hoppytoddle

What's Up, Buttercups?!

2011-09-03T08:50:00.000-07:00

I know, I know; I have been seriously MIA & suck. No worries, as I am told this daily. Well, I'm pretty sure that, "You are meaner than Cinderella's Step Mother!" is at least the 6 year old's way of saying that. Yes, I know this, too: SIX? Wha?

This was taken on the morning on her birthday. This is right after she opened this dollie, who has been named Rosalinda, that I made for her. Her birthday was actually the day after the last day of school, but her teacher still let her celebrate her birthday with her class. I gave her the choice of having whatever cupcake or cookie she wanted to bring in. She chose eclairs. Oh, my young lady with the refined palette!

We had a wonderful but short summer break together. She only had eight short weeks off of school, so we didn't really go anywhere n vacation. We sent her to a wonderful summer day camp on Sanibel Island at the Sanibel Sea School. She spent the whole week on the beach, on a boat, or in the ocean. She loved it. If anyone out there vacations on Sanibel Island, know that they have a year-round program where families can come spend a day at the school.

This is her heading out to watch the dolphins swimming in the wild. This is actually the only way she has ever seen them & she is saying she doesn't really want to go to Sea World in the fall because she doesn't think it is right for them to be kept in small pools when they are "use to having the whole ocean". Again; our little activist in the making.

The second camp she went to was at Florida Repertory Theatre and at the end of the two week camp they performed Seussical the Musical. She can perform on command the entire hour & a half show. I think I can, too. I made this dress for her that has various Seuss characters all over it this spring, & I am in process of making one for her little sister, who prefers The Cat In the Hat & Fish.

Speaking of the little sister, she will hereforth be known as MiniHe. Yes, she is still a girl, but just the spitting image of The Huz, so a little version of him. She is every bit the large personality of MiniMe, yet even at not quite two, definitely her own person. Together, they light up my days. MiniMe is an even better big sister than I ever could have imagined. She is patient, loving, understanding, and an excellent role model. I'm so glad they have each other. I wish I had one or the other as a sibling. I am grateful I get to be at home with them.

MiniHe is a big fan of Stitch, as in Lilo & Stitch, & it is quite an appropriate object of her affection, as Stitch has a proclivity for stealing left shoes. I was almost arrested for shoplifting when Violet put some shoes in my bag without my knowledge. She is also a stitch herself, doing things like putting Stitch on the potty, & plopping a piece of brown clay in the bowl so we could pretend he is potty training just like she is. MiniHe is also fascinated with ears. The Huz likes to pretend he stuffs his iphone into her ears, which she buys hook, line & sinker. As such, she tries to put random things in my ears, like brushes. She will brush my hair for hours, which makes me feel pampered but her sweet, gentle little strokes which she takes little breaks from to peek around my shoulder & get kisses.

The reason I have been so busy isn't just because of our sweet girls, however. I am working n building a business that will help us be able to move back to Detroit, and I have just launched it this week. I have a lot of products to add, still, but please check out hoppytoddle the store, here. & by all means, tell your friends! If you have products you cannot live without, let me know about them.

I've missed you, blog friends!

Things are better...

2010-06-03T20:41:00.000-07:00

I need to write, for posterity, the awfulness that was the last part of the school year for MiniMe, but for now, know that since she has been home with me for a week now, things are MUCH better. Even the last few days, when we have all been sick, even Guppy #2, things are much improved. There is more love, more affection, more joy. & the girls? Well...

I need some help

2010-02-21T20:28:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry I suck so much & haven't been posting. I'm sure most of you know that Guppy #2 is now sucking of most of my time with her nursing. We have finally gotten to a point where I am bathing regularly, but I'm still barely keeping my head above sea level. Biggie has finally relented & is paying for someone to come clean our house a few times because he is working such insane hours he is really not home enough to be of much help. Our house isn't that bad, honestly. It's more that I am stuck in this house, sitting on the sofa nursing, trying to revel in the beauty & wonder of motherhood, & I feel so guilty that our house isn't clean & resentful that I can't clean it & have to sit in it that we're going to try this to see if it helps my nasty mood.

Yes. I'm in a nasty mood. I love Guppy #2. She is an awesomely happy, beautiful baby. I am so lucky to have this new little ray of sunshine in my life. She is all good. The problem is with MiniMe. & boy, am I heartbroken.

She isn't resentful of Guppy #2. She seriously thanks me if not daily, sometimes more than once a day, for her new sister. She loves her dearly & honestly threw her hands up in the air one morning when I was driving her to school saying, "Praise God, (for my new little sister)!" I'm not kidding. It was sweet & I had to stifle my giggles at the Jerry Faldwellness of it all.

However, MiniMe is seriously not happy. & I'd have to say it's mostly with me. She has told me nearly daily for the last 2 weeks that I am the meanest mom ever, that she doesn't love me anymore, that she wishes she could go live in another world where I am not. One night when my mom was visiting & I asked her to pick up the tea party of toys that had been going on under the dining room table for 3 days she said that she, "...wishes lighting would strike my mom & die her." I expected all this eventually, just not at age 4.

So, I'm heartbroken. I know I need to stop expecting her to understand so much. She is four, & sometimes she is so mature I forget that her maturity in most things is exceptional & shouldn't be expected at all times in all circumstances. I know I need to be patient with her & listen to her so that she feels she is important to me. I know I need to find ways to not resent that now that I have less time to spend on her she needs more because things have changed & she's doing it out of a need for security. But I'm having a hard time of things with her & I am really sad that this girl who has consumed my life for the past four years now suddenly seems to be scared of me. It hurts. A lot.

I feel like all could be righted by a return of our bedtime ritual of stories followed by ticklies in the big red chair while I sing her lullabies. I thought that the reason I was having such a hard time with the ritual before I gave birth was because of my big pregnant belly. Now I realize that in fact MiniMe has grown to a size where she no longer really fits very well in my lap. Coupled with the fact that Guppy #2 has a pattern of wanting so be really high maintenance in the hour before & the hour after MiniMe's bedtime, and I cannot remember the last time I got to read MiniMe a story & give her ticklies.

She feels so lost to me. I tell her when she sees all of the things I do for Guppy #2 I want her to know that I did all of those things for her when she was a baby. When she tells me that Guppy #2 is the sweetest & most adorable baby in the whole world I tell her that while that may be true now, I think she was cuter. I lay in bed at night after I've finally gotten Guppy #2 to sleep, trying to quiet my mind in the midst of Biggie's snoring, & tears roll down my cheeks. My heart telegraphs across the house to where MiniMe is sleeping. I get up & go in & I pick her up. I rock her on edge of her bed & sing her the song from I'll Love You Forever.

the best gift

2009-12-30T11:12:00.000-08:00

Once we got in the car things really seemed to get going. Of course we were almost out of gas. Of course my contractions got more intense. The one I had as we were leaving the subdivision had me whining like MiniMe, pushing my feet against the dashboard, calling out to The Huz. I listened to my hypnobabies tracks on his iphone as The Huz drove up I-75 at 90 miles an hour.

I realized no one had called Christina, the midwife, to let her know I was on my way up there at this point. When I called her I couldn't really talk at first because a contraction hit as soon as she answered. I got through that, told her what was happening & she asked us to come to the birth center before we checked in to the hotel. We had to wait for a while because Christina was seeing another patient. I was okay, leaning over things, bending over at the waist through contractions, which were slightly less than 10 minutes apart at this point, but some were closer to 5 minutes. I don't remember much about the exam except that I was dilated to 3 cm, 90% effaced, & the baby was at 0 station. All signs pointing to baby coming soon. We had to go to the hardware store to get a coupler to run a hose from the faucet to the birthing tub & Cheryl was having a hard time finding a birthing tub for me. I had procrastinated, not gotten one myself, & had asked her to take care of that for me. Now she was having a hard time doing that.

When we got to the hotel we were disappointed. I had done a lot of research to find a hotel with 2 separate bedrooms so that my mom & MiniMe could be there comfortably, as well as a kitchen. The space was huge, but not as clean as we would have liked & awkward in ways like the toilet was too close to the wall.

Biggie left for about 15 minutes to get us some food. I hadn't eaten very much at all & had thrown the nachos up in the middle of the night. Even so, I couldn't really eat more than three bites. I don't know if it was excitement, fear, dread, or any combination of the three, but I just couldn't eat. Even though I was most scared of running out of energy, it was like my body didn't care about being reasonable. I guess this could be called Lesson #1 in Go with The Flow. No matter how much I thought I needed something, my body had ideas of its own.

I remember I was sitting on the sofa near the window when Cheryl got there. She came & hugged me before she brought in her things. We were excited, but not as excited as I had thought we would be. I remember that I had told myself to prepare for waiting a long time before she got there because I would have a long labor. I didn't feel like we had been waiting very long. Honestly, everything was just going along so smoothly. Yes, I had been having regular contractions for almost 24 hours, now but they were more than tolerable. I had actual breaks between the contractions where I could walk & talk & pee & just be fine. The difference between this labor, my labor, & the labor that was forced upon MiniMe & I was about the size of the Grand Canyon. I could do this labor, in fact, I was. & it was at this point that I really realized that I was. My mom came in with MiniMe around this time & I hugged her goodnight. They went upstairs for stories & ticklies without incident.

Cheryl kind of took over for Biggie at this point when I had contractions. When one came, she knew, & she got to applying the counter-pressure in my lower back quickly. While her hands weren't as strong as his, she had brought a sock filled with rice that I wish I had spoke out about, that it was more helpful so she would have used it more. She suggested I move to her birthing ball & I sat on it while leaning over the arm of one of the sofas. I remember talking to her while I was sitting there, as if it were just another day, & I wasn't pausing from time to time for a contraction. Things seemed so normal. I didn't think about how things were going, how quickly things were going, because I felt like I was going to jinx myself. In the split seconds that Biggie called attention to how regular & close together my contractions were, I acknowledged it briefly, but with caution. It wasn't that I had a sense that something was going to go wrong; not at all. I just felt like things were going so well that if I said so somebody else would correct me, saying something like, "Oh, but your contractions are only (fill in the blank) this long," or "Yeah, but I really don't think you're going to have this baby tonight." When I look back on it now I can articulate that I somehow didn't feel like I could have a normal birth experience because I was so afraid I couldn't.

At some point when I was sitting on the birthing ball I got up to go to the bathroom & had blood, bright red blood, coming out of me. I was alarmed & called Cheryl to the bathroom. She said it was normal. I had to ask her a few times to repeat that it was. I went back to the ball, still having what I felt were good breaks between the contractions, but the contractions were becoming more commanding, more authoritative. Biggie & Cheryl asked me if I thought the should start getting the birthing tub ready & I said yes. Cheryl had not been able to find a tub for me but had instead borrowed the back-up one from the birth center. When they were almost done filling it I had gotten up to go to the bathroom again. After I got up from the toilet, another contraction hit. I leaned over the sink waiting for someone to come help with the counter-pressure, & I felt a pop that I knew was my water breaking. Cheryl came in & confirmed that it was & that there was no meconium staining. Biggie didn't believe that was what it was because there wasn't a lot of fluid. Both Cheryl & I explained that because the baby was so low her head was acting like a cork, keeping most of the fluid behind her in the uterus.

I got right in the tub after that & the contraction I had almost immediately was absolutely devastating. I couldn't move, it was so crushing. I was scared. I thought when I got in the tub things would calm down a little bit like they had that morning. It was the exact opposite experience. I crawled over to the side of the tub & clutched Cheryl's hands. I remember begging her to make Christina be there. She assured me she was on her way. When a contraction would come she would remind me to "breathe for the baby" which I knew I needed to do, but I still found annoying. I was going to tell her it's hard to breathe when you're trying to keep from biting off your own tongue, but she was pretty pregnant herself at that point & I didn't think it was appropriate. Biggie asked me if I wanted him to get in the tub with me & I gave him a resounding yes, as if it was the stupidest thing he'd asked me in days. The tub felt so big, & I so unsteady, I felt like I had to hang on to the side or when a contraction came I might just drown. I remember at one point that Cheryl was on the phone with Christina. I was starting to get panicky that I was going to have the baby or something was going to go wrong before Christina could get there. I was mad. It seemed like years I was waiting for her to get there!

When Christina finally got there the first thing she did was check the baby's heartbeat. I haven't remembered to ask her about this, but when she first tried to find it, it seemed to me it wasn't there. It seemed like she then tried lower & got it, the precious sound, but like it was much lower in my abdomen then she had expected. It was there, nonetheless, & it reminded me that I was going to meet our younger daughter very soon. At that moment I felt a glimpse of this girl's personality. I felt that she, like her older sister, was going to be a force. I felt her preservearance & strength. Her beauty.

The contractions had now become at least four times bigger than myself. Not the pain, but the shear force of the contractions was terrifying me. I vocalized my fear & everyone reassured me. When Christina had first got there I realized my body was pushing the baby out on its own, but I had been scared to release myself to the power. Now I couldn't hold anything back. It was almost mechanical, electrical. I asked Christina to check that I was actually fully dilated; that there wasn't any bit of my cervix in the way, & I think she kind-of laughed at me. She did reach down there & told me that there wasn't anything there but the baby's head. She encouraged me to reach down & feel for myself, but I was too scared to. I felt like if I didn't have myself in the right position when a contraction hit I would collapse, doing something like fall into the water or out of the tub or just something completely ridiculous but completely reasonable to me. I wanted to tell Christina how ridiculous she was, maybe I did, but I know I did panic at this point. I knew I was going to tear & I was trying keep it from happening. At the same time, I didn't feel like I could endure very many more contractions. All of the planner & obsessive parts of me were freaking out: "You can't push- you'll tear!" "You have to push; you're going to run out of strength!" Polar opposite, classic gemini thoughts running around my skull, waving their hands in the air like they were keeping bats from getting in their hair. Finally it occured to me that I didn't have very much say over pushing or not because my body was pushing the baby out & that it didn't seem to care very much that I might tear & that her head was the biggest part of her body & after that, it was all but over. So I relented. I just let her come & the force was so humbling, I was truly beside myself that my body was so amazing.

Biggie caught her & I had to be told she was out. She came so fast & so powerfully that I didn't even know until I heard her sharp cries. I turned around, sat on my butt & they handed her to me. It didn't seem real. It was so normal & so strange at the same time. But she is here: Miss Violet Caroline. Seven pounds, nineteen & one quarter inches. At 9:45pm on November 12, 6 days before her due date. Only THREE hours of hard labor, with really no pushing on my part but for maybe two contractions. I did tear enough that we had to go to the hospital, which is a story in itself, but I'll post this & let it be for now. I'm sorry it took me so long.

excuses

2009-12-28T18:27:00.000-08:00

So. Let's go back to Sunday, November 8th, shall we? See, MiniMe's class had an assignment to dress as their favorite book character. She picked Ella the Elegant, so we had to get her a big, floppy red hat. I am so smart (S-M-R-T!) that I called all of the goodwill & thrift stores instead of trapsing all over town whilst extremely pregnant. I found a hat on the south side of town (I can't type that without giving props to Journey) & since we were down there I decided to go on a culinary adventure. I got food poisoning. I believe it was the tartar sauce & not the fish sandwich, but regardless. I puked well into Monday night & still wasn't up to eating much on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, November 11th, I woke up with contractions about 15 minutes apart. I had an appointment at the birth center that day, so I was as calm as an Ansel Adams portrait. Doo-to-do. By the time my appointment rolled around I was no longer contracting. It's alright. I had some. I had some bloody show. My midwife, Christina, discussed where we could put my heplock. She palpitated mah bellah to figure out how the baby was laying (head down, facing the passenger side), & she estimated the baby was approximately 7 pounds. She offered to do a pelvic exam to see if I was dialated. I said, "Nah. Why? It's not really going to tell us anything. So I'm dialated; it doesn't tell us much else. I'll just wait for the contractions to come back."

You must know that EVERY pelvic exam I had when I was pregnant with MiniMe sucked ass. They were EXTREMELY painful. I wanted outta there. Oh, & nachos.

My mom had come with me to the appointment in case I was still contracting, as it's an hour drive to the birth center. We went to have dinner, I got my nachos, & we went home.

Around 9pm Wednesday night I started having contractions again. They were 15 minutes apart all night long. They weren't really painful, but I was tired. I took some skullcap. No sleep. At 3am I got disgusted & took a benadryl. I slept from 3am to 6am. Ugh. The Huz got up & took MiniMe to school at 7:30. We he came home I called Cheryl, my doula. I told her I was worried because I was tired & was getting no sleep. She told me to get in the bathtub & listen to some of my hypnobabies tracks. The contractions did slow down & I was able to come up with some visualizations that I felt would get me through. I was in there for over two hours, only having about three contractions, but when I got out to go to the bathroom they came right back.

I had to break the news to The Huz that he needed to call & book our hotel room. He was under the impression that he was going to go to work. Um, no. I had him bring me a pad & pencil so I could make him a list of things still needing to be done or packed. He was acting a little hen-picked, but he got everything. He called my mom & asked her to pick MiniMe up from school. I got out of the tub & started getting a little testy. For prosterity, this is the last photo of my beautifully pregnant belly. Note the lack of stretch marks...

I have a lot more to report, but am swamped, so I'm going to leave this post as is for now. I promise, I'll post again soon. And when I say soon I do mean like within a week.

One More Year

2009-09-19T13:24:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I'm trying to keep this from being a hard time of year for me, but it isn't working very well. My dad's birthday was August 8th, & it was two years ago today that he died. His birthday snuck up on me & I didn't even realize what it was until the evening. That was a blessing. But ever since that day, I've been eying the calendar, keeping myself busy, trying to not mark the days.

I keep going back to the last time I saw him, in April of 2007. We had made one of those vacations that's not really a vacation that those of us who have moved away from their families have. Ten days of crazy driving, literal itineraries, literally a guilt trip.

This is why my dad never wanted me to get married. He never wanted to share me. Many, many trips were made from wherever I was living to his house. I would lay in the grass in the warmer months, split wood in the winter, or sweat it out in the house. (He heated his house with wood & it was usually around 85 in there!) I got there when I got there & I left when he had to go back to work. We would work on my car, wax it, mow the lawn, go into town to rent a movie, visit with his neighbors, go fishing. Just sit at the kitchen table & talk.

That last visit was nothing like that. MiniMe was 18 months old. My dad's brother & his wife had come over because they'd never met her. Dad spent most of his time on the front porch where he could smoke. MiniMe was stir crazy from all of the driving. We decided to bundle her up & take her to the cute neighborhood park up the street, even though it was in the 40's.

My dad had booked & paid for us to stay in a hotel near his house. He knew it would make it easier for me to negotiate spending time with him. It hurt me to think that he felt like he had to weigh things in his favor, but I let him do it, mostly because he wanted to.

As we all watched MiniMe scamper around the park, we were all fairly quiet. I know my Dad & I were thinking the same thing. She was exactly the age I was when he & my mom divorced. She looked so much like me I could tell it pained him. I felt like I was breaking his heart. I ached for him. I didn't know how to make it better.

But MiniMe did. In her innocence, she was just herself. She scaled the apparatus with no fear & sufficient grace. My dad was amazed by her. Her joy healed the pain. Her giggles were contagious. He commented on how capable she was & how he could tell we didn't chase her around, waiting for her to fail, & how he thought that was the way it should be. I watched him circle the park with his camera in one hand, cigarette in the other. I wasn't happy with how he looked. He looked sick. He had gained weight. His always there cough was worse than normal. He was quiet, with a fake smile plastered on his face. I wanted desperately to drag him out to the barn & ask him what was wrong, but I was afraid. I was afraid of leaving The Huz to have to run interferance between MiniMe & my family that he didn't know very well. I was afraid of what my Dad would say, more, though.

We left early because we had to get MiniMe to bed. I said goodbye to everyone, but to Dad probably at least six times. I just wanted an excuse to hug him. But everytime I did, I pulled way feeling a littel nauesous. He reeked of cigarettes. His body felt tough, like over-cooked chicken. His arms were thin & frail. It scared me.

We intended to go back the next morning, but when I called & grandma told me Dad had already left to make a run, I didn't want to. I didn't want to go back to my Dad's house, be fawned over by m grandmother or stepmom. As I've said before, that's not something I did when I was at his house. I wanted to see him. At the same time, I was kind-of glad that he had left. Being there now was awkward & awful. It was too much of a reminder that things are different. Too stark of a difference because I had changed so much, not necessarily for the worse, mind you, but drastically, none the less. Seeing my father, physically being with him, was strange because we had been apart for so long. When we spoke on the phone every week it wasn't so obvious. We were always the same. To see each other made the changes so exaggerated it was disconcerting.

We were in Michigan for several days after we left my Dad's & his route at that time was north through the Upper Peninsula, down through Wisconsin, into Chicago, over to Cincinnati, north through Toledo, than back to Port Huron. He called me on my cell phone a few times while we were there. His mood was cheerful, better than it had been on the playground. He talked about MiniMe in a way that told me he did see her as her own person. He expressed joy at getting to be with her. He was happy that I was home; that we could talk about where I was at the time & he knew what I was talking about. He would call when he knew my phone would be shut off to leave me messages telling me things he couldn't say to me in real time. Sweet things. I remember that I saved his voicemail messages from when we were there for like three months after that trip. It made me feel like I was still there.

Thinking about this trip has brought me a sense of peace about my Dad. I realized that looking back, it wasn't physically being in my Dad's presence that I needed so much as the connection. I have decided to convince myself that the connection is still there, even if the talks, the hugs, the smiles are not. Thinking about the overwhelming smell of cigarettes, the sorrow of things lost, I am trying to convince myself that we are liberated from those trappings, now. What it is truly is reminding myself that I am still me. I do not need his validation or even celebration, no matter how much I miss it. I ams what I ams & I only need to be a little more assertive of that. It was not he who made me, it was me all along. But still, it sucks that I can't talk to him about our plans, about this new daughter, the one in my belly & the one I'm becoming, about everything. I refuse to be one of those people that sits around talking or writing letters as if he is still there. It's too morbid. I'm looking for something more uplifting. That's what I miss.

Parenting Rationalizations & Pep Talk

2009-08-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

MiniMe started VPK (Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten) last week at the local Catholic School. She did great adjusting to the mandatory white leather shoes. She got up & put her uniform on all by herself. She thinks it's cool that I turned one smaller drawer of her dresser into a school-clothes only drawer & as long as she picks from that drawer, she can wear whichever shorts, shirt, sock combo she chooses. I wonder how long it's going to take her to figure out that there are seven sets of exactly the same shirts, shorts, & socks in there.

MiniMe 'signing in' on her first day

The way that they transition the kids is pretty good. Half of the class came on Wednesday, the other half on Thursday, then everybody comes together on Friday, then everybody gets a weekend back home with the fam before they start again. Sigh. Well, today, the Tuesday of the first full week, sucked. I forgot a few things I had learned back when I was still a working mom & MiniMe went to 'school'. They are my parenting transition rationalizations & they have proven true several times, so I'm sharing them.

1. Even if kids don't have separation anxiety, they will be difficult. When they go somewhere new, like a new school, new dance class, etc., they don't really know anybody. Because it's a new place with new people, many kids don't feel comfortable speaking up when they really want to. They don't feel secure, yet. Even in a very assertive child such as MiniMe, they don't know even who to go to when they have a problem or need help. They don't know if their needs are going to be met. It takes time, experiences, for that comfort level to be built up. The rules & expectations need to be felt out so that security can be established.

2. When kids are with their families, they know what to expect. They feel loved. They trust that they will still be loved. They feel secure enough to be themselves. They feel secure enough to work through the feelings accumulated throughout the day & unwind.

3. Because I am Mommy, I get the shit. Because I have done such a great job providing MiniMe with that sense of unconditional love, been consistent, holding fast to the rules & expectations, all while maintaining a cool, calm attitude, I am rewarded by being the dumping grounds for all the frustrations, challenges, lack of hugs. I am supposed to be comforted by reminding myself that the reason MiniMe is such a nasty little viper when she comes home is not because she thinks I deserve to be spoken to this way, but because she knows that even if she does, I am the only one (at least that's around) that will see her act this way & still love her. It's like she's trusting me with a secret; that she can be reaaalllly beastly, ugly, mean.

4. My job is to find a balance between reassuring her that she will find her way, that things will get more comfortable at school, and not letting her turn me into her own personal punching (& kicking!) bag. I have to remember that she still needs all the hugs, kisses, ticklies, snuggles that she has always gotten, but we have less time to squeeze them in. I cannot allow her to shout & bellow for me to, "(fill in the blank) RIGHT THIS SECOND!" I must make it clear that she is still expected to maintain a respectful tone & attitude, speak in her nice voice, use her words, cooperate.

