Sundays with Stretchy Pants

I wanted to play drums in middle school band class, but they wouldn’t let me because they had a rule that we had to know how to play the piano first. Dumb rule because, isn’t that what middle school band class is for? Learning? And Dabbling? How could I learn the stuff before band class? Assholes. I didn’t want to learn piano because, my god, the piano is so fine-motor skillish and I’m more of a gross-motor type. So I didn’t take band class, I took choir instead where I lip-synced and messed around and did drugs. Ok, I didn’t do drugs, but I could have and I would have been justified.

*sigh* We watched Girls Rock last night at the Wexner Center and I cried all through it because it was awesome. And then I yelled at Bryan because, well, he’s a boy and he didn’t even have to learn that he rocks. And it’s not fair! But then, Dawn’s Girls Rock post makes a good point about boys and their struggles and whatnot, so I guess I won’t yell at him today. For being a boy.

The movie inspired my girls to play the drums (Liberty), play guitar and drums (Lena), and play guitar and drums and sing (Maya). And Bryan and I were inspired to pay for stuff that would enable those endeavors. Finally, the girls are doing what they’re supposed to by living out my dreams so that I can live through them. Er, maybe it’s not supposed to be about me and my dreams? I can’t remember. The world is so confusing after seeing Girls Rock.

Anyway, Kids Know Stuff is giving away a Washburn guitar soon and now I wish we could win it. Except it’s kind of ruined because it has either Hannah Montana or Camp Rock paint splashed all over it. I’m sure a kid would like it, but whatever.

We’re going to the Wexner Center to watch two more movies today: Jump and Children of Heaven. I’m sure Jump will inspire a jump rope purchase. I just hope Children of Heaven doesn’t inspire me to make the children share one pair of shoes. I’m easily swayed by visual media.

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Lena and Liberty start a paper route today. Now maybe they can buy their own damn food and gas. Kidding! I know they would choose to buy video games and starve to death, clinging to the warm screen of the DS.

Anyway, we’re terribly busy because we all have jobs now, except Maya who is very quickly learning to read so she can get a job. She’s sitting on my lap as I type this and she just said, “Why does it say ‘Maya’? And why does it say ‘job’? I’m glad I didn’t type effin’ job or something like that. I’d hate for the first sentence she ever reads on my blog to contain profanity. (I wouldn’t really mind that, but I felt I needed to say that for that part of my audience which is comprised of good mothers.)

Um, anyway, yeah jobs. And we’re going to Michigan this weekend so the girls can trick-or-treat with their cousin so I have to make sure there are things to pack and stuff. Lena, Liberty, and Riley are all going to be characters from the Naruto books. (I gotta get this kid off my lap, she just said told Lena and Liberty, “Mom typed your name on the computer!”) And Maya is going to be a princess/cheerleader.

I’m kind of glad that we’ll be spending the last weekend before the election in Michigan. Hopefully, I’ll be able to pretend there is no election coming up, which will enable me to sleep the sleep of the non-swing-state citizen. We have election stuff to do on Monday when we get back, though. I did phone banking a few days ago again only this time we were calling democrats who have absentee ballots and telling them to mail the suckers in. It was way more fun than last week because everybody was all, GOBAMA! and stuff.

Ok, that’s all I got. It’s time for laundry now.

And just in case you don’t know what my title is talking about, here’s a video for you. Ok bye.

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Maya has a new review up over at Kids Know Stuff. And, if you’re into that kind of thing, there’s a free printable Sudoku-like puzzle for the little ones. Or for big ones who have trouble with that sort of thing. Like me. It gave me a surge of pride when I completed the puzzle after a few tries on my first try. Print one out for yourself and your kid and you could race and then gloat because you won. Unless you’re me and you’re racing against Maya. She’s smarter than I am. It hurts.

Last night, we checked out the new Sprout Soup mother, baby, and child store. It gave me baby lust. Well, baby product lust, anyway. The slings, the diapers, the baby leg warmers. *sigh* It all makes me want to start over with a brand-new, fresh, un-ruined baby. Especially the baby leg warmers. If you are having a baby and I am obligated to buy you a gift, it will be baby leg warmers. And don’t tell Maya, but I’ve got my eye on the Wooden Spinny Speller for a stocking stuffer for her. Actually, I think she might outgrow 3-letter words by Christmas. Maybe I’ll go get it today. I don’t want the last baby to outgrow Sprout Soup before I have a chance to buy up the joint. They also have some cool stuff from Baying Hound, another local entrepreneur. Local! And for those of you who aren’t local, don’t buy local! That’s silly. You’re not helping anybody when you buy local. You could just buy from the sites that are local to me.

