Monday, monday...

I like this left of center picture... (If you want me, you can find me left of center....)

He's a gorgeous boy and I love him so...

It's HIM not me...

So BP worriedly tells me he thinks something is wrong with baby i. She's constantly "squinched up" with her legs to her chest holding on to her feet. She did this all night - he's so worried - Is she gassy? Is something bothering her back? Constipated? Etc. A light bulb went off in my head - it's him - not me (at least this time) who is utterly neurotic. She's discovered her feet for Pete's sake! That's all there is to that. If suddenly you saw two parts of your body you'd never seen or had access to before and you were prone to shove things in your mouth it'd be a field day, no?

I told my mom about it this morning and she said, "Well - he wasn't around with F when he was little so he's going through this all for the first time. Just like your father, when you all were kids he wasn't around and now... etc. etc."

... Huh? Where was he when F was a baby? Why did I feel like he was there every waking minute? I won't dwell on it - it's just kind of funny. We're all revisionists I suppose.

----

Yesterday was M's funeral. We were talking when BP got home about how our perspectives have changed. Instead of this making us think of our own mortality, we both thought of our children and thought of M's parents. It used to be when things like this happened, we'd reflect on friendships and the whole melodrama of growing up and all the hardships we face. It's so different now... Once you have children you labor to make them happy - to make them engaged in life or at the very least content. It doesn't feel like it always, but it's not about you anymore. I couldn't help feeling more pain on M's parents behalf than on M's. How must it feel to have your child succumb to sadness? To have them one day decide it's time to die and to be powerless against that sadness in the same way you're powerless against a terminal illness. And if M had children, would things have been different? One of many questions unanswerable.

Thinking about books and stuff.

Last night I finished a book that I struggled to read - mainly because I'm too tired to read. But also because I didn't immediately get into it. Books that don't get me right out of the gate rarely stand a chance... this was one of those that took so long to ramp up but once it did... POW. As it happens, the author has another book, We need to talk about Kevin, which transfixed me. Her writing is so haunting, fluid & gorgeous. The book is The Post-Birthday World and my initial problem with it was this: it starts out as one of those "Groundhog Day" type books where the action happens the same way twice but told slightly differently. Well, ultimately it breaks from this and is about how a choice or non-choice impacts this woman's marriage. It's a tough one, but worth it. It made me think.

Going through some of BP's things with him to find pictures or mementos of Matt, whose funeral is tomorrow, we found a lot of my old letters to him. Geez, was I a windbag through our early relationship! (Not now, of course... tra, la, la...) As we were reading them, he remarked how I was always writing letters of apology to him and yes, for the most part, I was begging forgiveness, explaining myself, and asking for his patience. It's humbling to look back on us and see in print how much I put him through, how much he went through just 'cause he loved me. I'm grateful for his tenacity and so much more. He was meant for me - no one else could or would love me in this way.

.. Baby i went off meds altogether & seemed to be struggling again. She's back on them and seems to be struggling again. I wish her GI appt wasn't in July. I don't think we'll make it until then. I know there's more to her than this crankiness and sleepiness and moodiness. When she has those moments of feeling "right" she's so delicious and sweet and serene I can't even stand it. I hate this for her... I won't stop until she's figured out. (Now that's slightly funny - when do we ever figure another person out? Okay, so I'll rephrase... I won't stop until she seems okay.)

I'll be glad when April is in the rear-view mirror.

Just pictures!

I had to get baby i in her baby I shirt!

... this is so funny ... all three of them checking hockey stats!

It never fails!

One month before paying off the car and in the midst of considering quitting my job, my transmission blows.

$3,000.

This sucks.

What if it turns out my Mommy Intuition is wrong?

So... the gastro-pediatrician took baby i off of Axid and put her on Prevacid. She suggested we try prune juice to help with the constipation. All of this meant to hold us over until her lower G.I. Well... we put it to the test yesterday. We gave her Prevacid in the a.m. & prune juice in the afternoon. She spent the day clinging to me like a koala bear & I her eucalyptus tree and whining and crying. Oh, and spitting up/puking. She tried very hard NOT to drink the prune juice... she'd let it fill her mouth and then when it overflowed it would just drain right back out, down her face and all over her shirt (and me). (Man, is that stuff THICK!) She was beside herself all day. Girlfriend is not going to do well when she's sick. That stuff I said to the gastro-ped about my "Mommy's intuition" has me thinking... what if I'm wrong? She had her worst day ever after seeing the best we could find right now. What's the common denominator? Is it the medicine (Axid) that makes her sick/grouchy in the first place and nothing is really wrong? Should I just leave the poor thing alone? Am I the common denominator? Is our infamous over-parenting the common denominator? Today I'm giving this a shot - doing nothing, giving her nothing, not looking for signs of something. Clearly my intuition that something is "wrong" hasn't entirely left... but I'm wondering now if what's "wrong" is that I think something is "wrong" and I'm treating her for that and making things "wrong" in the process. Oh boy, this motherhood thing is fun.