Okay, now that that's out there, can I just say that it sucks & spend my time between laundry & dog-washing to have a little pity party for myself? Oh, & how long do I have to wait to teach her the Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Catholic School Girls Rule"?

Sisters

2009-07-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

So, we have known we are having a girl for quite a while, now. & we are all pretty happy about it. Before Biggie & I were married he told me he didn't really want a son the way many men seem to, but he definitely wanted a daughter. When we found out MiniMe was a girl we were very happy. For me, I was especially relieved because I had made a promise I didn't know if I could keep. Biggie had agreed that if it were a girl she could be named after my maternal grandmother, but if it were a boy, I would have to consent to give him a true Italian name. So, in case you're wondering, God loves me & I have proof.

Naming this girl isn't proving so easy. I gave Biggie a list of ten names that most of them he has commented over the years that he found appealing in some way. Talking about names is a touchy subject & I am sincerely hoping that I don't offend anyone in discussing names in this post. If I do, because I feel like it's inevitable, just know that I have been there. When Biggie told his old secretary what we were naming MiniMe she screamed across the dealership that our daughter was, "Going to fucking hate you!" & that her name is, "...an old lady name!" It sucks that people do that. I would never be so crass, but if you feel like I am, sorry in advance.

In order for me to explain my current number one choice, I kind of have to reveal MiniMe's true name. I'm just going to tell a story & let it be out there. We'll see how that works for a while. I will ask that my readers try to refrain from using her real name in the comments for this & any future comments because I do try to make a serious effort to protect her identity. Thanks.

Gram & I on my 3rd Birthday, They had just brought in my swing set.

Growing up I always knew my grandma's name was Evelyn & I didn't think very much of it. Most people called her Lynn, which was fine, but if I could have picked, I always would have picked something more spectacular for her, because she was a spectacular woman. When we wrote each other letters over the winters when she was in Florida & I in Michigan, we developed a habit of including unique names we had heard in our post scripts. I had suggested the name "Zoe" after seeing the movie New York Stories where there is a short entitled "Life Without Zoe". In her return my grandma replied, "Ok. What about Chloe?" When I asked her where that came from, (keep in mind this was in the late 1980's where these names were pretty uncommon), she responded, "it's my perfume". I always thought that was silly & I hated to admit that liked both names.

My grandma grew up the younger daughter in a fairly well-to-do family. She & her older sister, Lucille, went to private Catholic schools their whole lives. They were two years apart, but very close. When my Great Aunt Lucy graduated from high school she had decided that she was going to move to Ypsilanti to work in the bomber plant at Willow Run. My grandma dropped out of school to go with her. Grandma was only 16. While she was living & working there, she developed nearly fatal rheumatic fever. The man who would become my Grandpa came back from Germany & found her in the barracks, sicker than sick. The story I was told by him is that they never really dated before the war, they had just been friends. But, knowing my Grandma, I'm sure that the fact that she saw him as someone that saved her life in more ways than one had a lot to do with what they would come to mean to each other.

Grandma Lynn & Grandpa Red, August 1944

While I was growing up I always noticed how close Grandma & Aunt Lucy were. They were fun to be around. They both had six kids, even in the same order, 4 boys, 2 girls. While they raised their families about 3 hours apart in Michigan, they both bought houses in Florida when they retired that were about 3 blocks apart. They both were incredibly crafty & would sew together. When I was about eight years old I heard my Aunt Lucy call my Grandma "Evie", & I thought it was one of the sweetest things I had ever heard. It fit my Grandma so much better than Lynn, & the way Aunt Lucy said it changed everything. When I heard Aunt Lucy call her baby sister that name, I heard the lifetime of experiences they had shared. I heard secrets no one would ever know or understand. I heard the love of two sisters, now wrinkled & much duller than they had been, but absolutely sparkling in their joy, gratitude, and wisdom.

When I chose to name MiniMe Evelyn, I chose to do so because I could think of no greater legacy to attempt to bestow on her. Grandma taught me so many lessons in my life that I still frequently hear her voice whispering in my ear, the final lessons in her death, when I was just 16. Holding her hand, telling her I loved her, & knowing that it would be the last time I would actually hear her say it back was undoubtedly the hardest thing I had to do in my young life.

Aunt Lucy was mad that Grandma had left my Great-Grandmother's wedding ring to me, saying that I was too young to understand the responsibility. But Grandma did it anyway, & I have worn that ring on my right hand every day since it was given to me almost twenty years ago. When my Mom's Dad, who is still alive & full of piss & vinegar, tried to called our daughter Lynn, I downright pitched a fit. I insist that she is an Evie, & he doesn't understand.

About a week ago I took MiniMe to see The Spiderwick Chronicles, & in it there is a character named Lucy. The name haunted me. I began to remember the stories I'd been told about my Grandma & her sister. I remembered that Biggie had suggested the name Luciana a few months back, & I had given it the equivalent of a raspberry. But I thought about it again. I thought that using Luciana would honor Biggie's Italian heritage, as they so expect. But, I would also have a more personal, more sacred opportunity to honor my own heritage, & the heritage of sisters in my family. I see it as an opportunity to deepen the legacy I wish for MiniMe. I always hoped that if I were to have two daughters that they would love each other the way that my Grandma & her sister did.

Well, Biggie doesn't like that name. I don't think he's trying to be mean. I just don't think it means as much to him as it does to me. I'm trying to get him to pick something, anything, that we can both agree on & I am sick of not having some resolution. Honestly, I wish we could ask the baby what name she would like, but of course I have to keep in mind that MiniMe would rename herself Princess Aurora or Scarlett Violet, because they are her favorite colors.

But when my mom told Grandpa about my idea, of naming her Luciana, she didn't even get to the part about calling her Lucy. My Grandpa roared with laughter. He was smiling from ear to ear & said he doesn't know if the world is ready for that, yet. He said they would both be honored. & he said that he completely understood why I would want to name two sisters those names, because they were the best sisters he ever knew. By the way, he's 84, & he's known a lot of sisters.

2009-07-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

Before Biggie & I went to Michigan I asked him a favor. I asked him to not reveal our birth plan to his family. I asked this because we are planning a homebirth vbac, I don't think that they would understand, & I don't want them to be worried. I have also been trying to figure out if I wanted to put this out there on this here blog, because I was afraid of the comments I would get. I'm not scared anymore. I know what we are planning is the right thing. I thought that maybe if I put this out there I might help one more woman trust her intuition & that is worth whatever comments anyone could throw at me.

I was induced at 37 weeks with MiniMe. My OB had told me that if I had started dialating she would 'strip my membranes'. I didn't ask what that was, because I thought she knew what she was doing & if it was risky, she wouldn't be doing it. I had been in the office for a routine non-stress test when she did it. Biggie was sitting right next to me. When she pulled her arm back out of my body, with my blood dripping off her gloved hand, Biggie gave me a look that I'll never forget. The look said, "Just say the word & she'll be out cold". I couldn't speak, I felt so violated. I was reeling, thinking I couldn't trust this lady, & I didn't know what to do. The next thing I remember was Biggie telling her that I was out of breath all the time. She asked me what my pulmonologist had said at my last appointment with him, & I told her my blood oxygen was 96%. She practically leaped from the room, coming back to tell me to go immediately to the hospital. She was afraid the baby wasn't getting enough oxygen & I was going to be induced.

I remember in the car, a moment where Biggie & I questioned what we were doing. We didn't get why we were doing what we were, but we were doing it anyway. I ended up with 3 12-hour doses of cervadil, a suppository that is used to soften the cervix. I laid on my left side for the majority of 21 hours because I was terrified that our baby wasn't getting enough oxygen. I writhed in pain for most of this time, to which nurses responded with little empathy, only believing that I was legitimately in pain when they held the sides of my body when I was given an epidural.

After the epidural, which only worked on one side of my body, the next doctor on call broke my water & started me on pictocin. In my records, it says that I was given the option to stop everything, sleep, & start the pictocin in the morning. I don't remember this, but when I think about it, this seems crazy. There is no way I could have slept before the epidural. My lower back felt like someone had beat it repeatedly with baseball bats & the contractions were mind-numbing. Once the pictocin was started, I went from being dialated at 3 to 6 within an hour. I was excited; I was making progress. I remember the doctor wanted to put an internal monitor in. I didn't know why. She explained that I had been in labor for a long time & they were worried that the baby wouldn't be able to handle much more. She didn't explain that this meant they were screwing a wire into her scalp. Handy little welcome to the world, eh?

Suddenly, people were looking at the paper coming out of the monitor with concern. Shaking heads, making marks, leaving to get other people to come in & do the same. The doctor told me that that MiniMe's heart was a little too high & not coming down. She said if it didn't start coming down, we would need to consider a cesarean. It seemed like as soon as she left the room she was racing back in. Apparently MiniMe's heart rate did go back down, but so far down they were panicked. The pictocin was turned off completely. I was told that I would be getting a cesarean immediately, that it wasn't a choice, that MiniMe was dying. When they rushed me into the operating room I thought that once they got me settled they would let Biggie come in. They roughly shaved my lower belly with a cheap single blade disposable, nicking me several times. They tried to get some sort of medicine in my iv, but it wasn't working. On a good day my blood pressure is low, but after laying in a bed for a whole day, it was at a crawl. They had my arms strapped down like Christ on the cross while they poked me with needles & panic at the same time. It hurt. I cried. I asked for Biggie. They told me that there wasn't time & they were going to have to "put me out". They said if they couldn't get this one last iv to flow they would have to put in a central line. They didn't say this to me, but to each other, as if I were already "put out". A central line, in my jugular vein. So, not only would I have a scar on my belly, but on my neck, too. I pumped my fists & let myself weep. My heart rate went up & the iv flowed. I was unconscious.

MiniMe was born two days before my birthday. On my birthday I was still in the hospital, but to celebrate Biggie agreed to watch Funny Girl with me on the laptop. We ended up fighting because MiniMe was having trouble nursing & he was afraid she was starving. After he left to go home, because I asked him to, I ended up dripping little drops of clostrum into her mouth with a medicine cup, weeping because I was terrified that I wasn't doing the right thing.

While the first week that we were home was one of my favorite times in our marriage, Biggie only had one week off & after he went back to work things were not okay. I did not have post-pardom depression; I was very closely bonded to MiniMe before she even came out of me. I couldn't take my painkillers because I was alone most of the time, was afraid I would fall asleep & not wake up when she needed me. My incision became infected & Biggie had to clean it out with peroxide for me twice a day. I drove 45 minutes each way to see a lactation consultant twice a week. MiniMe couldn't go for more than 4 hours without eating for the first 3 months of her life, & this was only to be once a day. The rest of the time she had to eat every 2 hours. So for the first 3 months of her life I never got more than 4 hours of sleep at a time.

I went back to work, full time, when MiniMe was just 9 weeks old. My marriage suffered terribly. We bought a new house to be closer to our work & MiniMe's school. I think if had been thinking more clearly at the time I would have just stayed in our old house & quit working. It didn't occur to me.

It took me nearly two years to figure out that my reaction to MiniMe's birth was not normal. I sought therapy & was told I had indicators of post traumatic stress disorder. Throughout the therapy I had nightmares that were largely flashbacks. I realized that I was terrified of having another child because I didn't want to go through what I had again. My therapist recommended a new movie tht had just comeout on video, "The Business of Being Born". I watched it with Biggie & that was one of the handful of times I have seen him cry. He was furious. It was exactly what had been done to me.

So I've been investigating what our options are for the last two years. & this is what we've come to. I'm excited, not scared. I just wish we could decide on a fricken name.

& I didn't need the red shoes to get there

2009-06-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

We all got up at the crack of dawn to get to the airport. As soon as we landed, we drove north, to Petoskey, where I was born. We stopped about an hour north of the airport to eat at The French Laundry, what used to be a little restaurant, in the little town of Fenton. I once worked just minutes from the place & they have a sandwich that is probably one of my favorites, anywhere. It's a combination some find weird; chicken salad, cream cheese, red onions, raspberry preserves & leaf lettuce in a whole wheat wrap. I think it's delicious & I cannot quite replicate it. Plus, they have new dill pickles, which I also love & cannot find anywhere in our county. If I could find some decent cucumbers, I'd make my own. But I digress.

As soon as we got out of the car to go into the restaurant, MiniMe immediately noticed the grass. She stood on the sidewalk staring at it, then crouched down to brush her hands over it, calling it "baby grass". She was shocked when I told her she could walk on it & looked at me like I was suggesting she walk on silk sheets. "I know," I told her. "I think it's wonderful, too."

We ate outside. It was about 68 degrees, but it was breezy & sunny & felt like heaven. The food was good, but the service was slow, lousy, & we had a long drive. The drive was surreal. We do have trees here in Florida, but they aren't as tall or numerous as the ones in Michigan. Even in the city, things in Michigan somehow seem cleaner. I have a theory that the process of winter, the freezing & thawing, make everything seem that way, but Florida gets such rain, you would think it'd be a wash. (ha!) As we drove, I felt like I was sitting there with my mouth open, in a haze. I was tired; I only got about 3 hours of sleep the night before, but it was so weird. As my mom moved downstate when she & my Dad divorced, I made this drive many, many times in my life. There were experiences that felt like flashbacks. Little miniscule things I had forgotten; the way sunlight dapples through the leaves of deciduous trees in the afternoon, the feeling of weightlessness for that second when you launch over a dip in the road. They seem so insignificant, but I had not felt them for so long after being a daily occurrence. Like I said, surreal.

Our first destination was the home of my godparents, Craig & Harriet. Their three children are all younger than me, but all grown & gone. They lived right next door to my parents before I was born & though we went through a long stretch of time where we had lost contact, Uncle Craig tracked me down right before I met Biggie & I have never felt anything but love from them. When my Dad died we stayed with them for 3 days & it was a great comfort to me to be with people that were more concerned about my loss; that I didn't have to comfort over their loss. We really just went to be with them, in their home, in that town. Petoskey is a beautiful little town on a bay of Lake Michigan. The views are stunning. It is one of those places that if you visit in the summer you can't understand how it is not overrun with Holiday Inns & high-rise condos. Well, the average snowfall there is such that as a child we had to shovel the snow off the roof of the house so the roof didn't cave in. Most people that live there have snowshoes, because they are needed, & if you don't have a tractor, you certainly seek someone out that does to befriend, because it is inevitable that you or a loved one will need to be dug out at some point. Jobs are scarce there, & although it hasn't had the steep decline of the Southeast part of the state, it has always been of a slower pace, a simpler time.

Even though we didn't arrive until the early evening, it was still warm. MiniMe was amazed at how comfortable it was outside, with more baby grass, the breezes, the lack of the oppressive heat. Biggie looked at the clock at 10pm & was shocked because the sun was just going down. Petoskey is north of the 45th parallel, so in the summer the days are almost 16 hours long. It is something I relished as a kid. Just another one of those things MiniMe is missing out on that she doesn't even realize.

Being with my godparents gives me the illusion of growing up with many things I did not, but easily could have. The illusion that I grew up with both a mother & father, in the same home, for example. The illusion that I belong more to this place than I truly do. Uncle Craig & Aunt Harriet give up their own bed for Rick & I to sleep in when we come to visit them. The simple sweetness of this gesture speaks volumes. I was miserable with an upper respiratory virus while we were there, as was MiniMe. When she took a long nap the second day we were there, Aunt Harriet & I had a nice talk on their deck. She loves me, & I her. It is so nice to be with people that love you & pray for you, even when you speak infrequently.

The second day we were there we went to see my step-mother, Linny. She has been staying in Petoskey, with her own mother, for much of the time since my father passed. The home that was her & my dads' is in a remote town on 3 acres. She fell the winter after he died trying to clear the driveway & they didn't realize until the following fall that she had actually broken her pelvis when that happened. She had surgery to re-break the three places where it had broken & since healed incorrectly, last December. She has been staying in Petoskey, also near two of her three children, all of this time.

Visiting Linny was a strange experience for me. We have both remarked to each other that we both feel that no one else can understand the loss we feel for my Dad as we do for one another. My dad's mom is still alive, & yes, we know that she misses him, too. But her loss is almost as if she has lost a prize possession; something to be angry about, to avenge. I have not spoken to her much since my father has been gone because the conversation inevitably turns to things that were either my dad's or his father's or both & how Linny is not doing as my grandmother thinks she should with these things. I don't think it is any of my grandmother's business, & more over, I think it's a cruel place to put Linny when my dad didn't leave a will. I have developed a policy that I never really thought about that I would keep my mouth shut about things unless it really bothered me or Linny asked me. When she told me last year that she wanted to sell the house, I didn't have a problem with it. She told me the day we visited that she has accepted an offer on the house. I was shocked. The market in Michigan has been nothing short of awful, & as proof, she sold the house for the price my Dad paid for the land alone, almost 20 years ago. I don't begrudge her. It is too much for her to deal with. It's just that her children & grandchildren are already swarming like vultures because they know she will have money & that makes me ill. It's not that I want the money, it's that my dad died on the job. He never got a day off. I want him back & I can't have that. & it is his hard work that paid for that house. I talked to Aunt Harriet & Biggie about it. They understand. It's just one of those things that sucks, I talk about, it still sucks, but it will always suck, so I move on.

After two days of Petoskey, we headed back downstate to stay with my Aunt, MiniMe's godmother, just north of Detroit. We are pretty close, & I was sad that we were only staying with her for one night. She also gives her own bed to Biggie & I when we visit & it doesn't go unnoticed or unappreciated. I had made plans to go to dinner with a group of women that evening; my only activity away from Biggie & MiniMe while we were there. Aunt Mary grilled us some steaks & we ate outside. We walked down to the lake, along the shore, & sat in a swing. MiniMe begged Aunt Mary to tell her a story about Sonya. (Biggie frequently makes up stories starring Sonya & MiniMe always requests her. My story character is a girl named Isla, but she's not nearly as popular as Sonya.) Aunt Mary did a splendid job.

I went to pick up another mom that was going to the dinner & Biggie, MiniMe, Aunt Mary & her friend all went to see the movie Up. It was nice to be out, with friends, & know that Biggie & MiniMe were out having their own fun. My ankles were so swollen at this point I had to take up a valuable seat at the table to put them up. I talked with another pregnant mother most of the night, but I still got to get faces to go with names I have known for months. Just to be in a place that isn't dominated by retirees, where I'm not the youngest person in the room besides our kid, was nice.

The next morning we planned on going to eat breakfast at one of my long-missed restaurants then onto an annual tour of my favorite neighborhood in Detroit. I figured out after we got everything packed up to go that I had ruined our plans. I had borrowed my Aunt's GPS to get around the night before, & when I returned it to her car I accidentally dropped the keys to our rental car in her console. She had left for work before we even got out of bed & wouldn't be done until after lunch. I figured out where she worked, called her there, & yes, that's what happened. She called her friend who came, got the keys from her & then brought them to us. It wasn't a total wash. MiniMe spent our time waiting laying in the baby grass, rolling down the hill. Although, we didn't get to eat at that restaurant, (The Breakfast Club, for my Metro Detroit readers), & just typing about that makes my pregnant belly rumble, my mouth water.

The tour was my favorite thing that we did there. It was stressful, at times, wrangling a somewhat bored preschooler through meticulously maintained homes. The number of times I reminded her to "look with her eyes & not her hands" was too numerous to count. She was frustrated because the lure of these homes to her is the fact that they have an upstairs & I believe only one home on the tour had the upstairs open. But doing the tour changed our plans as a family. We strolled through the neighborhood, in the supposedly Most Dangerous City in the Country, with no fear. We walked under trees old enough to be taller than the houses, past houses with shiny windows, in gardens with peonies and dahlias. Biggie told me if I can find a way for us to afford it, we can move there. While my taste tends to run more toward the Arts & Crafts style, which we did get to see in the Stratton house I wrote about before, Biggie's favorite house was a federal style colonial by architect C. Howard Crane that used to belong to Jack White. MiniMe loved it, too, but I think it was more about the gracious Airdale in the backyard. "It's a Neighborhood!" she said, like she had found The Definition according to Webster.

My ankles were hideously swollen at this point, so we left to check into our (thankfully) nearby hotel. We drove up Grand Boulevard, past houses that were once as grand as those we had just toured, but were now in shambles. I fight the sorrow. I've come to a place where I can see it for what it is. I believe that the change is necessary, inevitable, & gets much more than its' share of publicity as the best example of the worst things happening. I am just happy to see them occupied. Our hotel, The Hotel St. Regis, is a place I have spent a considerable amount of time in. It just recently underwent a substantial renovation & I was pleased. While our room was small, the view was directly down Cass Avenue, & the beds were the most comfortable we slept on for the entire trip. I rested for a bit & then changed my clothes to meet Biggie's father & sister for dinner.

They fought my choice of restaurants, Andiamo's, but I was going under the advice of the women I met from the Detroit Free Press, & I didn't relent. I could go on & on about this, but just know that Canadians, well, at least the ones I married into, don't like doing anything in Downtown Detroit. I forced their hand, because I am The Mean Daughter-In-Law & I travelled several hundred miles, with a preschooler & pregnant, the least they can do is let me pick the restaurant.

It was during the Stanley Cup playoffs, so the restaurant had tried to make things easier on themselves by limiting the menu & offering a buffet. I felt gypped. We all got the buffet, which was great, but I still had like 3 different entrees in my head that I was trying to pick from before I sat down. I indulged in an Ice Cream Puff Sundae covered with Saunder's Hot Fudge for dessert. This hot fudge is a Detroit standard & is actually a milk chocolate caramel, not the plastic-y dark brown most other places serve. I didn't eat all of the pastry, but I did scrape up every bit of that stuff that I could.

My father-in-law & I tend to clash, but I think we got along fairly well; we even sat next to each other. MiniMe decided almost immediately that she loves my sister-in-law, Biggie's younger sister. She chose to have her Aunt take her to the bathroom about five minutes after we met up, which isn't like her at all. Biggie's sister is a competitive body builder, yoga instructor, & licensed massage therapist. She was discussing yoga & MiniMe piped up to say that she wanted to show her Aunt her tree pose. I think her Aunt was touched that MiniMe knows yoga & she asked me to take a picture of them doing it together. She posted it on her facebook page the next day. It was sweet. (& yes, Kristine, that's the aforementioned Christmas tree)

The following day we had plans to meet up with some friends that were going downtown for the Tiger's game, that we hadn't seen since 2004. They tend to not do much downtown, as do many suburban Detroiters, except contribute to traffic to attend sport events, & then leave right away. I suggested a place practically right across the street from the ball park. We had a nice breakfast together & they asked us what our plans were for the day, which were to go down to a newer park on the riverfront where there is a carousel & a bike shop that is owned by a friend of my from college, Wheelhouse Detroit. MiniMe begged her new friends to come with us, & they did. While Kelli B., my friend from college, was doing a bike tour of her beloved Corktown that day & not at the shop, we had a nice time down at the riverfront. We all rode the carousel & MiniMe even got to ride the token mermaid.

As we walked along the river, I marveled at how clean the water is compared to my younger days, as well as to the inter-coastal waterway here in Fort Myers. I laid in the baby grass, again, and spoke to our unborn child with my heart. If I close my eyes, I can still go back there, & I have several times since we came home.

We dropped our friends off at the stadium & went back to the hotel. We then drove out to a town to the west, Belleville, where Biggie's brother & sister-in-law live. They had a small birthday party for my mother-in-law with mostly people I know, & a few I did not. I tend to not fit into the typical doting, hovering females, but am not welcomes into the activities of the men either. I tend to stay on the periphery, where I am okay, but now that MiniMe is older, it is more obvious. After most everybody left, Biggie's sister was kind enough to give me a small yet intense massage. It was needed, but I always feel bruised the next day, she is so strong. We went back to our hotel & we all slept well.

The next day we got up & checked out of the hotel, then went for breakfast at a fairly new restaurant I had read about located in Corktown, Le Petite Zinc. It was a cool, drizzly day & MiniMe was grumpy in her slightly too small raincoat. Honestly, breakfast would have been heavenly without her whiny, testy little attitude, but even with it, our meal was the best we ate on this trip. Biggie & I both had crepes with spinach, pine nuts & a salty cheese. The coffee was strong, not bitter, & fresh. I can understand why, even on a Monday morning, the sweet waitress had to rush around briskly & take help from the chef. We let MiniMe wander out the doorway into the garden where we could still see her as she picked up stones to put into the fountain & we rubbed our bellies, sipping the last of our coffee. We took our time leaving & MiniMe validated my perspective that she was cranky by falling asleep in the car as we drove back to my brother-in-laws.

