Fine Young Fauves

We're back from vacay in South Carolina . It was lovely there. I had always suspected that the reason it was so uncrowded and blissful was that we always went in the off season. Now for the first time, I've learned that no– it's ALWAYS uncrowded and blissful. Because they don't let anyone build anything taller than two stories, and so the population density on the beach just can't be packed in like sardines. And the water was very warm, with just the right amount of waviness. And my numerous secret fears about slimy or threatening ocean type critters — your jellyfish, sting rays, giant squid, etc.– proved to be unfounded.

Isaac had expressed reservations about possible sharks himself, but forgot them all upon arrival. I bought him a little floating jumpsuit thing to wear and he took to the water in fishlike fashion. At times we had to bodily drag him in for meals and rehydration. Ben. too, was in his element and I think pleased to have a little buddy who also wanted to stand in the ocean 12 hours a day. 

I swam or at least bobbed up and down whenever I got too hot, but also had time to reread that classic "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." It's a wonderful book that everyone should read at least once. I worked hard at maintaining my native pallor, having been yelled at by many a dermatologist in my day. I sat under a large hat, under and umbrella, wearing SPF 1 million. And still, I did manage to get sunburned around the edges and now confess to being somewhat tan.

Elias focussed on several important projects: eating sand, growing teeth, and learning to walk.

He took a few steps from beach chair to umbrella pole, and we got some old-fashioned home movie footage of him toddling around on the beach holding someone's finger. Since we got home, he's suddenly sprouted even more teeth– now has four on top and two on the bottom! What a clever boy.

On the way down and back we drove in our sumptuous new van. It really felt like a living room at times– Junior watched a DVD, baby chewed on his toys, mom talked on the phone, and Dad, well, Dad drove… but other than that there was hardly a sense that it was a car. Okay, I'll admit that spooning peas and rice into a squirming baby, in a moving car, in the pitch dark was surely varsity mom-ing at its best. (The sequel to mom my ride: mom my clothes.) ANd kneeling between the back seats doing poor-man's yoga in order to nurse the screaming one was very challenging. But really it could not have been more comfortable.  We made a lot of progress in our barbecue research and also saw several important revolutionary war battle sites. Isaac got a wooden toy musket.

One mishap: Isaac managed to lock the keys in the car, just as I was on the phone with the mortgage guy, who was upsetting the apple cart by suggesting that we take the old house off the market during the refinancing process, just as the realtor was setting up an open house, and only had fifteen minutes to pull the ad and stop it, and I was standing next to the car with the door open while talking to both of them at once on the phone. We were at the North Carolina Welcome Center. Ben and Elias were inside using the bathroom and Isaac was prancing around when all the sudden he slammed the door and I realized that the keys were on the driver's seat and all the doors were locked.  But at a busy rest stop in broad daylight, this was not all that big a deal. We had a locksmith there within an hour and all was well. … although I did want to strangle Isaac when, during the long wait in the heat for said locksmith, he began to whine, "I'm hungry. I'm bored. Let's go somewhere!" Arrrg. 

Speaking of wanting to strangle him… lately he's been insufferable sometimes for hours on end. Seems he's suffering from acute 4-year-old-boy syndrome. Yesterday I spoke openly of giving him up for adoption, or at least putting him in boarding school until he's 18. Preferably the cold showers and root canal British variety… My friend Martha confirmed that age four is one of the two points (the other being four months) when people actually DO surrender their children, having decided that no more could be tolerated. At times like those, it helps to remember the priceless gems of speech and thought that Isaac brings to my life…

For example the other day he was showing me this pouch he made at school last year. He made several of them at the time– a basic folded over piece of felt with the sides sewed up and a button sewn on by his non-idle little hands. I was admiring it when he mention off-handedly, "That's where I keep my dwarf." 

"Your–?" I said, rather stunned. (My son has a pet dwarf! How nice.)

"My dwarf!" He opened the pouch to reveal a troll doll hiding in there. I struggled not to just lie down on the floor and laugh.

"Um, we don't call that a dwarf dear… we call that a troll…" I tried to gently explain. (Oh, sure, he's going to go up to a lady in the grocery store and say, "I have my own dwarf! And I keep it in a pouch!")

"No!" he yelled. "It's a dwarf and it's MY dwarf and I keep it in a pouch!"

I give up. But at least "That's where I keep my dwarf" is a remark I can cling to when the going gets rough. 

Now we're back in the stacks of boxes and the hopeless housekeeping conundrums… like, the only time I can possibly vacuum is when the baby is asleep. But if I vacuum when he's asleep, the vacuum will wake him up. But it's safe to say now that when we say "back home" we mean home in our new house. It's really starting to feel like we live here, and that's a very good thing. 

Never has a youtube video spoken to me, personally, nor captured my experience as well as “mom my ride. ” By Zima.

You see, a few days ago I woke up and said to myself, “What? Is that a gold-toned metallic minivan, indeed a Honda Odyssey, in my driveway?” I went on to ask myself, “What? Am I a 40-year-old mother of two, living in outer suburban splendor driving a huge living room on wheels and shopping at grocery stores that are not on the human scale?”

