Travel logistics

Many moons ago a grad school friend and I submitted a proposal to present at a conference. There’s a new kind of technology available in our field and we had some ideas on practical applications of it in the classroom. We finally heard back; in five weeks we’re slated to present four hours away on a Friday afternoon. Great, right? Well, it’s looking a little complicated. Husband will be in Belgium for work then, so it looks like it’ll be a road trip with me, my friend, her crawling baby, and my two-year-old. Hopefully her mother will be able to meet us there and watch the little girls so we can do our thing. If not…um…huh. My mom can probably watch Little Girl, at least, but she’d have to stay at my mother’s house for a day night at least. Husband, unlike in times previous, is okay with this idea. “She’s two now,” he reasoned.

I was pretty excited for Husband to get to go to Europe, especially since his brother might be able to come down from Sweden to see him while he’s there. But now it looks like Husband is leaving on my birthday. MY BIRTHDAY! We take birthdays very seriously around here; you get your way for the entire week previous to and after. It’s awesome, but the system isn’t designed to accommodate interrupting spates of international travel.

Originally he’d planned on going next week or so, but Husband is afflicted with moles, and he recently had to have four removed, and he’ll be getting more area cut out around one of them tomorrow. He didn’t want to travel with the stitches in (he knows from experience this procedure bothers him a lot) so he rescheduled, which, fortunately, it was okay for him to do. So instead he’s going ON MY BIRTHDAY! If I didn’t work and it were free, we’d totally go with him to Brussels. I’m kind of jealous. It’s not that I have a long-standing urge to go to Belgium, but I like to go new places. Lately I’ve paid quite close attention to travel articles in magazines, and I think about where, about what, about how. I look forward to when Little Girl is eight (this is my magical mental age for successful sight-seeing with a child) and we can see Italy, Greece, Croatia. That sort of thing will be much more doable when we live in Europe already.

Shortages (updated)

So…there’s no gas where I live. I haven’t seen a gas station with gas in days; Husband went out this morning looking for some for my car so we could attend a birthday party today and a playdate tomorrow, but no dice, so I had to cancel. Ugh. I have a third of a tank, and he a fourth. Husband can work from home, but as a teacher, on Tuesday I really gotta have gas to get there (unless they cancel classes due to the gas outage). I live in a car-driven city so this is a pretty big deal around here.

Also, there are no diaphragms where I live, either. Or rather, none in my size, and reportedly they are no longer manufactured (one pharmacist says even if there are some around here, they’re “old and brittle.”) I still have my old diaphragm, though it’s two years old; the many pharmacists I have called don’t seem to have solutions for this beyond using a different size (too big: risk of back aches and pain; two small: loss of functionality) and one didn’t even seem to know what a diaphragm is. I guess I’m the only person using one anymore. Or at least the only person with a 75mm size cervix.

To summarize: I no longer have access to fuel or contraception. When and where do I live again?

Updated with Husband’s photo of two-hour line for gas:

Dilemmas of appearance

Little Girl recently had the opportunity to appear in a television ad (via an acquaintance in PR). I declined and passed the chance on to a friend. I guess it’s perhaps silly to worry about this with a two-year-old, but I don’t want Little Girl’s looks to be a big deal for her. Look, Little Girl is almost unbearably cute. The golden ringlets, the happy face, the goofy run. Rarely, though, do I talk to her about how she looks, beyond complimenting her on her superbly large, round tummy. I’m more likely to comment on her strength, politeness, good eating, color identification, helpfulness. But maybe by trying to make appearance a non-issue, to emphasize other attributes, ones that she earns, as time passes, I will only instead make it a taboo topic? Or make her feel like her looks aren’t worth praise?

And at any rate, publicizing Little Girl like that didn’t sit well with me. (And then of course I have this blog. Hmmm.) I want to keep the residue from the reality television circuit of self-aggrandizement via celluloid far from my child. That opinion, though, doesn’t keep me from noting how much more adorable my kid is than those on the covers of parenting magazines. Given the opportunity, she’d be impossible for advertisers to resist. That such an idea makes me proud is a little shameful, though, as I simultaneously rail against a superficial milieu. Do I just want her to be privately, unconsciously, yet somehow confidently beautiful? How do I raise her to feel confident in her looks without feeling overly bound up with them? Am I making too big a deal about this TV thing? Would you like your child to be featured on television or in magazines?