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ETA: By good I mean, well, a decent enough Christian. Mostly, though, it’s cool Muslims in the video (why are they at a McCain rally? I don’t know. Free country, I guess). I wrote the title like that because I’m always all down on the Xtians (they hate when you put an “X” there. They hate it when you do it to XMas, too, because what if Jesus is that small that it makes him go away when you abbreviate the Christ out of everything?) and I thought you’d be surprised that I used the words “good” and “Christian” together. Surprise!

Maya watches the Mr. Roboto video more times per day than necessary. And she sings along. I blame my brother. Maybe he didn’t introduce her to Styx, but some of our shared (obviously mutant) genes must have been lying dormant within me and I inadvertently passed them on to my precious baby. Too bad there’s not a pre-natal screen for that. At least we would have been prepared and we could’ve tried to keep the gene from becoming active. My theory is that Maya’s mutant Styx gene would have remained dormant if she hadn’t been next to me listening to her uncle’s voice on the phone the other day. Obviously, it’s an auditorily-activated gene. Sick.

In other news, more of this needs to happen:
Muslim McCain Fans Confront Intolerance at Rally

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I like Junie B. Jones. I know a lot of people don’t like the fact that she talks like a Kindergartener or a First Grader, but I think she’s cute. There, I said it. I love being controversial on my blog.

It’s been a long time since Lena and Liberty were into Junie B., but, thanks to a life-size poster in our library, Maya has jumped on the Junie bandwagon with full force. She’s been checking out book after book and listening quietly to chapter after chapter. This is kind of a big deal because Maya has never been the “listening quietly” type. Never. Goodnight Moon? Feh. The Runaway Bunny? Boring! But Junie has a hold on her. Maybe it’s because Maya has a bit of a speech problem, so she feels she can relate to Junie B? Whatever the reason, she’s hooked. And a lot of my day is spent with her following me around saying any of a number of versions of, “Remember when Junie B. lost her furry mittens and then she was sad and then she went to the lost and found and then she didn’t find them yet and then she wanted that backpack that wasn’t even hers? That was funny!” And I totally agree. It was funny!

I got nothing else today. I’m tired and it’s raining and Sarah Palin is still making my ovaries act all rebellious. I swear, it’s like they’re trying to get out so they can use the fallopian tubes to strangle somebody. Probably John McCain. Will the Secret Service read that and think I’m serious? I hope my ovaries don’t go to jail. Or maybe I hope they do go to jail. I can’t decide.

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There was an animal in our wall for a couple of nights in a row. I swore it was a raccoon or something worse, like an escaped gorilla from the zoo. Bryan figured it was a squirrel or a mouse, but it sounded really big and slow to me. I felt I had more experience in these matters, having lived through the great red squirrel invasion of ‘82 when our old farm house became home to several families of little guys. This animal didn’t scurry when we pounded on the wall. I figured that was because whatever kind of animal it was knew that it was big and bad and rabid, and when you’re big, bad, and rabid, you don’t have to lower yourself to scurrying when some random human pounds on your new home. So I declared it an emergency and made Bryan call the rental company yesterday afternoon. Oh, our rental company apparently does not have an emergency number for weekends and holidays. I was upset about that yesterday. Until we found the empty hamster cage in Lena’s room. Then I was just grateful that we didn’t call Varmint-Gard and pay them to come rescue our frickin’ hamster out of our own wall.

After discovering that our neglected beloved Choji was missing, Bryan thought it would be a good idea to announce it very crassly in front of all 3 very sensitive girls. Right before bedtime. The girls then proceeded to throw themselves on the floor and wail, “Chooojiiiii! NOOOOOO!” and “Chooooojiiii! I LOOOOVVVVE YOOOUUU!” and “Oh, God, WHY? Why did you take Choji? You should’ve taken me instead!” and “Why didn’t we play with you more? WHY?” Why he couldn’t have waited 2 minutes until every kid was in bed, is beyond me. It’s not even like he told them in a very serious, funeral director way. No, he was laughing hysterically while he announced to his children that their very first pet was in the wall. Lucky for us, Choji chose a wall that had a removable panel so we could get to him easily, which we did. And then the children took off their sackcloth and ashes and ceased beating their chests in anguish and remorse. And then Bryan and I got down on our hands and knees and thanked the good Lord that our rental company indeed does not have an emergency number. We would have died from embarrassment.

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In the summer of 1984, my father built me a hurdle. And then he tried to teach me how to jump over it while running. I was 9 years old and there was nothing in my physical make-up that would have lead him to believe that I would be able to hurdle things. Mostly, I was the sort who would run into things, lumbering solidly, not gliding swiftly. I didn’t have long limbs that could stretch and snap over a hurdle in just the right way. My body was made for sturdiness, not grace.

