http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/ en-us Copyright 2012 Mon, 07 May 2012 17:16:40 -0700 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss At the end of this somewhat lengthy post I promise you a cute kid photo and a funny story but first you will have to suffer through a not-very-funny story and some whining from me. If you're up for it, keep reading. Last week during a visit to a park near our house Kate tripped on her way up some stairs to a slide and hit her mouth when she fell. I will leave to your imagination the amount of blood and screaming that resulted but whatever you are picturing, picture more of it. Being the ultra-prepared mom that I am, all I had on hand in the minivan to deal with this emergency was baby wipes. Somehow that worked to stop the bleeding (what can't you do with baby wipes, really?) and then we went home, where a string of phone calls between me and our pediatric dentist ensued. Kate by this time was acting totally fine and not bleeding and if you just looked at her in passing you wouldn't have thought anything was wrong. But on her gums up above her two front teeth there was this wince-inducing cut and as her mom I felt that it was my duty to look at it every few minutes to determine if it was better, worse or the same. Mostly it was the same. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon. Our dentist advised me to bring her in for X-rays in the morning, so at 8 a.m. the next day we were sitting in an exam room. Within minutes of our arrival Kate was kicked back watching a Barbie movie on a screen mounted on the ceiling and I was sitting in the corner wishing I had brought a paper bag into which I could breathe slowly. Or puke. I think almost everyone who knows me in real life knows the following biographical fact because I bring it up any time the subject of sports, teeth, dentists or crippling phobias are mentioned. But for anyone who has somehow missed it, here's a story: When I was 11 I was on the playground at my school and I got hit in the face with a baseball. As I remember it, I wasn't even playing baseball. I just happened to be standing behind a kid who was supposed to catch a ball but didn't. Not that this is his fault. Kids are pretty unreliable at catching balls, as my embarrassing youth softball career demonstrates. Unfortunately, the ball hit me in the mouth and the damage was pretty serious. To date I have had a total of four root canals on two front teeth that were injured plus several incarnations of cosmetic work to cover up the gradual discoloring of those teeth. It was very generous of my parents to pay for my college considering that by the time I was 18 they had probably shelled out an entire college degree's worth of money on dental procedures, plus braces. Thanks to them and my wonderful childhood dentist, (Hey, Dr. Amzi!) I had great dental care. But something about the amount of dental care I have had in my relatively young life has left me with some heavy-duty anxiety about going to the dentist. They take X-rays and I spend the entire time trying to guess what giant problem will be uncovered. I pretty much feel like happy gas should be mandatory for dental cleanings, but that seems to be frowned upon for some reason. So while Kate was blissfully spacing out with Barbie I was envisioning 20 years of dental procedures resulting from this one slip on the playground. The X-rays were much less dire than I had imagined. There aren't any clear fractures or problems but we'll go back to the dentist several times this summer for followup X-rays to make sure her teeth don't suffer any ill effects from the trauma. These are her baby teeth and while it wouldn't be great to lose them early, it won't be the end of the world either. The gum gash will heal on its own with proper care and already looks much better than it did a few days ago. Most importantly Kate hasn't been in a lot of pain and she seems completely unfazed by her brush with dental trauma. Which brings me to the actual reason I wrote this post in the first place -- so I could show you a picture. At the dentist office they took two sets of X-rays, one where Kate sat in a chair and held the film in her mouth, and one where the dentist aimed a handheld superhero gun-looking contraption at Kate's face and took X-rays from a different angle. During all of this I would have sworn Kate was paying no attention she was so fascinated by the movie. The next day I came upon her and Isaac playing a new game in my bathroom. Kate kept telling Isaac to lie down. Then she would put a washcloth over his shirt and tell him she was going to "take some pictures." Next she would point my hairdryer at his face very seriously, make a beeping sound, and say "Good job! Let's take another one!" I have no idea what Isaac was getting out of this game but he was extremely compliant. That may be because he recently had his first dental checkup and got about ten pounds of prizes and loot at the end. He's probably still waiting for a balloon. When I told my mom this story, she said maybe Kate would be a dentist and that we surely could use one in the family. So if Kate ever does become a dentist I know what photos I can get out for her graduation dinner. A brief administrative note: I have closed comments on my blog due to a massive spam comment attack. I am probably going to leave them closed since most people now leave their comments on Facebook. If you want to friend me there you are welcomed to do so or you can always send me feedback via my email address, which I will now give to you in clever code: It's my first name@my last name.com. You can figure that out, right?]]