Belleville, where they live, is closer to Ann Arbor than to Detroit. My brother & sister-in-law wanted to go to Zingerman's, a bourgeois, expensive, yet good deli in Ann Arbor that is pretty famous. The original deli is located in a converted victorian home in downtown Ann Arbor. Biggie loves a lot of their mail order catalog, but detests actually eating there, because the tables are either outside in a tent or really teeny tables upstairs. He likes space when he eats & if he pays $15 for a sandwich, it should have more prosciutto on it than what he has gotten there in the past. I lived in Ann Arbor for four years, & during most of that time I did not have a car, so I know it pretty well. I suggested we instead go to Zingerman's Roadhouse, an actual restaurant they established in 2004, inside a former steakhouse. It made me feel good to help his family discover a restaurant they didn't know about as well as find a compromise between what they wanted to eat & Biggie's issues. The meal itself was a trial for me because, again, MiniMe was really cranky. At one point I did take her back out to the car to sit for a few minutes to decompress, but it was still nice.

MiniMe took to this Aunt, as well, much easier than I expected her to. It was a shock to me to have help around in regard to her & to not be the sole person her endless stream of thoughts is directed at. Our last morning of the trip, I woke up to go to the room where she slept only to find my sister-in-law wedged into the sofa bed next to her. Apparently, MiniMe had nightmares the night before & my sister-in-law just climbed into bed with her. I was touched that she would do that for her, & appreciative that I got one last good last rest before we had to schlep back to the heat of Florida.

The trip home was brutal, uneventful, & this post is bordering on novella, so I will let that sweet gesture be the end. I wanted to get all this down for MiniMe to read later & before I forgot how things were. I have proofread it a few times, I feel like there are still some things to fix, but people are pestering me about our trip, so here it is.

This little light of mine

2009-06-15T09:29:00.000-07:00

Dear MiniMe,

Four years ago, on June 11, 2005, at about 1:30am, I was unconscious as you took your first breaths. About an hour later, I am told that I held you for the first time, that I wept, but I don't remember it. The first thing I remember is putting my hands on your belly as you lay in that plastic bassinet & singing the Waylon Jennings song "If You Ask Me To" to you. To anyone who has heard the song a few times, they might think the morphine was still a little high, but for anyone who knows the words, I'm sure they'd understand. I mean every word, & you now know them by heart.

As we have come to know each other, your personality has seemed to be there all along. I've always felt like I've known you for a long time. When I think back to my life before you, when I would think about what a child of mine would be like, you are just as I always knew you would be in so many ways. Yet, you are so much better. I always thought you would look more like Biggie, with darker hair & eyes. The first time your Nonna met you she held you up in the air, saying, "Oh! Look at my little Calabrese!" I scoffed inside. You look so much like me it hurts sometimes, but you do it better. Your eyes sparkle more, you've got some of your dad's curls right at the ends of your hair, you are more honest than I could ever hope to be. I am proud of how authentic you are. I do my best not to be hurt when you don't want to hug me, but thankfully it is rare. You indulge my policy that I don't get out of bed until somebody gives me a hug, & I thank you for it.

I need you to know that I am not the kind of mother I want to be, sweetheart. I hate that we are trapped inside during this relentless heat. I am sorry that I can't take you for a walk in the woods, to try to master your new scooter, or to just lay in the grass & look at the clouds. I'm sorry that you are forced to settle, day after day, with your sometimes cranky & not-so-creative mom. I am trying to do something about it, but the guilt is a heavy burden.

I am so grateful that you love to help me. Yes, most of the time it takes me longer to get tasks completed because you do, but the fact that you want so earnestly to make things easier for me speaks volumes about your character. In your own way, you tell me that you see all I do for you & that you think it is right. So many times you show that you understand me better than most adults do & you never question my motivations. You seem to always trust that I will not let you down, & while some may see that as a disservice in some way, I don't. Some days it is the only validation I can find.

Although I want this to be about you, I have to tell you I am so excited for you to become a big sister. Just yesterday I asked you what am I going to call this new baby, because only you can be my Punk. You said, "Oh, Mama! You'll come up with something! You always do!" You are such a great little cheerleader, you make our whole family excited to see what is down our path.

You are on the cusp of going out in the world to meet new people. While I worry over if you will find the balance between staying true to yourself & being gracious, I'm excited. I can't wait to hear you describe your experiences in your exuberant, colorful vocabulary. I savor every morsel, lovey. More than anything, thank you for loving me back. I don't know what I did to deserve you. I strive everyday to do so.

For Mimi...

2009-05-23T12:19:00.001-07:00

My mom was a single parent, essentially, living 4 hours from my father. I spent a considerable amount of time in day care, with babysitters, some family, for most of my early childhood. I remember very fondly the sweet Montessori school she sent me to when I was 3 & 4, run by the Dominican Sisters & a bit of a drive for her. I remember learning how the calendar worked in 1978, when I was four, & the feeling of pride I got from understanding. I remember generally gazing over the classroom & being proud of the sense of order that there was, with everything having a place, & knowing there were still discoveries for me to make. I felt comfortable with my teachers as well as my peers; I had a sense of community. This was a primary reason in me wanting to send MiniMe to Montessori, & I know she found her experience to be as satisfying as mine.

When we moved into the City, 3 blocks from the very house my mom grew up in, I was to go to the same elementary school as she did. On the first day of kindergarten I had an awful experience I remember very vividly almost 30 years later. The teacher was going over the alphabet, probably to get a sense of where we, the students, were in our understanding. I was bored. I reached over another student to grab a Little Golden Book, opened it, & read quietly to myself. The teacher scolded me for not participating with the group. I told her, "I already know that, though. I've never read this book before." She mocked me. She ended up bringing me up to the front of the class, where she was standing & all the other students were sitting in front of her on the floor. She didn't believe that I could read, so she literally dared me to read the book aloud. I knew that she expected me to fail, which was something I hadn't really experienced before. I read, slowly, but certainly. The kids in the class didn't seem to understand that what I was doing was a positive thing. All they understood was that the teacher was mocking me. The fact that I could read was irrelevant. I was disobedient. I did not conform. I was to be punished. I was to be mocked.

I went home that day & cried more than I had when my Brittany, Missy, had run away. I was beside myself. I didn't understand. Thankfully, my mother understood exactly. In fact, she had even endured the cruelty of the same kindergarten teacher herself as a child. She made an appointment with the principal of the school & I did not go back until after we met with Mr. Castle.

When we met with him I remember he & my mom explained to me that I would be given some questions on paper & I was to just do as best as I could. There was no right or wrong answers, they just wanted to see how much I understood. I remember rows & columns of words that were somehow related. I had to circle some things, or underline them, or simply read them aloud. I was comfortable. I didn't feel like I had on that first day of kindergarten & was relieved.

The decision was made to just put me in first grade at 5 years old. I remember my teacher, Ms. Shirley, who used phonics before they were very popular. She used to put words on stars around the ceiling & we would take turns reading them aloud as she pointed to them with her pointer. I was not afraid to succeed or be proud.

I remember in 2nd grade I left the rest of my regular class for a few hours a week & went to the library with other kids from other classrooms. We did special projects where we got new markers, new books, & it was there that I first heard that I was gifted. In the 4th grade, my best friend, Rachel Hernandez, & I were moved out of the same class as our other friend, Ramona Castro. Ramona's mom tried to get her moved into our class, but they wouldn't let her. I remember how mad Ramona was at us, but we didn't understand why the grown ups did what they did. Rachel & I were put into a 'split' classroom, where there were about another 8 students our age, 4th graders, but the rest of the class were 5th graders. My mom made the decision to put me in private school before I got to junior high because she was a juvenile social worker, she knew too much, & she didn't want me to be 10 years old going to school with pregnant girls.

When I was older & we moved out of the City into a more affluent suburb, I had a hard time. I was the girl from a broken home with the wrong clothes. I had a hard time adjusting socially & because of that my grades suffered initially. Eventually, I grew into high school, but while I did have a few close friends, I was behind socially. When my classmates turned 16 & got cars, my parents tried to compensate by buying me a moped. I didn't turn 16 until the summer before my senior year. I started college when I was just 17, and I wasn't very street smart. I had a hard time in college because I didn't know what to do with myself. For the first time in my life, I had to study, & I didn't know how.

I have been thinking about this a lot because MiniMe is going to four in a few short weeks & she is eligible for the Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten program, which covers a big portion of the cost of her to be in certain pre-school settings starting in the fall. (You know, the fall, when I'm due to have another rugrat to suck up my time as well as my breastmilk) She is desperately in need of being with some sort of a peer group, as we live in a seriously unbalanced population. She was used to being in group care from 9 weeks old until just last summer, so she is incredibly social. But the choices for schools here are, well, let's just say that the state of Florida is currently ranked #49 in the country for quality of education.

In raising MiniMe thus far, we have cultivated a love of learning in her that is nearly unquenchable. She is caught between wanting to be an astronaut, a violinist, a veterinarian, a scientist, and a dancer. The library is like a fantasy to her, where any question she has can be explored. She has asked for Gray's Anatomy (the book) for her birthday because she is fascinated with what is going on in there. I love to hear her questions, as they are already so thoughtful, it is possible to have an intelligent conversation with her. I am afraid, however.

I feel as if there is a choice where you have to cross a boundary, & I feel I am upon its' precipice. As we have let MiniMe's desires lead her, she knows all of the planets in the solar system, but does not recognize each letter of the alphabet. She can tell you what a gardenia, bougainvillea, hibiscus, plumbago, & bromeliad are, how banyan trees grow from the top down, but she cannot grasp why twenty-ten is not a number.

We have chosen to send her to the local Catholic school because, well, we are, & this is the first year they are participating in the VPK program. Another part of my rationale is that if we are still here (God forbid) for the following school year & cannot get her into the arts magnet elementary, at least we would have the option of keeping her at the Catholic school as it goes through 8th grade, & we would be able to provide her some sort of continuity. I am worried, however, that they will squelch our passionate girl.

I remember, sitting in Calculus class, & being irate with the teacher. I could not grasp the concept & was trying to get him to help me visualize what the concept was. He lost patience with me & told me to just follow the directions. It was the first class I ever failed. This rutabaga cannot just follow processes very well without understanding how the process related to something tangible. I learned math in Montessori, which uses a series of manipulative beads to illustrate the concepts. I realized that while I was given a firm foundation of loving to learn, a gift of having things taught to me in a way that I fully understood them, I never learned to just memorize for the sake of memorization. What a waste, I thought, of my time & my thoughts.

The Catholic school expects MiniMe to be able to write her name when she starts in August, & I am expected to teach her this. I'm annoyed. This is yet another fine example of where No Child Left Behind has gotten us; children must learn how to test well. We both have such better things to do with our time. When she decides she wants or needs to know this, she will, & it will take her all of a half hour at most. But to force her to sit, at not quite 4 years old, & learn this thing that someone else has decided she needs to know, I don't know if I can do it. Part of the reason I think the Catholic school would be good for her is because I don't want her to be in Calculus class one day & be in that place that I was. I want her to know how to study. But at the same time, I hear Yeats, whom I share a birthday with saying, "Education is not a filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire."

I know she is smart. I don't care if someone thinks she's gifted; in fact, I hope no one ever labels her as such. It's an awful kind of pressure. I'm more worried about squelching that little flame. It is so beautiful, it lights up my days.

raising my hackles

2009-05-11T18:32:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about one of my favorite houses in Detroit that was on the market last year for a very reasonable price. It is known by some as the Mary Chase Stratton house, who was the founder of Pewabic Pottery. I lived right down the street from Pewabic for a while & I use to go there just to look & touch the magnificent tiles that they make. I went to the Pewabic website to revisit some of those tactile memories & I got a chill.

Mrs. Stratton was an amazing woman. She grew up in the Upper Pennisula of Michigan,in what is called Copper Country because of the copper mines. Mrs. Stratton named the company after a river where she grew up near Hancock. Pewabic is an Ojibawa word used to describe copper, or the sheen of copper, which Mrs. Stratton replicated in her beautiful glazes.

As I was reading about all of this, I felt a breeze on the nape of my neck, though no windows were open. I was thinking about my family that comes from the same place; my father's family. I felt, very strongly, the presence of my father. I could even smell the Swisher Sweets.

I don't like to say I believe in ghosts. I want & need to believe the loved ones that I have lost are away from this world, its' pain, & in a better place. All of them were lost to cancer. But when I put my hand to my belly, my heart sends out tentacles to wherever that place is. I cannot fathom that I will be having a child that my father will never know. When I heard these words in my head, I cried, but almost immediately, I felt comfort. I felt the comfort that my father, even though he is gone, believes in me.

I am afraid to think about the things that I want too much because I am afraid of failing. I am afraid to miss home too much because I may not be able to return. My mother reminds me often that you can't go back home. But in that fear, I look up to see MiniMe at her easel. I hear my dad's giggle. I remember him telling me that it is okay to fail, but not okay to give up.

So I will push forward with my plans for a business that will help us to be able to go wherever we want to go, regardless of the local economy. Biggie is taking us to Michigan for my birthday & I am giddy to get there. I can't hope too hard that he will find a way to want to go back. I have to keep reminding myself that MiniMe's birthday is right after we come back so I don't forget to plan it & send out invitations. This trip is eclipsing so many exciting things, even my first ultrasound, that it is speaking volumes to me about how much I miss Detroit. I can't wait to take pictures of the places I miss & share them with you.

Taking Me back to Dionne Warwick & Stevie Wonder

2009-05-08T13:30:00.000-07:00

I think Kristine was in my car for all of 30 seconds before I had told her I was pregnant. We hadn't been in the same room together since 2003, but I couldn't tell. We were right back at it, finishing each other's sentences, swapping stories, just as we always have. It was so nice, to not have pretense, not that I normally do, but it's different with certain people.

Morgan, or Momo, her daughter, is a doll. I think she may be the most mellow baby I have ever spent time with. The kid cried maybe twice that I noticed in four days she was here, furthering what I have always said; if we have another girl we might as well name her Scarlett, because that would be more honest. I loved following her chirpy little butt around, introducing her to the chalkboard easel, the ball tracker. So easily entertained. With none of the dramatic sighs & "Well, you know..."s that are MiniMe. But then again, MiniMe is also so affectionate, not that Momo isn't, but I like me some hugs. & I got them, from Kristine, in spades.

Whenever we have company Biggie is always trying to get them to the beach. I know people like the beach, but I don't. Especially since I've become a mother. The sunscreen slathered everywhere, the squinting, the covering of the fat rolls, the greasy food, the sand in every crevice & throughout the car for months, it's just not worth it to me. God Bless Kristine. She was content with the few sporadic plans I had made; open gymnastics, lunch, the fabric store, the Italian market, walking in our woods were enough. She came to see us, not the place.

I had forgotten how fun Kristine is & how much she likes me. I was remembering being on the phone with a resident when we worked together, Kristine was sitting across my desk, drawing crazy stick figure drawings. I was being given a verbal finger-shaking from the person on the phone, but my voice was smiling, because Kristine was bored. She would come out to sit with me when I took a cigarette break, even though she didn't smoke. When she was here, Biggie did something, maybe it was my hormones being insensitive to him or my hormones making me overly sensitive to him, that hurt me. I didn't have to say a thing. I got one of those sobbing, can barely get the words out talks that we all need to have with a girlfriend every once & while. Other company that we have had has stressed me out, making me worry about the dishes, the towels, the dog hair. Kristine is the kind-of friend that loads the dishwasher, finds the coziest way to sit on the sofa, & is like she lives down the street.

MiniMe has this ritual thing that I have always done to calm her down before she goes to sleep called ticklies. It involves feathery stroking of her limbs, torso, wherever her bossy self can think of. When MiniMe wanted Kristine to read her a bedtime story instead of Mom, I didn't have to explain what ticklies are. Kristine already knew. Even better, on Sunday, while we were laying around before we had to go to the airport, Kristine gave me some ticklies. Now THAT'S a friend.

So, Kristine. Thank you for coming to visit me. It meant more to me than I can explain. I so hope I can find a way to come visit you. Bless your sweet girl. Thank Brad for letting his girls go for a few days. My only regret is that we didn't get a picture of us together. But, we will.

Our Little Pilgrim

2009-05-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

So, I'm pregnant.

I'm due two days before Biggie's birthday, (Nov. 20th), which is funny because MiniMe was born to days before my birthday, (June 13th). Not that I put much stock in due dates. MiniMe's was June 27th. My mom's due date for me was May 22nd. So in other words, we're not a timely bunch in these parts.

Be glad that I decided to not blog about this in my first trimester. About 2 days after I figured out that I really didn't need to rush out for tampons, Kristine decided she was going to come visit so I decided to wait to tell her face to face. I also considered the fact that things happen & I didn't want to force a bunch of people that have never laid actual eyes on my person feel sorry for me if something went wrong. But let's just say that being pregnant at 34 is a lot different than it was at 29. No, I haven't had morning sickness; I've had evening sickness. It starts right around the time I'm supposed to go in the kitchen & mess around with raw meat, stinky cheese, other generally smelly things. The actual first red flag that I might be pregnant was when I was cooking sausages with cheese & parsley for the fam, lifted the lid to turn them over, & promptly did an about face to vomit into the sink. The only thing that has sounded appetizing to 'me' (I am temporarily hijacked & my taste buds are not to be trusted), is turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, with gravy & cranberries. Poor Biggie. There is a Bob Evans on his way home that we have developed a first name relationship with. I think it's waning, though. I actually managed to eat a chicken burrito last night, so let's hope I can move on to other foods soon.

I think I just have an aversion to food I cook, because nothing I can think of cooking for dinner sounds good. Well, maybe some grilled cheese & tomato soup?

The week, a summary

2009-04-26T19:29:00.001-07:00

I hate sippy cups. MiniMe has been able to drink out of a regular, open-topped cup since she was a year old. When we go to restaurants we always ask them to bring her a regular glass of water, just like the rest of us. Sometimes I'll get crazy descriptive & ask for a juice glass. Is that unclear? Because, a lot of the time they go ahead & bring the damned plastic cup with the lid & the straw that we know is just going in the damned landfill as soon as we leave if we don't take it home & recycle it. So, then if they bring it to the table & we send it back, we know it just goes in the damn trash. I hate these people that make our carbon footprint bigger because they are too lazy to listen. Dammit.

I am MiniMe's friend. She has been ultra affectionate with me this week. I am a great mom, she tells me. This has nothing to do with homemade chocolate chip cookies, four trips to the park this week, one spur-of-the-moment playdate with one of her favorite girlfriends, or Bubblefest '09.

I have BIG news. BIG. I just can't tell y'all yet, because it's not ready to be unveiled yet. But please come back soon, because I NEED INPUT!

Biggie rocks. He has sold 24 cars this month. Craziness. Some whole dealerships don't sell that many cars in a month. Not our Biggie. Oh, & he took today OFF because he sold 4 cars alone yesterday. He may not help me much around the house, may be a little too much a smart-as morning person, but hey, he sells the cars.

Kristine coming Thursday. Much cleaning, sprucing, checklist making between now & then. Plus, MiniMe has her fricken VPK interview. I'm thinking that the interviewers better have their game faces on because she wants some answers on why, exactly, they are going to make her wear plain white leather tennis shoes. She thinks they are ugly.

Warning: If this doesn't make you tear up you have no heart

2009-04-17T09:02:00.000-07:00

On Easter we went to Mass, came home, I made cinnamon rolls & chicken sausages. MiniMe found her eggs & basket. She proceeded to hatch & heal the plastic eggs all day long. She completely reinforced the idea that we need to obtain a living situation where we can have a couple of chickens. She loves them.

My mom came over & we all sort of tag teamed dinner. It was rich & we all ended up splayed over our sofa. After growling over the car shows that Biggie chose to subject us to all day, I insisted on watching The Sound of Music. He groaned. It was 4 hours long, due to the fact that it was on ABC Family & had commercials. He said he has seen it before, but I don't think that was a true statement. I think a true statement would be that he has been in the room before when it was on, but I'll elaborate on this further later.

I am ever-so-glad I insisted on watching this movie. I love Rodgers & Hammerstein. My Gram was one of those women who would chirp about the kitchen, humming these old classics, & was famous for making up her own lyrics when she couldn't remember the actual words. I can't listen to Blue Indigo without tearing up, remembering how she changed the lyrics to be about how sad she was without me around. My friend Kristi & I used to play a travel game where we would sing snippets from show tunes & the others in the car had to guess the show. But in the Hierarchy of Show Tunes, anything once sung by Julie Andrews is known backwards, forwards, sideways, in reverse ala Black Sabbath. I have VIVID memories of The Sound Music viewings with my Gram. I knew that MiniMe was finally old enough to at least stop & stare a few times at the screen. She exceeded my expectations.

First of all, through the viewing of the Good Night Song, MiniMe has perfected her curtsy. She has requested a "twirly" dress every day since then, so as to have sufficient skirt to hold to the sides of her body n the event she stumbles upon what she believes is an appropriate time to curtsy. Say, to Farmer Red, the farmer we buy our greens from at the Farmer's Market.

She chirps around the house, I am certain in her head she is flanked by matching siblings, prancing around Salzburg. She has requested a white dress with a blue sash. She has consulted with many people she thinks are smart to attempt to come to a solution on the problem of Maria.

By the last scenes of the movie, when the von Trapps are attempting to escape the Nazis, my mom had gone home, & MiniMe was snuggled in between Biggie & I on the sofa. I explained that the men in the matching suits were trying to make The Captain leave Maria & the children to fight in a war he didn't believe in. Biggie made me absolutely speechless, saying that he didn't think it was fair to the family to leave the lavish existence behind, that he would have just gone along. Apparently he didn't pay much attention in history class about the Nazi's. I explained that there was no way they would have let Maria, a Catholic, stay in that house with the children. They surely would have taken it for some senior officer. As far as The Captain, there isn't even any certainty that they would have even put him in command of anything, given his outspoken disagreement with the Third Reich; they may have just taken him away & killed him to prevent him from lending his support to The Allies. I told Biggie, in no uncertain terms, would he ever have left us to fight a war none of us supported, and that we would all be better together than separate with more material wealth. His life is priceless to us.

At this point, MiniMe looked up at him and said, "Daddy, I'd die for you."

Heart. Shattered. I couldn't speak, I just hugged her. I looked over her head at him with tears in my eyes & told him she had heard Father David during the homily talking about how few of us realise we have people in our lives that would give their lives for ours. I make no attempts to force our religious beliefs on anyone, I am just relaying the concept. But, still. She loves.

The one thing that I've always said is the most important value for me to teach to my children, she's got it. At 3 years old. I will hold this memory up for those times when she is screaming at me to stop, even when she's a teenager telling me she hates me.

She Used To Be My Girl

2009-04-10T13:38:00.000-07:00

When I was in college I got sick of waitressing & did a stint at a copy store. While working there, I noticed another girl that worked there with dyed black hair, wearing Doc Martens. She was snarky enough that I noticed, & when I overheard her talking about going to see The Cure on a cigarette break, we became friends. Her name is Natalie, she used to be one of my best friends, but she isn't anymore.

When I was still in school she lived in a house right across the street from campus & I lived 20 minutes away, so I would hang out at her house between classes. We'd go through pots of coffee, packs of cigarettes, & watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer instead of studying. I don't know when she stopped taking classes, but she sort of just gave up on graduating, it seemed. After I graduated, she became a manager at the copy shop. She moved on to other retail jobs. She had crappy boyfriends & so did I. But we talked almost everyday & shared a lot of formative experiences through our twenties.

She dug my Artsy-Fartsy genes & we would hold "NBA nights" (No Boys Allowed) where we would make 5 course meals, make frozen girly drinks, do bong tokes, and make crazy things. We would take things to the pawn shop so we'd have enough money to go to the bar. One summer night she had a BBQ at her house & I had helped her get ready all day, but had to work some stupid 6-8pm shift at the copy store. She told me to just leave my sweet dog, my beloved Casey Jones, at her house while I worked. "He'd be fine." Well, when I got back to her house, Casey was missing. After a frantic hour of searching for all seven pounds of him, someone showed up with him. I ended up having to take him to the emergency vet clinic because someone had given him beer. Should have taken it as a sign.

After I graduated we still kept in touch. My first job out of school was for a non-profit, so I was actually making less than I did waiting tables. When I did start making money though, I was excited to be able to buy Natalie some nice Christmas & birthday presents. She had lived in Paris one summer & I was so proud & she so happy when I bought her this 3-foot wire sculpture of the Eiffel Tower from Pottery Barn that I knew she had wanted. I bought her a huge glicee of a Mucha print, had it matted & framed & sent it to her. I liked to do things like that for her. She appreciated it.