Yes. It’s all true. To complete the picture and frankly to facilitate the logistics of this genre of life (and to off-load a 2001 Prius that was a pre-owned certified LEMON), Ben came home on Monday night in this enormous cruising machine. Seats 7 in a pinch! With cargo room to spare behind even all those people. Sliding doors open themselves when we approach. A DVD player descends from the ceiling, and get this—it has wireless earphones for the children! Meanwhile the adults don’t have to listen to the hundredth iteration of “7th voyage of Sinbad” and instead can listen to whatever they want! And all this for the exact same price as the Prius from hell. A financial net equal! And yet such a boon.

I went grocery shopping this morning and found that “when in rome” sensation of pulling up my gold Honda minivan alongside all the other mothers and all their gold Honda minivans. It was an eerie sensation, slightly uncomfortable. Are you my posse? I wanted to ask them all. Is this my hood?

I mentioned to Ben something about the severe reduction in my cool factor with this purchase. He replied tartly, “I didn’t realize you were cool.” And so the last vestige of urbanity has been stripped away. Ben drives to work in the Scion xB that has been my trademark for two years, standing out as odd in the school parking lot. And now…

But the practicality of it boggles the mind. No more choosing between the dog and the stroller—we can have both! No more multiple trips across town because not everyone can fit in the car at the same time. No more complexity when Isaac wants to bring a friend (or two)—we can have guest car seats on hand for all comers.  And the huge doors that open themselves so graciously, allowing in people and groceries and gear in virtually limitless quantities.

We’re going to take it out for a spin—to South Carolina—and then we’ll really see what all it can do. Cup holders everywhere! Arm rests! Cruise control! The mind reels.

There have certainly been times in recent months (see for example) when I wished our cat would simply disappear. After she peed on all my stuff in the closet, after she peed directly in my bed when I was up with the baby for five minutes. But now she actually HAS disappeared, and the feeling is ambiguous. Some anxiety, some guilt, and no closure.

Back in March I actually tried to give her away. I felt that we had hit rock bottom in our relationship and there was no way she could be a welcome part of our life again. I wanted to find her a situation where she could live outdoors most of time (so as not to inflict her issues on another household). I reasoned that she has all her claws, and good hunting skills, and began life feral so knows how to handle herself. But then after I had her in a crate in laundry room for a couple weeks, my temper cooled and my heart warmed towards her again.

I remembered how she came into my life six years ago, when I needed a kitten quite badly. It was the bleak summer of 2001, after we had lost our baby. Lena chased the kitten up a tree behind our house one night. When I first saw her she looked like a chinchilla, a ball of gray fuzz with big saucer eyes. Over the next few days I coaxed her to eat sardines, and finally caught her and took her inside. She was filthy and full of worms, covered in fleas. A reclamation project that I termed "the kitten cure." She was curing me, that is. I helped her thrive and grow. I bathed her and fed her and cured all her ills. Mr. Cat (RIP) took care of her with all the devotion of a mother, too, and together we raised her.

Through sweltering summer and frigid winter, she slept on my head each night like a vibrating Russian fur hat.

I realized that although she had done me wrong in all that peeing, there were a lot of mitigating factors. Lena chased her when she tried to use the cat box. Ben had let the cat box go to the point of total sewage dump while I was pregnant. The baby had been taking up all my time and attention, and on many occasions, when she tried to sleep on my head per usual I would push her away. I knew she was lonely after Mr. Cat's death, but I was too overwhelmed by the children to spend much time with her.

With all this in mind, I decided to try to rehabilitate her. I figured I should at least make sure that she didn't have some sort of physical problem causing the peeing, so I took her in for a full medical work-up. $200 later, I learned that she was in good health and her problems were merely psychological. (i'm glad now that I got her shots up to date. …) Then I found a cat consultant, a lady who said cheerfully on the phone, "It may sound strange but feline house-soiling is our specialty!" I filled out a multi-page survey about the cat's issues, and completed a detailed drawing of our floor plan.

(I mentioned this whole process to my friend Martha who said, "You're such a s—" When I heard the "s" I figured she was going to say "saint." But what came out was instead "sucker!")

But then we found this house, and suddenly it seemed that we could just bring her here and she could be a pretty much outdoor cat. I researched this special locking cat door, in which the cat wears an electronic collar that unlocks the door, so that she can come in and no other animals (raccoons, opposums, etc.) can't. During the two months between finding the house and moving here, I boarded her at the cost of $10/day. Then once we were living here I brought her home and established her in the basement. There she hid for several days in the very darkest corner of the farthest room. But after a while she warmed up and would come and weave through my legs and purr when I was doing laundry. As she got acclimated she began to sit at the top of the basement stairs and meow to rejoin the rest of the family.

But I was loathe to give her run of the new house. I also remembered the pissing bandit side of her personality, and thought of the expanse of beautiful new carpet upstairs. I reallized that I didn't really miss having her sleeping on my head when it was 90 degrees. And that her wads of grey fur everywhere really were unsightly. No– a cat door and life in the basement would be best.

But in the midst of everything else I didn't get the cat door in. I just left the back door open and she would walk out, sniff around, run back in. Sometimes I would find her hiding in the ferns outside the back door. Sometimes I would find that she had vomited up some grass on the basement floor. Overall the arrangement seemed to be working, only I needed a way for her to get back in when she wanted to. It was on the list! It really was. (I'm happy to say that at least I got her a new tag with our current address, and a reflective collar to make her less likely to be hit by a car.) 