> http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/05/last_week_started_out_pretty.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/05/last_week_started_out_pretty.html Every day stuff Mon, 07 May 2012 17:16:40 -0700 I would like to say that I take my kids to the library every week, but the truth is that we make it in maybe once a month. Since books can only be checked out for three weeks at a time this means that on average our last batch of books is at least a week overdue. So even though we are relatively infrequent fliers at the library I am probably still on the top of their list of regular financial contributors/library criminals. Any day now I expect to see my face on a WANTED poster, if not because of our fines then because of Isaac's penchant for exiting the library while throwing a level of tantrum that he never achieves when we are not in a public space specifically dedicated to quiet and order. (Seriously. It never fails.) Kate loves it when we bring home new books. In the last year what was her nap time has been transitioning into more of a semi-quiet rest time. It goes better some days than others. On good days she stays in her room and looks at books or plays with her puzzles or dresses up and sings her original narrative songs. Even though she doesn't sleep much anymore it seems to help her be more refreshed in the second half of the day. So on a recent library trip I was brainstorming for new books to keep her interested when I stumbled on a book that gave me a flashback to my own childhood reading. Shel Silverstein's "Where the Sidewalk Ends" and "A Light in the Attic" were some of my absolute favorite books for years. I read them so many times that they fell apart. Something about the silly poems and simple pen-and-ink drawings kept me coming back even though I know I couldn't have understood some of the plays on words that the poems hinge on. It was just a little over my head but I think that made me like it more, like the poems were little word puzzles to figure out. For that reason I wasn't sure Kate was old enough to enjoy it yet. In the past I've gotten all excited about reading some book to her ("The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" comes to mind) only to have her space out within the first few pages. So I'm learning that I need to be patient and wait for her to be old enough to enjoy something rather than forcing it on her. But she does like Silverstein's classic "The Giving Tree," so I checked out "Where the Sidewalk Ends" anyway and we read a few of the poems before rest time. Two hours later Kate came out of her room carrying the book and asking to have certain poems read to her, and I knew she was hooked. We read through that one and went back for "A Light in the Attic." A couple of weeks later when I was shopping for the kids Easter baskets I found a 30th anniversary edition of "Where the Sidewalk Ends" and got it for Kate. She was thrilled to have a copy of her own. So now to the story I actually wanted to tell: Several times yesterday Kate told me that she and Dan were going to write a poem when he got home. I wasn't really sure what she was talking about but she was very insistent that they were going to write a poem and it was going to be called "The Girl Who Brushed Her Eye." Ummm, OK. I blogged earlier about how Kate has been working on learning to tell jokes but her punch lines leave much to be desired. So given the non-sensical nature of her chosen poem title I thought maybe she was just trying to make me laugh, which I obligingly did and then I forgot about it. Last night Dan came home from work for dinner but then headed out again to get together with some friends from church. While I put Isaac down he got Kate ready for bed and spent some time with her and when I came out of Isaac's room he had just left. On the coffee table were two pieces of paper with Kate's drawings and Dan's handwriting -- and the poem! They actually did write a poem! Later Dan told me that Kate had started talking about wanting to do this the night before and he was surprised she was still talking about it the next night. I think it was a very collaborative effort since Kate doesn't know how to read yet, and I assume Dan helped her rhyme the endings but the basic idea was hers. So here is Kate's first poem, with assistance from Dan: The Girl Who Brushed Her Eye: The girl who brushed her eye It made her start to cry She was sad It hurt bad She'll brush her teeth next time. This was accompanied by a drawing of a stick figure poking herself in the eye with a hairbrush. It was a joke poem! And it was actually funny! This is huge progress. The poem is on the Refrigerator of Honor right now, but I think I will keep it. It is her first poem, and I hope it won't be her last. One more great memory, courtesy of Shel Silverstein. ]]> http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/04/kates_literary_debut_1.