This Week: A List

This week we

• Went to the local public garden, where the kids ran around,

and I took pictures of plants I've decided I can no longer live without,

Ornamental millet, you complete me.

and the kids ran around,

and I took more pictures of plants I can't live without.

They had all kinds of water plants in containers throughout the garden.  Why has this never occurred to me?  Fill something with water, then grow water lilies on top!  Brilliant!

And a direct result of all that running, not to mention half the reason we go:

• Won a golf tournament.  Well, Derek won a golf tournament, but I'm counting it as a family victory.  I don't have a picture of that, but I do have a picture of him winning at Chinese checkers.

Derek is one of those people who somehow wins all manner of things.  This is infuriating to Adelaide.  If an impassioned rant is what your life is missing right now, you should ask her about it.

• Played with legos.

Okay, so the boys played with legos, Derek won a golf tournament, and I'm reading this book right now:

It's, like, mondo good.

Adelaide is reading this:

She claims that hers, too, is mondo good.

Seriously, though, those are all container water gardens!

That'll Learn 'Em

A few weeks ago a friend of mine came a-calling, telling me all about this "apartment turnover" thing, how fun it was, how much she looked forward to that weekend every summer, how it was a nice way to make a few bucks each August, how I, too, should join in on the festivities and work with her this year.

Apartment turnover is where you clean and paint a slew of recently vacated apartments in preparation for their new tenants.  It involves scrubbing and brushing and rolling and going up and down thousands of stairs for a total of 42 hours over three days.

It turns out this friend has a somewhat different definition of "fun" than my own.

Listen to me, friends:  I am in pretty good physical condition.  I love running and exercise and throwing my body around in a variety of different ways, but after the previous weekend of "fun," it took eleven straight hours of sleep and one solid hour of yoga to work out the various nagging aches afflicting this body.  Because cleaning those apartments is nothing like cleaning your own house; it turns out university students have no problem whatsoever living in utter squalor, paying God only knows how much to live in a box of their own filth.

The depressing part is knowing that these new kids are going to come in to those nice, clean, newly painted (BY ME) apartments and junk them up again.  It's an endless cycle, a horrible, horrible loop without end.

My question is:  Why?  Why does it have to be this way?  Yes, there were a few apartments that had been decently maintained, but not many.  Couldn't the management of said apartments have some kind of orientation for all those fresh, new, dirt-mongering students the first week they move in?  Things as simple as:

• Place a sheet of aluminum foil at the bottom of your oven to catch spilled food, so the apartment turnover people don't have to spend hours scrubbing in there and you have a prayer of getting your security deposit back.

• If something spills on the floor, clean it up.  Immediately.  It will take you maybe three minutes if you do it right away, rather than half an hour for the apartment turnover people and you'll have a prayer of getting your security deposit back.

• Wipe down the bathroom.  It doesn't even have to be that often!  Twenty minutes, once a week is enough to stave off certain entropy, and you'll have a prayer of getting your security deposit back.

I am not asking for a miracle, here.  And perhaps I'm naive to believe that the eighteen- to twenty-something crowd are capable of looking away from their phones a couple times a week to pick up a sponge, but I feel like some basic education could go a long way.  

Failing that, I'm also not opposed to the use of shock collars.  Not after the weekend I had.

BZZZT!  Wipe off the stove!  BZZZT!  Scrub out the tub!

Hu-mi-di-ty

Thankfully for you guys, Derek's dad came over yesterday and fixed our dishwasher, which wouldn't drain, took out our old kitchen faucet whose hot water handle broke off about a year ago and swapped it with a new one, and fixed our broken garbage disposal- it had a corn cob skewer jammed in its innards (hashtag Iowa probs).  Because of this, I'm beginning to think my father-in-law is a wizard, making our kids only around 75% muggle, yay!

All of this means that instead of two things to complain to you about today, I only have one.  That thing is, of course, humidity.