I think it was Sunday that she vanished. She went for a walk and didn't come back. Now that I think of it, I have a vague memory of her meowing loudly. But I didn't check what she wanted. I figured it was just the usual sitting at the top of the stairs and wanting to rejoin society. We had a cleaning team here and I didn't have time for her.

Then I noticed that she wasn't coming and rubbing my legs in the laundry room. I checked her bed, where I assumed she was hiding, and she wasn't there. I started actively looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. I leveled the top of her food to see if she was eating any, and day after day it stayed the same. I walked around in the woods calling her. Each night before bed I called her. 

I wish I could be relieved to be shut of her. But instead I'm simply worried: has she drowned in the creek? Been eating by a coyote or carried off by a hawk? Is she wet and lonely, trying to find her way home? Or is she happily sleeping in a hollow log, making friends with other outdoor cats and getting fat on chipmunks? 

My mother has had cats return home after adventures as long as six months. It's only been a few days– maybe she'll come back. Strangely enough, I hope so. Since there's nothing I can do about it, I suppose it's best to picture her out there happy someplace, out there by choice rather than by circumstance. Maybe she'll come home when winter comes. Maybe this is her version of sports camp. I hope so. In the meantime, I'm leaving the light on for her. 

There are some things a person just shouldn't watch. One of them is the entire contents of one's life being lifted, tossed, and well stirred. Today is packing day at our house. That means that three very nice professional complete strangers are going through everything we own, manhandling it, and putting it into a box. It's a site of destruction. Pictures are coming down, boxes are piling up. Shelves are being emptied, laid bare. The bones of the house are being exposed and years are being stripped away. Back in time to 1998 when we first moved in.

SOmehow I find this unnerving. On thursday I'm sure I will welcome the arrival of all this stuff at the new house. The new house is the place of CONstruction, the building and the beginning anew. The old house is the exact opposite. It's painful to be there. I helped for a while with baby in tow. I cleaned out the linen closet and through away many defunct health and beauty products. I Hauled out some trash and packed up some bedding. But then the baby was fussing and I was overloaded with emotional intensity. So much sweat equity in that house! Our starter house in the truest sense. 

Meanwhile we've been negotiating hard with these potential buyers. As of Friday the deal was off and we were depressed. We muttered some unkind things about them over the weekend and then Monday morning, humbled, reopened the conversation by basically agreeing to their slightly painful terms. But only slightly… there's additional fiscal loss in keeping the house on into the future. And if we're forced to drop the price and repaint and recarpet in order to lure the imaginary new buyers, there goes the money that lay between us and these buyers that we already have. Each day we all are hearing how terrible the market is, and how it's only going to get worse. So we decided to try again to make it work with the bird in hand. I just heard from the realtor that they want to look yet again at the house tonight. Sadly, it will all be in ruins then. We had it so lovely for all these weeks, a house and a showplace, and now they want to look tonight when it looks like, well, like a kit that one could make a home out of.  Unopened and still in celophane.

tomorrow there's a weird lull in which we can only barbecue and forget about all this. Then Thursday the truck will come and disgorge everything we own in more or less a heap. Then the fourth and final stage of this project, reassembly and settling in, will begin at last.

I'm hoping that by the end of the week, all our possessions will be in one place and we'll have a deal agreed to in order to pare our holdings down to just the one house.

Upstairs it sounds like a mule is kicking the walls in. Just the carpet installing guy. The new carpet looks great, but the project has been fraught with cost overruns, mistakes, and delays. Ben didn't mind the to-me hideous navy plush, and yet he's been very VERY patient with my need to replace it. 

I'm very glad I have a forty foot wall of green trees– how many shades of green are there, anyway?– on which to rest my eyes. I find that the wind moving through the trees has the same exact sort of calming effect as watching the ocean.  

 For all his brilliance and accomplishments, Elias is at a very dangerous age: post-mobility, pre-sense. He seems determined to harm himself. He seems magnetically pulled to the item in the room that poses the greatest bodily threat to him. It's nerve-wracking, especially in combination with the chaos that always attends moving, and the myriad distractions. Isaac running amok for one thing, and then all the packing and unpacking going on, and then normal life also somehow going on (laundry, dinner, dishes, etc.) And in the midst of it all the baby has chosen this exact time to learn to crawl and put things in his mouth.

Example from about two weeks ago: I was sorting and rearranging the kitchen cupboards at the new house. Unpacking a box or two, taking inventory, deciding which should be sort of a "pantry" cupboard and which should be dishes, etc. Elias was crawling around in the floor within a few feet of me. I was keeping an eye on him, somewhat, but when I look back on it there were seconds mixed in, indeed whole minutes, in which I was not directly looking at him. Okay, so at some point he started to get fussy. I picked him up, took him into the other room, nursed him. He went to sleep for a little nap. I set him in his crib and walked back to the kitchen where I resumed my project. This was all utterly routine. Then after a while he woke up. I got him up and fixed him some lunch. We sat together and ate. Routine, routine.

And then…

I discovered that there was a piece of cellophane in his mouth.

Just a clear, deadly piece of filmy plastic about the size of a quarter, that somehow he had held in his mouth, WHILE nursing, and I hadn't noticed it. And WHILE sleeping, when I was in the other room and he surely could have choked. And WHILE eating!!!