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/04/kates_literary_debut_1.html Every day stuff Wed, 25 Apr 2012 06:26:14 -0700 Speaking of driving cars, you got so much Cars movie related loot for your birthday that I think we may be on some kind of Disney platinum customers list now. You'll probably get invited to shareholders meetings soon. Please take your daddy with you. He is really into cars too, or at least he is really excited that you are into them. I think inside grown men there is always a little boy right under the surface that still just wants to play with cool toys, and since you have gotten old enough to like toys I have been trying to keep your dad's inner child from maxing out our credit cards. This has its advantages. I didn't do any of the shopping for your birthday at all. Your dad took care of that -- in February. Christmas was barely over and your dad was online bookmarking ideas for your birthday. In the future I am going to have to pay a little more attention to what he's buying for you. We were on a trip to visit my side of the family in Mississippi when your dad found what he assured me would be the perfect birthday gift for you. I was up to my elbows in cooking a meal for everyone and was only halfway listening to what he was saying. Something about a 12-car set and a carrier plane. I was pouring boiling water out of a giant pot of pasta and saying "Uh huh?" which I apparently continued saying when your dad asked if it was OK with me if he went ahead and ordered whatever it was. A week later we were home in Texas and the doorbell rang. I opened the door to see the Fed-Ex truck driving away and found a box the size of a dishwasher on our front porch. The Disney logo was on the side which sent your sister, who can spot a Disney logo at 50 yards, into a frenzy. She was sorely disappointed to learn that it was not for her. While dragging this thing inside I called your dad at work to ask him to explain to me again what precisely he had ordered for you and if it might have been an actual working airplane given how huge the box was. He said he hadn't exactly (cough, throat clear) looked to see how big it was, which was not reassuring. Here's what was in the box: I am glad to say that the items inside weren't as big as the GIANT box led me to believe, but they are still going to require some reshuffling of our toy storage systems. I would be annoyed except that you love this ridiculous thing, which allows you to put a car inside a plane and then fly it around in the air while making whooshing sounds. More importantly it allows your dad to making whooshing sounds, so everyone is happy. One of the best things about this last year with you has been seeing you and Kate develop a relationship. This has not been a process without ups and downs. I now spend what I would estimate to be 75 percent of every day refereeing your various disputes over toys and what games to play, but y'all are capable of playing very happily together at times. And you really are good little friends. You ask about Kate first thing when you wake up after your nap every day, and you are a good sport about playing along with the somewhat complicated games she devises for the two of you. In this photo you are playing "going to grandma's," which is a game where you each pack backpacks and pretend to board airplanes on a long trip. I think this was your connecting flight to Africa, which is one of your most frequent destinations. In the last few months the fact that you are a boy has been coming to the forefront. Specifically it is showing up as a need to tackle everything. This is great when you take it out on your dad, and not as great when you try it on your sister. Neither of you are especially big kids but somehow you can pin her in no time and you sit there grinning while she screams. You genuinely seem to mean this in a spirit of good fun and are confused when she doesn't enjoy your game. After spending all day with two girls you are so ready to wrestle that when Dan gets home he can barely get in the door before you are wrapping yourself around his knees. I expected the tough-guy aspect of having a little boy, but what I didn't anticipate was that you are also very affectionate and tender-hearted. You have always loved to snuggle. When you hurt Kate with your romping around you readily tell her you are sorry and give her a big hug. This morning you gave me and Kate two kisses each after I asked you for a birthday kiss. You are basically just a sweet baby pretending to be a big tough boy. I love this about you and I am trying to soak it up because I know it can't last forever. While I am shocked to find that you are two years old I am also somehow surprised that it has only been that long. This I think is because it really is almost impossible any more to remember our family without you. We have been so blessed by the joy and laughter you bring to our lives. Just try to stop growing up so fast, OK? I'll buy you a thousand toy cars. I love you, Mama Isaac's birth story is here, for people who find that kind of thing interesting. ]]> http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/04/dear_isaac_two_years_old.