Getting my (really expensive) copays’ worth

Today I took Little Girl to the pediatrician’s to have the spot examined from which, three weeks ago, I removed a tick mercilessly feasting on my innocent baby (okay, it was really small, and had no blood in it, but the gall of that thing, to attack my child!). She still has a little pink bump there and I wanted to be sure all was well. It is. Little Girl, though, was so wackily giggly, running laps around the little room, demonstrating hysterics at every opportunity, that the doctor was moved to ask, warily, “Is she always like this?” From a pediatrician, who sees toddlers all day!

You understand, then, the alacrity with which I filled the prescription for a new diaphragm I got when I went to see the OB/GYN who delivered Little Girl for my yearly appointment (even though, like IUDs, it’s not covered by insurance. Like a pregnancy and birth of mine would somehow be cheaper!). I had a long series of questions for her. I was quite interested by what she said about the office’s VBAC policy. Mostly that it differed remarkably from what I’d been told by repeat c-section moms I know who go to this same practice–that the circumstances under which VBACs are not permitted seem to be more limited to those in which they are (everyone had told me the doctors said they didn’t do VBACs; I suspect the discrepancy has something to do with birth spacing). I didn’t get any numbers to demonstrate how this translates into reality, but it was encouraging.

Unfortunately, it’s true my preeclampsia risk is heightened from having it before, and whatever it was my RE had found that made them put me on aspirin for my pregnancy is still true, and she agreed it was possible I had undiagnosed GD, given Little Girl’s birth weight (8.5 lbs) at her gestation when born (37 weeks). The doctor was very pleased with my weight loss (thirty pounds since when I got pregnant, forty since I got married) and said that the likely better nutrition that led to that would help with any further pregnancies. Not that I have any planned. Not that that can always go according to plan.

The art of non-acquisition

The prospect of having to box up all of one’s belongings and pay to move them across oceans and continents, at great expense, makes one reconsider the necessity of many of those belongings. Shopping isn’t so fun when you realize that soon enough whatever it is will most likely have to be gotten rid of. Clothes and things for Little Girl are mostly exempt from this reasoning, but it extends to bird feeders, kitchen gear, electronics, lampshades, decorations, water slides–all the fun crap you can buy at Target, basically. Consequently, I’ve amped up my library usage: all the fun of acquiring, none of the hassle of owning. I’m surprised how ingrained the “acquire, be happy” thrum inside me seems to be, and have developed an appreciation for flowers and food and other ephemeral joys.

But I’m still left with all the stuff we had before:

Things I bet my mom will take:
plants, pots, garden decorations, garden supplies
Cats (hopefully)

Things to sell/give away:
Baby clothing and accessories [willfully ignoring any ideas about other babies]
Toys
Book shelves
Kitchen table/chairs
A lot of the books
Records
Anything that has to be plugged in (different voltage there)
Weird knick knacks I no longer care about
Most of the linens/towels

Things I don’t know what to do about:
Crib
Piano
Dining room set (pretty old–was my great-grandmother’s–kind of fragile to move abroad–but I love it)
Our mattress (Super-comfy, but the sizes of bedding there is different, plus it’s big)
Couch (good quality, fold-out, but suffering from a few imperfections, despite its constantly being slipcovered)
Weird knick knacks to which I am unaccountably attached
Christmas decorations

I’m not even thinking about all of Husband’s billions of tools and bits of photography equipment.

This issue, even more than preparing the house for selling (good luck with that, I know) stresses me out about moving. But I also welcome the opportunity to pare down, to de-clutter, to re-prioritize what surrounds me even if, in the moment, it’s trying.

Un-Alaskan

I am sad to see that many people have been making sweeping judgments of Alaska and Alaskans based on that one crackpot GOP VP candidate. Sure, as the women of Alaska like to say about dating there: the odds are good, but the goods are odd; but Alaskan oddness (discussed here) can be a virtue. It’s a strange and wonderful bunch up there, as I got to know growing up (summers only, visiting my dad) in Anchorage. The pioneer spirit is visceral.

And Alaska’s landscape is beyond stunning; it’s sparse and open where it is not overwhelmingly immense and solid. Even as a child I felt the age of the earth there and the smallness of humans. What with the diverse population and those kind of strikingly grandiose surroundings it’s difficult for me to imagine living there having the viewpoint of Palin–insular, myopic, unilateral.