Oh, dear GOD ABOVE.

So that's one example.

Here's another. This house is really truly FILLED with outlets. If you come here, I dare you to try and count them. There are just tons and tons of them, which may be part of why our electrical system was a complete and utter mess and needed major work before we moved in. We've gone around and tried to cap them all with those little outlet covers. And yet I keep finding more, or more to the point, Elias keeps finding more. The other day he was sitting next to one outlet and started to scream. Again, mea culpa, as a few nano seconds had clearly passed when I wasn't looking directly at him. I picked him and checked for damage, but couldn't find anything wrong. It wasn't until it happened again yesterday in exactly the same place and manner that I chose to touch the outlet myself. 

I got a huge shock.

Seems the outlet cover wasn't covering it right, and it was possible to get quite a jolt nonetheless. 

This upset me a great deal– while I'm grateful that the shock wasn't of a truly dangerous variety, I'm miserable to think of how painful and stunning it must have been for him. 

Today, again, I found Elias with a little piece of foil in his mouth from god knows where.

And I haven't even started on the falling. The kid looks like he's been repeatedly battered about the head, especially the forehead. He needs to wear a hat to cover his bruises, or perhaps one of those little padded helmets people are marketing these days for just this reason. I lament that at his peak cuteness, a few months ago, I didn't take him in for professional photos. He's still adorable now, of course, but the bruises are not so attractive and his two little upper teeth buds are marring his bright gummy smile.

Let's look at it this way: accomplishments:

1) Crawling: speed and confidence

2) standing up, holding on, and going places (letting go… and crash!)

3) teeth: bucking tradition, he's doing the upper ones first. Always efficient, he's doing them both at the same time.

4) sign language: only just nine months old and yet he already knows three signs– nursing, more, and all done. Which pretty much summarizes his priorities.

5) growth: he's already wearing mostly 12-month clothes, and wearing things Isaac wore when he was over a year old.  

But early predictions of his stunning intelligence were sadly premature, I fear. … Even a lab rat would not have been shocked by that outlet twice.

6) Well, I won't call it "hair" but his ever downier downy fluff is really golden and soft. It's just gilding the lily as far as I'm concerned. He's gorgeous.

7) interests: other than nursing, breasts and foods of various kinds, he is primarily interested in the low architectural features– outlets and cords, heating vents, drawers and drawer pulls, that type of thing 

I realize he's marvelous and perfect. I couldn't ask for a better baby. He needs to learn about the world and the freedom to explore. I just really need him to get through this particular phase (as I pause to remove a dirty sandal from his mouth) in one piece.  

 One unsung benefit of urban living is that tornadoes generally hop over a city due to the bubble of heat created by all those cars, buildings, and asphalt. Not so out here in the sticks. In Cleveland in nine years I never went to the basement once due to severe weather. And that was right on the lake! I mean, weather… tell me about. That sleet would really come off the water in a straight line, right for your eyes. But not tornadoes.

So Friday, after a mere two weeks of sort of living in the new house, we had a serious weather situation on our hands and had to literally hide in the basement. The babysitter, wonderful dear violist Bonnie was here riding herd on Isaac and carrying the baby around while I worked on the many unpacking projects and phone arrangements that still daunt me. I noticed that the day had gotten so dark that I was compelled to turn on the light to see (it was three in the afternoon), and that there was a torrent of rain falling around us on all sides that resembled sitting under a major waterfall. I looked online at the weather maps (we don't have TV or functioning radio) and could see that indeed a serious storm was in fact here. (Somehow this official computer validation was more convincing than the low-tech approach of simply looking out the window.) There was a severe thunderstorm warning with lots of talk about "damaging hail" and "80-mile-an-hour straight line winds." But it looked to me like on the radar maps the worst was already beyond us.

Then it started to clear up, and Isaac was really acting the goat inside the house. The sun came out and I poked my head out, saying to Bonnie that it looked like it was okay to take him out to try and tire him somehow.  But at that very moment, the sirens started blaring. This really took me back to my youth in Minneapolis, where at school we were subjected to the storm sirens the first Wednesday of every month at 1:00 p.m. We were also drilled often for tornadoes, although only a few actually  came during my entire education.

So, feeling sort of like a Londoner during the blitz, I grabbed the computer and my cell phone (certainly the security blankets of the modern era) and the children, and a blanket, and Bonnie and I headed downstairs. Then I realized we didn't have Lena dog and so I was doing the Auntie Em routine, calling her desperately from the top of the stairs (she was asleep in her bed and could only be bothered to come very gradually and reluctantly… stupid dog! Next time I'll let the twister get her, I swear!) (Our lapsed cat is living in the basement these days, so she was already there.) I called Ben to confirm whether we needed to be down there at all. He searched online and found that there was a funnel cloud spotted in the area and indeed it was true that we should take shelter. 

Our basement here is not so bad for an old house. There are huge trees for beams holding up the ceiling and indeed it's a comfort to know that they've been there 175 years or so and are unlikely to be dislodged by a weather event at this point. The floor and walls are concrete and dry and seem quite solid. It's cold down there and there's no place to sit, but really a cut above the dungeon that is our basement in the old house.

Anyway, Bonnie and I were trying to keep the mood light and keep Isaac entertained. I swept the floor rather nervously. Then Isaac added an unneeded layer of anxiety by making the following totally unprompted remark: "There are spirits moving through the basement." 