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/04/dear_isaac_two_years_old.html Baby Isaac Mon, 23 Apr 2012 06:25:07 -0700 ]]> http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/04/we_are_nine_1.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/04/we_are_nine_1.html Dan the Great Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:48:10 -0700 You have always been a talker, but in the last six months you have taken another giant leap forward in your ability to express yourself and there are days when I have to remind myself that I am not, in fact, talking to a miniature adult. Your little baby phrases and grammatical mistakes are mostly gone and that breaks my heart. But in their place is a growing habit of using your words to build up other people. I am really starting to recognize this as a gift you have. Back in December when your cousins on the Wachdorf side of the family were in town, a bunch of the adults loaded up all seven kids and we took y'all bowling. Since the oldest child of that group is five years old, it was a pretty hilarious outing. The toddlers were waddling off off towards the lanes, and bowling ball safety was an issue requiring constant vigilance. We set up bumpers and a little ramp to guide the bowling balls on the lane the kids were using, got everyone outfitted with shoes and lurched through a game. It will not surprise anyone who knows me to learn that I am a terrible bowler. You could modify that sentence by inserting any sport on the face of the planet and it would still be just as true. If you and your brother inherit the athletic abilities of your Dad and I then I sincerely advise you to focus on winning an academic scholarship for college. I am seriously worried about my ability to guide you through the team sports participation that makes up an average childhood. I may have to hire some kind of sports surrogate or parental coach just so I don't screw it up. On the day in question my final score was somewhere in the double digits. The toddlers bowling with bumpers had higher scores than me. But every time I got up to humiliate myself by bowling again, you cheered and clapped and jumped up and down and told me "Good job, Mom! Woohoo! Three pins!" Actually you did that for everyone who bowled, even as the game dragged on and the toddlers got restless and we rushed through the final frames to get home for nap time. People in other lanes were staring at us. But I was really proud of how much you wanted everyone else to be encouraged and how you paid attention to their games and not just your own. That wasn't an isolated incident. Last month when I was sick, you told me over and over "I'm so sorry you are sick, Mom. It's no fun to be sick." You encourage your brother and clap for him when he is learning to do something "SELF!" which is his way of saying that he will do it by himSELF. (At almost two, SELF! is a big thing for Isaac.) And several times a day, usually for no apparent reason, you tell all of us "I love you!" This is all so encouraging after the Year That Was Three. I loved the third year of your life but there were times when it felt like one long unreasonable tantrum. You still have some moments like that, believe me. But you are also maturing and developing the ability to think of others first, rein yourself in before your emotions get the better of you, and do things because they make other people feel important and loved. Whenever I see that in you I feel like I am getting a little glimpse at the grownup you will be one day. I think you will be a wonderful person to know. Lately when I ponder the adult Kate I also find myself hoping that she isn't featured on an episode of "Hoarders: Buried Alive." I can't say that your love of collecting, well, anything, surprises me. I'm not going to name names, but we have some collectors in the genetic line that leads to you. I just never expected it to have any real manifestations in my own life because I am of the school of thought that loves nothing more than to do a big junk purge and then make a run to Goodwill. Thus, it is not without irony that you form deep emotional attachments to every object that comes into your possession and are never, ever willing to part with them knowingly. Key word: Knowingly. Since you can't read yet I can still get away with spilling my parenting secrets here and you'll never be the wiser, so I admit that every couple of months when you are at school or on an outing with your Dad or grandparents, I go into your room with a big trash bag and run through your many junk stashes like a controlled burn through a stand of pine. (Hi, Dad! I used a forester analogy! Aren't you proud?) I did that just today and it never ceases to amaze me how many separate pockets of stuff you have managed to accrue in a few short weeks. Every box, purse and shelf in your room yields up a new snarl of broken beads, crumpled stickers and those awful low grade plastic toys that seem to accumulate in our lives no matter how much I try to avoid them. I also find things that belong to me, to your brother, to your dad. Spoons and random socks and letter refrigerator magnets that have lost their magnets. I try to toss only the most useless of trash at one time so that you don't detect the missing items. I would seriously throw