Her having children is not why I don’t want her to be my leader. I don’t want her to be my leader because she evidently puts little value on my personal ideals of being well-informed and thinking reflectively; on the separation of church and state; on the privacy of personal decisions; or on honoring other animals and our planet. Her interpretation of the gift of that wonderful place, Alaska, and its wildlife and populace is to take advantage and rape, murder, pillage what she can’t control. I don’t get it. Living all that time in such a place, with such wildly diverse neighbors–how can she have missed their messages, their beauty, so entirely?

“Who should mommy vote for?”

He’s just too competent for his own good

My in-laws live in another country and I see them once a year. Rarely do I talk to them on the phone, and emails volley no more often than once a month. They don’t ask anything of me nor I of them.

Husband’s in-laws live in the same country. His mother-in-law lives two hours away, and sometimes she visits, usually with just about no notice, and sometimes he is, uh, strongly encouraged to go come along to visit her and other in-laws on a day-trip. His father-in-law lives pretty much as far away as possible while being in the same nation, and he comes and visits once a year or so. I talk to both my parents at least once a week, usually more often.

These parents, his in-laws, both rely on him for various kinds of help. His mother-in-law wants his advice on: computers, cameras, careers, home repair, and, most notably, financial planning. His father-in-law wants his advice on: computers. These topics come up kind of a lot.

When my dad was here last month we gave him a laptop computer (not brand-new–an old one Husband had outgrown). My dad had been using a PC from 1997 and we wanted him to be able to watch videos of Little Girl and, you know, do more than one thing on the computer at a time without it crashing. Husband had been hesitant–he wasn’t sure he wanted to do free tech support for life–but we were happy to give it to him.

The problems started immediately. My father is pretty computer-illiterate. He was convinced the web browser was broken when it was just that the website he was trying to visit was down; he wanted to leave the computer here so we could fix it and sort of accused me of breaking the web browser by changing the homepage address. But I convinced him it was fine and sent him back home with it, hoping he’d be able to figure out how to stop using dial-up (dial-up!) and use his Special Lady Friend’s wireless connection set up at their home (he was concerned this would be illegal, but we told him it’s just like the phone; everyone who lives there can use it). This has evidently not happened, and in his efforts to change that, my dad has fiddled with things to the point that there’s no way to access the internet at all from his home now.

When Husband finally got off the phone tonight, after two hours spent talking to my dad trying to get his internet connection sorted out and an hour talking to my mom about my grandparents’ stock portfolio (I swear my parents don’t even call me anymore, just him), he very sweetly requested that no more of my parents have any problems tonight, as he’d like to eat his dinner. Poor dear. Maybe the tables will be turned when we move to be near his family, but rarely does anyone ask me for advice so I’ll probably be okay.

Unhappinesses big and small

My students, who couldn’t believe seven years had passed, all remembered where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about 9/11, be they in Brazil, Saudi Arabia, or Korea. I remember, too. Indelible. A few months after the attacks I visited Ground Zero. From what I understand from my students who recently field tripped to NYC, it looks about the same these days, too. Bereft. A host of make-shift monuments. Will there ever be more?

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Big dog accident in the kitchen today. Also, a really, really boring play date, plus the mom turned out to be allergic to my house. Add in an impromptu observation of my teaching by a superior, a no-show student for a make-up test, a two-year-old being a two-year-old, five hours of sleep last night, today’s anniversary, and it all adds up to yet another crappy day!

An early bedtime was needed by all II

Tuesday I got a notice from the university where I teach that I needed to come in on Wednesday afternoon for a mandatory training on an email program. Nevermind the fact that a) I already know how to use this particular email program and, more notably, b) the university has never given me an email address, meaning any knowledge I have about this particular program would be wasted. At any rate, Little Girl’s caregiver when I’m working is quite flexible, and sure, I could have arranged for her to go there while I went to this meeting. But they don’t pay me for meetings such as these making me reluctant to spend 20 dollars or so to attend them, especially seeing as this one was clearly not applicable to me. However, last week there had been a meeting (for which I had again received one day’s notice) that I did not attend because I had a work conflict with my other job, so I felt like, in order to prove to these people that I do value the job, which I do enjoy, even if they are rather cavalier with my time, I would go to this thing today. But I would bring Little Girl. Dun dun dun.