When I met Biggie, Natalie was the first of all my friends to meet him. She was skeptical until she saw his hair. Good hair genes are hard to pass up. Of all of my friends, she was the only one who actually came to visit me when I moved in with him. She & Biggie got along famously. When he decided he was going to propose, it was Natalie whom he consulted with on my ring. When I moved out of my house, she helped me pack a little. I still have a box of my Keith Haring prints & personal photos that she boxed up. On the top she wrote, "Pictures of You (I Miss You)".

During the planning of our wedding, Natalie was pretty broke. Had she not inherited most of my furniture when we moved to Florida she wouldn't have had much in the way to sit on. I paid for her bridesmaids dress. I didn't care. She did things like take care of me the morning after my bachelorette party when we had to be out our hotel at 11am & I still needed to sleep, but lived 1200 miles away.

The winter after I had MiniMe, Natalie lost her job, they didn't give her her last paycheck, & she had little hopes of finding a new job. She was going to get evicted. We had just bought our house which had a huge bedroom & bathroom off the garage. I bought Natalie a plane ticket to Florida. Biggie had her come to work with him. She drove our "Home Depot Mobile", a 1995 Cherokee that ran well but needed a paint job. When they came home from the dealership, she would help me, a new mother that worked full time, by cleaning the kitchen after dinner so I could get MiniMe to bed. She also helped me with the mopping, vacuuming from time to time. We charged her no rent & let her drive the car for free. She lived with us from December to August.

We had told her we needed her to find a place to live because we were putting our house up for sale & trying to move out of state. Things had gradually degenerated at that point to the extent that she didn't really eat dinner with us anymore. I rarely saw her at all. I'm sure it was hard for her pride, living in our house, going to work with Biggie everyday. I had tried to talk to her, but honestly, some things she said did piss me off. She had managed to find the money to fly home for Mother's Day, for example. I didn't try to pry into the situation of her finances, but considering I didn't have the cash to buy plane tickets, I did speak up on that one. We had asked her to water our plants & walk our dogs when we went to North Carolina for a week. We came home to dead tomato plants & dog shit all over the floor. Biggie had bought a used car that a customer had traded in for her to drive pretty quickly after she had moved in. She never had it plated or insured until the week she moved out, & even then, he really had to give her an ultimatum. I was embarrassed. I didn't understand why she was doing this.

After she moved out, we had made plans to meet for lunch. I was going to go pick up some sandwiches for us & meet her up at the dealership. Biggie had moved on to another dealership at this time, so he wasn't working with her anymore. When I called to ask her what kind of sandwich she wanted, they told me she had called in sick that day. When I called her cell phone she didn't answer. She did call me back a few days later, apologizing to my voice mail, calling when she knew I wouldn't answer. I was hurt. I waited a few days & called her back. I got her voice mail. Weeks became months & she still hadn't called. When we were coming upon her birthday in November, I told Biggie I was going to call her. He told me not to. When I asked why, Biggie told me that he didn't think Natalie cared as much about me as I did about her. He told me mean things she had said to him about me. Stories about things I did in college that husbands don't really want to know about their wives. Stories that were elaborated & embellished to be specifically awful. She told him she & her boyfriend use to snicker about my relationship with my dog & how I was just a little too attached to him, insinuating something out of middle school urban legends. It hurt to hear him say these things, but I could hear her voice in my head saying them. I knew it hurt him to hear them. I felt betrayed in a way I never had before. I felt taken advantage of.

I hadn't thought about Natalie for months until we moved & I saw her writing on a box of "Maturnity Clothes". At first I wanted to go find a sharpie & fix the misspelling. Then I was annoyed that her writing was on my box of precious things. Then I wondered where she is now. If she still has the nice gifts that I bought for her, driving the car we bought for her, if she thinks of us at all. I remembered that she is in the home movies from MiniMe's first Christmas, her christening, her first birthday. What will I say to her about this person? Then I thought about how surely one day someone will hurt MiniMe the way this friend hurt me, & there is nothing I can or will be able to do to stop it. I'll have to teach her that it's okay, I've decided. Because in the end, I did what my heart told me to. I helped someone whom I thought was my friend, not out of guilt or for gratitude, but out of love, & there is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in that.

Ready to Fire The Pimps

2009-03-20T20:23:00.000-07:00

It's on the market. Our old home. For $187,900.00.

In case you just landed here because of a random google search for something about pimps, our former home, that we let go back to the bank because we couldn't sell it for what we owed, that we had an offer on a year previously for $333k, is now for sale for less than half of that.

All over our county there are foreclosures, short sales, abandoned homes, bank owned property. There are some pretty great deals. But I think I've decided that I don't want to own anything for a while. See, I'm firing the banks.

There are so many people that I know, have read about, hear about through friends that have tried to renegotiate the terms of their mortgage, sell for slightly less than what they owe, these types of things, & the banks refuse to work with them. The banks are offered a certain amount of money to walk away from the previously negotiated situation. They refuse. So the people end up, like us, in bankruptcy, or in foreclosure. The banks end up having to pay attorney fees, cleaning, painting, lawn maintenance crews. In the end, these properties are sold, by the banks, for hundreds of thousands of dollars than they would have settled for, & the owners' credit wouldn't be in the toilet. It makes no sense.

The banks that are refusing to work with us are then asking for our tax dollars because they have so many derilect properties that they can't sell for what they own them for. It is absolutely the worst example of sound business practices I've ever seen.

I forgot to elaborate on why I was so upset about the houses we've seen in Cape Coral. They are not built well. It feels like if you lean up against the wall you will leave a dent in it. There are miles & miles of these houses. Biggie says that because the cost of land was driven up so high so quick, the only place left to cut corners was in the construction. I think he's right. But although you can't tell from looking at the pictures I posted of the mafioso house, that's what it feels like. So we have a whole City full of abandoned, poorly built houses. I want out of here.

Less Hate, More Love

2009-03-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

When Andy Cook came to interview me for his blog, he made me realize something that made me feel like the biggest idiot. He asked me what sacrifices our family was making either as a result of the recession or to get us through. I stopped to think, besides the bankruptcy, besides my serious lack of new clothes, besides not getting haircuts, it'd have to be Biggie.

He's always worked a lot of hours. When he would hold them up as proof of the sacrifices he makes for our family, I would scoff. He did this before I was in his life. He would still do it if I weren't in his life. The difference now is that it isn't a choice, but a necessity. Before things started to go bad with the economy & all, if I asked him to take a day off, it wasn't a problem. While the other salesmen would get fired for showing up five minutes late, Biggie can just call them & tell them he wouldn't be in that day. No consequences, other than he didn't sell a car that day. They like him at his dealership that much, & it's not because he's cute. It's because he's an awesome salesman.

Everybody knows the jokes about car salesmen, lawyers, mechanics. How they are immoral, liars, leeches. While I'd like to think most people out there wouldn't use these stereotypes as justification to treat these people rudely or somehow subhuman, after being with Biggie for eight years now, I can no longer be so optimistic.

Maybe it's the economy getting everybody down. I think it's more that since there are such fewer buyers out there, he can't tell people to leave when they are nasty. They are nasty, though.

There have always been the ones that don't want him to wait on them because they think he's Hispanic. Then there are the ones who are just brazen enough to ask him where he is from. They get all frustrated & flustered when he's tells them Ontario, because it doesn't tell them what they want to know. Then there's the people who he actually tells them that he's Italian & they actually apologise because they had assumed he was something somehow insulting.

There are people that are on the lot, walking around cars, that he walks up to & says hello. Just hello, I'm here if you have any questions. Some people ignore him. Literally act like they don't hear. Some people mumble that they don't need help, they're just looking. Some people tell him to leave them alone. People have actually told him to Fuck Off. For saying hello.

Biggie doesn't do as well as he does as a salesman because he manipulates people. Don't get me wrong, he does manipulate some people, but he saves it for the people that deserve it because they are mean or stupid. The biggest reason that he does well is because he listens to what people say, he doesn't let them buy more car than they can afford without caution, mostly because he doesn't give up. He assumes people come into a dealership because they want or need a car & he does everything he can to get them one that works for them. Sometimes this means spending four hours going on test drives, or searching on the Internet for the car for someone, or pushing the finance manager to try yet another bank to approve a customers loan. & in these times, he spends a lot of time in the finance office.

People have been being really nasty to him lately, though. People screaming at him, that he's a liar, because there has to be something he is doing that is keeping them from getting a $250 a month payment on a $30,000 car with no money down over 5 years. Trust me, as soon as we find the place on the planet where 250 x 60 = 30,000 + interest, we'll be letting y'all know.

Biggie is the kind of person that goes out in the parking lot to look at our waitresses car when she tells us that a body shop has given her an outrageous estimate. He's the kind of person that goes into the repair shop to get an extra hub cab for the guy in the produce department at our favorite store because he lost one. He's the kind of guy that drives 40 minutes out to the little old lady's house that can't figure out how this new fangled electric car starts, again. He's the kind of guy that answers a customer's questions about their lease or transmission or suspension on his cell phone while standing in line with his family at Disney World.

So, in the event that you find yourself in a car dealership, do me a favor. Recognize that the person, or people, trying to help are in fact, people. They don't get paid unless you buy a car, & if you have to humiliate them to do that, well, that just sucks. Yes, I know some of them out there that are assholes, just don't assume that they are. For my sake.

Home Hunters: Foreclosure Crisis Edition

2009-03-12T20:33:00.000-07:00

A major portion of the stimulus package consists of the previously mentioned Neighborhood Stability Program (NSP), that provides down payment assistance as well as rehabilitation funding in areas hardest hit with foreclosures. For my Australian readers, Florida led the nation in 2007 with the highest percentage, 16.5%, of High-Risk Negative Amortization Loans. Lee County, where we live, has a foreclosure rate of over 11%.

I really want to get out of here, but I have to balance what I want against the best interests of our family. We, well, mostly MiniMe & I, are looking at houses. I really wanted to be in downtown Fort Myers as there is a public arts magnet elementary school there. The girl just held yet another concert in our living room tonight where she sang her original work on jellyfish, which poetically emphasized that jellyfish indeed do not have hearts. She's 3, for crying out loud. She plays guitar & piano. No joke. No, I don't force her to sit & practice nor does she take lessons. But I digress. The point is that it seems like an arts magnet elementary + she = positive feelings about school.

The area we are now looking at houses in is the city of Cape Coral. It's killing me, my peeps. I mean, I'm a fricken Urban Planner. ("Um, we know that, crazee ladee. You ramble on about it in every fricken post!") I'm from the bellweather of failing Urban Policy. But, Cape Coral? There is a book about it entitled, "The Lie That Came True". It honestly was a real estate scam that so many people bought into it actually got built. If you look at it on google earth it's freaky. It's a bunch of crazy manmade canals to nowhere. The streets are all number names to the extreme ie. NE 12th Place, NE 12th Street, NE 12th Court, NE 12th Avenue. & it's in several of my textbooks as the perfect example of sucky suburbia. There's a fairly popular heavy rock band from there who entitled one of their albums "Cape Coma" as a reference to the city. I feel like I am one giant sellout.

I can't ignore the incredible deals on homes in the City of Cape Coral, however. For the same amount of money, or less, we could buy a home that is twice the size of the one we are renting. I spent one Saturday afternoon driving round with MiniMe and Grammie & came upon an unsettling revelation, however.

The first home we went to look at is owned by Fannie Mae. It is 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom two-story house that was built in 1999. It is on a canal, has a 2-car garage & a pool. It's listed for $214k. Sounds nice, right? Well, it's not.

When we walked into the house I was immediately struck by the prominence of the colors, or lack of them. The home is decorated in entirely black, white & grey. When the agent started discussing things that could make the house better, I suggested perhaps a centrally located globe with some neon lettering around it. He was all, "I think I've seen that somewhere before!" Um, uh-huh.

Take a lookie at this gem of a bathroom. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the bathtub is pretty much in the middle of the room. Faux black marble? How about badly airbrushed fiberglass? Combined with the etched glass mermaid (which MiniMe seriously swooned over), complete with exposed nipples, I would feel obligated bathing there as if I were expected to put on some kind of show.

But hey, if I did there was the built in radio/intercom system! When I asked the realtor if he knew what it was for, he lodged into some explanation to the effect of, "See, back in the 80's it was considered classy to have built in radio systems..." I cut him off. "No! This is for Issac Hayes!"

I was waiting for Tony Montana to show up, but I guess he's moved on.

See, people love me!

2009-03-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

I often get asked if I have considered making things to sell to the public at large at craft shows or on etsy. It always makes me think of my Grandma, MiniMe's namesake, who frequently got requests from my friends to make things for them that she had made for me. A very few times she did oblige, but for the most part, she had a canned response that she only made things for those she loved, out of love. She said taking money for something was just too much pressure.

When grandma died there was quite a volume of fabric that she had acquired. If I needed a shirt or a skirt to go with another fabulous piece, she would rifle through her cabinets to find a fabric that I might like that she could craft into what I needed in a single afternoon. I completely took it for granted until she was gone.

I currently have a backlog of my own. About three new jumpers for MiniMe, some sweet organic knit I scored off ebay for leggings or twirl dresses, two different groups of fabric for a vintage mommy & child apron pattern I found. Oh, & three pairs of pants to hem for Biggie. (BOR- ring!) I am still trying to find places for things in the new house. MiniMe's craft drawers are barely able to be opened, they are so in need of purging. Someday, my sweet Singer.

Dear, Sweet Kristine sent us a package last week. I had requested a hat, as we were going to be going on a trip to somewhere cold that has since been cancelled, & Kristine knits. She went above & beyond, not only making a hat that MiniMe has decided resembles her & my favorite vintage Strawberry Shortcake character, Blueberry Muffin, but also a little version of an apre-bath wrap, in Hello Kitty of course. There was also a matching person-pillow, who has since become Rosebud's, & a lavender belt with musical notes on it. It's almost like Kristine knew I had said that if we put the kid's gold collection on her from her christening with certain pants, it would make the perfect LL Cool J costume for Halloween.

The wrap was tried out immediately. MiniMe decided she had to wear the hat, too, since it matched so well. After the pictures were taken, a rowdy game of Hide & Go Squeak was played with Dad, while MiniMe pranced about happily.

I have to say, while I love getting gifts, I love giving them so much more. It is awesome to open Kristine's flickr account & see her daughter in something I made for her, even though I've never actually met her. But, I will. Soon. They are coming to the Even-Farther-Down-South in the next month. I am so excited I seriously am already contemplating what color roses I will get from the farmer's market for the dresser in the guest room. Yep. I've lived in The South too long.

The Rutabega & Turnip Club

2009-02-26T22:27:00.001-08:00

I know I can't be the only one to see the ridiculousness here.

A preface:

My mom has a baby brother, the youngest in her big Catholic family, who lost his job in Michigan 2 years ago & moved down here to find work. He & his teenage daughter moved in with my mom. He found work. My mom wanted to buy a smaller house & saw that the market was going downhill. She decided to go ahead & buy a smaller house while my uncle would rent her house. She only charged him around half her payment. She saw that she wasn't going to get anywhere close to what she owed on her big house based on what was happening to us. She decided to let the house go back to the bank. Before she did, she did try to negotiate with the bank. She bought the house in 2004 for $220k & owed $173k. My uncle offered to buy it for $150k. The bank didn't take it.

Yes, I have an affinity for rutabagas. I identify with them. I detest eating them, however. My love of the rutabaga comes from an analogy my dad made. In his Finnish culture, rutabagas are a staple, so there were many situations when I was a kid where I was sitting at the dining room table starring at a serving of them through teary eyes. A few times my dad slathered them with butter, trying to convince me they were great. Eventually, one evening he caved & they were never again put on my plate. He told me that as time went on, with us living separate lives for the most part of my childhood, rutabagas came to make him think of me. When I was in college, during one of our kitchen table talks, I launched into a diatribe on how rutabagas, turnips, cabbage & cauliflower were all in one smelly, gas-inducing, gross food category for me. My dad found this hilarious & told me that he couldn't help but think of the phrase, "You can't get blood from a turnip". He always saw it, as you're supposed to, as that the darned turnip just doesn't have it within itself. It's not being stubborn or selfish. The blood just ain't there. That's how I was about the rutabagas. So the phrase became applicable to me, in some crazy mixed up way. When I would talk to my dad about my marriage & how Biggie was expecting something of me I just couldn't bring myself to do, my dad would say, "Well, Rutabeggie,..." We never had a talk about it. I knew what he meant. He got me.

A few weeks before my dad died, MiniMe came home with a photocopy of a definite root vegetable, colored with red & purple crayon, decorated with sequins. She was just over 2 years old at the time. When I asked her what it was she clearly replied,

"Disco Rutabeggie".

I LOVED it. It gave me one of those smile in my belly & heart feelings only parents & grandparents can get. I was saving it to send to my dad because it was just too priceless. I knew he would put it up in his truck & drive all over the country smiling at his girls' girls' silliness. He died before I could send it.

But, back to the banks.

Our former home is no longer ours. If you were to go to the county tax appraiser's website & search for our last name, the same staggering list of eight properties comes up, but it's not right. (I though about using the word correct here, but I opted for right. It's more fitting.) There were a few things left in the house that we hadn't gotten out yet that I still wanted. Like the 4.25hp self-propelled mower I bought when we bought our first house, that I used up through my sixth month of pregnancy, & that my dad had taken all apart to clean, tune up & sharpen the blade when he came to visit me. I wanted to give it to my uncle as a gift. It's gone. As are our chaise lounges, planters, a floor lamp. The bank took the stance that the house was abandoned, changed the locks, & put those things in the landfill. I've got half a mind to go dig them out. It's so stupid & wasteful & lazy. & not right.

My mom's former house is up for sale for $46,500.00.

I've thought about how it makes me feel to have been through this experience. It just doesn't make any sense. It gets worse.

I have a possible opportunity for a job. Two incorporated cities here are seeking to hire qualified people to run their Neighborhood Stability Programs, which I am very qualified to do. These programs give down payment assistance & rehabilitation money to people buying bank-owned or foreclosed properties. Ridiculousness: Currently we qualify for reduced cost preschool for MiniMe for me to go back to work & to buy a house through the program. If I took the job, we no longer qualify for either. Um. Work & never see sweet girl or stay home, send her to school on the cheap, & get a new house?

So, what was wrong with our money? If the bank had taken our buyers' $334,000 for our old home a year back, wouldn't they be in better shape now? I can't help but wonder how much the attorney charged the bank for the whole foreclosure process. Maybe they would have needed all these tax dollars to help them out if my money was good enough. Wait a minute. I pay taxes. I'm confused. My money wasn't good enough for the bank to take to pay for our house last year, but my money that went to pay taxes is good enough?

Can't wait to see how much they list our house for. That's sure to send me to the liquor store.

I'm starting a club. When I get my sewing machine up again & some of Biggie's pants hemmed I've decided I'm making up some Disco Rutabega applique t-shirts. If you want one, you have to pay the membership dues. (cost of bourbon & root beer to drink while making said shirt)

We have infiltrated the perimeter...

2009-02-05T06:45:00.000-08:00

Our new place is in a gated community. When I say gated community I don't mean a place where you pull up to get in & have to punch in a code or call the people you are coming to visit. This place has guards (we like to call them Condo Commandoes), 24 hours a day. We have to have a barcode sticker on our cars to get in the gate without pestering (& really, they subtlely let you know) the Commandoes. I don't like it.

The primary reason I wanted to live here is because there are over 9 miles of walking trails here. By walking trails, I mean paved paths through true conservation areas with actual trees, not just telephone poles with shrubs on top (aka palm trees). The community is also on a slow-moving river that connects to the intercoastal & in the winter manatees migrate up into the river because it's warmer. There are complementary kayak rentals for residents. We are going to be checking this out as soon as we can find a way to try it without MiniMe.

But there are two golf courses here. Very swanky golf courses. With golfers that meet a certain demographic that seems to lead them to believe they can look down on individuals they feel don't meet their criteria to deserve politeness. Case in point: MiniMe & I headed out for a stroll down to the playground with our dogs. It was a good mile to mile & a half walk. After a week of moving, I thought she'd be glad to be outside for a long time with my undivided attention. They have bathrooms on the course that are locked, opened by keys for the golf carts. MiniMe, being 3 years old, can't always anticipate very well yet that she might have to go to the bathroom before we reached the playground & doesn't quite understand why someone would lock her out from a toilet. As we were walking, there was one such bathroom directly across the street from our path & she very clearly asked to please use one. Thankfully, there were golfers at the bathroom. When I explained to MiniMe that the doors were locked & one of golfers were going to have to let us in, she walked right up to one man & asked, "Can you please let me go to the bathroom?" She was polite. She was brave. She was assertive. I was proud. The guy first acted like he didn't hear her, so she persisted with her previous request, but now proceeded with "Excuse me!". The guy finally looked down his nose at her, literally, gave her a one-sided smirk, & said, "Are you walking your dogs in your pajamas?" Completely bypassing her request. Completely oblivious to her manners & genuine patience. I was trying to get the dogs on a shorter leash, so I was too overwhelmed to actually speak up before that group rode off on their carts, snarkily chuckling at how smart they are that they can demean a 3 year old. The starter was just on the other side of the building, thankfully, so I asked him to let her use that bathroom. He seemed a little put out, but did grant us access.

I have to explain that I was once the assistant manager at a private golf club in Ann Arbor, where the likes of Tom Monahan, Bill Clay Ford are members. I'm not a golfer, but I worked as a waitress in the clubhouse for 2 years & the members were so pleased with my service & attention to detail that I was put in this position. I can't imagine any of those members ever hesitating to allow a child access to a bathroom.

This brings us to a brief discussion on gated communities. I don't like them. They don't make me feel safer. They don't make me more likely to approach a neighbor or wave at a passerby while walking the dogs. I do those things anyway. I don't like my visitors having to be screened before they can come to my house. More than anything, I don't like the idea that someone has to be qualified to be where I am. I'm not the first person, certainly not the first planner, to bring this up. I'm just reiterating my opinion, now more enlightened from the experience. I don't like someone else deciding who can be a part of my community.

I've thought about some way I can say something that isn't redundant or obvious about the whole contrived community, here. What I've come up with is that I want to take a moment to recognize the blog community I am becoming a part of. The community where my old friend can stop by & catch up, where my neighbors know me by what has been written instead of the cars we drive, our dogs, or as the ones who never take their garbage cans back in & darn it, we've got to report them. I like this community where I can ogle over Rebecca's darling Fable, marvel at Sarah's preserves, worry over Ivy, giggle at Mimi, even offend Jim. It's much more diverse than reality while still maintaining some sort of relativity.

But hey, the view out our backdoor is pretty swell...

Pooh Bear Planning

2009-01-22T21:04:00.000-08:00

So, still packing, but I have a really cool article for anyone interested about what would happen if (Italian, no less) children were creating cities. This makes me think of Pooh Bear because in architecture school I had an ass of a prof who took notice of me reading The Te of Piglet & thought it would be fun to analyse our class into Pooh characters. He was so fricken pompous. I know, "Isn't that a prerequisite for becoming an architect?" No, I actually know many that are fairly relatable, but onto the story.

"Once upon a time, there was a construction cooperative in the small north Italian town of Correggio, not far from the larger cities of Modena and Parma. It specialised in building houses. One day, back in 1990, its members made a decision that would radically change the way they worked.

Coriandoline: winner of the Peggy Guggenheim Prize for the most innovative project in 2001 and the World Habitat Awards in 2002

Taking on the new name, Andria - inspired by an ideal city in Italo Calvino's novel, Invisible Cities - they transformed it from a cooperative for abitazioni (habitations) into a cooperative for abitanti (inhabitants). One of Andria's founding architects, Luciano Pantaleoni, says this was something of a revolution, "We had to learn to listen to the service-users, in other words, families".

Taking their logic one step further, Andria decided that, since families comprise both adults and children, to be a true cooperative for inhabitants, they would have to listen to children as well as adults. And that's how the idea to build Coriandoline was born."

If I've peaked your interest enough to read the story, it is here:

http://www.radionetherlands.nl/thestatewerein/otherstates/tswi-090117-inside-outside

Oh, & the ass-prof? Yeah, he completely pegged me as Rabbit.

Swoon

2009-01-08T13:24:00.000-08:00

E gads. In South Detroit, I mean Toledo, no less.

Don't stop believing,

Just hold on to the feelin'...

Letter to a Home

2009-01-01T11:41:00.000-08:00

Between the years of 1993 & 1998 I moved 14 times. Yes, three of those times were to dorm rooms, but I still count them because they did require a major analysis of my belongings, paring them down to only the bare necessities, to fit into a very small space. When I think of those moves now, one thing is very noticeable to me regarding then in comparison to now. The majority of those moves were expected, except for somewhere around number 8, where I had a literal crackhead steal most of everything I owned, which to her credit did make things pretty simple. I did not fret much then about how I was going to pack, how things would be relocated, what would get broken. I occasionally made the decision of the next place within days if not hours before the actual move. Like I've said before, I was a leaf that went where the wind blew me.

