That tonight I get to go see Wednesday night bluegrass with my girls for the first time since May. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

August 2007

I never would have imagined it being immeasurably worse than this.

Crafting and watching LOST until 1:00 in the morning.

Worse idea: blogging after that.

Hazel and I keep listening to her naptime mix from Aunt Janet at all hours of the day, not just naptime, and she always does a little extra dancing for Regina Spektor. I can’t help but smile to myself when I see her bobbing and flapping away to this song, because of course she has no idea…

And I wouldnt raise my child inside the city, anyway
They grow up too savvy and they grow up too fast
And they know about buying shit and they know about sex
And they know about investment banking and also about brokerage firms
And they know about the numbers and they know about the words
And they know about the bottom lines and also about stones
And they know about careers and about the real deals
And they all grow up and become peoples’ people with people skills

As a city kid, though, she has made far too many trips to Ikea for an eleven-month-long life. I went for a few specific things and left with only those things… including this tray. I have a weakness for serving trays. I like my food to be pretty. I am a nomadic crafter, always carting projects around on trays to work on everywhere but at my craft table (because it is now covered with Work Laptop and Stuff and Finished Projects and In Progress Projects). I plan on having lots more babies and my midwives will need trays to hold all of their instruments while they follow me around. Jess, you will have your pick of birds, elephants, polkadots, stripes… all sorts of cheery and colorful possibilities when you birth babyfrate number two.

 

Listening: Regina Spektor, et. al.
(I am) Reading: The Blue Cotton Gown
(Hazel is) Reading: still stuck on Mary Had a Little Lamb
Working on: ephemera packs, but I think I’m going to have to cut myself off – they’re overflowing my work table
Packing progress: packed one box

the thursday after the first night that we ever set ears inside the silver dollar, i called my mom raving and she wanted to know how long i thought it would be until mikey was on stage with any of them.

so hazel was eight months old a few days ago:

- her sleeping has not changed (she still is) and her mobility has not changed (she still isn’t), but she’s way different and way more fun over the past month.
- she knows how to wave hello / goodbye and is generally interacts much more with people, and tolerates other people for longer periods of time.
- she is usually amused by other people’s attempts to entertain her instead of just confused – if you make her toys talk or filp your sunglasses up and down really fast or any other baby-amusement-things, she will almost always smile or laugh instead of just staring at you with her brows furrowed.
- she still babbles incessantly and now says “mama mama mama” :)
- she cut her third tooth to the right of her bottom two.
- the car is much easier – she can be entertained by toys and snacks. no more crying fits.
- she continues to be obsessed with food – in the past month she’s had papaya, olives, tofu, cheerios, a wee bit of cheese, rice, watermelon, and probably some other stuff – still have not found a food that she doesn’t like. she can feed herself little finger foods and it’s quite adorable to see.
- being on her belly is somewhat more tolerable since she can push herself up really well and scootch around a little.
- her hair is growing back.
- she will sit in the bathtub splashing and screaming until the water goes cold if you let her. she can’t scoop up a cupful of water, but if she happens to pick up her cup and it’s already full of water, she will attempt to dump it on her head.
- she’s still in skinny clothes and small fuzzibunz (not for much longer, i don’t think – her legs are her only chubby feature), and i found some size one disposables at my parents house that still fit her with room to grow… i can still circle my hands all the way around her waist :) not sure how much she weighs – so “heavier” will have to suffice.
- her favorite toys are a little people ark full of animals (great yardsale find!), wooden stacking rings, nesting cups, other little stuff like that, a velvety/silky little taggie blanket… and of course her spatula. she now has bright measuring spoons to go with her spatula and she’s pretty in love with them. still doesn’t care too much about stuffed animals, blankets, or have anything like that that’s her “comfort” thing. i was starting to think this was weird until kelly pointed out that it’s probably because she nurses for comfort – duh.
- she loves books. absolutely loves them. plays with board books “by herself” and i’ve been trying to get through her regular storybooks because she now only sometimes gets really grabby / rips at them. i don’t have to read to her with her arms pinned down.
- when she wakes up from a nap we can hear her in bed just talking to herself for awhile – it’s so cute.
- since paisley has not been here to tell her when daddy’s home, she has learned the sound of his key hitting the lock and her head snaps towards the door, and then she dazzles him with her snaggletooth grin.

lenten haiku, day sixteen

baby pulls ears and
dog wags unsuspecting tail
not knowing it’s next

lenten haiku, day seventeen

in seven short days
i’ll be on that southbound train
headed for my home

lenten haiku, day eighteen  (that’s today)

thank you for barfing
just before we left the house
so we’d get there clean

so there those are. i don’t know why i find it so difficult to just PUT THEM HERE or at least write them down. instead i walk around with them in my brain for three days, reminding myself of them every so often so i remember when i finally get around to it.

