently earned high marks for behavior, proceeded to tear through the store, running into people and knocking over displays and just generally acting like an ass. We finished mercifully fast, and I asked big boy to help me carry a bag to the car. He snotted "NO," so I said okay and just got the stuff myself, then grabbed girl twin from the cart. There was a soggy squishing sound as I pulled her from the seat, because she had shit a perfect storm through her diaper and clothes and all over everything. I wrangled girl and mess and bags to the car, with big boy screaming behind me that he had changed his mind and wanted to carry a bag. I ignored the insanity and loaded the car, changed the baby, and started to pull away. Big boy made hissy huffy noises until I asked him to stop. Naturally, he continued, so I told him, still calmly, that I would not take him to the pool if he kept it up. He did it again - no pool. So, he screamed, literally SCREAMED, all the way home. I am a mean, mean mommy, it's my fault he acts badly, he hates me, I hate him, life sucks. Wah wah wah. Got home to a message from my friend that she had to cancel our playdate due to car trouble - apparently, today's powers of disruption are not localized. Dropped off the kids and went to pilates, which had been canceled (another sign of the day's widespread negative energy). Went to pick up my veggies from the CSA (love Tuesdays!), and am trying to maintain my enthusiasm for greens. Lots and lots of greens. That's okay, though, that's not really part of the day's suck. Came home to more bad behavior from big kids and whiny poopiness from little kids and it's 1:45 and I really, really just want to go to bed and start over.

How's your day?

SCHOOL'S...OUT...FOR...SUM-MER!

Children fold time back on itself. My oldest son just "graduated" from kindergarten, and the three months of vacation stretches out before us like the promised land or purgatory, depending on the time of day and point of view. I know that this summer will be challenging in many ways, but I still feel the excitement of summer as seen through my newly-liberated child's eyes. Thank goodness for the pool, for naps, for window air conditioners. For the chance to live childhood again, with more power and less sleep.

School is behind us but also already looming in front of us. I thought I had put the school decision behind me when I signed big boy up for his current school last March, but my commitment to that decision is a weak reed indeed. Just as I met the new principal and started feeling really excited about next year, I learned of a new charter school. It's a language immersion school - kids choose Mandarin, Russian, or French - and it's just around the corner. Wouldn't it be amazing to grow up bilingual? I've been reading studies of children from immersion schools, and they tend to do better in all subjects, not just language. If I don't send the kids there, am I depriving them of a really unique opportunity? If I do, am I scarring big boy by switching him from a school where he's already comfortable? Think they'd just let ME matriculate, as a kindergartener, so I can learn Mandarin myself?

I need to put the littles to bed. Our bedtime creeps later with the setting of the sun. If we lived in northern Alaska, the poor kids would be reduced to a 45 minute nap around midnight (but would sleep 23 hours a day in winter, now there's an idea...).

Diagnosis - clinically odd

My lovely, strange 3 year old is now officially odd. I took him to be evaluated for some of the wacky things he does and says, and he's been diagnosed with PDD (Pervasive Developmental Disorder) (it can't really be a coincidence that PDD and ODD are only one letter off from each other, right?). PDD is technically on the autism spectrum. The doctor described it as a catchall diagnosis for children with autistic traits who don't fit any of the other diagnoses.

I'm really glad I took him in - I was on the fence about it, because he really does seem okay a lot of the time. The evaluation was very revealing. A lot of my concerns had to do with his strange speech and frequent spells of inattention, and it turns out that a lot of that is attributable to a significant receptive speech delay. The doctor said that he knows that the socially appropriate thing to do if someone speaks to him is to respond, but he's not processing our words normally, so he just spouts back whatever his weird little brain conjures up - quotes from movies, phrases someone said earlier in the conversation, or just random jumbles of words. It's like he's been covering for his own delay and tricking us into thinking he understands us. She said he has a high IQ - isn't it strange that he's smart but has such a fundamental delay? Brains are so strange and complicated.

Because he's going to get intervention early (high order language therapy and some behavioral therapy) he should be able to lead a "normal" life. I'm already seeing a bit of a difference just having him repeat back what we say to make sure he gets it, and it's a relief knowing what's going on in that nutty little head.

And now for another obsession

I'm not sure this really counts as new, and obsession has a slightly negative connotation, but I'm sure this is how my husband would characterize it, so I'll go with it.

And the obsession is.....environmentalism, I guess you'd call it. Living as low-impact as possible. The eco-friendly madness started with cloth diapers, progressed to reusable grocery bags, and is accelerating noticeably this week, as I start poring over grocery origins and buying reusable bottles and sandwich wraps for us all to carry to the pool. I admit to being suggestible (the move to more grocery-origin-awareness was prompted by Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), but I also think it is indicative of my place on the learning curve. The more I read about the oil used to transport food and manufacture disposable products and the impact on the environment we have with our disposable culture, the more logical it seems to reduce my family's oil dependence and environmental impact as much as possible.

What sounds a bit like sacrifice is actually turning out to be a lot of fun. I've hinted at my craziness about cloth diapers before (they're so CUTE! and SOFT! and LEAKPROOF!), but I'm finding that all of my new reusable trinkets are just about as fun. I have an assortment of reusable shopping bags (made from organic cotton or recycled materials), which are sturdy and handy for far more than just shopping. I've started checking not just food labels but food origins at the grocery store, and I'm pleased to report that sticking to local food has resulted in much tastier, fresher food - sure makes doing the "virtuous" thing more palatable. I just ordered super-cool SIGG bottles from www.reusablebags.com for everyone in the family (except I forgot my mom, whoops! will have to place another order) to reduce the juice box/water bottle waste we generate, and I learned a lot about the benefits of reducing vs recycling from their website. I got some reusable sandwich wrappers there, too, to reduce my ziploc dependence.

We all went to the farmer's market today, with my newly-local friend Heidi and her son patiently in tow, and bought local, humanely grown meat and eggs and locally made cheese and bread. Our first CSA delivery is scheduled for this Tuesday - with the food I got today and the veggies on Tuesday, I really only need the grocery store for crackers and toilet paper.

I know this post isn't very entertaining - zealots aren't nearly as interesting to other people as they are to themselves, and I can recognize that even in the midst of my own zealotry - but it feels good to support the local economy, feed my family better, teach the kids to live simply and well, and reduce our direct and indirect oil usage all at once. If you want to enter into my madness, I highly recommend reading Barbara Kingsolver's book.