We have made a decision on the next place we will be living, signed the lease, paid our money. It was stressful for all of us. No, it doesn't meet any of the qualities that MiniMe had requested & it is far out from most of the places we like to go. Regardless, MiniMe told us she likes it. She includes, "I want to go to the new house!" in her daily list of laments. We are happy with our decision & it is truly a nice house. I'm still not okay. It's not the new houses' fault.

It's not the loss of our current house that is bothering me. It's not the bankruptcy. The decision to file for bankruptcy is unquestionably the most right decision we have made in the past year. There are things about our current home that I will be glad to be relieved of. It is the loss of our home that I am mourning.

A sense of place, experiences tied to the context of the environment, is a very essential part of my personality. It is why I studied architecture & became a planner. The concept of place is something that preoccupies most of my thoughts. Very many important things have happened to me, to us, in this place. This home.

This is the place where I sat & nursed MiniMe for hour upon hour. I painted this room "Blue Collar" the second week we lived in the house, when MiniMe was just 3 months old, & we had no power because of Hurricane Wilma. Biggie put the beautiful crown molding up, using the compound mitre saw I got him our first Christmas in this house. Where I sang Audra, Nick Drake, Innocence Mission to her. The very last time, when I sang Into the Mystic, into her ear, while my father listened over the phone. Just this past Christmas she realized that as I was singing Barbara Streisand's The Best Gift, I was telling her that she is The Best Gift I've ever received, in this very spot. We still sit here to read bedtime stories together every night before bed. The majority of the most profound conversations she & I have had have been in this place. We have discovered each other, more than any other place, in this place.

This is the place where she took her very first steps, the Wednesday before Mother's Day, in 2006. She was so nonchalant about it all. I couldn't comment for what seemed like forever because it looked so strange to see this little 15 pound person actually upright & independently mobile. I was mesmerized.

This is the place that I was the very last time I spoke to my Dad. I was stripping the wallpaper off of the wall. My mom was there helping me. He was talking about things he had seen on his route the past week, driving through the Upper Peninsula. He told me he was so glad he had a daughter that understood him; that understood why he preferred driving on little State Routes where there was little traffic, simple people, simple food. When I told him my mom was there with me, he asked me to tell her that he thought of her every Monday, when he crossed over the Laughing Whitefish River, as they had made that trip when they were married, on his little Triumph. I marked the sense of nostalgia in my heart. It is the place where I was the last time I got to hear him tell me he loved me.

This is the place I was standing when my step-mother told me my father was dead. She had called, hung up after 3 rings, before I could make it to the phone, & then called back not 2 minutes later. I had sensed something was wrong when I went to answer the phone. I had dreaded that moment for years. I paced in this doorway, not crying, just nodding, listening to the flood of sorrow my step-mother poured over me. I stayed in that spot to call my husband to tell him. My mother, too. I remember thinking that maybe if I stayed in that spot I would be able to continue to not cry.

This is the place that Biggie was sitting when we healed our marriage. He said awful things to me & I let him. I let him say them, meaning I actually listened, because I knew he didn't mean it. I knew, finally, that it wasn't about me. It was about everything before me. He saw that I let it go. He knew that I had every right to be justified, self-righteous, hurt. He saw that I let it go because We Are More Important. Whatever it is, We Are More Important. He acknowledged the sacrifice of my spirit to do this. That acknowledgement brought us back & gave us hope.

Although we lived in another house when we were married, when MiniMe was born, it is in this house that I became a mother & the mother of my husband's children. This place is inextricably tied to the history of our lives, of our family. I am sad that we have to leave it under these circumstances. It has served us well. I have been proud of it.

I wish we could know the next occupants. There are so many places, houses, homes that are losing their stories & context. It's messing up so many families. In the telling of stories, you have the who, the what, to what extent, & the where. For so many, the where is being forcibly & traumatically changed.

post script- I could have developed the concept of place & its' meaning more fully, more eloquently, but I'm too weepy. I wanted to get this out there & done. Maybe after we are closer to the light at the end of this particular tunnel I will come back to this, but for now, it is what it is. & yeah, I might be a little busy for the next month, but I'm around. I'm sure I'll have some funnier, more uplifting stories of moving antics.

Don't rock the boat, Baby

2008-12-19T20:31:00.000-08:00

So, we had a bit of a rant tonight.

We went to see a 'hockey' game due to the benevolence of mah friend who has season tickets. (I have to put it in quotes as I am from Hockeytown & am married to a Canadian.) It was fun, even though MiniMe loaded up on the sugar today & did not nap. Biggie sold 3 cars today. Yeah. 3 cars in one day in this economy. & no, he don't wear no cape & magic boots. We waited for him to finish showing his last customers the ropes on their new Van; MiniMe used her little potty in the back of my truck.

When he got in the car, he said something that shocked me. He said, "I'm sorry we're always late." He meant that he is sorry that he is always at work until at least 8pm & that every time we make plans to do things with other people we are inevitably late because he cannot leave yet. I told him not to worry; it is how things are. I was overcome by how he felt compelled to say this, but even more so by the thought that he doesn't realise how I am always late to everything, regardless of if he is with us or not. I have no control of when I am able to be somewhere. I am beholden to the needs & constraints of others to the extent that I can never be confident in my ability to do anything at a particular time.

On the way home, something happened. I don't know why, but Biggie has this thing about food. It's been a source of constant struggle in our marriage. He would tell you I am some sort of food Nazi that restricts anything that actually tastes good. I will tell you that we made an agreement when we became parents that we wouldn't bring any food (eschewing liquor) into the house we wouldn't want our kids to eat. Biggie is much more strict than I am about what MiniMe eats. I'm much less "Do as I say, not as I do" than he. Regardless....

He has a fast-food habit that he tries to hide from me. It's not so much a health thing as it is a money thing. The friends that have the season tickets saw him at McDonald's that morning, when he happened to be running late. When he commented on the way home on how he couldn't believe he got to work in less than an hour, I said, "Wow. If you ate breakfast at home maybe you could sleep in even longer." Not in Miss Snarky voice. Seriously. He immediately turned into Mr. Driving Aggressively, Mr. Interrupter, Mr. I Suggest You Don't Dare Say Another Word. I HATE it when he does this. I know it's not really about me. I HATE that MiniMe has to see her father talk to me this way because she Does Not Like It & shows it very demonstratively for hours if not days afterwards.

The biggest problem I have with Biggie is that he can be so incredibly Mean. When he feels that someone has wronged him, including me, anyone really, he thinks it is completely justifiable to treat the offender however he feels like. He has said things that can't be taken back. No, he would never hit me. But often, his words hurt more than any blows ever could. He can be Cruel.

I said something offhand the other day that apparently really bothered him we need to find a way to discuss it, because he is being mean. I said that I feel like I never get what I want. He took it personally, as he IS the bread (ok, I make the bread. But, with flour his salary pays for.) winner, 1st generation Italian Man. He isn't getting what so many of you moms out there I'm so sure do. I meant that I can't even get through a workout without tending to the needs of our kid at least twice. I did also mean that I am so fricken homesick, break into tears at least twice a day because everywhere we go is playing White Christmas, & (dude!) I want to go skiing, tobogganing, make a fricken snow angel.

Just had to get that out there.

Joy & Pain

2008-12-09T21:06:00.000-08:00

Yep. I'm singing Rob Bass. (Pump it up! Pump it up, now!) Hey, I never had Garden Weasel bangs.

So, the pain part. We have been given a court date on our house for foreclosure. You typically have 60 days after the court date to get your stuff out before it is no longer available to you. I have to find a place for us to live. During the holidays. With a 3-year old in tow. A 3-year old who REALLY wants to live in a 2-story house where her bedroom is closer to ours & has a pool. Sigh.

Also, the dealership is raising our health insurance premium. Again.

Moving on... (both literally & figuratively)

The joy part. Christmas jumper #1 is complete. It has been worn to a birthday party for our friend Lolly (Lorelai) on Sunday & again today. It is super-cute. My favorite part is the trim on the hemline.

She's got it bad for Tommy the Elf, who is in this print. You can't tell very clearly from the pics, but I also sewed little lightbulb charms along the pockets.

She really does appreciate that she has a mom that does this stuff for her.

I also am very excited for Christmas morning. We are giving MiniMe the dollhouse I was given by my parents when I was 3. Seen as how MiniMe was born 2 days before my birthday, she is basically exactly the age I was when I got it. My parents, who had been divorced for a while at the time, actually worked together to buy it for me. It was relinquished to me by my mom when she was pissed at me for something & not speaking to me. Apparently she didn't see that episode of Gilmore Girls. To her credit, she did cart the thing down here, even if her second husband actually threw away the toddler bed my dad made for me. Bygones. I asked Biggie to make a platform for it with casters so that the house can be turned around. It always annoyed me as a kid that I couldn't really access the front of the house because it was up against the wall. He rocks & made a backyard for it, too. He's asking about grass for the yard. He's giving me seriously unpleasant flashbacks of making models in architecture school.

I also have to finagle what Santa is bringing. MiniMe told Santa she wants a space station. Seriously. Last year, when she was 2-years old, she asked for a 'pinano' & a 'gee-tar'. She's killing me. We've had talk(s) about how Santa would have a really hard time fitting a space station on the sleigh. I just don't want to stretch the whole Santa discussions too long because we haven't exactly decided how we are going to handle the day when she looks at us & point blank asks if there is a Santa.

Last Christmas she picked this super-cute pseudo vintage book, Miss Flora McFlimsey's Christmas Eve, from the library. I seriously knew it by heart in 3 days, & it ain't a short book. I didn't mind; it's a great story. Flora is an old-school doll living in the attic that comes down to peek at the Christmas tree & gets suckered into being a present since that slacker Santa lost a doll on his way. The other dolls make fun of her. I don't want to ruin it, but it all works out in the end & I love the look MiniMe gets on her face when we read the last page.

Well, it turns out that Flora McFlimsey was an actual doll back in the '30's that the author used as a model for the series of books she wrote about Flora. Madame Alexander made a Flora McFlimsey doll last year & let's just say that I'm crossing my fingers that she is a welcome substitute for the space station. Yes, I love that my 3 year old girl wants a space station, but I highly suspect that it has more to do with the fact that Caillou asks for one for Christmas & less to do with ours trips to the MOSI museum. Cross your fingers, y'all.

Hot Glue & Ric Rac

2008-11-30T12:27:00.000-08:00

Kristine, turn away from the post. It shows the package coming on Wednesday. I know, I suck. You are at work & desperately in need of some distraction to get you through some mind-numbingly dull review or regulation. I haven't posted all week. Well, read on, but be prepared to have your surprise ruined.

All others, feel free to move forward without concern.

'Tis the season when my artsy-fartsy genes truly kick in. I come by it honestly. I have vivid memories of the blinking lights, wrapped with metallic garland, framing the mirror of my grandma's guest bathroom. I remember trying to make sure I washed all the food off my face between the static cling Santa figures. SO miss that lady.

This is the wreath on our front door that I made when MiniMe was in-utero. The stereotypical holly & berry wreaths just seem so wrong here in the tropics. Considering our neighbors make fun of our house, calling it the 'Key West House' due to it's color, I think it fits. We haven't painted our house since we bought it, so apparently someone else thought it was a nice color. Whatever, windbags. The wreath. We love it. Styrofoam balls wrapped in polyester thread, plastic bead garland with bells, hot glue. All that's missing is some foam curlers & a Virginia Slim.

These are more hot glue creations. The first was also made while MiniMe was in utero, but we stored it in the attic that first year where the heat was so hot the glue melted & I had to reconstruct it the following year. Some of the original ornaments were too far gone, so I came up with the idea of adding the admittedly random ribbon at the bottom. We like it. Our living space is largely blues & greens, so the typical Christmas themes clash too much for our tastes.

The second I made for MiniMe's room last year, because she really liked the first one I made, & honestly, I just love gumdrops & wanted an excuse to use that garland.

I have to take a second to whine about my kid. I told her I wasn't going to be putting the tree in her room until it was clean & it took over 3 days for her to get her shit together enough to help me get it done. She is going through a helpless phase where I have to show her 17 times how to do something over & over without ripping things from her hands & doing it myself. Lots. Of. Liquor. Thank GOD my innards have recovered from food poisoning & I can drink again. I am in no way that naturally patient & she knows it.

I may be making another one this year from cheap bulbs I got last year, but we'll see.

I kind-of have my hands full with sewing. This is the first of the Christmas jumpers. I realise now that I never explained the origin of the Christmas jumper. See, here it is still like 80-something-degrees in December & therefore way too hot for any kind of traditional Christmas garb. I thought about starting my own company of Christmas t-shirts, tank tops & the like when my friend Kristi moved back to The States from Sweden. She moved back to TN, where it is only slightly warmer than MI, where we grew up. She was all "!!!!!" about trying to have Christmas where it's over 40 degrees. We joked about the Christmas 'wife beater'. Well, after much searching, I decided to make my own fricken Christmas dress for MiniMe that would be just as she wanted & not, you know, velvet.

This one is, again, Hello Kitty, for Morgan, Kristine's daughter. I had to make hers' first because it has to be mailed to AL. I wasn't happy with the way the neckline is laying because I didn't use interfacing, I sewed the ric rac between the lining & flannel. Usually I just sew the trim on after the thing is done, but Morgan is only 1 & ric rac can be itchy. Plus, you would think after making so many of the damn thing I'd have it down by now. Apparently I'm not as good as I think I am.

I'm going to be finishing off MiniMe's Christmas jumpers (yes, two. She IS a Gemini) sometime soon, if she doesn't drive me to drink to the point I end up sewing my finger. I sound like a fricken pirate.

& no, I am not one of those sickos that tries to match the actual tree to the decor. I do have a number of blue ornaments, but we also have mostly traditional, more emphasis on the where-it-came-from type. I'm not THAT sick, people!

Our perspective...

2008-11-24T11:41:00.000-08:00

Y'all know I'm from Detroit. You can probably guess that the majority of my family does or has worked for the industry. I like to talk about it, & I have been. But you wouldn't know that because it's been actually speaking, not typing, because I've had a nasty bout of food poisoning. Better now. But as I was saying...

My mom's mom divorced her husband after they had raised six kids because he stood up on Christmas Eve, in front of whole family, & bragged about the women he had all over the country. It was not a common, or heck, even accepted thing back then. I remember Gram taking me to Mass & how most people in the parish did not speak to her, but through other people to her. It was a sort of communicated excommunication. It wasn't just because she divorced her husband, but then she dared to remarry, without an annulment, therefore outside of the church, a Baptist. (!) She met this new husband at the job she got, in Plant 9 of the Pontiac Assembly Plant. He was a General Foreman, who worked his way up, when he moved to Michigan from Arkansas at age 15, lying about his age to get a job on the assembly line. I remember as a kid watching him leave for work in his Johnny Carson sport coats & wide ties. I remember him talking about the people he oversaw with a furrowed brow. He worried about their kids, knew their names. He got angry from time to time about someone not pulling their weight. When he retired our family threw a party for him at a little community hall that burst at the seams. He asked me perform a dance as part of the entertainment. (I took dance lessons from age 3 onward & knew I was the apple of my Gram's eye.) The first time I heard the expression "bee's knee's" was after I finished my dance at that party & it was used to describe me personally. I made a mental note to use it on one of my own kids one day.

My dad's father came to Detroit from Massachusetts, where he did his apprenticeship as a tool & die maker with Bethlehem Steel after coming back from the Pacific Front. He had an amazing ability to just know how to put things together. When I was an architecture student he was the only one who could explain how to calculate tension or compression to me, becuse he knew how my brain worked, too. He worked in various shops all over Detroit over the years, with shops slowly closing down into the 1980's as those jobs were replaced by computers. Now, it does suck, but I told him he should just think of it as validation that his brain was a machine.

When my parents were first married, my Dad worked at Detroit Diesel in southwest Detroit. He developed an allergy to diesel fuel & had to find work elsewhere. Years later, when he moved back downstate from Petoskey, he became a journeyman & worked in the foundry in New Haven. I don't believe there is a more fundamental relationship between the auto industry & the foundry where they make metal molten & form it into engine blocks. When the foundry closed down a few years back, my Dad became a truck driver. He ran routes for dedicated Chrysler, Ford and GM & was considered an asset not only because he was a model employee, but because he understood the big picture of how what he was hauling fit into the economy.

When my mother was getting burned out from the work she did in the juvenile justice system, she too began to work on the assembly line, first part-time, at night. Then when she saw a posting for a salaried position she thought she was qualified for, she moved up. She became an auditor for the CPC (Chevy, Pontiac, Cadillac) division, travelling all over the country. I remember how our lives changed when this happened. I remember my mom going from wearing jeans to work to suits.

Biggie is a Car Salesman. Before that, he was a Mechanical Engineer. He isn't interested in the status quo that has been available to him working in Detroit. He'd rather be with people, weighing the pros & cons of different vehicles. When we got married he worked at a Chevy dealership. When one day every single car that he took on a test drive malfunctioned in some way, he decided he needed to move on. Now, to their credit, a lot of the malfunctions were due to a lack of maintenance by the dealership. For example, cars that sat for so long their batteries would go dead & no one would have checked them. But there were other instances of door handles coming off in customers hands that made him finally leave after over 3 years.

We both drive imports. We both take criticism from my uncles about not supporting the economy, but truthfully, both of our 'foreign' cars were manufactured in large part in North America, if not the US. Certainly more than their domestic counterparts.

I used to look at the Renaissance Center, the large black building usually featured as a defining building, in the Detroit skyline & glower. The building was built by Henry Ford as symbol of the rebirth of the Motor City. Now it's the headquarters for General Motors, who used to have one of my favorite buildings of all, built by a firm I used to work for, as their headquarters. I hate the Renaissance Center. When I look at it all I can think of is how many people I love, or how many people that I love love, have given of their lives for this industry. My own father, who is now gone, who poured the very hearts of so many engines. My own city, who made so many sacrifices for & allowed itself to be taken advantage of, for this industry. When you stand in front of the damn thing you can't even see the Detroit River. I don't think I've ever been in the building & not gotten lost. Then there's the fact the same exact building is in both Atlanta & Los Angeles. Like we don't even deserve our own symbol of rebirth.

Excuse me if I don't get a little defensive when you talk about the 'lazy union man'. It's a lot bigger than you know, people. That Gram, who MiniMe is named after, left high school at age 15 to work at Willow Run constructing B-24 airplanes because she realised that if the Allies didn't win World War II America would never be the same. My grandfather came home from liberating Auschwitz to find her in the barracks, nearly fatally ill with rheumatic fever. It's a sweet vision I have of my Grandpa, who looked like the actor Van Johnson, swooping in (in my mind, he's in his Army uniform) whisking Gram off to the hospital. The auto industry is what made it possible for the United States & the Allied Powers to defeat Hitler, people. The moniker 'Arsenal of Democracy' was coined for a reason, & a city.

My point is this: I'm just one lady. There are millions of us out there. Want perspective? The recent dip in the economy has been a 0.3% reduction in our GDP. The auto industry is 4% of our GDP.

Go over to read sweet-juniper.com . He's saying it all much better than I can.

The sacrifices & compromises

2008-11-16T18:55:00.000-08:00

In my last full-time position, I was given the opportunity to actually do the work I always wanted. I had not one, but two large-scale true urban renewal projects. Fort Myers isn't exactly a metropolis; but I was the project manager for two of the most dense, urban scale mixed-use projects in the City's history. It didn't really hit me until the day before I realized I was pregnant with MiniMe. My company had sent me to the State Planning Conference & I was very actively pursued by several other employers. I felt like the new, pretty girl at school. Except this had nothing to do with my appearance & everything to do with my brain. It was a profound moment in my life. Trying to talk about it makes me stutter.

I was completely unprepared for becoming a mother in so many ways. Yes, my own mother worked through most of my childhood, but of course that first year, when she stayed at home with me, I don't remember that. I didn't realize that finding a caregiver was so hard. I didn't know that I would feel so torn; that I would come to resent my career for taking me away from MiniMe. When my boss tried to dangle a carrot in front of me that she might want me to take her place when she retired, I was already feeling the weight of what I wanted. I was honest. I told her that I wanted to have a child, & I knew that she worked longer hours than I would be willing to with a new baby. She assured me I could do it. It was a vague statement, & I remember feeling like I was expected to just smile & nod & move along. When I complained later of the trouble I had getting MiniMe to sleep the woman actually suggested I drug her. It's what she did with her children, after all.

I remember being three years old & refusing to speak English to my mother. She was away from me most of the time. I resented the changing of rules between when she was around & when she wasn't. "No es Mama!" I would shout. I believe it's something that made me a better mother to MiniMe, who so greatly needs to know what to expect.

I never expected to be on this side of the Stay-At-Home/Working Mother battle. I always felt that I didn't deserve to have a choice. I spent so much time & money on my education. I am talented in my field. I felt the choice was made, if not for me, because of me. But when I think back to that the panic I felt when our nanny pulled the rug out from underneath me & I suddenly had no childcare, I shudder. The relief I felt when I found the wonderful, but outrageously expensive Montessori school that she attended for the majority of her first 3 years, was monumental to me.

When I remember that first day back to work I get angry, but mostly at myself. I was lucky in that Biggie was the one who took her in, that I got to pry her from my breast in the privacy of our own home, was given the time & space to try to get ready for work in solitude & silence (except for my blubbering). When I rushed in on my lunch hour to nurse her, she had already been fed & was asleep. I was full of milk. I had left my pump in my office. I just sat in a chair & held her & wept. Ms. Kim, who would become one of the people I am most grateful for, brought me Kleenex. I hadn't wanted them to let her go hungry. I was glad she was taking the bottle. I just didn't know it was going to be so hard. We had an appointment with the pediatrician that afternoon & he had told me that if she wasn't yet eight pounds he was not going to sign for her to be in daycare. I nursed her in the waiting room until they called her name. She was eight pounds, one ounce. As we drove home, I had expected to feel relieved. I could go back to my work & feel I was doing a good job as a mom, too. That's not how I felt.

It is so hard for me to put into words how I feel about this scenario. Saying I am mad at the way that families are treated in this country is an understatement. No, I don't think parents should be given special treatment in society. I certainly think children should be. I'm not saying they should be allowed to run around like hooligans. I'm saying I think that we were made the way we are for a reason. The whole thing I went through of going back to work when MiniMe was just 9 weeks old?? Yeah. Never shoulda happened. It was torture for a reason. Both my body & her body were designed to put us through bloody hell if we were separated the way we were because it wasn't in our best interests. Now, I know there are some mamas out there that NEEDED to go away from their kids for a few hours (preferably to somewhere with someone playing a harp & a king-sized tempurpedic bed) when their kids were nine weeks old. It's alright. I get that. However, the majority of women, & babies if they could, would tell you they'd probably be better off, & choose to be, together.

We have to screw with everything. We have to take every single natural process & try to make a buck off of making it better. I am completely not surprised with the whole formula thing. I wonder if anyone has ever taken it as far mentally as I have. Wouldn't be shocked. Follow me, here...

It's no secret that men love boobs. But truthfully, boobs are meant to serve the purpose of nursing, producing food for the babies. Now, I know that there are a lot of women out there that can't nurse successfully & I'm not trying to make any judgements on them or the families who simply choose to use formula because they don't want to nurse. But the pushing of the formula!! The gallons upon gallons of free formula given to new or soon-to-be new mothers! We've got a perfectly good system of feeding babies, but we can take this thing that was invented to feed orphans or kids with sick mothers, tell everybody it's better than breastmilk, make tons of money off of it, our wives can go back to work & we get our wives boobs back to ourselves, again! (I literally had a dream involving Mad Men about this)

Then, there's the cereal... It will help them sleep better, it will help them gain weight. It has been found to increase the likelihood of diabetes! Yeah! Not only that, it tastes like wallpaper paste!

Sometimes I feel like in the effort to free women from the trappings of motherhood, we kind-of made it an expectation. I feel like people use these 'advancements' to pressure mothers into spending more time away from their babies than they really want to. I feel like shaking a fist in the air & it's not because I want to stay home with my little offspring, gloating in the wonderfullness of bon bons. It's because it's what I feel I am supposed to do. I don't resent her. I resent that I'm going to have take a hit in my career for doing what I thing is the right thing. Anyone who knows me knows I take this work, of being a parent, seriously.