I honestly don't think I've ever used the term "spirits" … where did he hear about them? He began running about doing something odd with his hands, sort of clapping motion but where his hands didn't connect. What are you doing? I asked… "Trying to catch the spirits!" he exclaimed. "They're all around us!"  Shadows? I suggested. Are you talking about our shadows? "No, spirits!!" he insisted.

Sotto voce to Bonnie: "are we having a Sixth Sense moment here?" (the movie where the kid says, "I see dead people..")

Bonnie: "… Because if there's any kid in the world who would have that sort of thing, it's Isaac…"

Me: "I mean, is he going to start saying, 'who's that lady and what happened to her head??'" 

Nervous laughter..  

After close, close investigation and detailed questioning, it seems the "spirits" he was referring to were those little bright spots you get floating before your eyes after you look directly into a light. He was apparently gazing into the light bulb on the ceiling and THEN chasing the spirits. And this from the child who just last week announced in the car out of the blue: "I don't believe in ghosts. I believe in GOD … and BATS."  

The tempest raged outside, which we could see if we peeked around the corner to see the window above the washing machine. It got progressively darker, windier and rainier. Not much else happened. There was no sound of a freight train going right over our heads, the windows didn't burst in and no cows sailed through the air. Who knows where the tornado actually was anyway, someplace else in the county? I don't know, but online it said, alarmingly, "TAKE SHELTER FROM THIS STORM!!" Of course my wi-fi ceased to work at the key moment. I called Ben periodically for updates and after a while (we had been playing rocks-paper-scissors on a quilt on the floor) I went upstairs to check the situation and sounded the all-clear.

I have a feeling this will be a common occurrence in these parts. I should put together a kit, with a radio and some games and whatnot to pass the time down there. (I could throw in some duct tape in case of terrorism and those little germ masks in case it's the bird flu pandemic…)

Toto, I don't think we're in Cleveland anymore…

Our dream of wooded acreage and convenient shopping was slightly marred this week by a gas leak that nearly killed us all in a giant blue whumph. The straight-from-cental-casting hillbilly who came to fix it looked at the situation and quickly surmised, “Just open the window to smoke a cigarette and kaboom..  —- But,” he added wisely, “Let’s not think about that.”

Thank god we’re all non-smokers!!

We started sleeping here a week ago Thursday. We’ve been somewhat camping here sans the vast majority of our furniture, because we’ve been showing our old house furnished in the hopes of selling it. So it’s been sort of rustic, and we’ve all had moments where we’re, say, washing our hands with shampoo, or eating dinner on new Isaac Mizrahi plastic dishes from Target alongside grandma’s heirloom silver. Incongruity is the word of the week.

I started smelling the gas the first night when we all bedded down in the so-called master suite on the first floor.  It was a hot night with the window open and fan on, and occasionally this waft of gas would flow over us. I recognized it as gas right away, that first moment, but denial and exhaustion combined to make me just ignore it and fade off to sleep. I should add some confusing factors: it was our first night in an unfamiliar environment; we live on a natural gas well, literally, and are paid monthly for the gas that is pulled from under our land. Ben pointed this out when I mentioned the smell of gas, and aided my denial by claiming a) that it wasn’t gas, and b) that it was just gas from our land. I pointed out that natural gas from the land is unscented, it’s only smellable after the gas company makes it so. But I was also confused by the story recently in NYC of the gas smell that swallowed the city mysteriously for a few days and later turned out to be harmless marsh gases.

Anyway, each night as I fell asleep, I would smell the gas, drift off, and in the morning hit the ground running like crazy with moving madness and two small children, never smelling it by day, forgetting about it completely, and then again, at night, smell it and remember that something had to be done just as I was going unconscious. This went on like this until Memorial Day, four nights of it! Then finally on Memorial Day I woke up, remembered the gas leak problem and finally called the gas company. They came out immediately, found the leak, and shut off the gas. Only then did I realize retroactively how incredibly dangerous it had been.

We had been sleeping with our children under gentle breezes of gas atop a crawl space probably filled with gas. The baby could have been killed just by breathing it! We all could have been killed when this particular room, with all of us in it, went kaboom.

But, let’s not think about that.

It’s fixed now, and all that’s left of the situation is lingering anxiety about what might have been, rage towards the inspectors who missed it, and wrangling with the insurance company who is unwilling to pay for the obviously covered repair.

Otherwise, our new life is pretty good. It has fully dawned upon me that we live in the suburbs. We don’t live in one of those treeless, soulless, conformity inducing sorts of suburbs, but it’s still… well, a wonderful compromise between rural and urban. Suddenly the whole question of what's appealing about the suburbs seems stunning obvious. NOW I get it. We have unblemished views from all our windows. We have neighbors who are there, but concealed by tall stands of old trees.  We have a creek well stocked with minnows and baby salamanders, and the woods, although all clapped up with poison ivy, are also dewy and beautiful with blooming phlox.  Peonies! Rhubarb! And yet, a merest ten minutes away there is such a valley of shopping that I am continually amazed by its stunning ease and variety. It’s a monument to consumption and a guilty pleasure.