So we had the day from Prevacid with baby i yesterday and a despondent F who was just strung-out tired. He wept through his bath b/c he had so many sores the water "hurt." He counted and he has 45 boo-boos and they all are "killing him." He wept through my cutting his fingernails after bath because his right hand, according to him, was not long & didn't need to be cut. It was his left hand that was long. I wasn't even going to try to reason with him on this one. I just clipped and he cried. And as he was falling asleep (at the wee hour of 7) he gave BP the "my life is terrible" speech... "I had a bad day. I have 45 boo boos. I lost my bouncey ball. I got a bad note home from school. Mommy cut both of my hands' fingernails and they didn't need it." Etc. Etc. I walked in to BP giving F a "Control your own destiny!" speech. I think it was a little heavy-handed (when all F really needed was to just fall the heck asleep), but it did give me reason to smile. We were trainwrecks last night of the first order.

And now entirely off-topic but also among the macabre...

It's so gross and cliche that the VT murderer was just a reclusive weirdo with no real motive other than to act out his internal pain at such a hopelessly high cost. It makes me plain sick. When you're going to turn the gun on yourself in the first place, belly up to the bar and do it FIRST. My heart hurts awfully for those families and friends of the victims who lost something so definitively irreplaceable for someone so decisively sick. A friend of mine works with someone who lost their son on Monday at VT in this, the end of his senior year. Thinking of that, I feel gutted. This guy doesn't deserve to go down in infamy. I don't want to see his "creative writing" or hear about his "stalking" and alarming behaviors. I don't care about him one whit. I think others should turn their back on this dissection of this maniac as well. Find out how to prevent this from happening again? I'm all for it! Understand this guy? No thanks. But it does raise the question, why are all of these incidents remarked on with, "Oh yeah - that guy was unhinged!" or "Surprised? No way. The only thing surprising is that he didn't snap sooner." or my favorite, "I contacted the cops twice he had me so concerned. They said they couldn't do anything to him for being weird." Ugh. Ugh. Moan. (And here I reveal my one discrimination - people who raise that inner red flag. I hate them. I know they're not stable. Read "Protecting the Gift" - I beg you - and you'll know why!)

Finally, watching the Oprah two-day special on the "backlash" from Don Imus I felt I was in a parallel universe. One where I'm meant to be enlightened by the likes of Common (who was honestly verbose & composed) and Russell Simmons (who has such a strange lisp BP asked if he'd had a stroke) and to find meaning and "poetry" in hip-hop & to understand why it is a rappers' right to say the things the rest aren't meant to say & that are not meant the way Don Imus took license. Sure, there's some poetry in there sometimes and sure, Imus had no business saying what he did. I get that; I don't use that language myself (and heaven help the child of mine who does). But, for once can we address why anyone is using anyone in the entertainment world or the media as their moral compass? And for crying out LOUD can we stop repeating these slurs over and over by anyone with a byline or a microphone when they take place? Wagging my finger and saying, "Parents... arrange your children so that when these words are flung at them they won't fall down." This way when rappers, talk show hosts, Don Imus, Mel Gibson, et al get verbal diarrhea they can understand this kind of shit can roll right off.

And to lighten things up - taking F to see Blades of Glory and hearing him use the term "sex addicts" was a true highlight (or is it low point?). Didn't I tell you being a mom is fun? To quote Carmine Jr from last Sunday's Sopranos, "The sacred and the propane..."

Sad day yesterday...

I couldn't believe the news out of Blacksburg. We heard just as we were headed into baby i's gastroenterologist appointment. Stunning & deeply saddening. I wonder if our rabid media can take the attention of Al Sharpton and Don Imus now and focus on getting guns out of the hands of lunatics & helping repair a torn university - and a broken country... Even the Blacksburg police - authorized to carry loaded weapons - couldn't do anything to stop what happened yesterday. I'd gladly give away my right to bear arms. I don't want that right anyway. I imagine it sounds idealistic to wish for a gun-free nation. Times like this make everything so senseless - why not allow wishes that belie common sense into the fray, too?

April is always a weirdly tragic month, ever notice that?

It seems trivial to talk about much else this entry except to say this: Life is impossibly short.