7 Quick Takes Friday!

#7

Teehee

Lately I've been having an existential crisis over my About Me page. (I know, could I get any more navel-gazing? If you're thinking not, brace yourself for the next paragraph...s.)

See, I have two family pictures I can use for that page. One is a pretty good picture of everyone in my family except me and Sienna (and Sienna has been refusing to do anything but make ridiculous faces lately so she doesn't count). The other is a mediocre-to-bad picture of everyone else except me. 

Two days ago I put the one that's a better picture of me up. I also like it slightly more because it's in color and so are all the other pictures on that page. But the last two days I've been dealing with this nagging feeling that perhaps I shouldn't sacrifice the visual appearance of my entire family on the altar of my own vanity. I realize this is probably the stupidest and most ironically self-absorbed train of thought I've ever had, wondering if I'm being too vain in my handling of the "About Me" page of my blog, but I'm still having it, and it's still bugging me, so I'm blogging about like one would suck the rattlesnake poison back out of a wound. (Not me. I would never do that. But someone else might, if they lived in 1890 or were a character on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.)

I've decided to let you guys decide which picture looks better, and I'm bracing myself for the very real possibility that my inbox will quickly fill up with variations of "are you effing kidding? No one cares but you, pick a picture and get over yourself," which is advice I should probably take ahead of time and erase this quick take. But I've already spent time writing it, so it's gonna stand. Plus I can use the picture comparison for quick take #6. 

#6

(I'm sorry for the huge gap between these pictures. Blogger sucks lately.)

Picture #1, in color, with my chin tilted at the appropriate angle to minimize photographic evidence of double-chinnery

 

Picture #2. Charlotte and the Ogre are the big winners in this one, looking cuter than cute (Oh, sorry, I guess the Ogre looks "distinguished and professorial")

Cast your votes below, or chastise me for my vanity, but either way, know that I am in no way responsible for Sienna's rockin' side-ponytail in either of these pictures. That was my mom's doing. She's got a thing for side ponytails. I'm convinced it's a direct result of trying to raise little girls in the 80's.

#5

Tired of hearing about the things that keep me up at night? Then don't click on the link attached to the above picture. Also don't note that all this crazy shiz is happening within a one-to-three-hour radius of our current location. 

Also, why would you be tired of hearing about the things that keep me up at night? If you're a reader of this blog (which I assume you are, otherwise I'm not sure how you got here but I deeply apologize for it) you know I'm slightly-unhinged-bordering-on-legitimately-crazycakes. And you either love me in spite of it or find my particular brand of crazy amusing.

And anyway, it's not like I've ever done a full-blown post on the things that keep me up at night. 

#4

Alas, since I have literally no idea where else to take these quick takes and my children are hovering around me anxiously saying, "are you done yet? Are you done yet?" I'm afraid that today is the day in which that post shall become a reality. 

At least it's in the form of quick takes. 

So without further ado, here are three other things that keep me up at night.

#3

Shudder, shudder, shudder, shudder, blech. 

I hate spiders. I know they're part of God's creation and keep like, some sort of insect population in check or something but seriously, did God have to make them so creepy? 

Guuaaahhhhhh. 

This is made even worse by the fact that we moved from a place where the only poisonous spider was the brown recluse to a place where we had to worry about black widows and brown recluses to a place where we have to worry about brown recluses, black widows, red widows and brown widows. Add to the fact that Liam suffered what several doctors identified as a "necrotic spider bite" from an apparently invisible spider, and yeah. I have nightmares about spiders.

I also check everyone's sheets and the undersides of beds obsessively before anyone gets in, shake out blankets, rustle curtains daily, and bang shoes against the ground before we put them on. 

And freak out regularly when I see anything even remotely resembling a spider, even though they usually turn out to be either crumbs or fuzz.

I hate spiders.

#2

When I'm not laying awake freaking about spiders or listening intently for zombies to come crashing through the glass doors, I'm usually terrifying myself by imagining some version of In Cold Blood. 