The same day he made the hurdle, he also gave me just a plain piece of wood, explaining that I was to run up to the wood and then, just as my foot hit the board, I was to jump and hurl my body through the air, hopefully landing far away from the board. Yes, he made a long jump marker thingy.

I’ve often thought back to that one day that summer and wondered what in the hell my dad was thinking. At that point in time, I was playing softball and I was pretty good at it. I didn’t need another sport, and Track and Field wasn’t even an option for an extra-curricular activity until high school. Finally, after 24 years, I think I know what my dad was thinking. Watching the Olympics this year has given me a little bit of insight into his psyche during that time. Yes, I was a good little softball player, but softball wasn’t an Olympic event back in 1984. I think my dad had a brief bout of Olympic fever and he dealt with it by building a hurdle and a long jump board. For me, his short, sturdy little girl. It hit me while I was watching Misty May and Kerri Walsh play volleyball. I found myself looking at Lena and Liberty, thinking, “We should really buy a volleyball.” In that instant, I knew that watching Carl Lewis in 1984 had affected my dad the same way. My brother and sister would have been 15 and 14, way past their prime. All of his hopes rested with me. And then I dashed them. Just like my children are dashing my Olympic dreams for them.

I didn’t buy a volleyball because I’m sure they would just whine about how it hurts to hit it. And I don’t know why they can’t do a perfect cartwheel, let alone an entire floor routine. I don’t know why they won’t even attempt synchronized diving. And I don’t know why they insist upon running all willy-nilly, limbs swinging about with no rhyme or reason. They don’t pace themselves; they just sprint and then collapse giggling in the grass. That’s not technique! That’s just tom-foolery! The Olympics have taught me that my children don’t care about me and my needs, just like I didn’t care about my dad’s needs.  That Michael Phelps’ mom is a lucky woman. You can tell how much he loves her just by looking at all of his gold medals. *sigh*

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We have this sweet, goofy baby girl who is suddenly a five year old. Huh? I mean that with the utmost sincerity. Seriously…huh? She was a baby, I remember that. And now she’s a kid? Not a preschooler. Not a toddler. A kid. I’d like to be all poetic about her as a person, but since this is the the first birthday post for Maya, you get a birth story. Lucky you!

Five years ago yesterday, I woke up in labor at 5:00am. I was having a dream that I had a new baby boy and I was taking him to the IGA and introducing him to the check-out lady. “His name is Judah,” I said very sheepishly. Back then, that would’ve been kind of an odd name in my area and I guess I had a lot of anxiety about using it, because all of my baby dreams were about introducing the baby by name and cringeing while somebody said, “Judah? What kind of a name is that?” Anyway, I woke up with a cramp that hurt so bad, it made me roll off the couch and get on all fours. I went to the bathroom, found bloody show, and figured the baby was coming. My mom and my sister, with 6 kids between them, never labored for more than 5 hours so I didn’t think I would be any different. Stupid uterus. I was having a super-secret homebirth so I called my midwife and she got there at about 10:00 am. I don’t really remember what my contractions did all day except they were there and they were, like, whatever, and I had this midwife and her apprentice over, and my friend was visiting from Maine, but I had to cancel her visit because I thought I was having a baby, but then later that night, her parents saw Bryan grilling barbecued chicken outside and they were like, “I don’t think Abby’s having the baby because I saw Bryan outside grilling.” And my friend was all, “Weird.” Maybe she knew about the super-secret homebirth. I don’t know. I don’t remember the few people I spilled the beans to in those last couple of weeks. But I do remember demanding barbecued chicken while we waited for the slow-ass baby.

Nothing really happened all day long and it wasn’t fair. Throughout my pregnancy, we took bets about when the baby would be born and I CHOSE THE 16th! When I woke up at 5:00am on the frickin’ 16th, I thought I just won myself $65. At the time, I had a neighbor who had been my high school English teacher and he bet the baby would be born on the 17th because that was his birthday. He put his $5 on the 17th and he would say with such smug, English-teacher conviction, “I’m not gambling because I know that the baby will be born on the 17th.” Bryan even saw the English teacher in the grocery store that morning and said, “It looks like today’s going to be the day. I guess the baby couldn’t wait until your birthday.” That was at 9:00 in the morning and my neighbor very coolly replied, “There are 15 hours left in this day, so I wouldn’t get over confident about anything just yet.” All I knew is that I didn’t want to have the baby on the 17th because that would have been my midwife and her husband’s 30th wedding anniversary, only her husband had died in June. Two months before. Yeah, and you know what else? She was supposed to come for my first home visit in June and when she didn’t show up, I called her and you know why she didn’t show up? Um, because It was the day of her husband’s funeral. I called her at home to see where she was and her son answered and he actually put her on the phone and she was crying and apologizing and explaining that she forgot to call me and she was ever so sorry, but her husband died and, well, she had to bury him. And then I went and had the baby on what would have been their 30th anniversary. I’m so selfish.

