a night

This was our night...

Thorin goes to bed with us at about 10.  At 11:30, he is awake and whining, enough so that I get up and take him out.  Joy.  Dizzy, bleary, obscure.

1:30, Glen and I both wake up and look at each other.  What was that?  Hmmm.  No further sounds noted as we both fall asleep again...

3:15.  Oh.  I know what the noise is.  The noise is a smoke detector, clearly intent on evil and with a dying battery, chirping to wake the dead every inconsistent two minutes or so.  Ugh.  Thorin awake, can I pacify him and convince him to go back to sleep?  Perhaps, but then I detect other doggy toes in the hallway as apparently Hugger has freed herself from her usual bounds in Emma's room.  (Sidenote: since the end of the summer, Emma, owner of a completely overactive imagination, has kept Hugger barricaded in her room at night as if that might offer protection and comfort...)  I get up to put Hugger back in Emma's room, then return to my own because now Thorin is leaping and yipping frantically and Glen is up pulling on pants and glasses with a low steady stream of curses.  I tell him I'll take Thorin, but then I hear Hugger back in the hallway after apparently hurdling two sets of barricades again, so I tell him to take Hugger out the other way.  I attempt to get Thorin downstairs then, but of course he is so excited to see Hugger and it's been hours since he was out and he pees a line as I drag him out of the room...  As I try to head down the stairs, Hugger is frantically trying to follow me.  I get it now, it's the chirping making her frantic, but I know that in her panic she will never get down the stairs without sliding and so I am trying to shove her back out of the way and lock the gate and still hold a small ton of wiggling Thorin in my arms because he hasn't mastered the art of walking down stairs yet either.  Somehow I get to the bottom without tumbling to my death, but of course while struggling to pull on my coat Thorin completely loses it and pees in the kitchen.  OK, so that's two, right?  Sigh.

Outside, luckily, he is better and does his thing with appropriate alacrity for a cold winter night.  Except then we hear Glen calling Hugger in the other yard.  And Hugger is not coming.  I can hear it, hear his voice getting more frustrated, hear the upper door slam, open, slam again as he goes back in to actually get coat and shoes and clomps across the snow to physically drag the stricken Hugger back into the demonic chirping house.

Finally, Thorin mobilizes again and we go back in the house.  Up the stairs, back in the cage, back down to get cleaning stuff for both pees...  Hugger still wandering about freaked, so I take her back down the garage stairs, drag her through the outside breezeway to get her back down stairs into the living room, which is the furthest I can get her from the noise thing, and leave her there to fend, slamming the lower gate in her face to prevent her frantically following me back up the #$%%^&* main stairs.  Back to the bedroom to calm Thorin, then wandering about the house to find that of course it's the highest possible out of reach detector, not accessible except by the big heavy ladder (which is in its proper place downstairs in the garage).

Back to bed then, no hope of stopping the sound for the night.  Glen is already asleep, face down as if nothing ever happened.  expletive, expletive, expletive  I can only say that the last note in this story was when I was awakened at 6:00 by Glen screaming and swearing again.  Apparently the cleaning ladies the day before had left the shower head turned toward the shower door.  And so ends our night.  Shalom.

and yet - an amendment

OK, so creaky trees at night are maybe not as cool.  Creeeeepy!  Some nights it turns out it is a toss up whether it's me or Thorin running in first...  Turns out my big thump of a dog is a bit of a chicken too.  :)

Bathroom Break

Emma is always asking for stories about me as a child.  I figure it's only fair to save some of her own...

This morning, budding chemist Emma is working on her hypothesis which goes something like "it is possible to create a mountain on top of water without there being a mountain under the water."  OK, so.  How, you might ask?  She is pouring spices on top of water in a bowl.  Chili powder, basil, pepper flakes, God only knows what else.  Somewhere in there she realized that salt and sugar do not float...  All hurrahs, she achieves a a small spice mountain on top of the water.

Meanwhile, I reach the end of my ability to wait, and ask her if she will be OK if I go to the bathroom.  Foolish mortal.  Amateur.  Rookie, even.

I enjoy possibly a full 30 seconds of peaceful bliss.  It might even have been a whole minute, then...

No, Thorin, bad puppy!  Bad!  Stop!

So much for peace.  Moving as fast as one can move, I get back in there to discover the puppy has grabbed the paper underneath the bowl... underneath the water...  underneath the mountain...  And now the puppy is licking up spice water from the floor, from the chair, from the table...  To her credit, she did try to clean it up, although she did find herself sitting under the drip from the table.

God bless my baby chemist.

Alice in Mommyland

Alice in Wonderland:

Sometimes I believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Moms:

Sometimes I do as many as six impossible things before breakfast...

And yet...

And yet, as I stand outside with the new puppy, I realize I never knew we had a woodpecker living in our yard.  He's pretty, and tinier than I thought woodpeckers would be.  And I never noticed how much I like the clacking and banging of the old trees above.  My own Mirkwood, or maybe Fangorn, clacking and thrashing and whispering around our little glade...

Happy New Year

Well, it's the new year, and here I am, still tangled, still mommy, still trying to figure out how to find my song again.  I don't even know where to start, so I'll just plunge in and it will probably come out mixed up and in the wrong order, but here goes.

My life on the surface?  Big, fancy, two houses and three healthy kids and a great husband and not a worry in the world.  And yet, something not quite right.  So often I feel like I am being pulled down, down.  I am angry because no one seems to appreciate me, at least that's what the voice inside says, but when Glen offers help or the kids tell me I am the greatest, it makes no dent in the scream.  So what is it, really?  What am I squirming under?  There are days when I truly feel grace, when I know all is well and I can watch my kids and know that I am so blessed.  I feel glowing, loved, warm.  But then the next moment it all slips away again, the knowledge and the comfort, and there I am again, wailing about how hard and how I have no free time and how I have lost my identity and how overwhelmed I am.  Really.  Really?  Part of me knows it has a lot to do with the lack of sleep, and part is a selfish and never satisfied longing for alone time, which is silly because half the time when I am alone I have no idea what to do with myself and go searching for company.

Why can't I just be content?  IS there such a thing?  Why should't there be and why am I not?  What is wrong with me?  I know, I know there are people all around me with so much harder lives.  I know it.  People with real troubles, money troubles, health troubles, death and life and bad things all heaped.  And here I am.  It seems like thankfulness should go so much further…  What is it I think I need that I don't have, truly?  Why can't I just be happy already?????

Or maybe I am, and it's just unfair of me to expect it to be all the time.  Maybe happiness is not something that can be sustained indefinitely.  Maybe the problem is not that I am not happy, but that I think that should matter all the time.  Maybe sometimes it just doesn't.