Some things you may not know about humidity:

• It makes you want to die.
• It is worse than craving a BLT but finding there is no bacon in the house.  WHO ATE ALL THE BACON?
• It is actually a higher-level demon, beloved great-uncle to Wormwood.
• Its favorite haunt is along paths that enjoy heavy foot traffic, where its wet fingers reach up from the ground and pull pedestrians to the ground.  This is why you feel the insatiable urge to stop completely and stretch flat-out on the ground when it is humid.  Scientific fact.  (Hey, this is the internet, where apparently I can say any crazy thing I want, and the following will happen:  People will believe it---They will experience absurd outrage---They will lose their minds---They will open their pie holes to vent their spleen, not realizing how embarrassed they should be.  I know this because I have seen it 4,921 times this week.)

I blame humidity for my last ten runs, all of which felt way harder than they should have.  I've tried running well before the sun came up, I've tried running with a full water bottle, I've tried running hills in the morning well after the sun came up.  (Almost died.  Good times.)  I'm still not entirely sure why God didn't grant me autonomy over the humidity thermostat (humidistat?)- a simple oversight on His part, I'm sure- because running in 99% humidity is less like running and more like stumbling around while a wet blanket smothers you.  This weather is fit only for mold and maybe cigars, I keep telling God, not humans, but He just unplugs my extension when I start up that old line again.

Related:  Does anyone else sometimes picture God as one of those old-timey telephone operators sitting in front of a bank of cords, plugging and unplugging people's prayers?  I think this anytime I've been asking for the same thing for awhile- like He sees my extension light up, sighs and plugs it in, wincing to hear my voice, tinny and wheedling, "So, was that a 'no,' then?  'Cause it's starting to feel like a 'no,' and I just don't think..."

"Yes, you've reached God, this is God speaking."

One last question:  Do you think "humidity" is a valid excuse to have ice cream for supper?  Asking for a friend.

Nieces From Kansas, Kansas Nieces

This summer both of my sisters made visits to Iowa with their families.  I don't want to brag, or anything, but the only thing that could possibly make a looong car drive with little kids worth it is a certain spectacular big sister.

This shirt was not made for the likes of me.  Or my sisters, for that matter.

Naturally, we showed our visitors a raucous good time whilst they were here.

In June we introduced Charlotte to the wonder that is Legos:

We made them take us back to their hotel so we could swim and I could take adorable pictures of Norah:

Then last weekend we showed Steph and Clinton just what kind of noise they were missing out on by not having a piano in their house for tiny hands to mash themselves against.

Vada jumped on our increasingly decrepit trampoline.  Iowa winters + our children = outdoor items probably quiver in terror as we walk past them in stores, afraid we'll be the ones to buy them and bring them home.

Both Vada and Elliot allowed me to hold them while I stared in rapture at their squishy faces.  I told them their high tolerance for creepers is only okay when the creeper is an aunt.  Best part about three- and one-year-olds?  They'll never remember the things you tell them, so you can say all kinds of wackadoodle crap.  (Who wants to let me hold their children?)

We played hide and seek.  The preschool set and I play this game perfectly together, because like them, I have a childlike belief that if I just look away, no one will find me:  If I can't see you, you can't see me.  You'd be surprised how often this works.

I'm like a chameleon, right?

Our kids waste no time in loving on littler people, either.  I have no idea who they get this from.

Even Derek is unable to resist reaching out a tickling hand with sweet nieces.

Now I need someone to tell me that they'll all look exactly the same in 3-6 months when we see them again.  No growing allowed, you hear?

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

I had plans today for this blog, plans for posts about nieces and family visits and running and humidity.

But then I stepped outside.  I crossed the street to our mailbox, opened it up, and hit the motherlode.

Oh, you thought "motherlode" referred to silver or gold or some other precious metal?  Nay, friends, this is a motherlode:



ONE

A gift card to the grocery store that opened right about a week ago right here in Brave New World, Iowa.  Now, our town is sufficiently small enough that we did not previously have a grocery store, but when it was announced around a year ago that Fareway was coming to town, well, the community just about lost its collective mind.  You have no idea.  People could not have been more excited if the President himself had decided to build a vacation home in our town- you know, to take advantage of the many amenities we have to offer, like, um... mile upon mile of corn fields, and... plenty of hog farms.  It's a glamorous life we live around here, now with A GROCERY STORE!  (You know those overly excited people I mentioned?  I was undoubtedly one of them.)  And now they're sending out gift cards?!  Come on down, Mr. President:  The corn is ripe and the bacon is plentiful.  Amen.