as noted above, hazel has discovered the joys of TOUCHING paisley. she’s watched her, talked to her, smiled at her, and even laughed at her a few times – all for weeks – but had only stretched out a tentative hand and fallen just short of actual contact. the other day while hazel was playing on the floor, paisley came scooting over inch by inch on her belly like dogs do, chin on the floor, seemingly willing her neck to get just a little bit longer. hazel noticed and reached out her hand towards paisley, who took that as an invitation to speed up the progress and a few seconds later she was laying beside hazel, gazing down at her patiently. first hazel touched the side of her nose, running her palm across paisley’s whiskers. then she buried her fingers in the thick fur on paisley’s neck and wiggled them around a bit. then with a satisfied “oooouuuaaahhhhh” she  started wiggling all of her limbs at once like she does, in four directions at one time, and then grabbed paisley’s ear and gave it a healthy yank. pulled on her floppy neck skin. pulled on her whiskers. pulled on her ear again. it was not until hazel stuck her fingers between paisley’s lips, hooking her fingers around paisley’s cheek and stretching it out as far as she could manage that paisley looked at me helplessly, a portrait of confusion and desperation. she slowly pulled her lips out of hazel’s hands and rolled over onto her back beside her, kicking her own four limbs into the air and swishing her tail back and forth happily. she loves her girl so much. the only problem this has created – paisley pouts incessantly when hazel sleeps. she wanders from room to room (shut out of the bedroom), and will wander by every so often and give me a look that clearly says “why can’t you just wake her up to play?” i say “hazel needs to sleep”, and she lets out a huffy sigh and flops herself onto the floor.  she knows the deal.

we went to see chris play tonight – what we thought was going to be his last night – and found out the owner of the bar wants him to keep it going. this is good news. i was sad to be losing our most baby-friendly music outing. saturdays are great and there are tons of kids, but chris is a bit quieter and more comfortable. not to mention that mikey works every other saturday so we can’t always go. she got to see her auntie ella (who brought her flipflops for summer), and to finally meet sarah, who brought her a knitted nautiloid cephalopod (hazel has nerdy friends) and crocheted hat. she wore her headscarf all evening and it stayed put just fine. she’s so stinkin cute in it. perfect use for fabric scraps, too. between that & some of my patchouli getting rubbed off onto her clothing, mikey asked her if she was going to be a hippie when she grows up. before she could answer chris said very sternly, “you’d better be a hippie”.

i think she’s too into red glittery vinyl to be a hippie just yet.

he sang her a song tonight. and if that cart and bull fall down, you’ll still be the cutest baby in this town. sometimes i wish (not logically or for real) that she could live here for enough of her life to be able to remember some of these things & some of these people. there is so much love & she’ll never know it. not like now, anyway. a table full of people passing her around, meeting kids, her musician friends singin’ her songs, not flinching when the subway trains whoosh by & other city kid things.

i had a dream that we were pregnant, four weeks from our duedate, and without a midwife. i’m pretty sure this is kelly’s fault.  i now know for a fact that i am not actually pregnant, which is good, or a second pregnancy dream would have sent me to the drugstore for a test first thing in the morning. although now that i think about it, all of my (actual) pregnancy dreams that i had before were about a child. these were not about being pregnant with a particular child. if i start dreaming about a kid then maybe i will worry.

it’s midnight, but since my headache & i napped the afternoon away with hazey, i am nowhere near tired. perhaps i will take a bath. the chances of consistent water temparature are good this time of day.

listening: nothin’ at all – the mockingbird song in my head now, since i was thinking about it
reading: annie dillard; vegetarian times

pat’s funeral mass, celebration of his life, and a leisurely lunch with friends in between the two took up the majority of our day. it was all really wonderful and really sad. there were hundreds of people and i’m sure just as many who could not come (he is from michigan, students have scattered far and wide). his wife & kids were incredible. before the mass began they were all waiting in the back of the cathedral with his casket ready to process in and i was discreetly bouncing hazel around in her carrier in a corner putting her to sleep (where she thankfully remained for the whole mass, until darren started belting out the closing hymn beside us – she woke up and beamed at him). i kept peering sideways at the casket, all kinds of sad things going through my head (i didn’t go to the viewing with mikey & ella because hazel hadn’t napped all day), trying not to cry before the damn thing even started, and jocelyn, the kids, and the small gathering of immediate family all of a sudden erupted into belly laughter. jocelyn was fanning her face trying to stop laughing / crying and burying her face in their son’s chest, then she’d look back at the casket and laugh some more. i have no idea what might have been said, but it was a perfect beginning to his funeral mass. the homily was great, the celebration at the college was great – it was a perfect sendoff.