I don’t work that close to where I live, and the Swedish playgroup we go to Wednesday mornings was this time near where I work. “Why, we’ll just spend the day in the area instead of going home!” I thought, common-sensically. There’s a mall right there, and I figured we could entertain ourselves there a couple of hours between engagements.

This plan was much better in theory. First I got lost on the way to the playgroup. Then the mall was really boring. Next, the exit I needed to get off at to get to my job evidently doesn’t exist going west, only going east, so I had to do a lot of extra driving to get to my workplace. Once there, my boss was all, “Oh, what are you doing here? You don’t need to come to these.” Then why the “mandatory training” notice in my mail box, hm? Finally, the person presenting about the email application struck Little Girl as so utterly hilarious in her speech and movement that I was able to sit in the meeting for only a couple of minutes before giving up and watching from the hallway, while Little Girl found various things in the hallway utterly hilarious instead. We left after fifteen minutes. Little Girl occupied the remaining hours before bedtime having temper tantrums with completely insane motivations. Sometimes it was hard not to laugh. At least she went down easily.

An early bedtime was needed by all

Pretty worn out. Little Girl has a host of very strong opinions and intentions and when things don’t go her way, through a lack of ability or because Mommy won’t let her, she is much aggrieved. Very much. It’s been a hard day. On the way to the babysitter’s, Little Girl kept insisting, “No work. Mommy stay home!” My being impressed with her verbal skills did not make hearing her less sad. Then later, playing with a big pile of dress-up clothes given us by a friend, Little Girl lunged from my arms. I wasn’t able to recover my grip; she broke her fall by bouncing her little throat hard against a table. Then, recoiling into me, we landed on the floor, and she, crying, peed all over us, her princess dress, my (dry-clean only, work) skirt. Now she looks like she has a hickey. Not the best day ever. I also had to confront cheaters at work and discovered our big bag of onions living in the carpeted closet had largely decayed into sludge. I’m ready to pack it in.

Cute kid, though:

High school best friend

I met M on the first day of sixth grade. I was starting at a new school, and I still remember seeing her the first time, carefully-coiffed blonde hair framed in a doorway. Except for our penchant for taking unrequired Spanish classes, we were pretty different in middle and high school. I was widely understood to be daring and smart; she was seen to be friendly and sweet (and nothing more). (In college, M realized the untruth of the assumptions about herself, thank goodness.) At any rate, despite these apparent disparities, we were very close growing up. We studied in Mexico together; we biked to each others’ houses Christmas afternoons to compare gifts; she visited me at my dad’s in San Francisco; we had phone lines practically dedicated to one another; we threw joint parties where her other friends looked justifiably suspicious at my other friends as they wobbled back from around the back of the stand-alone garage.

We had a huge falling out our senior year of high school (because of something to do with my now-husband–more on that later), though, and ended up not speaking for four months or so. When we finally made up we felt like reconciled lovers, and held each other and cried, almost, smiling, competing to say who had missed whom most, who was the most sorry.

Then we were off to college far away from one another. Time passed. One day, nearing graduation (and my wedding), we were, as we infrequently did, catching up. I asked her if she was seeing anyone. She told me “you’ll never guess.” I threw out a random name–guy from high school, someone she saw sometimes around her college campus; my high school boyfriend, in fact. As a joke. “How’d you know?” she said. They’d been dating half a year.

They’ve now been married a bit more than a year. Today Husband, Little Girl, and I drove to the next town over to visit them in their new home. M adores Little Girl (rightly so), and, constantly surprising to me, M’s husband (aka My High School Boyfriend, remember), and Husband get along great. I always tell Husband he doesn’t have to visit with them, but he has evidently lots of man-bonding fun with My High School Boyfriend. I think they’re better friends at this point than I am with M–she and I really just keep in touch for nostalgia’s sake. Sometimes that happens.

It doesn’t help that M always comes with My High School Boyfriend as a permanent accessory. I mean, do you want to hang out with your high school boyfriend–and your spouse and child? No, you do not.

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My mother seems to be hanging in there. My stepfather says he thinks she’ll be okay. Thanks for your support!

PS: The tone of this post is really uneven and the end abrupt because Husband put on Eddie Murphy Raw a few minutes ago, which was extremely distracting. I can’t even really proofread it; I keep wanting to add in “suck it, motherfucker!” somewhere. I’m forever going to associate M with Eddie Murphy in a purple leatherette jumpsuit doing Bill Cosby impressions as a result of this juxtaposition. This is not going to make future visits less awkward.