One of my peers, who seriously is a mentor, but so funny & humble she comes across as more of a peer, has a daughter in her second year of college right now. The friend is beautiful, witty, an excellent cook & hostess. She has an illustrious career. The daughter is darling, insightful & charming. When the daughter was graduating from high school I was leaving that last full time position. My friend told me in an almost self-deprecating way that I was doing the right thing. My friend was sad & was questioning her past decisions to not stay home for a while with her daughter. I don't want to be watching MiniMe graduate from high school & feel like I missed something. I'm grateful for this time & glad we, as a family, found our way to it.

Consumer Pilgrims

2008-11-11T20:42:00.000-08:00

Please don't read this & have me committed. I know I'm insane. Well, if I wasn't before, I most certainly am now.

Since yesterday was Biggie's day off, I scheduled a meeting to work on that uber-mysterious, yet to be revealed project. He took MiniMe to the beach, as I have an ass the size of a billboard & am not too keen on having sand stuck between my fat rolls, further calling out to me that I am not keeping up with the things I'm putting in my mouth. I had bugged him earlier in the week about how Ikea had sent me this email with these killer deals on some dining room tables. He was all, (sigh) "Really? I don't want to drive all the way over there & then all the way back in the dark. I hate Alligator Alley!" (for my Australian friends- Alligator Alley is a long stretch of interstate highway that runs through the huge swamp known as the Everglades. It is extremely desolate, as I imagine northern Australia, but with swamps, not desert.) But when I asked him what he wanted to do when we met up back at home after lunch, he was all, (sigh) "Oh, alright!" when I asked again.

I have to explain that I have a bordering on sick thing about Ikea. Remember how Edward Norton's character in Fight Club poured all over the catalog at the beginning of the movie, prior to becoming, er, enlightened? Yeah. I can mumble & proclaim all I want with some anti-consumerist rants, but I'm not fooling myself. Or whole house is Ikea. I am writing this on our aqua Karlanda sofa, across from our Karlanda chair, with our Lack coffee table & end tables, and Magniker entertainment center. If you look at the photos from the leaf rubbing experiment, you'll see the Marianda curtians in our family room. Our desktop computer sits on an Alve desk, between 2 Alve drawer units, under a Hensvik shelf. Our bedroom, which has dressers & nightstands either built by my dad or purchased from the unfinished furniture store & stained by me, has curtains, duvets, & pillow shams in the now discontinued Alvine Satin botanical pattern. MiniMe's room is decorated with a combination of fabrics that were once Rosalinda duvet sets. The only rooms in our house that don't have anything Ikea are the bathrooms. It's a little freaky.

The freakiness is more evident when you realize that the closest Ikea to us is over 2 hours away. That's where we went yesterday. That store has only been there for 1 year. Most of the Ikea in our home was bought years ago. We either ordered it online or over the phone, which with this company, is quite an ordeal. he curtains in the family room & the fabric I used for MiniMe's room were only available in the store, so I paid my friend Alexandra who lives in SF to go to the store, buy them for me & ship them to me. Yeah. I know. Freak.

It gets better.

When we left for our trek, MiniMe had pranced around the beach all morning & had told me she was tired & wanted a nap. Great, I thought. I'll pack a snack just in case, get our water bottles filled up, & subject Biggie to 2 hours of me wailing some Audra Kubat.

When we got to Ikea, MiniMe had slept for just over an hour, which is not as long as she usually naps, but okay. Well, she pissed her carseat. & I, who used to have a laminated post it for excursions such as this, left her extra outfit on one of those Lack end tables. Shit. So, I went into the store, past the signs declaring that both of the dining room table deals that I was hoping to score were out of stock, as I had managed to hold the contents of my bladder. I asked the lady at the door if there was a Target or something nearby & was told it was only a couple of blocks away.

So I drove to where I thought she said this place was & it started raining. The irony shouldn't be lost on any of you so just know that it only rains around 5 times between October & March here. I couldn't find the damn Target. We drove to a gas station & ended up at a full-fledged mall. I just ran into the stupid Macy's, found something that reasonably matched the shoes she had on & wasn't too hot for the tropics. Yes, they still sell clothes here that are for true winter weather even though it's 82 here today. I could have bought 3 outfits at Target for what I paid for that thing & spent a good 10 minutes alone trying to find someone to take my money.

Yes, we went to Ikea. No, I didn't get a new table. We still have this ridiculous glass top, black metal thing that I hate. (pausing to glare at it across the family room.) I did however get some random things I needed that were way cheaper & cooler than anything from a non-Swedish store. I mean, $.99 for 40 Christmas ornaments?

Oh, & today was the last day of the Music Together classes I've been doing with MiniMe & the SAHD we're friends with. So, I had to leave the house at 9am this morning, which wasn't fun. Then, I had to go to the grocery store with a hungry MiniMe, who was starving because I had to rush her away from her scone to get to the fricken class on time. Then I had to listen to the old grocery bag guy sigh about how he had to try to help me load the groceries into my car stuffed with Ikea bags because we got home so late Biggie didn't want to take them in. He did have to peel a piss-soaked carseat cover off for me as I was dealing with her being piss-soaked again when we got home.

So now I have to take a nap, because I think Biggie is going upstate for a training tonight & I am not prepared to deal with MiniMe by myself. Then I have to clean up this dump. & I have 4 baskets of laundry to fold.

If you're holding out for some drunk ramblings tonight, you might just get them!

Whoa!

2008-11-10T13:06:00.000-08:00

Today is my Christmas.

I am starting a new endeavor, to be revealed shortly, which required we get a new computer. Well, that & Biggie click, click, click, click, click, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLIIIIIICKING on the ol' Inspiron. Back in the day I was a Desktop Publisher. I'm a mac paerson. Clarification: I used to be a mac person. Now, I am again a mac person. But, I am lost. Lots of things to figure out. So, sorry if I'm not too frequent with the posts for a few days as I'm playing with my AWESOME NEW 15" MACBOOK PRO!!!

So, yeah. No other presents for me.

It's alright.

THIS is a gift that keeps on giving.

This is where you were on this day

2008-11-04T21:19:00.000-08:00

Yep. I made her shirt. The woman who handed me my ballot asked to read the back of her shirt. It reads:

"...and it means taking full responsibility in our own lives- by demanding more time from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism;

they must always believe that they can write their own destiny..."

The woman got all teary. So did I. Because, this pretty much sums it all up for me.

Such a weird fricken holiday

2008-11-03T20:59:00.000-08:00

MiniMe has known what she wanted to be for Halloween for months. I've spent the last month locked in our family office that really serves as a giant 'In' box for random paper we need to file & my sewing. She begged me to make her a mermaid. Now, this did not initially begin as wanting to be the Disney character Ariel, but eventually she infiltrated our lives.

Sidebar: I am one of those moms that hates those bitches aka the Disney Princesses. The first one to come into our lives was Princess Aurora, or Briar Rose, or Sleeping Beauty. My mom was all, "What's wrong with Sleeping Beauty? She's a sweet girl!" Now, I must confess that this is/was my favorite of the category, but it has nothing to do with Princess Aurora. I love the faerie Merriweather. She's a faerie badass. Now, Sleeping Beauty??? What does she do? She sleeps until some prince comes & saves her & the whole world by molesting her in her sleep. Not my idea of a role model.

MiniMe found a Disney Little Mermaid book at the library. I read it to her for weeks. I've decided she's okay. She does save the prince, afterall. & stand up to the expectations of her family for her own dreams. Okay, I'm stretching, but I refuse to buy a Barbie, dammit!

She wore the costume several times throughout the week. To Music Together class, to storytime at the library. On the actual day we went to the 'Family Festival' at the Mega-Church I call the God Mall. They had bounce houses & slides for the kids. She was not impeded by her tail at all; bouncing & sliding right along the other kids. She won the chicken race. Something wrong with a mermaid fishing, though.

I gained some serious points with these adhesive crystals I bought & offered to stick on her face & body. The girl likes her bling.

She still tells me her favorite part was after we came home & trick or treated at only 3 of our neighbors houses because it was pretty late. She told me while we were walking home that I am fun & thank you for her costume. So, I already got what I wanted for Christmas.

Placating with false autumn

2008-10-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

It has finally gotten to the time of year where I can don my sunglasses & take my vampire-lookin' ass outside. We slept with the windows open the last two nights & tonight had to close them because it is too cold. (My Scandinavian ancestors are howling in their graves.)

When I lived in Michigan I said that my favorite day of the year was in the spring, when I looked up & realized that the trees all of a sudden had leaves again. Trudging through the bitter, soggy, grey months of winter sure made you appreciate spring. It's no coincidence that green is my favorite color.

But after living in Florida for six (gah!) years now, the season I miss the most is fall. The smell of the leaves, not to mention the color, are like sensorial mermaid serenades. I said that my dad died in September on purpose because he knew it was my favorite month & having to go up to bury him then just might convince Biggie to move back.

So MiniMe & I embarked on an arts & crafts slash nature activity yesterday. She's been incensed that I refuse to trim our house in paper ghouls & goblins. She even offered to clean out her piggy bank for some plastic pumpkins. I had to do something, so I decided to make our own autumn.

We combed our yard for some leaves we liked. Of course, none of my favorite acer rubrum. Sigh. I hate palm trees. (more on this later.) We did find a fig leaf, which made me giggle for some reason. Maybe it's because we also decided to pick some key limes from our tree, which is contexturally so wrong for what I was trying to do.

Yes, that is our sweet Casey Jones minding his flock & the aforementioned Rosebud tucked under MiniMe's arm.

We brought them in the house & I tried to teach her to do rubbings with them, but of course she is my kid & she got all frustrated because mine were turning out better than hers. I ended up doing moreof the share than I wanted to. But then I got all brilliant & suggested she cut them out. Scissors are big in the life of MiniMe. She is a cutting master. Scissors ARE her medium. Fringe is her passion. I see many fringed hemmed jumpers in my future.

Yes, I know I am lucky. But just know today was a 2-drinks before dinner day where I had to flee the library hoisting a costume-wearing, wailing & shrieking child out of the library because, in her words, "I'm destructive!" In the systems of checks & balances, I've been checked & I have no balance. Just a suggestion- when you are mid-tantrum & brewing up consequences in your head for if the "bad choices" continue past that ever-threatening number three, don't, for the love of God, threaten that there will be no Noggin after naptime. That is, of course, unless you aren't planning on cooking dinner. Just don't do it.

My other pre-existing condition...

2008-10-23T11:09:00.000-07:00

Although I haven't written very much on her yet, you must know that MiniMe is by far the greatest gift I have ever been given. I think I haven't written much on her yet because I have so much to say, I wouldn't know where to start. I also have so much to say about current events I want to get some of that off my chest, first. However, in regards to current events, there is an intersection between my choice for president & how MiniMe got here.

As a Reader's Digest version, I was induced at 37 weeks. My doctor decided to induce me because she was concerned MiniMe wasn't getting enough oxygen. I could go into at least 3 more paragraphs on this, but just know that I have good reason to believe she planned to induce me all along. I have gotten third & fourth opinions, one even from the doctor who induced me's former partner, that there was absolutely no evidence that MiniMe was not getting sufficent oxygen. Induction by any means greatly increases the likelihood that a cesarean will be necessary. My doctor never told me this. I spent 21 hours in labor. I was eventually given an epidural, which only took on one side of my body, but I was still relieved. I was given pictocin & my doctor broke my water. I was making great progress when MiniMe's heart rate first was very high without coming back down, then fell dangerously low. I was rushed into emergency surgery & was put out completely. I do not remember the first time I met our daughter. I did not get to see my husband or my mother meet her for the first time.

In Florida, the rates that doctors have to pay for their malprcatice insurance are three times the national average. Because of these high rates, many OB/Gyns have stopped delivering babies. The doctors that do deliver babies average an over 30% rate of delivering by cesarean. Most doctors do not deliver babies vaginaly after a woman has had a previous cesarean. In fact, there is only one in the four counties nearest us that even presents that he would let a paitent attempt to do this. Insurance companies, as they have created this situation, are very aware that if I were to become pregnant again it is most likely that I would again be delivered by cesarean. Since I had MiniMe, our insurance premium tripled. We currently pay over $1000/month for our family's insurance.

If & when Biggie changes dealerships, we will have to pay Cobra to keep me insured or I risk being denied coverage under a new plan. If at anytime I become uninsured, it is highly likely that I will be denied under any other group plan because between the cesarean & sarcoidosis, I am considered to have two pre-existing conditions.

This is one of the major reasons I am voting for Barack Obama. Under McCain's plan, the dealership Rick works for would no longer be able to afford to cover me under their insurance plan, nor would they be required to. When I would go out on our own to find our own policy, as I have those pre-existing conditions, insurance companies would be able to either charge me ridiculously high rates, or refuse me coverage altogether. Under Obama's plan I would have much more appealing options. I would be able to stay on the plan that we are on now with no increases in cost, perhaps decreases. If we wanted to, we could change our coverage to the federal plan that McCain has enjoyed, at tax payers expense, his whole life. & if the day ever came where we actually get to move away from here, under Obama's plan, no insurance company would be able to deny me coverage due to my two pre-existing conditions. How could my decision be anything other than Obama?

There is a whole bunch of other posts to come on the story of my cesarean. I have done weeks upon months of research on my options in regards to another birth. For now, I'm just moving forward & will deal with those choices if & when they arrise. For now, MiniMe & I are kneading bread, working in the garden, reading about mermaids. We're waiting out to see if our friends & family actually like us enough to like us enough that they vote to keep us around.

How I breathe (not so much)

2008-10-18T06:58:00.000-07:00

The lung disease I have is called Pulmonary Sarcoidosis. Basically, even my immune system is so Type A it has nothing better to do than attack my lungs. It causes a cellular condition called granulomas, which remind me of fish eggs, but don't function so well as lung cells are supposed to.

The first sign that something was wrong in early 2003 was that my ankles & feet swelled so bad that I took my shoes off at work & couldn't get them back on. When I went to the ER, they did a chest x-ray to make sure I wasn't retaining water in my chest. They told me I had pneumonia. After 3 weeks of antibiotics, my ankles were still swollen. I spent the next 3 months going to every kind of specialist there is, until I finally ended up at a pulmonologist.

Dr. Siegel told me the day after I bought my wedding dress that I either had Sarcoidosis or Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. I had to wait 2 weeks for him to perform a bronchoscopy on me to make the official diagnosis. Bronchoscopy is code for outpatient procedure where they give you VALIUM AND ONLY VALIUM, well, with some throat numbing spray, where they stick a tube down your nose, into your lungs, put a camera down there, snip a piece of your lung, & then pull it out. I laid there with tears streaming down my face for the whole thing, terrified. Dr. Siegel told me I was the best bronchoscopy patient he'd ever had. I told him it felt like I swallowed a Lego. The good news was I didn't have Lymphoma.

Aside from the swelling, the disease causes me to tire easily, have achy joints, yawn a lot (often at very inappropriate moments) because I'm not getting enough oxygen, & make my chest hurt. When I was first diagnosed the pain was more in my ribs. This summer it's been higher; like it's between my boobs & collarbones.

The treatment for Sarcoid is prednisone. It is a steroid that suppresses the immune system. It also causes hardening of the arteries, osteoporosis, aggressiveness, & possibly Cushing's Syndrome, which results in a condition called "moon face". Exactly the image a soon-to-be-bride wants to be used to describe her. It is notorious for giving people voracious appetites. Most people that I have met that are on this drug are on around 10mg a day. I was on 40 mg for over a year. Not only did I manage to lose 30 pounds on the drug, I planned our wedding 1200 miles away. I basically walked around feeling like a scared cat the whole time. You know, arched back, wild eyes, claws out. Biggie was a little bit scared of me. I was a little high strung.

I was declared to be in remission in March of 2004. I got pregnant in October. I was fine through most of my pregnancy until about April, when I got REALLY puffy again, but my chest didn't hurt. More on the pregnancy another time.

In the winter I am pretty much okay. My ankles still piss me off. They look gross. The only time they have looked normal is when were in MI, last year to bury my dad & the Easter before that. When we were in OR this summer it was hard to tell because we did spend over 8 hours on a plane to get there, which tends to make me swell even more. I did manage to be a highly active pedestrian in Portland, which made me all kinds of smiley.

In the summer, here in FL, I am housebound. As is MiniMe. I HATE it. Starting usually the first week of March there is an algae bloom here known as red tide. It causes respiratory distress in most people. In me, I get all of my symptoms cubed. As this is the tropics, we get massive amounts of rain during the summer. The rain combined with merciless heat makes for an ideal climate for mold. You can smell & occasionally taste it outside. It's gross. My lungs think so, too. The biggest things that sucks about this damn disease is that it keeps me from being the kind of mother I want to be. When I lived in Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, Plymouth, MI, I used to take little Casey Jones for 6 mile hikes every Sunday out by the minimum security prison in Chelsea. I always looked forward to the time when I would have a little papoose strapped to my back. I've never gotten to do that. I have tears in my eyes, just so you know. This disease has changed who I am. I feel like my husband can barely remember that girl, now & our daughter doesn't know at all.

This is a picture my dad took of Casey & I hiking one time when he came to visit us:

This is MiniMe & I in 2007, outside of Asheville, NC, picking wild blueberries. If we got to do this more often, I wouldn't have six chins when I lay down in soft grass.

Until I get through this other post...

2008-10-16T18:00:00.000-07:00

...MiniMe's best friend, a pink bear, named Rosebud, who happens to be a He, told her he wants to be a princess for Halloween. So apparently, at age 3, our daughter is a fag hag.

Then at dinner, which I held so Dad could eat with us, Dad was "singing" to the radio. "Singing" means he was holding my hand & being very demonstrative. The song was "I Want To Know What Love Is". Being Canadian, the poor guy can't hold a candle to my 80's music knowledge. He's always trying to stump me. He thought he had me on this one.

"So, who sings this one, huh?" he snarkily asked.

(Snicker from me)

"Foreigner."

(Snicker.)

A Desperate Phone Call

2008-10-13T20:37:00.000-07:00

I mentioned before that my mom has been sending me all of these scary emails that I KNOW are coming from my Aunt Mary & her stepfather. They are chock full of lies about how Obama is a Muslim & how the handbasket is nigh. They take me all of about 3 minutes to disprove via the WSJ, snopes, factchecker.com, but I lost it on Friday. I sent her an email, that while restrained, was still pretty full o' the all caps. It's not that I don't believe that people have the right to vote for McCain, I just can't get any of the ones that are close to me to give me a reason. This makes me think that a) it's because they know their reason is illogical (i.e. he's a Muslim), not based on the issues &/or b) they are looking out for their self-interests, which just happen to be completely contrary to mine (i.e. they make more than $250k). I thought about sending an email to all of these people & letting them know that if McCain were to win, I have to move to Canada because under his plan I would have no insurance. I have TWO previously diagnosed conditions. I decided I don't need to worry about it because I KNOW Obama is going to win, but I needed to feel better. I did a crazy thing. I called my grandmother.

My Grandma Ike is 83, a widow, that lives in Saginaw, MI. Her real name is Eileen, but she & her 3 sisters all have these silly nicknames (Maryann is "Neem"?). I've never asked. Both of her parents were from Finland & she grew up in a town in the Upper Peninsula of MI so small (Kenton) that she just tells people that she's from another, slightly larger town, Bruce's Crossing. Her mother went blind at age 18 from a cavity that travelled up to her optical nerve. She still raised 4 girls in the Copper Country, largely alone. My great-grandfather was a lumberjack & built trusses in the mines. When he wasn't felling trees or in the mines, he was hunting deer. She is tough lady, but still a lady. An example? See photo below. She is holding a state record setting walleye. (record has since been broken) Notice how even in the gloves, she's holding the fish away from her body? See the sneaky smile?

The reason it's a bit dicey for me to call Gram is because we have talked all of 3 times since my Dad died over a year ago. She has been carrying on ridiculous tantrums about certain things, namely guns, that my grandpa left to my dad, that she thinks should go to her cousin. Ridiculous things. Before you get all shocky, yes, my family has guns. We are from the north. I was fed solely fish & venison for most of my early childhood that was caught or killed by my family. I ain't Sarah Palin. Don't panic.

I was my Grandpa's favorite. I would leave the kitchen full of women to go to the barn with Grandpa & Dad. Gram thought I should stay & help with the dishes. I went fishing with them while she stayed home. We have issues.

Gram is, however, a through & through Democrat. That walleye earned her this plaque, signed by the governor at the time, Engler, a republican. Gram threw it away because he signed it. She left the Upper Peninsula to go to California during WWII to volunteer for the USO, Lutheran Church, & help a very pregnant cousin whose husband was believed to be a POW. She met Grandpa in Los Angeles the day he got back to the states through a roommate. She moved to MA & married him after only knowing him for 2 weeks. She's not a wallflower, but she also can be pretty racist. I was nervous.

Gram didn't let me down. She had already voted, & voted for Obama. She is excited for him, for us. She is worried about what "these zealots" are going to do to his family. "Poor, sweet-faced girls of his," she said.

Phew.

She was glad I called. I think she feels a little better about me, now. I feel a little better about myself because at least someone in my family is fighting for me.

"Honey, Canada's not so bad, ya know," she said.

There's an old sheriff in this town

2008-10-10T00:40:00.000-07:00

In case you needed more evidence that I live in a backwards, good old boy cow town, you should know that our sheriff, Mike Scott, is under investigation by the feds for violating the Hatch Act. Yeah, that police officer you saw on the news referring to our next president as "Barack Hussein Obama" is the sheriff of the county we pay our very high taxes to. You bet (you betcha?) I've got something to say about this...

Sheriff Scott:

I have voted for you in two elections. I have sat next to you in Mass on more Sundays than I can count. I counseled your girls on the significance of Palm Sunday & you witnessed the baptism of our precious daughter. You are a member of my community, Sheriff, & I am concerned about you.

I understand & agree that you should have the right to support the candidates of your choice, but I take serious issue with your choice of speaking at the local visit of Ms. Palin. You should know better than anyone else the power of your uniform. Your choice to wear your uniform on this day was clearly an attempt to validate your presence & words as the Sheriff of Lee County. Your vote is your own & is made as Michael Joseph Scott, not Sheriff Mike Scott.

To say that your choice to use Senator Obama's middle name was innocent of any implications is petulant & insulting. Whether or not you intended for your choice of words to incite hatred, it has been pointed out to you that it clearly did. You have more opportunity than most to take responsibility when you do something wrong, and make no mistake, Sheriff Scott, what you did was wrong.

I believe that you are an intelligent man, but let me be clear. This has nothing to do with a double standard. This has everything to do with spreading hate. How am I supposed to be comfortable with our police department being headed by someone who personally perpetuates hate?

In our very racially polarized county, I am certain that you are very aware of the effect of your words regarding ethnicity. There has been a great amount of discussion, in even the local media, regarding the false accusations of Senator Obama's connection to terrorism to the extent that I believe it would be more than fair to say you must be aware of them. Even if it was not your intent, it has been made evident to you that your words have been seen as spreading hate. Especially while in uniform, it is a primary responsibilty to not only refrain from contributing to, but to prevent the spread of hate. I believe it is your obligation to find a way to truthfully address this situation responsibly. Let me make it easy for you: even through the expenditure of millions of dollars, no one has been able to uncover any credible connection between Mr. Obama and terrorism. There is no need to even address your intent by using his full name. Due to this diligence, you can say with conviction that Senator Obama does not have any connections to nor is he himself a terrorist. Until you do, know that I will vote for any and all of your opponents in any future elections. I cannot allow my family to be protected by someone who spreads hate.

Let me know if you've got anything to add...

I know, you want to be my friend

2008-10-08T14:44:00.000-07:00

When I went to work for the more rural township of outlying Ann Arbor, Kristine was the bubbly (well, you are!) intern in the Planning Department. She was the one who was advised by our department head that she shouldn't plan on cutting her hair after her wedding because men don't like girls with short hair. We looked at each other & became united in our speechlessness.

Let me just say that I can't really elaborate on this supervisor because of the waiver I signed when I got my severance package. I know, I am an assboss magnet. But, Kristine, she rocks.

Her husband dragged her to Alabama & mine dragged me to Florida. We are both raising daughters in the Deep South, trying to keep them from growing up to be little eyelash battin' belles. Kristine's daughter, Morgan, is about to turn one. I have never met her. But I made her this jumper, because Kristine is trying to pass on her affliction for Hello Kitty.