it was a really long day, but the foggies dinnertime show was a breast cancer benefit with a bunch of local women joining in for the second set, so we went even though we were beat. it was a great show – they were on and the girls were awesome. lots of kids that we are getting to know, and just about every other person from our little community. they ended the evening by leading the entire at-capacity bar (with all the girls on stage at once) in a drunken rendition of “will the circle be unbroken?” …i managed one photo before i had to go hide my face in mikey’s shoulder. perfect song for the end of this day.

i did not write a haiku yesterday. what’s lent without slipping up?

lenten haiku, day ten

i cannot stand the
being here any more than
the thought of leaving

listening: nothing at all
reading: i am rereading the shipping news on a whim. just because kevin spacey is on the cover, and every so often i can flip the book shut and look at his picture, because i have a mild crush on him. i will probably stop reading the book when the movie comes in the mail, which it should any day now.

1.) the kids that hazel meets at bluegrass all have great names: georgia, wynn, amelia, alice, finley, griffin, sage, etc. having a baby means all the other kids in the room want to meet her vicariously through you. we’d met amelia before, and today she & her friend finley were sharing a (my) barstool, chatting with mikey about star wars and the never ending story. at one point they slid off their seat and finley instructed ameila to push him as hard as she could. she did, he fell on my feet, they laughed hysterically, he got up. amelia’s mom came rushing over, told her to stop pushing other kids around the baby and people she doesn’t know. amelia put one hand on her hip, extended the other towards me, palm-up, and proclaimed, “but mom, i know her.” … “go finish your grilled cheese or you can’t go to finley’s house tonight.” … “okay okay.” … she was back five minutes later to play with sleeping hazel’s feet some more. her mom then decided to properly introduce herself to mikey and i, since she’d apparently decided that she couldn’t really keep her daughter away from the strangers with the baby sitting at the bar. i don’t really know what the protocol is for introducing yourself to the parents of children that your kid is playing with (or in our case, the parents of the baby your child is enamored with). i am trying to watch and learn but there seems to be absolutely no rhyme or reason. during an especially upbeat song featuring chris on clawhammer banjo (which makes everyone bounce their babies even if they weren’t before), two men and myself were all standing in a row bouncing our babies. we all chatted and swayed and bounced for the duration of the song. that was normal adult interaction because our kids can’t talk to each other. some parents find it fitting to entirely gloss over the fact that there is an adult person holding hazel, and say things to their older kids like “ooohhhh do you see the baby? can you ask the baby how old she is?” - instead of just asking me how old my child is. i feel like i should be annoyed by this, but i’m not. when people do it to my dog… THAT is annoying.

2.) i keep forgetting to take my new year’s resolution photos. i have been doing things, i just need to do the photos.

3.) i think bruce springsteen’s best album is nebraska. i never listened to it, ever, until about a month and a half ago.

4.) hazel knows them better than her own family:

5.) i had a dream that i was pregnant. this morning we hung out with the maxwells – kathy got pregnant with #2 when #1 was hazel’s age. i can’t say it wouldn’t be really really scary to be pregnant right now. i almost want to take a test just to show myself that i’m not pregnant. it was just a dream. i also dreamt that we were in canaan valley with a bunch of people, and my brother & the above chris had to drag me away from windows one night because i was trying desperately to take good photos of the ghosts on the other side of them. i also dreamt that we took a streetcar from here to baltimore. my dreams clearly mean nothing.

6.) i had a six…

listening: nebraska
reading: musicophilia

hazel has had a couple more firsts this weekend: yesterday she went to see the foggies play for the first time. we only stayed for part of it because we had a christmas party to go to, but they played a hazel dickens tune for her. their saturday shows at the old place tended to draw a lot of families, but this place was absolutely packed with children. lots and lots of dancing, adorable children (and one little tiny blonde boy who really just wanted to stand still and watch, aside from keeping perfect time with his itty bitty blue converse, and continually got knocked over by the dancers). hazel mostly just cared about the disco ball reflections on the floor and eventually went to sleep. i am not kidding when i say she sleeps better in a noisy, crowded place than she does at home. the more live music the faster she will go to sleep, and more soundly. i suppose it reminds her of being in the womb, because it was probably one of the first things she could hear clearly – wednesday night bluegrass when we’d sit right by the stage. today i desperately needed to take a break from christmas gift making, and scott needed to not sit at home and worry about the comp he has to write tomorrow, so we all went to see chris play solo, too. he always plays hazel this version of that “hush little baby, don’t say a word” lullabye that has an extra verse, and the extra verse cracks me up. i had it in my head pretty much the whole time we were home for thanksgiving.