it all out in one fell swoop if it were only about me but you really do have a hard time letting stuff go. Last month after spending a week down with The Great Flu, I got totally creeped out thinking of all the flu germs that must still be in our home and decided that I would not be able to rest easy until we tossed our old toothbrushes and got new ones. You were thrilled to pick out a new Tinkerbell toothbrush but I didn't exactly do a good job of explaining to you that it would be replacing the four other toothbrushes that you have held on to since your babyhood. When you realized those were headed for the trash, you were devastated. You actually cried. These are the moments when I see your future on a television show about people who set world records with the toothbrush collections and have names for all of them. I have to try to take a deep breath and remember that some things are just a phase. And then I hope that one day you have a house with big, big closets. You're getting really tall and looking more and more like a big kid every day. Last month when we were getting ready to take a trip to Gam and Geez's house I was packing your clothes and realized that most of your pants were much too short. A couple of Sundays ago you put on a church dress that had fit just fine the last time you wore it and it was up above your knees. New clothes have been acquired for you and now I am in the process of gradually smuggling out the ones that are too small lest you insist on keeping them. (See: Hoarding.) It is perhaps not a coincidence that around this same time you snapped out of your LIFELONG apathy toward food and started eating like an Olympic swimmer. I am in total shock. Just last summer your dad and I had to institute this whole set of rules and procedures all geared toward requiring you to consume just the bare minimum of food that would allow us to sleep at night as your parents. Now all day long you are hungry. It is like having someone else's kid in the house and I cannot get over it. It's kind of a novelty in my world to put food down in front of a child and watch them actually consume it, so I am enjoying it while it lasts. You are in the process of growing a sense of humor and at the moment it is ... awkward. Your current favorite thing to do is to attempt to tell a joke and then laugh deliriously at your own punch line, which invariably makes no sense. Here is an example of how all your jokes are structured: Kate: What did the chicken say to the cow? Me: I don't know. Kate: What are you doing, cow? AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Knock knock jokes are even worse and I hope you get them figured out soon. Right now it's hard to tell when you're done and I am supposed to laugh and you are really offended when I don't laugh at the right time. I'm sorry. I'm doing my best. Your humor is clearly above my comprehension level. Try to be patient. Here is a photo of you and Isaac Skyping with your friends Lily and Owen. Since people may be noticing a common theme in these pictures I will point out that yes, you do wear that headband every single day of your life without fail. The other big development of the last few months is that you are in a pre-ballet class. It will surprise no one to learn that you are loving it. We started in the middle of the year for a variety of reasons and on the first class in January you were measured for costumes for the June recital, sealing your belief that you have hit the big time and are now well on your way to being a true ballerina. There is a picture of your recital costume posted on the wall of the business office of the studio. You will be a butterfly, and every time we pass the picture we have to stop and look at it in adoration for a minute. Then you are all business, putting on your shoes and waiting for your teacher to come and take you to class. Every time I see you walk off with the other dancers, so confident and so excited to go and do what you love, I get another one of those little glimpses of what it will be like to watch you walk away and do whatever it is that God has called you to do in your life. And I feel an odd mixture of pride and joy and heartbreak knowing that these are just small rehearsals for a time when I will let you go into the big world for good. But today we are going to make pizza together. With just cheese for you. Cheese and sauce. I love the simplicity of this time in our lives together. And I love you at four-and-a-half years old more than I can say. Mama ]]> http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/03/dear_kate_45_years_old.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/03/dear_kate_45_years_old.html Baby Kate Sat, 24 Mar 2012 07:40:59 -0700 Actual transcript of a conversation the kids had tonight in the car while we were on our way to get frozen yogurt after dinner: Kate: A! Isaac: A! Kate: B! Isaac: B! Kate: C! Isaac: C! Kate: D! Isaac: .....No! Kate: Yes! Isaac: (screaming) NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! Kate: (Queen of the screamers) YEEEEEEEESSSSSS!!!!!!!! This went on for five straight minutes. Some of the time they were really sounding angry, and some of the time they were laughing. Then we got to the yogurt place, ate yogurt and watched the kids dance around with great gusto and no apparent memory of their recent fight to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," which was playing on the sound system. Then we went home. The end. http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/03/real_life.