It underscores how inconvenient and unfamily-friendly our urban life had become. When we used all the bars and restaurants, they were wonderfully close by, but now we never get to eat out and the drunken partiers are just a nuisance. When we didn’t need Target as much as our right arm, it didn’t matter that it was a long highway drive away (to the suburbs…)  (Although they’ve just opened a new one within striking distance…)

Ghostwise I should mention that all is is fine. I think it was our second night here that I had to be alone with just the baby for a few hours after dark. Terrifying… there were literally things going bump in the night, and then—I kid you not– a light started turning itself off and on.  Our puckish poltergeist had my hair standing on end. I called Ben in his car (coming home with Isaac from a late concert) and insisted that he talk me down. But the next day the light continued to do it, even in daylight with the man of the house on hand to witness it, and it started to seem a lot more like an electrical problem. And now, after a week of living here, I’m certain that any ghost that was lingering in the great room has been completely exorcised by the nearly continuous loop of “the Magic Schoolbus: Bugs, bugs. Bugs!” No 19th century ghost could tolerate that. I’m from this century, it benefits me in that it contains Isaac for a short (educational!) time, and I can barely tolerate it.

I’ve been a single parent all weekend because Ben had to go to Connecticut for the burial of uncle Will’s body. It’s been fairly grueling without a moment of freedom whatsoever. I’ve had a chance to write this blog only by being interrupted ever other sentence, losing my temper, separately getting apples, blueberries, whales-n-guppies organic cheddar crackers, milk, changing the DVD from “Scooby Doo Meets Batman” to the Muppet show, and nursing off and on. Even still, my “time” such as it was, is up.

I posted yesterday but you wouldn't know that because for some reason the notification didn't go. I got suspicious when I toted up three reads in the last 24 hours. That says to me that there was a technical glitch of some kind. I tried to get it to notify you but it just wouldn't cooperate. So now I'm posting to say simply that you may have missed a killer post yesterday, all about moving and how trying it can be, even when you're moving to your own slice of heaven.

Also, I wanted to mention that there's a slim chance that Isaac may have been seized by a dark presence since the night we slept in the new house. I say slim to comfort myself. Really unlikely! However here's some data…    

1) At the new house he was making us and our guests come into the "great room" (aka the living room, but the realtors called it the great room, much to Ben's annoyance, and it's the part of the house from 1831) to hear a private guitar concert. Our friend asked Isaac the title of the piece he had just played, and Isaac replied, "It's called 'God of the Underworld.'"

I'll admit the great room scares me a little bit. Just a lot of history, I guess. Anyway, later that night, around midnight:

2) I woke up to a strange sound. Really a scary sound if you ask me. Sort of a persistent slap/thump sound that didn't have any known explanation. Lena woke up a woofed at it, too. I got up and walked into the great room. It's rather huge, 30×19, with light wood floors that have a ripple to them. Not flat. The walls are dark wormy chestnut. Isaac sat in the middle of this large empty space, cross-legged, with his back to me. Something about his small back and the rolling sea of wood reminded me of The Omen. Also it was so late and he was doing something with his hands that was making the sound. I expected him to turn around with his eyes glowing, or eating raw liver, or something like that. I said, "Isaac, what are you doing?" And he turned around (normal!! phew!) and said, "I can't sleep." Then I saw what he was doing: thrashing a large rubber snake on the floor. That was making the slap/thump sound. Oh sure, I thought. Like this is what a normal child does in the middle of the night! Just comes in here and flogs the floor with a rubber snake to soothe his nerves! 

3) The next morning he was sitting with a rock in the middle of the terrace. Doing something. What are you doing? He answered with a grim coldness in his voice: "Killing everything." Fortunately he just meant the ants. But still! There's no need to kill ants.  Now I've made a rule that he can only kill two bugs: flies and mosquitoes. My mother added wood ticks. Those he can smash with a hammer — yippee! He can't wait! So three bugs: flies, mosquitoes, and wood ticks. Then we read about some locust borer bug thing that kills the trees, and so now we're up to four bugs he can kill. He seems to be researching such that he can expand this list. I ask you– is this healthy?

But on the other hand, for all the stress we've been under, he has also had uncanny moments of cooperativeness and kindness. The sort of kissing, sweet moments that pop out and surprise me. The sudden "mama, I love you so!" type moments . The spontaneous putting away of Lincoln Logs without being asked! The formal "will you accept my apology?" interludes of regret for past wrong-doing! So, okay, I don't really think he's a Bad Seed. He does have Bad Seed moments, of course, but I think he's actually holding up pretty well, considering that he's a very sensitive child and the stress in the house is clearly thick enough to be knife-worthy. 

Because we can't get through a day without someone going to the doctor: this morning baby woke up with a horrible rattle in his chest and a full-on wheeze. Now he seems fine again, only a cold, but the situation bears watching. I don't want him coming down with asthma too! Cleveland is the fourth most polluted city in the nation. (Also, the poorest– beating out even a post-Katrina New Orleans! Psyche!) Anyway, I'm happy to report that the air is much clearer at our new house and that bodes well for lungs, even if it is possibly a little haunted.

This is the point where we ask ourselves: why must we have ice skates AND a sun hat?

This is the point where we start to think: all possessions are evil. Let's divest ourselves of everything and live a simpler life. (Who needs dishes, anyway?)

It's been exhausting around here lately and we are far, far from done.