Somehow, 23 hours later (some not-so-hard hours, several really hard hours), Maya was born right in our bedroom. Bryan cried, I cried, my midwife cried (probably for other reasons). My sister was there with me, having forgiven me for waking her up at 6:00am the day before with promises of babies and then failing to deliver any new babies to her in a timely manner, and she cried too. We were happy. It was cool. Maya rocks. And the neighbor gave the $65 to Maya for a birth day gift. Sweet.

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As of two days ago, if you come across Maya she’s very likely to say something like, “I gotta show you sumfin. It’s cool!” And then she will take you out to the swingset and show you how she can get herself swinging and keep herself going by pumping her legs. And then when you give her the appropriate props for that, she’ll say, “CanWeGoToThePool?CanWeGoToThePool?CanWeGoToThePool?CanWeGoToThePool?” where she will show you her other brand-new feat of jumping in and going under the water. Under it! “Where people can’t even breeeeve, so I have to hold my breff! Isn’t dat cool?” And then she’ll swim around under the water with a great big smile on her face and tell you over and over that she doesn’t need her life jacket anymore and she’s ready for swimming lessons. You’ll agree with her that she’s cool, because she is.

It’s been a big weekend for amazing feats of pool bravery for all of the girls. Lena has been regularly jumping off of the 8-foot springboard after previously going off of it once and deciding to never, ever do it again. Over the weekend, she jumped off of it for about 2 hours straight, adding little tricks like a half-twist with a peace sign flash. Liberty (after the horrible influence of Dawn’s older kid) has been going off of the 16-foot platform. She went off it for the first time when Noah was there a few days ago and I really thought she wouldn’t do it again, but she did it several times yesterday. All my girls are bad asses. Watch out for them.

One teensy hard part about this is trying to convince Lena that she can be proud of jumping off of the 8-foot board. An age difference of more than a minute would come in handy here. I think Lena might feel like it’s not a big deal anymore because her sister, who is the exact same age as she is, jumped off of the 16-foot platform. Indeed, when Liberty went off the platform, Bryan and I walked all the way over there to congratulate her. We did that with Lena when she went off the 8-foot for the first time, too, but that had been days earlier and I’m pretty sure the glow from that moment had worn off. It’s tough to balance one girl’s feel-good feelings with the other’s feelings that her good thing isn’t good enough, when it really is good enough. This is one of those times when being a twin would so suck. We try to teach them that they can’t compare themselves to each other or to any other people, there’s always going to be somebody who can do more or less, blah, blah, blah. But I think it’s hard to live that lesson sometimes. I think it’s sinking in, but I just think it’s hard. Still, they’re bad asses. Total bad asses.

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Guess where I’m going tomorrow. Guess. I’ll give you a hint: I’m not going to West Virginia.

OMG, how did you guess that I’m going to Michigan? You’re so smart.

All the girls are going camping with my inlaws this weekend. They’ll be about two hours away from Chesaning for two nights and then I’ll join them for one night, unless it’s absolutely necessary that I join them sooner. I don’t think Maya has spent more than one night away from me at a time, but I’m not really worried about her. She digs my inlaws (and my inlaws’ food) and I know that if she’s having issues, they’ll call me. We used to camp with them for a weekend every summer when we lived in Michigan, but this will be the first time it’s happened since we moved to Columbus. Excitement abounds. I told my inlaws to just tell me when they want them, and I’d be sure to drive them up there. They requested this weekend, which turns out to be very convenient for me because my cousin is getting married Saturday. Wasn’t it lovely of her to plan her wedding around when we would be up in Michigan anyway? She’s always been sweet like that. I think I’ll put another $3-5 in her gift card just to show my appreciation.

So I’ll be packing today. I did my laundry and grocery shopping and baking yesterday. Baking? Yes, baking. My father-in-law needs to be compensated with chocolate chip cookies. He’s diabetic, so maybe I shouldn’t bake for him, but when I don’t bake for him, he whines about it. On the other hand, when I do bake for him, he tells me he’s diabetic and he shouldn’t be eating stuff like that. At least, I think that’s what he’s saying. It’s hard to understand him when he’s cramming cookies into his mouth.

Anyway, I’m going away again. I’ll miss you. I’ll be back Tuesday. And I’ll miss you.

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