oh little darlin’, if you were mine, wouldn’t you love to starch and iron
say darlin’ say
starch and iron would be your trade, and i’d get drunk and lie in the shade
say darlin’ say

just the kind of things i want to teach my daughter! i suppose it’s no worse than me singing her lazy john as her lullabye for the first few weeks of her life. we’re going to miss two really awesome shows when we are home - their christmas show (but i wouldn’t leave the baby for it anyway, and my dance partner has already gone home for xmas as well) and a john hartford tribute show on his birthday. boo.

things i must accomplish before i can go to bed tomorrow night so we can leave on tuesday morning:
- empty memory card (which i can check off soon, because it’s happening right now)
- get this project to a point where i can fit it all in a shoebox and take it home to add the final details (i will have the time there, but refuse to drag home ALL of my supplies – minimal, minimal)
- drop of some photos to be printed (this is the only thing i’ve deliberately saved until the very last minute)
- go to the bank for US cash
- go fill out a form that i need to get my maternity pay (i swear if this is not the last thing i need to do i’m crackin’ YSM skulls)
- package and mail etsy orders and close up shop
- make a “no flyers please” sign for our door so we can actually get it open upon our return
- herd mikey into the computer room and make him put his additions in our xmas letter so i can print all of them
- meet a coworker for lunch & to exchange some handmade stuff of mine for some of her’s (jeah, outsourcing gift-making!)
- pick up printed photos
- go to the dollar store
- fridge detail
- three loads of laundry
- pack
- attempt to clean up a little – i don’t have high hopes and i really don’t care what we come back to as long as it doesn’t smell :)

paisley has still not snapped out of her post-wv depression from last time, although she hasn’t thrown up in three days. i guess that’s something. she’s going to be one happy dog. mikey was talking to her yesterday and said “do you want to see earl?!?” – she wagged her tail for the first time in days, it seemed like, and the look in her eyes almost killed me. so hopeful.

one of today’s post secrets broke my heart into four million pieces:

 

 

and so did an emailed response: My son just wrote Santa last night asking for that special present and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that “Santa’s” back injury has kept HER from waiting tables the past two weeks .

my secret:
I wish Santa Claus was real so on Christmas no child would have to go without and no parent would have to feel like they failed there child.

back to it. it’s 12:20. i’m aiming to be in bed by roughly 2:00, when hazel will wake up to eat.

 

listening: uncle dave macon in my head

“big city bluegrass” = some of the best bluegrass i’ve ever seen, period. come visit in the middle of the week so you can go to high lonesome wednesdays at the silver dollar. it’s within walking distance, is only three dollars (but beers are $5.75 a pint - can’t win ‘em all), and you can get not-mugged walking through all the pretty tree-filled campuses after dark. crickets and treefrogs do live in this city. just not on my street.

i think you will probably find us here at least twice a month, even though they don’t know any hazel dickens or gillian welch, and the guy who knew all the words to rocky top quit the band. they are still superb.

listening: neil in my head

Saw Billy Bragg tonight. He’s an enigma… a genius musician who is NOT a good guitar player. His stage banter is excessive and comic gold. The altered lyrics about Bush being gone soon are just what this sad little american needs to hear.

On the way to the show we walked by this spectacle that I have passed at least ten times since it was arranged a couple of weeks ago and never really paid attention to. There are always people crowded around taking photos, and I still did not feel the need to observe more closely. Today, for some reason, I looked harder, and then had to take a photo for myself. It’s a huge granite table on the sidewalk, set for twelve or so people with china and silverware and champagne flutes. In the middle is a lime green Lamborghini. There’s always a security guard with a clipboard standing inside the red rope enclosure. I just thought it was some strange Wedgewood china vs. fancy car sales scheme, and it sort of is.

It’s being held up by four teacups. One under each tire. I suppose that’s not as impressive as the cohesive/adhesive abilites of water molecules and the way THAT can hold up a car, but it was at least photo worthy.

Maybe I will find a job this week. Kathy’s theory is that she’s not going to find a job until she wins a game. If this is true, I should definitely find a job this week because Mikey and I kick ASS at games. And we won last night. Again. I haven’t won anything by myself, but we are in the lead as a pair. Does this mean I’m inferior as an individual?

I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them
but they were only satellites
is it wrong to wish on space hardware?
I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care…