MiniMe is named after my maternal grandmother, who taught me how to sew. I plan on passing this on to MiniMe, too, as it's only fitting. (Ha! I am a pun master!) I have this pattern (Butterick #3772) in three different sizes & have made several for MiniMe, as well as some of her friends. The one's I made last Christmas are now too short, but she loves them, so they get worn with shorts, now. The fact that they have pockets makes them very popular with the girls. I could write a whole post on the things I have found in the pockets, as they are pretty representative of MiniMe. They are popular with mothers because of their flexibility. They are great when potty training, making it easy to whip those training pants off. When it's hot, as it almost always is here, they are a simple, hassle-free layer. When it gets cooler, add a shirt underneath. Even cooler, add tights or leggings.

I love to take MiniMe to the fabric store & let her pick out fabric for her jumpers. She will tell you that her favorite colors are red & purple. I worry about this being a result of the "Red Hat" ladies that are so prominent here in God's Waiting Room. She loves polka dots & (Thank God!) rick rack. I love that this allows her to develop her own idea of what she likes, without having to pick from what someone else thinks is cute.

Of course, MiniMe got a Hello Kitty Halloween jumper, too. But her's needed two pockets, because she's just that kind of girl. I have given up on getting her to stop wiggling in the darn thing. She said, "Ma, I AM an active girl!" Well, we are now informed.

So thanks, Kristine, for being my friend. & when Momo gets old enough, take her to pick out some more fabric. But not the HK Christmas flannel with the (argh!) pink background, because I already bought it.

I am a leaf

2008-10-03T21:01:00.001-07:00

I go where the wind blows me.

This was one of those things I always said when someone asked me where I wanted to go when I was in college. I always think of it this time of year, when I'm stuck in the tropics, with no falling leaves.

Considering the current status of our lives, this phrase has new meaning. The wind was kind-of at a stand still for a while. I was feeling like we weren't going to get anywhere. Now it fells like a category 5 hurricane. Almost daily I feel our next destination is changing. I feel lost & guilty & like a bad parent. I can't figure out what is in our best interests.

Tina Joy & I have an ongoing fantasy about winning the lottery. I think it's something like more than 70% of women that do. Well, when (ha!) I win, what I would do is pretty simple. I'd move back to Detroit. I'd buy one of the many great houses for sale in the City, I'd make it sustainable. We'd start a business that would employ some of the very hard working unemployed. We'd use some of that vast abandoned land. I was thinking I'd like to start an urban plant nursery, an urban farm, a RIE Institute. Of course, I'd become a rablerouser, attending all of the Planning Commission & City Council meetings. I'd know the Master Plan, City Code, Historic District Ordinances by heart. I'd probably get myself shot.

Where we are with economics in this country right now, I can't help but think of one of my favorite buildings in Detroit, The Fisher Building. It is located on the northwest corner of West Grand Boulevard & Second Street in the New Center District. I used to park my car in the garage there & walk through this building everyday to get to my office. It is resplendent. To try to begin to describe the glorious materials I stepped on with my vinyl, Payless black mary janes everyday, would be ridiculous. The building was commissioned by the Fisher Brothers, the founders of Fisher Body Company, which became part of GM, and designed by Albert Kahn. It was originally to be the western-most building of a series of three structures, with an even taller more grandiose building at the intersection of West Grand & Second, with a sister building opposite that. The stock market crash of 1929 stopped the project & only the one tower was built. There is the General Motors building kitty corner across West Grand, the Hotel St. Regis farther east, and the Albert Kahn Building farther down Second. But the Fisher Building has always been such a standard of decadence, lavishness in architecture to me. As a kid that grew up in the last big recession, the child of Irish & Finnish temperance, this was excess.

My husband had never been there before he met me. I took him there on Saturday afternoon before we were engaged. It was empty. We felt like we were the only people in the building; that we had just happened to find the one door that hadn't been locked. We walked across the skybridge to the New Center Building to find a security guard practicing his saxaphone. When he saw us, he started playing Mona Lisa. While we danced, I stepped on a little green glass bead. I still have that bead in my jewelry box as a momento of that day when my husband grew to understand my position in this dichomtomy.

I was a girl scout that was taught to always leave things better than they were before I got there. When I left the far north & affluent suburbs to go downtown, it was a complex experience. I heard stories from an early age of the riots in 1967. I knew that people moved out of the City to escape violence. I could not grasp how it was okay for an entire City to be left to rot. I know who Aubrey Pollard was. I understand the fear & frustration. I still cannot reason with the tremendous resources being abandoned while so much mediocrity is heralded elsewhere. That's kind-of my unspoken philosophy as an Urban Planner. Why would you go & make another mess when you haven't cleaned up the one you already made?

So, I am this Pollyanna white girl who wants to swoop in & save this place. I have long dreamed of living in a grand old house that smells of lemon oil from the woodwork with trees older than my grandparents growing in the yard. I want to take my kids to Belle Isle to play in the park. I want to take them to the DIA, the Science Center, to see The Nutcracker, which I was in as a child, at Christmas. The Zoo. I love the feeling of standing on the riverfront with my eyes closed & thinking about the millions of people that made this great place. I hear their voices shouting out for justice for this place that has been orphaned by millions. I can't ignore the sound. It speaks to my heart. & I have a big heart.

My husband knows this about me & does want me to be able to try, but I am scared. So many people think I should be scared for the safety of our child, for the cost of taxes, the cost of maintaining an old home, the reality of the corruption. What I am really scared of is that it would be the wrong decision to go back because the economy is going to get worse. My husband wants me to consider moving our family to Canada, where he is from. I think of how lightened the burdens of the last 10 years of my life would have been without having to worry about the cost of healthcare, the cost of my education, & I want better for our child.

I am abandoned by my country. I am disappointed in how it has failed my family. My husband, who came here, got an engineering degree with no financial assistance. He has applied to become a citizen 3 times & has not been able to complete the process. Before he met me, the second application was lost in the World Trade Center. He has worked as a car salesman & sales manager between 60 and 80 hours a week for the last 7 years of his life. He faces racism almost daily; in Michigan where they assumed he was Arabic, in the south where they assume he is Cuban, followed by the ridiculous apologies when they find out he's Italian. He has paid around $70k into social security, & I get emails where people ask me to sign some ridiculous petition that say he shouldn't be entitled to that money because he isn't a citizen, because they don't understand their own country's laws.

I watch my husband, who does not have the opportunity to vote, watch the debates & read about the canidates for president. I love him so much. I have seen him with tears in his eyes in the last few weeks more than once. He has absolutely no problem supporting Barack Obama. Since he cannot vote, he has donated some of his very hard earned money. He has not once tried to tell me who I shoud vote for.

I had lunch with a friend today at this great restaurant that was owned by a woman from Greece. She made me the best gyro I've had since we left Detroit. She came out & sat with us & our kids because her business was so slow. After we talked for a while, the conversation turned to the economy. She had tears in her eyes as she talked about how as a child she was determined to become an American one day, because in the US anyone who works hard enough can make a great life for themselves. She said she felt cheated. She is about to lose her business.

I am broken. I am torn between standing my ground & trying to fight in this country, or leaving for Canada where I believe my family may have more opportunities. I am on the brink of giving up one of the greatest dreams of my life. It is crushing.

How it's affecting us

2008-10-02T19:59:00.000-07:00

This is the post where I just lay it all out there. I suspect that I will probably try to write the bulk of it & break it up. I tend to write a bit of lengthy posts, I've found.

I'm pretty scared. The whole bailout situation has me freaked. I'm reading a lot, but I can't say it's really helping. The first class I ever failed in college was Macroeconomics. But come on, the prof used an overhead projector with the full range of Vis a Vis palette to make his graphs "explaining" (very loose description) the concepts, but he was left handed. I'm left handed. I know better than to try to write with mediums that smear. Bygones. I have read enough to know that there are some major problems with either scenario, the two scenarios being bail out or do nothing. I want to write about how this all applies to us.

As I wrote previously, my husband declared bankruptcy. It's not that we were unable to pay our bills, it was that it would be stupid to. The only reason we could afford to pay for it all is because we are incredibly frugal. We have been trying to get out of Florida for two years & we we're unable to get out of our house without paying money out. Taking our down payment & the lost equity, we have lost $270,000 on this house alone. We are not destitute. We are not whining. We didn't do anything stupid. We are not expecting anyone to help us or bail us out. We are trying to cut our losses & move on.

We have been socking away between 3 & 4k every month, except for the month we went to Oregon. (Let me just say that 10 days without bugs was worth way more to me.) I have been entertaining MiniMe, putting gas in my car, & feeding us, healthfully mind you, on $900 a month. The dealership that Big works at is huge & it boads well for him to work there. As a salesman, last year he made almost 4 times as me with my silly little degree did in any year. He was the highest selling salesman for every month but 2 in 18 months, including last September, when my dad died & he was gone for 10 days. He was promoted to a sales manager last spring & has had the most number of deals as well as holding the highest gross. He took a paycut to be promoted, but it meant he'd have to take his 2 days off a week, unlike when he was a salesman & often worked 10 days nonstop.

In case you didn't read it on the news, auto sales are down to levels that they were in 1993. Last week he had a customer with a credit score of 780, made $200k a year, that couldn't get approved for an $800 payment. Today he was demoted back to sales. In a way, it's okay because he'll be making more money than if he stayed in management. But again, the blood-turnip thing.

Our plan has been for him to stay there because it is good for him to get management experience there. We are living rent free. We wanted to stay here until we got a certain amount of money saved up & then move to wherever we are going to go. We were expecting the longest it would take is two years. We've watched craigslist to see how much we would have to pay for rent if we get kicked out. We've discussed how we should try to get our bank to let us lease back our house instead of moving.

I know I could go back to work, but I need to explain what this means. The school that MiniMe attended up until May was $13k. This is for the school year only, and only until 2:45pm. I tried to find work in Planning here that will let me be done by then & it is not out there. If I went outside of my field I would not make much more than it costs to send her to school. I know, look at other schools. There aren't really any other options out there for us or her. This place is not family oriented in so many ways. We tried another school for 3 months last year & it was pretty disastrous. She had just turned 2 & told us all she wanted for Christmas, in July, was to go back to her old school. This is how I ended up where I am.

I should mention that we have had a huge cloud inside our house all summer long. I had a lumpectomy in June that I regret. I know, my life is sacred, & it is to my husband, too. But the literal shakedown of the various doctors has been alarming. Our insurance is supposedly good & we are up to almost $6k for the outpatient procedure. It is very hard for my Canadian husband to pay these bills. Especially after he has to pay over $500 a month for this insurance. I checked to see if I would have had to wait to have this surgery in Canada. I would have had to wait one day longer than I did here in Florida to have the surgery, unless my doctor felt this was too long, in which case they could schedule it sooner. But I probably wouldn't have had to have the surgery, because they would have done some sort-of more detailed radiology technique that would have shown that it was just breast tissue. Oh, & that would have been free, too.

5 years=Wood?! (snickering)

2008-09-26T20:01:00.000-07:00

Five years ago today, I became a Missus. We got married at one of my favorite places on this planet, Cranbrook House in Birmingham, MI, where I snuck in & skinny dipped in younger days. We had our reception in an old bank in downtown Pontiac. It was a blast. It was beautiful. But, to give you some context...

My husband sold me my first new car. People find this hilarious & say things like, "That must have been a great car!" (Har! Knee slap!) It was a crazy time, in the end of 2001. I was trying to decide if I was going to move to Colorado, because it would be a huge difference in cost of living. I was always afraid I was going to meet a guy that would make me want to stay in MI. So was my Dad.

One of the clearest memories in my life is when Biggie was putting my license plate on my new car for me. I wasn't use to this much chivalry or customer service. He was asking me why I'd want to move to Colorado because it was so snowy there. He told me as soon as his lease was up he was moving to Florida. I froze. I knew if I wasn't careful I was going to end up moving with this guy. Florida? Ick!

I did love my new car. I always bake about 10 different batches of cookies around Christmas & box up some to give to people that are new friends or acquaintances. I dropped a box off for Biggie. Our first date was 2 weeks later at the International Auto Show. He thought it was cool that we could have a logical discussion regarding the benefits of a rotary engine. When we had dinner afterwards at a Detroit standard, Cyprus Tavern, he started a tradition of asking me what I thought he should order. I'm an excellent orderer. He had the Moussaka.

Our second date was in Downtown Plymouth, where I lived at the time, to the ice sculpture competition & for dinner at a great place that I miss a lot, The Box Bar. We sat at the bar, drinking, joking around. At one point he got up to go to the bathroom & he just kissed me. It was abrupt. I was kind-of pissed. I felt like I had the rug pulled out from under me. But at the same time, I was glad he did it.

As time went on, I started to get worried. I really liked this guy & he was going to move to Florida. He told me after we had been dating for about four months that he wanted me to move to Florida with him. He had the opportunity to go to several different cities in Florida, so he told me to just figure out where I wanted to go & that's where we would go. Things between us have always just rolled along. One of the first jobs I applied for was with The City of Fort Myers. They flew me down to Florida, interviewed me, & offered me a job on the spot. I got up the next morning, found a condo for us to rent, & flew home. It was just kind-of understood that we would be engaged before moved. He's told me I ruined his plans for a romantic proposal. I was all bitchy that night when we went out to dinner & wouldn't let him get a word in. He ended up just asking me in his apartment. I like to think I let him off easy.

My life at certain points is much like the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Even though I'm Catholic too, I still come off as incredibly waspy. My husband is first generation Canadian, with both of his parents from southern Italy. His mother, from Calabria, moved with her family to Niagara Falls when she was around 12. His father moved to Canada from Sardinia when he was 18. They had two boys, my Biggie the second one, then a girl. They were divorced when Big was a teenager. His mom suffered a traumatic closed head injury that left her in a coma for a year. She's functioning pretty highly, but she isn't the same person she was before her accident, I'm told. Between them & I, there is a large cultural barrier. Between his father & I, let's just say there is a division of responsibility barrier. With his mom & I, there's an additional strain because of her accident.

In the last three years that we have been parents, our marriage has been seriously strained. I have gotten to the point that I can look at things in a macro sense & see that there will be ups & downs. The down seem to coincide with lack of sleep. The up seem to coincide with gifts. (I'm kidding.) No, the ups seem to coincide with progress, as in the meeting of challenges. The process of parenting & seeing our affect on MiniMe has helped our relationship greatly, lately.

There was a long spell of great tension in our relationship that stemmed from unresolved resentments. We would have a disagreement & it would never get dealt with because we didn't want to fight in front of MiniMe. I started to notice that her behavior would change. She knew there was a problem & she didn't like it. She would be terse & make abrupt, angry little grunts. By the time I would get her to bed, Biggie would be sleeping, too. Things festered. There were shouting matches & threats. When MiniMe started shouting at us, I realised something had to be done.

I thought about it & realised that it wasn't right for MiniMe not to see how problems got resolved. The reason it would be inappropriate for things to be resolved in front of her was because of the way Biggie & I talked to each other. I tried to talk about my theories to Biggie, but as in parenting, setting the example was far more effective. Biggie is an expert at getting me "spun", as he says. When he would say things that were nasty, I asked him quietly to not talk to me that way in front of our child. When I stopped reacting to him, & instead asking how I could help him to not to say or do these things, He noticed. But also, so did MiniMe.

Biggie knows things he says hurt me, make me angry. He knows it's not okay. I do the same thing sometimes. When I don't react or retaliate it reminds him that I love him & settles him down. My love, my restraint, they humble him. They remind him of the promises we made to each other & they show our daughter how people that love each other treat each other. It is a powerful thing.

On our wedding day, it had been cloudy, drizzly most of the day. Right before the ceremony it began to clear. I remember getting ready to walk down the aisle, trying to not be too sweet to my Dad, because I knew he was on the verge of crying. I concentrated on squeezing his hand, yet not making eye contact. Looking at this picture the photographer took, I wonder if this is the way between many brides & their fathers.

It made me flustered, & when I stood at the top of the steps to the garden where the ceremony was, I looked down to see my dress was too long for some reason. I've been told that when I stepped up to the top of the stairs, the sun came out from the clouds behind me & lit me up. The church across the street was ringing it's ancient bells, completely unplanned on our part. I heard people gasp, thankfully taking me away from cursing myself. My dress was too long because I had forgotten the slip that went under my dress. Typical me. Too late now. People were gasping at me! *blush*

But it was the sound of Biggie, weeping, that truly made me present. My machismo Italian was weeping for me. He was overcome with tears of joy at the sight of me, his bride. It was audible. It is one of the things that gets me through those times when he can be, frankly, a major trial.

I remember a lot of things from that day, but the tears & this moment, below, are my favorites. I knew it was going too fast. I just paused because I could, & because I knew these things would sustain us. I remember how I felt with his breath on my face, his smile, this very moment. This was a celebration of our love, corny, I know, but in times such as these, very necessary.

Detroit breeds us people...

2008-09-24T12:21:00.000-07:00

...these people that doubt. People that are accustomed to fear & intimidation. Being accustomed to it after a while, you start to question why. When you question why, you start to find out there really isn't anything to be scared of, as long as you ask the right questions & act responsibility. But, the trick is, & this is what's getting my hometown down, you HAVE to ask the questions.

I've been reading, again. & again, today's soundtrack is brought to us by Marvin, who in case you didn't guess, is definitely in my list of top 5 people to have dinner with. Open it in a new window, then come back to read the rest of my post so you can read with the song playing in the background. I'll wait here.

From what I understand the big bank CEO's are threatening to NOT participate in any bailout agreement if their bonuses are taken away. Yes, you read that right. You know me, I'm currently trying to find the names of these CEO's. I think the FBI might be able to help me...

For others that may still be confused, this is an excellent article for you to read:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/getting-real/

Yes, I had to re-read it a few times to sink in, but it helps.

Okay, so what all these experts are saying is that if controls for oversight are put into the legislation, only banks that are failing would want to be part of the bailout. So lots of people are asking the next logical question; if banks aren't failing, why do they need our help?? This is what the White House Press Secretary said:

"With respect to executive pay, again, I'm not going to get into specific, point-by-point details on what our views are on that, other than the Secretary of Treasury said it would make more difficult to make this plan work and effective if you provide disincentives for companies and firms out there who are holding mortgage-backed securities and other securities from participating in the program. You have to remember, these are not all weak or troubled firms that own mortgage-backed securities. A lot of them are very successful banks and investment houses that have done very well, have been responsible, are holding performing assets that have value. They were not necessarily irresponsible players, and so you have to be careful about how you deal with them."

So where the "HUH?" comes in is here. This is why I am saying this is essentially a Socialist, heck, Communist, banking system being proposed. If a bank isn't troubled, why do they need our tax dollars to help them out? The reason they wouldn't want to participate is because if they aren't allowed to have bonuses, it's not worth it to them. This is because the only reason they are in the game is for their bonuses. If these firms are doing so awfully they are going to fail, why would the issue of bonuses even be an issue? You know the phrase you can't get blood from a turnip?? (I'm actually a rutabaga. Nice to meet ya.) If these vampires don't need to participate, obviously they are going to be able to get their blood some other way. So they aren't going to fail, I'd say.

Remember in my first post on this how I quoted Section 8 about how there were no provisions for oversight??? Paulson (AArgh! A$$hole!) responded with this:

"We gave you a simple, three-page legislative outline and I thought it would have been presumptuous for us on that outline to come up with an oversight mechanism. That’s the role of Congress, that’s something we’re going to work on together. So if any of you felt that I didn’t believe that we needed oversight: I believe we need oversight. We need oversight."

Yeah, he didn't include oversight because he's been proven to be someone who isn't comfortable overstepping any boundaries, whatsoever. Ya know, first thing I think of when I think of him is how meek & unassuming he is.

I am looking for what Obama's plans are in regards to this, but this is what he's said up to this point:

"First, the plan must include protections to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to further reward the bad behavior of irresponsible CEOs on Wall Street. There has been talk that some CEOs may refuse to cooperate with this plan if they have to forgo multi-million-dollar salaries. I cannot imagine a position more selfish and greedy at a time of national crisis. And I would like to speak directly to those CEOs right now: Do not make that mistake. You are stewards for workers and communities all across our country who have put their trust in you. With the enormous rewards you have reaped come responsibilities, and we expect and demand that you to live up to them. This plan cannot be a welfare program for Wall Street executives."

& as far as the GOP, well, go here: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/RSC-Alternative-bailout-Plan/

I'll just summarize & tell you it calls for the elimination of the Capital Gains Tax for 2 years. Ya know, that tax that's based on profits in real estate, cause that's what we're all making right now. Talk about giving the richest people a break on taxes & then passing the tax burden onto everyone. It also seeks to repeal the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, this measly little thing that regulates things like, oh, requiring the government to utilize only reasonable measures in balancing the budget, mandates the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve to establish a monetary policy that maintains long-run growth, minimizes inflation, and promotes price stability. It also requires the President to set numerical goals for the economy of the next fiscal year in the Economic Report of the President and to suggest policies that will achieve these goals & requires the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to connect the monetary policy with the Presidential economic policy. Oh, & there's this other thing: it prohibits discrimination on account of gender, religion, race, age, and national origin in any program created under the Act.

I think things are looking up. It seems like the lights are getting brighter in this tunnel & the need for this tunnel is becoming more & more unnecessary. For those of you keeping up on this, & especially those of you that actually HAVE called & complained: BLESS YOU! This how the system is supposed to work. We call- They answer.

Cue the music

2008-09-22T19:59:00.001-07:00

When I was recently graduated with my Planning degree, I acquired a theme song. It was a Marvin Gaye song entitled "You're the Man". Sirusly, read the lyrics. Chills.

Then, not to be outdone in the slightly obscure Detroit 70's music scene, I've been singing Funkadelic's "Can You Get to That" all day, today, after reading about the (cough) $700 BILLION dollar bail out plan.

(Stunned silence followed by crickets.)

"I once had a life, or rather, life had me. I was one among many, or at least I seemed to be. Well, I read an old quotation in a book just yesterday. Said, 'Gonna reap just what you sow, the debts you make you have to pay.' Can you get to that?"

Yes, George. (Clinton, not The Shrub.) I most certainly can get to that.

For those of you not so in the know of the life of the Hoppytoddle, we are in the midst of a pretty big motha of a bankruptcy. See, we owned, um, eight different properties here in Florida. The house we live in we bought in 2005, at the height of the market, so that I could be closer to the shiny job I described in the previous post. We offered $9k more than the asking price, as there were 8 other offers made on the same day & if we hadn't we wouldn't have gotten this lovely place. We put $100k down. We got an offer when we had it up for sale that came out to exactly $300 more than what we owed, when everything was said & done. Oh, & I should mention that our taxes & insurance ALONE were $1100/ month, at this point. Well, see, we are still in Florida because when our purchasers tried to mortgage $10k less than what we owed on the house at the time, it wouldn't appraise. So, the deal fell through. That was way back in 2006. Fun, huh?

Then come to this past year, when we tried to refinance 2 of our properties that we bought in 2002, from adjustable rate mortgages to fixed. Yeah, houses that we've paid payments on for six years. Well, they also appraised for $20k to $30k less than what we owed.

Oh, & the suckiest. This lung disease that I have? It don't like the super humid swampiness that is, ya know, the tropics. My body does things like yawn every five minutes, since I'm not getting enough oxygen, my joints swell all up bringing new meaning to cankles, & my chest hurts like I've got one of those gothic spirits sitting on it. So I'm housebound from July to October, praying we don't lose power.

Since all of the real estate was in Biggie's name, we decided to just declare bankruptcy. We have no credit card debt. Just my student loans & real estate. This is really hard on Biggie. But a heart attack would be harder, I said. I'm one of those crazy bitches that actually likes to see her husband alive & shit. Well, most days.

(Yes, I'm feeling a little crazy tonight. Forgive the language. Consider tonight's musical selections for context.)

So we are now waiting to see how long we get to live rent free in our own house. I have a friend who's been in foreclosure for over a year now, & still in her house, so if that should happen we should have a pretty large chunk o' money. Not that it will be worth anything at that point, but hey, maybe we could buy a llama or something. The plan is to rent a house here for another year, assuming we are expecting to get pitched sometime around January, then figure out where & the heck we want to go. Since watching Sicko, my husband's native Canada is looking pretty good. It's currently looking like it's going to be a choice between Portland, OR or back to Detroit. & when I say Detroit, you should see this house. Sirusly, if you're not hip to the D, you'll flip.

Besides that, read about this supposed bail out. In case you don't know it yet, it is not the answer. It's an insult. Are we really supposed to care about all those whiny bankers out there who beat their desks with their fists about how the government needs to solve this problem or else it will cause the inevitable collapse of all business in America? Excuse me? Aren't you the guys who got multi-million dollar yearly bonuses for the past decade? Why don't you cough some dat back up? Because I don't quite see how we are in the same boat here.

I am getting seriously pissed at the panic being stoked by the media. I understand, but it is highly irresponsible. This is establishing a culture of hysteria. And this plan IS hysterical.

