Gems 2011

And the slog through the old Facebook posts continues...

January

Stoked and motivated to work my tail off for the next 6 months!!! which is a good thing, cuz I'm gonna hafta.
I did not expect for tears to come simply by passing the freeway exit to my grandpa's house. Dammit.
Dropped our ketubah off at the framing studio. Think I can get it on the wall before our 10 year anniversary?

February 

I was browsing au pair profiles even though I still think that's an unlikely route for us, and I think very firmly that the au pair company should have given a somewhat Americanized name to the young woman named "Supaporn."

Welcome to the 21st century: My daughters are using their email addresses to send each other messages like "Poooooooooooooooo". Some things change, and some things don't.

Apparently there's an STD nicknamed Donovanosis. Oh great. Well, at least I didn't name my daughters Chlamydia and Gonorrhea.

Today, Eliana told me she didn't want me anymore. I told her to write a letter requesting reassignment, to the woman she wanted to be her mother now. She wrote it to me. Happy Valentine's Day!

There's nothing in this world like motherhood to leave you stripped to your core, raw and aching. Love hurts.

March

D strips himself naked; Kes picks up her blanket (knit by my grandmother 20 years ago before she died), approaches D: "Are you cold, honey?" Wraps him in the blanket, like wings folding around him, and I think: warm blanket, sister's love, great-grandma's love, truly the wings of the shekhinah.

If I had to pick two words to sum up my last two weeks: bass-ackwards and mind-blowing.

Goodbye Kessa, hello Kesenia!  ("Mom, I like Kesenia best now. Please don't call me Kessa anymore. But it's okay if you forget every once in a while.")

More email updates from the front lines of sisterhood: Kesenia is now tattling on Eliana via emails to me while I'm at work.

I spent about 48 hrs wondering why I hadn't finished my MA and taught anthro instead of pursuing the strange world I've brought around myself. Then today I noticed I was studying pap smears, oncogenic HPV strains, and genital lesions, without having planned to do so, while enjoying my nice lunch salad. I think it's all good again.

April

K: "Mom, what does fame mean?"
Me: "It's when everyone knows who that person is. Someone's famous when you know who that person is even though you don't know them. Like Lady Gaga and P!nk."
K: "Oh, I get it, I get it. Waitwaitwait... you mean Lady Gaga and Pink are REAL???"

D stumbles into my room half asleep and blinded by my overhead light: "Nene, Mommy?" "Nope, it's sleep time." "Read a book to me, Mommy?" "Nope, it's sleep time." "Sleep to me, Mommy?" Who could resist? Precious fleeting moments feeling him drift off while still clutching me around the neck. My empty nest may be 16 years off, but I can see it.

Eliana, 7: "I don't like Jewish school because of all the stories that I just don't believe in! All that stuff can't have really happened, Mom. It's not real." 
I literally almost fell over, mostly b/c I was laughing so hard at how awesome she is.
10 points if you can guess what I said back.

May

I think it's a good solid sign you're sleep deprived when you get the urge to do jazz hands because you have gloves on... latex-free non-sterile medical gloves.

"Hello, I will not come out until you let me out today and I mean it. Nowone will see me again until you do it. (exept for special acations of corse) Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Sorry. I can not say that sentence. The world is selfish and cruel. Goodbye forever until you let me out. PS. Go Away! P.S.S. Let Me Out! Eliana"

D might just win cutest "I love you": "Ah wuh loo."

Eliana's watching The Princess Bride for the first time tonight! A momentous occasion deserving Dad and Mom all to herself, popcorn, M&M's, and a late bedtime.

My dad says, "Why couldn't you have done something easy for a living? Like be a lawyer."

When Eliana was 4 she chased down, picked up, and got bitten by a jumping spider. Precocious D has checked this off his bucket list at 2.5.

I LOVE the body God gave me! Now the body the kids gave me, I'm less enamored with. ;)

June

Still have no idea why there was a helicopter circling above for over 15 minutes at 1am last night... with no searchlight on or anything. But I do have an update on the situation, via Donovan: "Helicoppy no get us. Wiwwow clode."

My iPhone can fill in "birthiversary" and "birthgivingday" for me, guesses lots of crazy and wrong words after I've input one or two letters, but won't fill in the last two letters of "schedule", "breakfast", or "weekend"! ?