TWO

A Breck's Wholesale Catalog, because do you know how many tulip bulbs I plant each fall?  Neither do I, but the number is generally in the hundreds, because I can be the tiniest bit obsessive about some things, and tulips are most definitely one of those things.  I've always been satisfied with the bulbs I get from Breck's- good-sized and healthy- and I haven't been able to find better prices yet anywhere else.  This year I've got my eye on the Salmon Impression Tulip and World Impression Tulip.  Their Anemone blanda mixture is also enticing, although I have a tough time spending my spring flower budget on anything other than tulips.  Only three months until bulb planting, squeeee!





THIRD AND FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY

The sight of this package executed the twisted feat of filling me with tempered excitement and riddling me with anxiety, because apparently when my hopes begin to lift and float up where they don't belong, I get nervous.

Okay, so you know how Atticus has night terrors?  Horrifying, screaming, out-of-control, unconscious episodes that have perforated around 80%-90% of the last four years' of our family's nights?  Remember how we've tried everything?  Remember the mountains of advice we've received from people (people:  doctors, nurses, teachers, friends, family, strangers, google), how we've tried and tried and tried different things, but thus far our family has proven the depressing info you find in just about all of the medical literature:  That there's nothing you can really do except stay calm (you know, FOR YEARS) until they grow out of it?

Well, this box contains the newest thing we're trying, "thing" being the Lully.  My mom- who, bless her, has trolled the internet and special subscription-only medical databases and gone to sleep disorder seminars at her school nurse conferences, all trying to help us- she heard about the Lully via npr (who else hears or reads those three little letters and thinks, "Me!  I'll try it!  My hand is up, up, up!"), where their tech section did an article on this brand-spanking-new product, this pod-thing that you put under the afflicted child's mattress, sync up the associated app, and over a period of four weeks the Lully vibrates during a specific part of El Screamo's sleep cycle, not enough to wake them fully, just enough to disrupt and ward off the oncoming sleep disturbance.

The scary part is that this product did crazy-good during its testing and beta trials.  Hope is a fragile thing, and at this point it's near-exhausting to feel it stir its brittle limbs, ready to once again haul itself up and try, try again.  You'd think that at this point nothing would be capable of raising it, but my hope is evidently like a dust bowl farm, hard-scrabble and dry but still there, waiting for the (most likely nonexistent) rain.  I haven't even been able to summon the courage to open the box, but once we get this thing out and ready, you can most likely expect Lully News to dominate the posts around here for some time to come.

Unless it doesn't work at all for Atticus.  Which it probably won't.  (Unless it does!)

The Good

Good things from our week:

(I just had one of those moments where you type an innocent, innocuous word then stare at it suspiciously:  Is that really a word?  Did I just make that up?  "Good."  Gooood."  I kept pronouncing it like the first syllable in Gouda, as in the cheese, as in my brain is not to be trusted.)

• Yesterday marked eleven years of marriage for Derek and me.  I like the thought of eleven years because it's not the show-off-y, obvious number that ten is, the number you use as an excuse to revisit Charleston (ah, Charleston.  How I miss you.).  If the ten year anniversary is the wedding, eleven is the marriage itself, the everyday celebrations and devotion.  Hurrah for eleven years! 

Dear Charleston,

We

miss

you.