I'm gettin some deja vu from all this hysteria. I'm beginning to see a trend in this Doomsday, We All Need to Be Buyin' Some Livestock, Victory Gardenin', Fear Pandering. Does anyone else remember a time in the not so distant past when a certain governmental entity pressured our (actual) elected officials about how he could only save us from EMINENT DOOM if we provided him with FULL & UNDISCLOSED AUTHORITY???

Yes, from the plan:

"Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

Somethin' about Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Not be a complete ranting lunatic, but hasn't it been like 6 months since they (argh!) bailed out Bear Stearns? The government has yet to do anything to cope with the credit default swaps or oversee the investment banks. & we get no time to review this strategy?

Haven't we learned what ignorance & fear can do to our nation, yet?

Please, anyone reading this: write or call their Representative or Senators. Tell them that if they vote for this bill, without the kind of deliberation that anything costing $700 billion demands, you will vote for their opponent in the next election. Try not to swear.

& leave me some comments, already. I'm impressed that I'm drawing traffic from Austrailia. Wow. I can say, "Well, I'm big in Austrailia!"

Feminist my ass

2008-09-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot of blogs, editorials, and commentaries on Sarah Palin over the last few weeks, as I'm sure many of you have. I know mine is not a unique opinion, but I have finally been able to verbalize what it is that bothers me so much about her. She's a bitch.

I know, I know. It's not nice to call someone you've never met names like that. I don't care. Let me explain...

In the spring of 2004 I left my municipal job to go back to consulting. I was excited to go work for a woman who had worked her way up, creating a Planning Department in an notoriously good old boy South Florida engineering firm. Let's call her Peg. Peg fought hard for me to take some time off before I came to work there, getting me paid vacation time, because she knew I would hit the ground running. At my 90 day review she gave me a raise. She was extremely pleased with my performance. Peg told me she was excited that she had found me because she was looking to retire in a few years & she wanted someone to take her place. She told me she believed that I possessed the ability to do the work as well as manage the politics of the office. Then she told me that she was glad that I got away from my boss at the City because the day that I turned in my 3 weeks (yes, I was trying to be nice) notice, my old boss had called her to say, "You know she's going to leave as soon as she gets pregnant." Peg shook her head over how mean this was telling me she was glad I didn't have to work for that woman anymore.

To be fair, I have no idea if my old boss actually said this, though it is possible. It is completely possible that Peg pulled this out of her ass.

I worked very hard, until almost 7pm every night, & wooed an important project to the firm that I had wanted very badly. Although I was hourly, I only claimed one extra hour a day. I felt the prying eyes of my peers on my back.

I got pregnant the following October. I actually did a pregnancy test in a hotel while attending a state conference. I didn't tell my boss until December. Other women in my department had kids. Peg looked the other way when they came in late or had to leave frantically to rescue sick kids. I didn't feel like I had anything to worry about. When I was put on bedrest 30 weeks into my pregnancy, Peg changed me to a salaried employee so that I would be able to keep my benefits. I was permitted to work form home. My billable hours were around 20 hours a week during that time. I found out the fiance of a man that worked at the firm was looking for work as a nanny. We had them over for dinner, talked about parenting philosophies, & we agreed on a price. I was relieved.

MiniMe was born 3 weeks early by emergency cesarean after 21 hours of labor. When I tried to turn in my paper work for my short term disability insurance, I found out I didn't have any. I went through my files & found photocopies of the forms that I turned in when I started working. Apparently HR never took the money out of my checks to pay into the program. I had never noticed the $1.12/week wasn't being taken out of my check. So now not only was I not going to get that money, I also had to find a way to pay my insurance premium while I was on leave. When Peg called me to see how things were going I told her about this. She basically told me it was my fault for not verifying money was being paid into the program.

When MiniMe was just 6 weeks old, I called the nanny to ask her to come meet her. She told me that her soon-to-be husband was uncomfortable with the prospect that she might be home alone with my husband. Basically, my response was, "Huh?" Maybe it was more of a "Wuh?". I was floored. I was scheduled to present my pet project at public hearing in 3 weeks. I had an infected incision and a teeny baby that wasn't nursing correctly. Now I had to find someone, somewhere to take our precious girl. I found a wonderful Montessori school that had an infant program that followed philosophies I loved. It was $350/week.

When I went back to work, I was miserable. MiniMe was barely eight pounds. I would go to nurse her on my lunch hour & cry. I would go home in the afternoon & sit with her for hours, working on nursing. Because she was so tiny, I was only allowed one four hour stretch of solid sleep. After that, I had to nurse her every two hours, or pump & have my husband give her a bottle. My husband worked an average of 70 hours a week during this time. I was working 6 hours a day & flailing. Although I had my own office, I didn't have a lock on my door. When I pumped, I put a fluorescent post-it that was 3" by 6" on my door that said "ABSOLUTELY DO NOT OPEN!" People ignored it. I was told I needed to go to the women's locker room to pump. It made people uncomfortable to know what I was doing in there.

Another project manager criticized me for getting up at 5:15pm to leave a meeting. When I explained that I had to go pick up my daughter, he said, "Can't you just get someone else to pick her up?!" My husband had to work until 8pm, the school closed at 5:30, I was full of milk. The meeting was consisting largely of them discussing their golf games at this point. I don't golf. I looked at him & said, "No, Dan. I have no one else to call. Unlike you, I do not have a wife, or heck, even a spouse that stays home. I AM the wife, Dan!"

The landscape architects for the firm were largely four recently graduated men that sat in a big square of cubicles in an isolated area of our building. I had problems with them all along. They had photoshop images with each others heads pasted on figure skaters & a little putting station. They billed twice the hours they quoted to my projects & were shopping on ebay. One day when I was leaving their area after discussing review comments, I thought I heard the sound of a cow mooing. I ignored it. To get to the kitchen I had to cross by their area. The cow sound, followed by the snickers of fraternity boys, would be heard every time I passed by. When I complained to my stupervisor I was told that I must be misunderstanding something. Yeah, because between my 7 years of college & multitudes of animal toys in my house, I have no idea what a cow sounds like.

I went back to work full time between December & April. I don't know how I did it. In April, I begged Peg for mercy. She asked me what I needed. I told her I needed to be done by 2:30pm & was fine with being hourly, as long as I kept my benefits. She said fine, as long as I was there at 7:30 every morning. I don't remember much about this time of my life, except that I was moved from my office with a door to a cubicle between administrative assistants and interns. My clients would come all the way from Israel to be embarrassed at the conditions I was given to work in. Peg quit being my direct supervisor & I was now overseen by someone I had been told I would never work for when they hired me. When I had my review he told me I was costing the company money, being part time. My billable hours were at 81%. The man reviewing me was at 65%. When I confronted Peg with this she told me he was right, I wasn't coming into work on time. It made no sense to me. They were moving me to a smaller cube. I felt like I was in Office Space & needed to track down my stapler.

My husband & I had decided we wanted to move out of Florida. We decided that signing a contract to keep MiniMe at the Montessori for a year wasn't a good idea. The tuition would be almost half of my salary. I turned in my resignation & two days before my last day, Peg repeated what my previous boss had said. "I didn't think she was right that you'd really trash your career after you had a baby."

That's the kind-of feminist Sarah Palin is. She's had to hand babies off to someone else to take care of, but been able to afford to pay someone she can trust. She holds herself up as a woman who can "have it all", without acknowledging that it's not a level playing field. She allows someone to use her as a pawn, because she's pretty. She agrees to sell out other women, mothers, hell, even her own daughter, for her own ambition. She agrees that families in this country don't deserve healthcare unless they can afford it, that they should leave their children with people they don't feel comfortable with to pay for that healthcare, and even if a woman is raped, she should still be forced into this situation because it isn't fair to the baby to not be given a chance. I'm not even bringing up the issue of that if the woman is unfortunate enough to have to have a cesarean to bring that baby into the world she will be labeled as having a pre-existing condition that will slap her with higher insurance premiums for the rest of her life. That's for another post.

I'm not saying that women don't have the right to go back to work if they choose to do so. I am saying that for some women, it isn't a choice, & Sarah doesn't even acknowledge that. Even women who can chose to stay home with their children do so at a risk to their careers. What about the men that do so? She stands on a platform of "family values", when she refuses to consider legislation that will help every family have the same opportunities for their children. Sarah perpetuates the system that ignores the best interests of my child, just like Peg, she's a bitch.

Where hoppytoddle comes from

2008-09-17T19:50:00.000-07:00

I bought a pretty little journal (It had rick-rack. I love rick-rack.) when Mini Me was just 1 year old, with every intention of writing all of these sweet little stories in it for her of all the wonderful things that happened to make her who she is. I didn't write in it until a year ago today, when she was over 2 years old.

My dad died on Sept. 19 of last year, unexpectedly. Every time I sit down to write in that book since then, I think of him, & I just haven't been able to write. That's a big reason why I started this blog. I wanted to tell somebody about him & still manage to get some of the stuff that seems so mundane down for her. I'm sorry this is so sad. I'm not always this depressing, I promise. Just bear with me.

His death was sudden & as unexpected as it could be for someone who was an alcoholic, smoked 2 packs a day, occasional Swisher Sweets, & who drove the route through the Upper Peninsula of MI so he could get pasties. He wasn't always a truck driver. When I was born he worked at the Penn Dixie plant on Little Traverse Bay south of Petoskey. My dad lost his job there when the land was sold to the state, because they were drilling so far down for the limestone it was having negative affects on the fish in Lake Michigan. The selling of that land to a developer years later, who blew the remnants of the bed into the lake to make a marina for Bay Harbor, was the final push I needed to change my major to Planning. In between, he worked in foundries, as a welder, a journeyman. He did have a college degree, but he always worked with his hands. It wasn't until he died that I figured out that he preferred to work with his hands so he could have his mind all to himself. He was always thinking.

My parents got divorced before I was 2 & when they did, my mom moved back downstate. She worked hard to make sure I got to see my dad. If it wasn't for my mom & my step-mother, we probably wouldn't have really known each other. It was just too hard for my dad to see me, be reminded of both my mom & the fact that he would not get to see me grow up, really. I suspect that the reason my mom pushed so hard was partially because she's a martyr, but also because she was secretly hoping I'd decide my dad was as awful as she thought he was. It backfired.

My dad drove to stay with me in my dorm room at Michigan State. When I went to the University of Detroit, he helped me move into the dorms there. He looked at the bulletholes in the dorm & told me I was becoming an architect in Saigon. He helped me move into my first apartment, a flat at Van Dyke & Lafayette. He didn't say anything, but I knew he was scared for me.

One of my favorite stories to tell about him was when I was in Architecture school, he welded my friend Jordan's shock plate for his 1980 CJ Jeep. I was staying in this house with like 7 guys & they couldn't believe I knew the difference between an XJ, TJ & CJ. When Jordan could not find, or more accurately, afford a new shock plate, I took one look at it & said, "Let's drive out to my dad's on Sunday. He'll fix it on the spot. Just bring your one hitter." They couldn't believe my dad would just do something like that for someone. I told them, you're not just anyone. You're my friends. Jordan had a super sweet girlfriend, that I think he married, so it wasn't about that. It was a bumpy ride on 94, but it was fun, as we told stories about our families. It took all of about 4 minutes for Jordan & my dad to find something to talk about. Dad welded the plate with the torch he kept in the barn. I went to pick blueberries & made blueberry bread while they worked. I grabbed some Squirt out of the fridge & headed out to the barn. Jordan & my dad were doing hits out of the one hitter. The bread didn't last very long. We all sat around the table in the barn and gabbed. I can't for the life of me remember what we talked about, just how I felt. See, I spent a lot of time feeling sad about how my dad wasn't what my mom needed him to be. That day I stepped back, looked up, & thanked God. Maybe my dad wasn't who my mom needed, neither for herself or for me, but I was so glad he was my dad. On the way home, Jordan told me he'd never see me the same way again. It wasn't that I had a dad who got stoned every once & a while, it was that I had a dad that I could just be myself around. It wasn't just that our love for each other was palpable; we actually liked each other, too.

Dad never felt like he could ever criticize my decisions. He felt like because he didn't raise me, he didn't get to have say. Even when I begged him for his opinion, he wouldn't give it to me. He did tell me things he didn't tell anyone else. Like how he spent weeks building a landing strip in Laos, only to have to hide in a bunker for 3 days while it was destroyed. Then he had to go out & bag the bodies of his buddies that had been laying there all that time. He told me about how he got a letter from his high school sweetheart his first week of boot camp telling him she was pregnant & going to marry someone else because she knew he was going to get killed. He told me that my mom was the love of his life & never had a bad thing to say about her, except that she was a little messy. This meant a lot to a child who had no memories of her parents loving each other.

There were a lot of things about my dad that were hard to deal with. He had a gift for saying the absolute worst thing at the absolute worst time. He was not right in the way that someone with PSTD is, combined with a healthy dose of OCD. He had a combustible temper combined with remarkable shooting skills. Many times I was somewhere with him & had to quietly beg for him not to reach under the seat of his truck for his gun because he had witnessed something that he didn't know any other way to handle. There were also many times I wished he had witnessed something that someone did to me. When I was about eleven there was an incident where I gave him an ultimatum that I didn't ever want him to drink around me again. He stuck to it until I was of drinking age, & even then, he never really got drunk.

He would come stay with me at the little house I lived in in Plymouth in my last years at EMU. He would bring some Black Label, or Bell's if he was trying to be fancy. He'd sit at my kitchen table, which had been a wedding gift to he & my mom, while I cooked and baked. We would talk & eat. Walk my dogs. Drink some beer. Talk some more. He'd ask me to explain things I studied in school like situational ethics & how trusses work. We'd listen to Johnny Cash, Brenda Lee, The Dead, Jessie Colter, Jimi Hendrix. When I was just about to graduate, he saw a list on my fridge that I'd made of things that I was going to buy for myself when I got a real job. He picked the most expensive thing on the list & drove to Sears to buy me a brand new 32-inch televison that very day. His only concession was that I not tell my step-mother.

I would leave parties at ungodly hours, drive the 2 hours to his house, & we'd go fishing in the north channel of Lake St. Clair. By sunrise, I'd have caught something & fall asleep in the bow. He'd do things like put vodka in my coffee while I was sleeping.

When I met my husband & moved to Florida, I killed a part of my dad. His own dad died about a month after we moved down here & he was left with no one else to fish with. We talked every Saturday afternoon, unless something special was going on. He would call occasionally during the week too, & in his messages he would always tell my husband he loved him too. Pretty amazing for someone from stoic Finnish stock. The song we danced to at my wedding was "The Promise" by Tracy Chapman. I always thought I'd move back to MI before he passed.

I can't tell you how much I miss picking up the phone & hearing him say "Hoppytoddle!?" like some teenage Beatles fan. I want to tell him Mini Me has his giggle. Those moments, of seeing her beautiful face make that sound that pierces my heart, are the very definition of bittersweet. I went through pictures looking for ones to take with me to his funeral and didn't find very many of just him. As I dug through the boxes, I realised just how many pictures there were that he took of me. And they are all my favorite ones, because when you look at them you can see how he saw me. He made me feel beautiful just because of who I am, not because of who made me, but because of what I made of myself.

In the last year I've realized some things about my dad that I never would have when he was here. My mom is currently furious with me for planning to move out of Florida. She moved down here all of 3 months after we did & she is in the process of packing my bags for the kind of enormous guilt trip only an Irish Catholic can orchestrate. My dad said so many times that my family was me & my husband now, that he loved us, that he missed us, but we had to live our lives. It is amazing to me that a man who was so challenged in so many other ways in regards to relationships, seemed to manage to let both my husband & I know that he loved us immensely, missed us terribly, but never made us feel guilty about moving away. When we went to visit him the last time, I didn't have to say a word about not smoking in his own house. Then man who lived on bacon, bread, cookies & coffee had stocked his fridge with every single organic thing they had at the little country store by his house for Mini Me. There was always a little Squirt "pop" for me, too.

More than anything, my dad taught my husband how to love me, & how a father should love his daughter. When I pulled in the driveway, he would stand outside the barn with his hands in his bibbers, smiling ear to ear, just waiting for me to come hug him. He would bend his knees up & down like a little excited kid. That man knew everything single evil, stupid, thoughtless thing I ever did, & he still found a way to make me feel like I was the best thing that ever happened to him. He taught me one of life's hardest lessons: that relationships are work, & that if you love someone, you have to love all of them, not just the fun stuff. He never took me to the doctor when I was sick, or ran me to dance class. I think he only paid like $500 towards my college tuition. But he changed the oil on my car every time I came to see him. He helped me change the alternator on my car over the phone between my shifts waiting tables. He never told me to be quiet when we were fishing because I would scare away the fish. What we had to say to each other was always more important. He celebrated my achievements as my own with absolute glee, understanding the difference between being proud of me & admiring me. He made sure to tell me the latter. His only wish for me was that I would have everything I ever wanted.

& now, most days, what I really want the most is his voice on the other end of the phone.

Our new thing...

2008-09-14T12:24:00.000-07:00

We have a little battle in our house, lately.

Before I met my husband, I was a bit of a natural foodie freak. There was no soda, sorry, pop, in my fridge. No frosted flakes in my pantry. No instant anything. But I smoked, so he kind-of called me out.

Well, years later, the lung disease put an end to the smoking thing. Since I'm at home now, and I have not much better things to do, I've gone back to my old ways. Biggie is not happy. He has gone so far as to say he thinks I need to "go see someone" about how I grocery shop & cook. He doesn't even know about the quest to find locally produced organic beef. He's fine with all the veggies, and will eat pretty much anything green as long as I make my homemade dressing for it. He has a borderline obsession with my roasted chicken, has mastered the ability to reproduce my mashed potatoes. He doesn't understand why I buy so much yogurt. His biggest issue is that he is not happy with my bread.

I am a carb freak. The circumference of my thighs can be directly attributed to the prolific basil plant, cheap pecorino at the nearby Italian market, & pasta. I started a carb revolution a few months back with the purchase of an awesome book (Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Bread's) and the commitment to only use whole grain flour. The half bag of white flour in the pantry is being saved for Christmas cookies, & if I can't master the whole grain version by then, pannetone. I have made several different loaves of the ones in this book, & yesterday it was bagels.

Mini Me loves to help me in the kitchen & I find ways to have her help me with the bread. My lung disease keeps me mostly housebound during these sweltering months, and baking has provided us an outlet for our boredom. A new friend of mine, Tika, & her daughter Gabby, came over for a playdate yesterday. Before they left Gabby & Mini Me helped me add sunflower seeds to the dough & roll out the bagels. I wish I thought to take a picture of them but I am new at all this, & I think supervising two preschoolers with massive available amounts of flour is sufficiently ambitious. This is Mini Me supervising the mixer, however...

Biggie can't quite bring himself to love the bagels. This batch is exactly what he requested, sunflower seeds & salt. Yet, he says they need to rise more. He says I'm doing something wrong when I boil them. Let me just say that I know quite well how lucky he is to have a wife that bakes homemade bread several times a week and somehow manages not to bash him one when he even slightly wrinkles his nose about it. Bear with him. He's Italian. If it doesn't have copious amounts of something bad for him, it's not worth his time. I promise. I will not let him get to me. This is all part of my passive aggressive way to his heart, by keeping it healthy, through his stomach.

And this is a final product shot. There are only three left today, when there were seven yesterday. Next I will make whiny man some raisin ones.

My Pudding...

2008-09-11T14:18:00.000-07:00

I've been wracking the net over the last few days trying to do some research for my mom. She is struggling with this ridiculous email she got about Obama. She asked me to research it. The most ridiculous thing in the email is saying that there isn't any proof that he's a christian.

So, how exactly, do you go about proving what someone believes in their heart?

Been ruminatin' on this one for a few days.

Leave it to my Mini Me to make sense of it all. She got mad at her dad & spouted off,

"Jesus, Rick!"

I have no idea who says these things, but I guess it proves that I believe in God. Seen as how my 3 year old calls on him for help & all.

What's with the mean?

2008-09-10T20:38:00.000-07:00

So, I'm reckoning with the fact that I do not live amongst my kin. I am surrounded with people I can not relate to on so many levels I am beginning to be curious about my husband's obsession with Star Trek, because I now believe I can identify with living on another planet with other species.

Yeah. It's that bad.

I was looking for some female, mother venting. I went to our local newspaper's website, as I have seen several ads for this social networking site they sponsor. I was rummaging around & thought heck, I'll check out the political posts. Um. Okay, break. Sidebar. Red light.

I am not registered as any political affiliation. I think the current status of our country sucks. Doesn't help that I married a Canadian who whines every chance he gets about how ignorant & backwards we are. I have come to the conclusion that I am supporting Barrack Obama. I am a very thorough researcher. I have investigated his stance on the issues important to me, as well as his opponent. I watched &/or listened to both conventions. I became ill. I am very offended by Ms. Sarah Palin. Just leave it at that.

Both of my grandfathers served in WW2. My paternal GP, Frank, was a Gunny Sargent in the Pacific. He did SEVEN beach heads. (that opening scene in "Saving Private Ryan". Did that 7 times.) He volunteered for FOUR of them. Yeah. I know. My other GP, Louis aka Red, was in the Army. I don't know what his rank was (he's still alive at 82. Piss & vinegar gets ye far. I could ask, but we clash.), but I know he was there when they liberated Auschwitz. My dad was a Sea Bee in Vietnam. He was awarded a Bronze Star. My point with all these qualifiers is that I come from a family that supports the military. I do not, however, support our occupation of Iraq.

Back to the newspaper website. Let's just say that I was horrified by the blind, misinformed, one-sided, hate-filled comments I read there. Hate.

See, I've got this thing about hate. I'm from Detroit. I'm an Urban Planner. I became an Urban Planner because I love Detroit. I am one of those naive, hopeless romantics that wants to make it better. A friend calls me the S & M Planner because I'm from the bell-weather of failing cities & live just across the river from the textbook joke of all planned cities. The thing that did my city wrong is hate. I like to think of myself as an anti-hate super hero. I was correcting Grandpa Frank from telling off-color jokes at age eight.

I have 2 bumper stickers on my car. One reads, "We're Making Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them". Another reads, "You Can't Kill For Peace". Yesterday I took my car to the dealership where my husband works to have the oil changed. I went in, talked to the service tech, walked back out & got in my husbands car where he was waiting with Mini Me to take me home. He pointed out that the service techs were pointing at my stickers & laughing. Not the kind of laughing of, "Oh man! That's a good un!" No. This was the, "Ha! Look at the commie that's gonna get herself lynched!" laughing. I confronted the guy, not with hostility, but with concern. I told him (untruthfully) that I had had stickers removed from my car there previously & wanted to make sure I didn't have anything to worry about. He smirked. "Eve'rbody's got der right to der own 'pinion, I reckon, " he said. Smirk.

So then I came home & read some of my beloved Free Press online. Read some of the lovely stories & commentary on the Mayor (the title deserves respect even though he doesn't) resigning. Read some of the lovely hate he was spewing. Sigh.

Looked on you tube to see the reasons why people aren't wanting to support Obama. Found some lovely people that actually admitted they were not going to vote for him simply because of his skin color.

This morning I went to the local Obama office to try to get a yard sign indicating my support. I was having a hard time finding the place. I stopped a FedEx driver to ask him if he knew where the place was. He didn't want to tell me. He told me to go register as a republican. He told me I was "an idiot" for thinking Obama will win. More hate.

After I got my sign, they were apparently trying to tow my car because I wasn't parked in the right place. There were no signs indicating where I was not allowed to park in the clearly marked space that I did, but hey. That couldn't of had anything to do with the big McCain signs in the legal office windows facing my car, could it? No, couldn't possibly be more hate.

After I got home & was standing in my front yard with Mini Me, pushing our new sign into the ground, a big truck with tinted windows blared its' horn & swerved at me.

So, I decided I needed to spread some love.

I talked to my best, & admittedly republican, other mama friend here in SWFL this afternoon. She knows I've been having a hard time. We came to a mutual agreement. We love each other. We provide unconditional, non-judgemental support for one another. She was there for me when I didn't know I needed her & has become a primary witness to my life. We are grateful for each other because she has listened to my pain over all the hate I have witnessed in the last few days over this election. She understands how alien this all feels to me. We know we are on different sides of this fight, but we still find a way to respect each other. I am proud of us.

Oh, & I keep reading this:

"We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come. We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.

Yes we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.

And so tomorrow, as we take this campaign South and West; as we learn that the struggles of the textile worker in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in America's story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea - Yes. We. Can."

So, please don't send me any messages about how wrong I am. What's that thing? If you don't have anything nice to say....? Let's go with that.