The problem is that there are several jobs underway at once. For Ben, he has to move and also do all his normal work. For me, I have to move and do all my normal work too. That means… 1) take care of an infant, which is in itself a 24-hour-a-day job, even when we're talking about one of the sweetest most patient infants ever; 2) take care of a very high intensity four-year-old, and drive same all over the place, to and from school, etc.; 3) pack up an entire family, including gear from many different stages of life, and nine years of clutter to contend with; 4) prepare a house to museum quality of perfection to show it to potential buyers in a horrible market. 

Okay, so last week, about Wednesday, my friend Martha came over in response to my distress call. When she arrived I burst into tears and handed her the baby and said I wanted to put my head in the oven. This of course a reference to Sylvia Plath, the ur-suicidal housewife.  What sent her over the brink is still the stuff of scholarly debate. For me it was the sheer impossibility, the relentless hopelessness, of trying to manage all these jobs at once. Room upon room of endless work, the baby constantly interrupting me and any progress I made undone by Isaac the wild. 

Example 1) I took off all the slipcovers, exposing the nice pristine upholstery below. Then I found Isaac lying on his back, on the very pristine upholstery. He had his face, indeed his whole head, buried in half a honeydew melon that he had purloined from the kitchen without my knowledge. Juice! Eegads! The juice!

Example 2) he called me from the bathroom: "Mom! I peed my pants!" So I came in and here's what I found… a) he had filled the sink with soapy water to the very brim; b) he had climbed into the sink and was standing in it up to his ankles with his pants on, and c) at that point he had peed his pants (the power of suggestion). Trying to give him the benefit of doubt, I said, "Were you climbing into the sink to wash your pants after you had peed in them, or something like that?" and he shrugged and and said, "No, I peed in my pants once I got here."

Example 3) also bathroom related… I got a nice new bathmat from Crate and Barrel. SOmething of a splurge actually, but reasoning that it would make the house look nicer and then we could move it to the new house once this one sells… anyway, for some ungodly reason I put it on the bathroom floor. Then I heard the dreaded cry, "Mom, I need help!" And so I rushed in and found Isaac, half naked, covered in poop from the waist down. In his hands a poop-tainted snarl of toilet paper about the size of a basket ball. Standing on the very lovely pristine bath mat!!(which came through unscathed somehow!)

The pressure was on, too, because this weekend (today) is the big Ohio City home tour in our neighborhood. It means that several thousand people who are interested in our neighborhood walk by the house on this day, and really it's only once a year and not something you can miss by a week. So we simply had to have the front of the house looking wonderful (and that at least we did accomplish… I got the porch washed and painted, and the fence painted, and I planted some flowers, etc.) and our for sale sign up. This means that at any point from today forward someone could and should call to see the inside of the house also! 

After I had my nervous breakdown midweek, Ben agreed to rent a truck this weekend and get as much as possible out of here. ANd I declared it totally impossible to live here while also trying to show the house. I declared that I simply can't handle the struggle of having yesterday's work undone today, over and over again. On paper I thought we could do it for a couple weeks between the home tour and the end of Isaac's school year, but after trying it for only half an hour I learned that I would be driven insane by it much sooner than that. 

So yesterday Ben and a friend did haul out a lot. Enough so that we manage to camp down at the new house last night. We can exist there, no problem, but today by force of habit we are home again, messing things up again. Cooking, eating, living. We must stop! We're sleeping here tonight because we all have to be in Cleveland for various reasons in the morning, but really this can't go on!  

I calculate that if I can clean and pack and order one room per day we can have it pretty together by the end of the week. We can leave this house as a museum and bring all the mess of existence to the new house. After a few weeks of this, whether it has sold or not, we can hire movers to bring all the stuff down there, and then begin a new level of sprucing up things here. Like all the paint is the most sorry ass mess you ever saw. We really should paint the entire interior. And there's the battered stained old carpet in two rooms upstairs. And, and, and.

Meanwhile at the new house we did get the lethal electrical issues fixed, and the siding gutter people are coming this week. But do we have a washer and dryer? Do we have internet hook-up? No. ….

IN other news Elias had his nightmarish, alien abduction experience at the hospital at some point along the way. you know, just a nice normal day and then some people pin you down as if stretched on a rack, then insert something into your penis, while a huge machine looms over you. Your mother, who is distraught, is hampered from nursing you because of the chin to knee lead apron she sports. Meanwhile some other fiend keeps running over and dousing your private parts with cups of warm water, to make you pee, so they can snap a photo of your urethra in use. Then it's all duckies and bunnies again and life goes on as normal.

what the—?

As least his anatomy is okay! He is normal and fine, and does not have the defect they were looking for. Our good fortune was underscored later that day at Isaac's school. The new girl in his class is big sister to these romanian conjoined twins who are in cleveland for separation surgery. the twins were at school that afternoon! joined at the head! okay, god, i get it. my idea of a bad/scary medical day is nothing!

Elias's word of the week: hedt. Hedt is such a useful all-purpose reply to everything. and so fun to say. hedt. hedt. hedt. 

A mother worries.