Scott has a coworker named Yoga Kippur. This makes the JewBu in me very happy.

Donovan: "Gitcher own, LaLa. Gitcher own." Once again, hard to feel sorry for Eliana when it comes straight from her own mouth...

July

Chocolate cupcake with lime frosting. Who knew?

With the glaring exception of homophobia, I am so impressed with the values and priorities of this Mormon community. The rest of the US could use a dose of this sensibility.

Dizzy, temperature sensitive, constant internal monologue, achy, and nauseous. 2 points each = a 10 on my sleep deprivation Apgar scale.

Time has no meaning. I've had three naps in the past 24 hrs. We won't talk about what came before then... I can't remember! Trying now to get a good 6 hour chunk or longer... wish me luck!

OMG, 2 nights of sleep? What kind of parallel universe is this? Ahhhhhh.

It's Saturday, no one's in labor, I don't have clinic, I don't have my kids with me, and my body wakes me up at 6:30???

Dear ginger chews, you are quite hot and spicy enough to keep me awake while driving at 4 am just the way you are.  There is no need to try to go down the wrong pipe.  Please refrain in the future.

Trunky: LDS slang referring to a missionary's homesickness/burnout toward the end of the mission. Applied to me by my supervisor on my last day of my midwifery internship in UT, with the implication that I had earned it.

August

I just got a FB friend request from Willma Dickfit.

2001: "When Hell freezes over will I pay tuition for my children's elementary education, especially not in a school centered around one religion or culture." 
2011: "Hey Lucifer... it cold down there?"

My husband is at a "work conference." And by that, I mean he's at a Metallica concert.

September

I sent all the paperwork from my Utah internship to my midwifery school today. The package weighed almost two pounds. It may have looked like paper, on the outside, but once in the envelope I could have sworn the contents were two pounds of my blood, sweat, and tears, and three weeks of my breath.

2 years and 2 days after my first birth with my Nova ladies, I got to catch my 25th baby as official primary under supervision and attend my 74th official birth as a midwifery student. (Unofficially, 27 catches and 88 births as student, and I have no idea how many doula births.) This boggles.

E: "I feel like running away from home."
Me: "Where are you going to go?"
E: "I'll wait on the sidewalk for someone to call the police and then the police can take me to Grandma's house. But first I need a rope."
Me: "What's the rope for?"
E: "To climb out the window down to the street."
Me: "We do have stairs..."

D: "Tekiyah!" (blows toy shofar) "Teriyaki!" (blows toy shofar)

You know your 3 year old had a great birthday when bedtime results in a record-breaking meltdown followed by sudden silence.

October

Sometimes Kesenia says something that sounds exactly like my Grandma Anne. I know she's got a bunch of her genes just by looking at her, but it's still uncanny when the same phrasing and inflection comes out of her mouth.  How does my 6 year old Californian sound like a 90 year old New York Jew?

Watching Donovan try to remove his temporary tattoos.

Dear God, when I named my firstborn "God has answered me," I guess I jumped the gun a little. I apologize for being presumptuous. 8 years later... Please may I have some answers for parenting her? Or one? Or just a clue? Humbly, Me.

So... that vacation I thought I took 6 months ago? It was in 2010, not 2011. I don't know what that means.

I woke up to find my eldest and my father playing poker at the kitchen table.

D:  "Mommy, me play a big, scawy song on the pano. It go BOMBOMBOM."

November

I walked out of my (old) house for the last time today. Goodbye Chapman Way.

"Donovan, you can wear clothes or pajamas when you're sick. What do you want to wear today?"
"Me wanna wear naked."

Sweet, sweet Eliana is cuddling a double ear infection-ed boy to sleep. Beautiful.

Now he's delegating: 
Me: "Donovan, can I have a snuggle?"
D: "Kessa, can you go snuggle Mama?"

December

I haven't figured out how to drink wine with glasses on. I keep bumping the glass into my glasses as I try to finish off the last sips. I'm sure the fact that I'm tipsy by the end of one glass is not helping.

Donovan keeps showing off his new vocabulary word, "directions," by using it as often as possible. Fortunately for my sick sense of humor, he can't pronounce it correctly. He leaves off the D... so we're having lots of inadvertent conversations about erections.