• I've spoken in the past about how I loathe certain magazines, "certain" being just about any of those targeted toward women, because apparently all women care about is losing weight and organization?  (I just spent a solid minute debating whether to put a period or a question mark at the end of the previous sentence:  I leaned toward a full stop because that really is what those magazines seem to believe, but went with the question mark because I don't understand why.  Also, it would appear that this is one of those days that finds me incapable of editing; instead I'm just putting all my extraneous thoughts into parentheses.  You have my condolences.)  A magazine I don't loathe in the least?  This Old House magazine.  Oh my goodness.  My word.  There are no articles about losing weight by using your lungs to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide or the best way to clean the bottles that contain your cleaning products.  People, the cover has zero, ZERO exclamation points on the cover.  What it does have are articles on seed libraries (people bring in seeds they harvested from their plants to a central location- in the article's case, an old card catalog cabinet in an actual library- for other people to "check out" and take home to plant!  It's revitalizing heirloom seeds!  It builds up community!  Aaaah!), a review of this new dry erase board paint (goes on clear and glossy over any existing wall color!  It's a dry erase board painted anywhere you want!  Aaaah!), and tips on planting your own tiny hellstrip garden (that struggling strip of grass between the sidewalk and curb apparently has a variety of names, which I did not know- but what a great idea!  Fill it with low-maintenance flowers!  Aaaah!).  Adelaide, for her part, adores Smithsonian magazine, a copy of which my mom sent home with Daughter last month.  She spent two solid days poring over it and hasn't stopped talking about pneumatic tubes ever since.  Mom promised to send her back issues Adelaide's way soon.  Hallelujah.

• It's the most wonderful tiiime of the yeeeeaaaarrr:

Reason # 1,764 to live in Iowa

The sweet corn stands are up, and the Angels of the Corn (that's my designation, I don't know what they call themselves.  Farmers, maybe?) are out, selling their manna.  Shucking corn is one activity I don't have to force upon Adelaide:  Whatever gets it in her mouth the fastest, she will do.  In this pic she's only four ears into the dozen she prepped for me, and of which I had one for supper that night, one as a bedtime snack the following day, and one each for breakfast the next two days.  They say the first step is admitting you have a problem, so fine:  My name is Kristy, and I am a sweet corn addict.  I regret nothing. 

Adelaide, Morning Glory

Derek and I are currently embroiled in a fierce debate with Adelaide.  This disagreement has been bubbling for some time, her reasoning changing with the seasons, but her intent remains the same:  She thinks she should be allowed to get up for the day whenever she wants.  We, her puny, insignificant parents, disagree.

"It's summer!  Can't I control my own schedule even in the summer?"  "I am nine, you know.  Nine years is plenty old enough to decide when I wake up."  "We don't even have anything going on today!  Why do you get to decide when I wake up when we don't even have anywhere to go!"

We give her all sorts of perfectly sound reasons for our decision, but she still insists on setting her daily alarm for 5:30 a.m.


I don't know what's wrong with her.  "Yes," I agree with her, "it's summer!  You should be sleeping in like the rest of the kids your age, you early-rising little freak!"  I say this in a semi-jesting tone, and she laughs.  I am well aware that the day is soon approaching when I will say something like this and it will offend her, resulting in anger/tears/righteous indignation.  Before long we will have an adolescent girl in this house.  Come, Lord Jesus.

At our insistence, her alarm clock is currently set for 6.  This is a compromise, an hour earlier than the 7 a.m. that was our opening argument.  My mom has long hypothesized that children grow so much in the summer because they're getting so much sleep; doesn't she, the girl who is determined to reach a height of an even six feet by sheer force of will, think that some extra rest will help her body achieve that lofty goal?

She cares little for this point of mine.  Yes, she wants to be six feet tall (or, she relents, if she has to be shorter than that, then she supposes 5'11" will do, but she won't go an inch shorter than 5'10".  I love how she continues to believe she has any control over this.), but apparently even more important to her is her daily alone time.  I know what she does in those dark, pre-sunrise hours:  She pours a bowl of cereal, adds milk, then spends an extended period of time loitering over her bowl, eating in her extremely slow way, an open book tucked in next to her breakfast dishes.

I, of all people, understand this need to be by oneself, but doesn't she get that in the afternoons, during our daily rest time?  She insists that it's not the same, because I'm there, and besides, she just likes being the only one in the house awake.  It's her favorite time of day.

I'm well aware that I'll probably look back on this post when she finally has reached those dreaded teenage years and it's all I can do to rouse her before the crack of noon.  I'll probably laugh ruefully at my adorable naiveté.

For now, though, I think I'll go set Adelaide's alarm to 6:30, give her thirty extra minutes of growing time.  How else is she going to continue in time-honored Crisler tradition and outgrow all her clothes for fall?

Sleep, Daughter.  Sleeeep.