I got a call from the doctor the other day indicating that the bad/scary/threatening testing of my sweet little dumpling's urinary system will be next Wednesday. Since he had a bladder infection, which is not all that common, it's standard practice to check whether he has this defect in which the tubes leading from kidneys to bladder are hooked up right. If they're not, it causes sort of a backflow effect in which pee goes up towards the kidneys when it should be strictly going down, and in turn this can lead to repeated infections, which in turn can lead to kidney damage. If he does have it, most kids outgrow it, so the goal would be to just manage the risk of infection somehow or other until then.

He's going to have a renal ultrasound to look at his kidneys, and then also this test where they inject dye into his bladder (with a catheter, which we've already established he doesn't enjoy) to look at whether the gasket (using strictly lay terms) is sealed well. I made the GRISLY mistake this morning of googling "renal ultrasound in baby boys" and within merely five minutes I was in a tailspin of dread about whether he would have to have open or laparscopic surgery, and whether he would lose a kidney before we were through. Never mind that in the rational (admittedly small) portion of my brain there's this dim memory of a conversation during the crisis last week, in which the doctor said loud and clear: "We DO NOT do surgery on it anymore." He said that some doctors  do low-level daily antibiotics to prevent infection until he outgrows it, but that seemed to be the worst case scenario. Even that is debatable. But now I'm sitting here and fretting… if nothing else there's the procedure itself, which other parents online had to go and tell me involves "straps."  (to hold the little honey pot down!! I can't bear it.) 

Meanwhile… there's Ben. Last week when he confessed the little constant white spot on his vision, my first thought was that it was a detached retina. I know someone who had that one time, and it needed surgery, but was basically fixable. I called and got an appt for Ben at the Cole Eye Institute, which is a huge sleek new building in the Cleveland Clinic complex. When I called for an appt for Isaac's possible glasses, they said June 20. When I called saying my husband had a white spot on his vision, they said, "Come in in two hours." Like… NOW. So that concerned me a bit, and Ben too. He canceled his day (we had closed on the house that morning) and in he went.

They looked at his eye every which way, and put dye in his veins to take pictures of it. He brought the pictures home, even, to show Isaac. What's weird is that the spot he sees in the center of his vision, is also easy for US to see on the photo. Apparently what he has is a genetic thing akin to macular degeneration. So the plan, if you can call it that, is just to monitor what happens with it. But there's not much they can do. 

Well, in the context of uncle Will's death, what Ben and I were both scared of was something life threatening, like, say, brain cancer. So when it turned out to "just" be about his sight, we were both quite relieved. However, now that a week has passed and the dust has settled, the whole idea of Ben's sight being threatened seems a little more ominous. It's just in the right eye now, but…? It's a tiny dot now, but…? Back in the day, I worked as an amanuensis (her term) for intellectual/literary figure Diana Trilling. She was at that time 88-91 years old and pretty near blind from macular degeneration, so I have a sense of what that's like. But she was OLD. Ben is YOUNG.  

I would say that it's a nice change of pace to be less worried about Isaac than usual. I've been reading this book about the "spirited" child– one who is "more intense, energetic, perceptive, sensitive, and persistent." Isaac fits the profile to a T. This has helped me a bit in coping with his craziness, and also worrying less about whether he is really technically CRAZY with a capital C, or just… you know, crazy, lower case. The book is sort of like a support group– indeed the lady runs an actual support group– for those of us (apparently 10%) blessed with spirited children. It has a lot of useful strategies and ideas that I've been implementing with some success.  

It's been really an intense week, though. Dueling houses is the situation now. It seems like I spent the whole week down at the new house, carrying an 18 lb baby, while standing in the hot sun and hearing about the repair issues of the (fill in the blank). I met with the electrician, the siding/gutter guy, got the gas turned on, met with the mower guy, etc. etc. Isaac helped in his SPIRITED fashion– now pulling lead paint chips off the garage, now smearing the baby's head with Purell when my back was turned (when confronted, he explained, "I really enjoyed doing it!" as if that should suffice.) It's also of course challenging that there's literally nothing at the new house that one would need. So while I remembered food, water, diapers, changes of clothes for the boys, etc., I forgot sunblock and a hat for the baby, and disastrously, Isaac's Superman costume (with blue blazer to go over it for "Clark Kent" variation) and his remote controlled tarantula. 

I had an especially bad moment on Wednesday when I was trying to get over to Isaac's potential new school for an interview. Just when it was time to leave, the baby exploded in poop. When I was dealing with that, Isaac took to pelting the car with gravel. I got that under control, and finally set out. However when I turned from our driveway on to the main road, I was dismayed to see a billowing cloud of papers trailing out behind the car. I realized that I had left my (silver) folder chock full of the inspection reports, and all my notes of who I called and scheduled with what repair issue, on the roof of the (silver) car. I had fun running around in traffic with both boys screaming in the car while late for an important appointment. 

On the upside, even though the house is deserted, all the men who have come to fix things have nothing but praise for it. The electrician took me into the basement to admire the hand chopped full-sized trees that are still holding up the floors 175 years later. The gas man stood out on the lawn surveying the horizon and said, "HOW BIG is this place??" When I told him almost eight acres, he said simply, "You are going to have so much fun out here." 

It's true. Even under these trying circumstances, the sea of green has a wonderful way of relaxing the muscles on the back of my neck. I hear from the mowing dude that we have 3-4 acres of lawn. It's lush and vibrant these days, and full of violets and blue star creeper. We just have to take the transition one day/week at a time and stay focussed on the glory that will be SUMMER.