Really, the idea that a human being would slaughter an entire family for basically no reason at all is incomprehensible to me. But it happens, and it's not exactly rare anymore, thus I lay awake at night listening for noises and check on my children obsessively anytime I happen to wake up. I'm not sure what I hope to accomplish by losing sleep over a hypothetical and extremely unlikely situation that is entirely out of my control, but...well, crazycakes, remember?

#1

 

Most nights, though, I lay awake mentally berating Stephen Moffat for what he did to River Song. 

I'm sorry if you're not a Whovian (no really, I am sorry for you, but you can fix that by going to Netflix right now and making your universe infinitely better and brighter), but Moffat took a character who had sparkling, limitless potential and just...murdered her. Worse than murdered her. Made her just a side-show, a footnote (and a pretty deranged one at that) in his tale of Amy and the Doctor. 

I can never forgive him for that. All the good things he brought us...Matt Smith, the fez, the Weeping Angels, vampires and Van Gogh, even Rory, glorious Rory...all of it combined cannot outweigh the hideous injustice done to one of the most remarkable characters (sadly, only in potential now) to ever grace the Whoniverse.

I actually think I'm going to cry now.

For more coherent and far less navel-gazing quick takes, go see Jen! Happy weekend, everyone. I'll just be over here, bitterly cursing Stephen Moffat all the way through the zombie apocalypse.

Adventures in Swearing Sewing

Well, I'll be going to confession this weekend.

Yesterday I learned two important things about myself. First, I am not utterly hopeless and bereft when it comes to all household arts aside from cooking. Second, that creative bastion of colorful swear words that I gleefully collected in college was in fact not eradicated from my vocabulary. It was merely being stored away for a time of need, like when I spent half an hour trying to thread a needle, finally got it, and then promptly snagged the thread and pulled it back out.

Our dear neighbors across the street, to whom we've become quite attached, are moving back to their northern home next week. I don't know what we'll do without them. They're both retired, and while their son is at school down the street they spend their days hanging out in the garage, playing cards with my kids and keeping an eye on my front door, out of which Liam occasionally likes to escape. His life has been saved several times by Uncle D, a cigarette-smoking, beer-drinking, bicycle-fixing gem of a man who has become my husband's go-to confidante and a stand-in uncle/grandpa for all three of my children. He has the patience of a saint, and when he doesn't he just goes inside and closes the garage door. Aunt G taught Sienna to play Uno and Skip-Bo, and she offered to teach me to sew and let me borrow her sewing machine, which she'll be leaving behind. In typical fashion, though, I waited until the last minute, and yesterday she was kind enough to give me an hour-long lesson even though they left for a wedding at 5 a.m. this morning.

I was really surprised to find that what makes sewing difficult is not the actual sewing. If you have a sewing machine, the actual sewing part is simple. A trained monkey could do it, and could probably stitch straighter lines than I can. What a trained monkey could most emphatically not do, however, is make sense of the heavily encrypted codes they sell at fabric stores under the dubious guise of "patterns".

The internets and I spent well over two hours yesterday trying to crack the cipher. We watched video after annoyingly cheerful video, all promising to make pattern-reading "simple" and all failing miserably. I learned some valuable lessons, but not one internet video answered the burning question that drove me there in the first place: which way does the fabric go? Wrong side up or right side up? I got so frustrated that when the Ogre called to see how it was going I was basically incoherent. "It's ridiculous going, that's what! This stupid thing says the (expletive) thing should be color-coded and it is shaded but they have it all...all....like, folded, sort-of thing, so I can't even tell which side to (expletive) fold over and cut the (expletive) out!"

Proper English was murdered during the pinning on of this pattern

Worried about my complete inability to form a coherent sentence, the Ogre came home for lunch and figured it out in ten minutes flat. (He claims this is due to his superior intellect, but I have it on good authority that he was forced into taking a home ec class in the sixth grade.) Once the pattern was finally cut out, Aunt G came over and showed me how to use the sewing machine, how to stitch seams, and how long of an edge to leave. I managed to get the basics done last night while the Ogre hovered around me taking pictures ("to document your descent into housewifery"), but unfortunately Aunt G neglected to show me how to finish an edge and do slipstitches and topstitches. I can't really blame her, since Liam spent almost our entire sewing lesson unplugging the machine, unraveling spools of thread, and trying to eat the pin-covered pincushion. Her attention was necessarily divided.

Here's a mercifully blurry photo, in case you (and by you I mean everyone who's ever met me) also need photographic evidence that the apocalypse is nigh and hell has frozen over

So today it looks like I'll be diving back into the wonderful world wide web to try and figure out how to finish this dress, while repeating mentally, I will not swear. I will not swear. I will not swear.

After that I'll be dashing off groveling apologies to the neighborhood mothers for when my six-year-old inevitably decides to make my many lapses in linguistic judgment public fodder for the neighborhood children.

Maybe I should bake them cookies, too.

Memorial Day and the Zombie Apocalypse

Memorial Day always makes me sad. I see the way my friends and family talk about our soldiers and respect this day when we remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and I am sure that there is still goodness in America, that all those things that made America great have not been lost. Then I see the crass disrespect shown by politicians, television pundits and public figures, and I fear that the public message that our troops will receive today is, "We don't appreciate you, or your sacrifice, or even the sacrifice of those who died for us."

So for any of our military or their families who happen to stumble across this today, know that we, at least, are deeply grateful for you and your immeasurable sacrifice, and we are raising our children with that same gratitude.

Also know that since the zombie apocalypse has begun, I am hoping to see you all back here shortly in full force to defend us from the zombies, and don't tell me that the risk that you'll be changed into highly-trained tank-wielding zombies is too great. I know the government has developed a secret anti-zombie vaccine for the military. The threat of a zombie apocalypse was always too great to ignore.

For those moms and dads who are wondering how to protect your little ones from the legions of the undead, click over to Ignitum Today and read my latest post about how NFP (or the failure thereof) will help us survive the zombie apocalypse.

7 Quick Takes Friday

#7

So doing this next Halloween

I know I promised to be back, but about ten minutes after I hit publish I heard a desperate whine from the bathroom. I ran in just in time to see Sienna standing in front of the toilet, hear her say "Mommy, I feel like I'm going to be sick!" and then turn her head away from the toilet and vomit spectacularly all over the rug, the walls, the floor and the shower. 

It was so special. 

#6

It was also weird, because she'd been eating fine and acting fine all morning, she had no fever, and after she threw up she showed no signs of being sick. I was trying to re-trace what she had eaten to figure out if something could have made her sick when I realized that she had drank quite a bit of milk that morning. I picked up the nearly empty carton, which we had opened for dinner the night before, subtracted the four sippy cups Charlotte and Liam had consumed in between dinner and breakfast, and was horrified to realize that Sienna had basically drank most of the gallon herself in the three hours since she'd been awake. 

Lessons learned: 1) pay attention to how much milk your kid is drinking if you don't want to spend the next hour cleaning up puke, and 2) the gallon challenge cannot be won. 

I put a moratorium on milk for the rest of the day and the next for her, and she's fine now. She was fine ten minutes afterward, actually, but I kept her inside for two days anyway because I didn't want her to get the neighborhood kids sick, if she was sick. Today she can play outside, and I'm not sure which of us is happier about that.

#5

Yesterday we had our neighbors over for dinner and in a fit of whimsy I attempted my first-ever cheesecake. 

I used a recipe from Smitten Kitchen, even though I've had inconsistent results with her recipes before, because it contained massive amounts of cream cheese and didn't require me to bake it in a water bath. Despite early alarm at the quick browning of the top, it was a smashing success. It really was delicious, and had the most perfect flavor, courtesy of orange and lemon zest. Yum. And the best part is, our neighbors weren't really big dessert-eaters, so there's over half of the cheesecake left! Hello, lover. 

(What can I say? I'm pregnant.) 

(And fat.)

#4

I beg to disagree, Frontenac Baptist Church

It's hot here. It's really hot. It's so hot that we're already having to run the A/C nearly 24/7, and my ankles are starting to swell well before my third trimester. (I'm blaming the temperature, not the cheesecake, and don't tell me any differently!) 

Yesterday, my lovely neighbor said to me, "I hope you don't think this is hot. This is not hot. It will get so hot this summer that you will send your children outside to play and they will come back five minutes later, having melted."

Kill. Me. Now.

#3

Luckily the flies here are trying to do just that. Get this: the flies in Southwest Florida bite. 

What. The. Hell. 

No, really. I didn't know such creatures existed, but they do, and now instead of merely being annoyed and slightly grossed out by flies, I have to also be in pain because of them. 

And those little suckers can bite. For real. It's not lingering pain, like a fire ant bite, but it frakking hurts and they are everywhere, so you don't get bit by one at a time, and there's no way to avoid them. Basically if you go outside near dusk or after dark or in the morning or at all, you're going to come back in covered in welts and cursing like a sailor.

Note to self: swamps were considered uninhabitable in decades past for a reason.

#2

Even Laura Ingalls Wilder, that hardiest of hardy pioneer girls, was freaked out by Florida. She and Almanzo moved to Westville, FL to improve Laura's health, but they were so miserable in the heat and humidity and she was so afraid of snakes and her redneck, backwoods neighbors that they moved back north pretty quickly. And during the months they did spend in Florida, Laura insisted on carrying a gun everywhere, mostly because of the neighbors, not the snakes.

Know what that means? I'm tougher than Half-Pint! Hurrah. Something I never thought I would be able to say. 

I bet she didn't whine as much as I do, though, but in my defense, she had a gun and got to shoot things and I don't.

#1

I kept hoping Ma Ingalls would show up and say, "Laura, the sun will make your cleavage all leathery! Put those puppies away, in this handy high-necked blouse I just whipped up for you."

Speaking of Laura Ingalls Wilder, was anyone else scarred for life by Melissa Gilbert's presence on Dancing with the Stars? I only watched a few episodes of the season, but it was painful. 

I feel that I can never go back and watch old Little House episodes again, knowing that buck-toothed little Laura will grow up to dance in age-inapproprately-skimpy outfits, cry like a 5 year old when she thinks Maks (who is mean to everyone) is being mean to her, and make extremely awkward and creepy cougar-ish comments about Maks and his brother.

Thanks a lot, Dancing with the Stars. You're systematically ruining my childhood memories, one iconic and desperately aging actor at a time.

Go see Jen for more quick takes, and have a lovely weekend!

Check It

Really, this is how I feel about having finally updated that over-a-year-old page

 I finally updated my About Me page! I'm not a big fan of the family picture since I have a goofy weird laugh/smile on my face, but I'm happy to have updated pictures and blurbs...even if I did have to do it twice, since our stupid computer shut itself down randomly right after I had finished it but before I had published it. Grrr.

Be back later with a real (ish) post. In the meantime, go read The Crescat's post from yesterday. Just when I think she can't get any more amazing, she does.

Distracted

We've been a little distracted this past week with a ballet recital, a visit from my sister, a trip to the beach, an exciting sonogram, and shiny objects. I've missed the internet, though, particularly the great discussion that sprang up in my combox on my last post! I've been really interested to hear the differing opinions and the valid points brought up to support them. I'll be diving back into the blogosphere tomorrow, but today I thought you might like to know that our fourth minion, coming in September, is a boy! Little Lincoln Alexander is healthy, happy, and, based on his behavior during the sonogram, eager to show the world his penis.

We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

See you guys tomorrow!

Violence, Children, and History

The most common parenting issue I find myself disagreeing with friends and family about is whether or not children should be exposed to anything violent. We let our daughters, 3 and 6, watch the animated Justice League movies. One of our favorite family films is Miyazaki's Spirited Away, which is both violent and, in the words of my mother, "creepy and weird". I took Sienna to see John Carter even though I was warned it was too violent, and I'm glad I did; I didn't find it too violent for her (although a lot of credit for that goes to the unreality of the blue-blooded aliens...had the blood been red and the aliens been humans, it might have been a different story). We're not cavalier about violence, though, however it may seem; rather, we probably pay closer attention to violence in its various forms than most parents who place a de facto ban on violence in books and movies. The reason for that is simple. Human beings are capable of committing violent acts, both in defense of good and in service of evil. To ignore or deny that facet of human nature is dishonest.    

This morning, Mrs. Darwin directed my attention via facebook to a story about a French priest who is racing against time to try and bring to light the truth about yet more hidden Nazi atrocities. The generation who witnessed the mobile Nazi death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, slaughter hundreds of thousands of Jews and Gypsies in the Soviet Union is dying out, and Fr. Patrick Desbois is desperately trying to record their stories before it's too late. 


You really ought to read the article. It's fascinating, in the same horrific way that all the tales of those atrocities are fascinating. I have less trouble understanding the willing submission of the victims in the Soviet Union than I do in Western Europe, because the Jews and Gypsies had been subjected to pogroms in Eastern Europe for centuries. I don't even have trouble swallowing the cooperation of the townspeople, even going so far as to dig the graves and watch in silence for days as those buried alive struggled beneath the fresh earth, because what choice did they have? As I understand it, life in Eastern Europe, particularly those remote villages of the Soviet Union, was unimaginably bleak and cruel, due to both the government and the weather. These were not a people accustomed to anything other than trying to survive. (This is not to say that there weren't heroic acts of self-sacrifice; I'm sure there were, I just understand why they weren't the norm.) What I truly cannot fathom, though, is why no one said anything after the war, or after the oppression of the Stalinist regime had lifted. Were they afraid? Were they trying to forget? Did they think it didn't matter, that the past was the past? Why did no one think that these atrocities needed to be recorded, the victims remembered, and history set straight? 


After enduring the horrors of the Nazis and Stalin during their lives, the villagers have never posed themselves the kind of questions of guilt and complicity that so often bedevil the conscience of the wealthier and more privileged, believes Father Desbois.

I can accept that explanation, that questions of guilt and complicity have been pushed out of the minds of the villagers in the desperate struggle to simply survive. But I can't understand why they didn't think the victims ought to be remembered, and the atrocities recorded so that future generations would know.

Holocaust deniers are incomprehensible to me. I cannot understand people willingly ignoring vast swathes of evidence for the purpose of a political or religious agenda, or because they cannot comprehend and accept the depths of evil that humans are capable of. I'm so grateful that Eisenhower foresaw the possibility of future generations dismissing the Holocaust as "propoganda" and ordered meticulous photographic records to be made of each camp. And I agree wholeheartedly with the assessment of Fr. Desbois:

As for those who question the existence of the Holocaust, whether they are politicians or within his own church, he sees them as the direct inheritors of Himmler and Heydrich. They are, he says, the "deniers of the inferno".

Not too long ago, I had an altercation in my comment box with a reader who was horrified that I, as a Christian, would read The Hunger Games. She saw it as promoting gratuitous violence. I see no such thing. The violence in The Hunger Games is horrific and destructive. It destroys everyone involved. No one comes out unscathed, or even remotely normal, let alone happy.

I understand shielding our children from depictions of gratuitous violence, but I think we as a culture have begun to lose sight of when depictions of violence are gratuitous and when they serve a purpose. My husband thinks the movie Platoon is an important movie, one that our children should see at some point in their teenage years. I couldn't even finish the movie because I was so sickened by the violence, and for years I fought him about showing it to our kids. But now I'm starting to understand why it's important. It's important for the same reason that telling our children about the Holocaust is important, really telling them, not glossing over it but making sure they understand the depth and breadth of the horror. Future generations must understand what humans are capable of. We must not allow the generations of the future to insist that such things could not happen, that humans would not have done such a thing, because that's exactly when it will happen again. The US and Britain has at least some reports of the concentration camps well before they entered the war, but they didn't act because they didn't believe it could be true. How many lives could have been saved if our governments hadn't been lulled into a false sense of security about the capabilities of human beings to commit evil against each other?  (He objects to my mention of Platoon because the argument for that movie is more complicated than I'm allowing at the moment)

The tricky part, I guess, is figuring out when our children are mature enough to hear it and understand. I don't think it's too difficult to untangle which depictions of violence are gratuitous and which are not, but it is going to be difficult to decide when each child is ready to hear and see and to bear them. I believe it needs to happen before the kids go to college, probably well before, when they're still ready and willing to listen. But I truly think that one of the worst disservices we can do to our children is to shield them from the reality of violence. If they don't know what humans are capable of, they will never learn how to guard against it, both in others and in themselves.