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/03/real_life.html Every day stuff Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:57:36 -0700 The house we live in right now is a rental home. We were very blessed to be able to sell our home in Albuquerque, but it wasn't a good time to be a seller and it didn't make us eager to pick up a new mortgage any time soon. And San Antonio is a big place. Since we weren't sure where we would attend church or eventually want to put the kids in school, we figured renting a home would be a good decision for the first couple of years while the dust settled and we figured out where some of those puzzle pieces would fit for us. San Antonio is big on suburbs. If you drive for 20 minutes in any direction you will pass areas that have their own housing developments, grocery stores, shopping and schools in regular clusters and they never seem to stop coming. Our home in Albuquerque was in what was clearly a preplanned community built by a single construction company -- each house very similar to the next -- but I wouldn't really call it a suburb. I never lived in one of those until we came here. On the whole the experience has been like eating oatmeal. It hasn't been unpleasant and it hasn't been particularly exciting. I seem unable to arrive at any strong feeling about it, good or bad. Similarly to Albuquerque, our neighbors seem like nice enough people, but I don't see much of them. Between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. it is like a ghost town here. But I recently had reason to realize that just because I don't see my neighbors doesn't mean they don't see me. Diagonally across the street from us is a huge brick house with the nicest yard in the entire neighborhood. Last summer when a severe drought was baking South Texas and restrictions on sprinkler systems were in place the owners of that house, a retired couple, would sit in their lawn chairs once a day and hand-water their grass while the rest of us gave up in June and watched our lawns turn a sickly brown color. Not content with merely making our yards look worse, they eventually took more drastic measures. One day I was getting the mail and saw a truck parked in front of the yard advertising some sort of yard service which, upon closer observation turned out to be a guy spray painting the grass a deep lustrous green. Around this same time we received a notice in our mailbox from the homeowners association informing us that we were in violation of the neighborhood covenants. Our offense, it seemed, was that we had been leaving our trash can visible from the street. This has never occurred to us as a problem, but according to The Association, we were supposed to be keeping the trash can inside our garage or fenced in the alley. We dutifully complied but then the logical question began to creep into our minds -- who in the world alerted the homeowner's association to our trashiness? A few days later, it hit me: The Grass Painters! Who else has the time to care about my trash can placement? Once I decided it had to have been them I had a good laugh about it and moved on, now with a more properly disguised trash can. I tell that story mostly so that I can tell this one: One of our next-door neighbors is clearly out of town a lot. I see her maybe once every six weeks and only know she is home if we happen to pass one another in the driveway. But the other reason I know this is because she pretty much never mows her yard. Last summer this didn't matter much since it wasn't like the grass was growing anyway, but this spring we have actually gotten a good bit of rain and we have the weeds to prove it. Neither Dan or I are big outdoors people and one of the main things we learned about ourselves when we owned our first home is that yard work is not one of our spiritual gifts. Our negligence was obvious enough even when we had a yard that was the size of a postage stamp and 85 percent landscaped in rocks. But when we moved to a part of the country that is actually capable of growing grass, we agreed that we would save ourselves the drama and hire a yard guy. (And by "the drama" I mean "The nagging that I would have inflicted on Dan while also not doing anything about the yard myself." Lest you think I am a better wife than I am. Nope.) So while we might not have been all caught up on trash can etiquette, our neighbors can't fault us on our yard maintenance thanks to the yard guy. Meanwhile the yard next to ours made us look like rock stars. It basically grew six inches deep in weeds, not even grass. The bushes were out of control. And all the while the grass painters were across the street trimming stray blades of grass with nail clippers. I knew that overgrown yard directly across from them had to be making them crazy. On Friday, as I mentioned before, I took Isaac to the doctor to get treated for the flu. It was a long morning and the first time I had been out of the house since I got sick a few days before. I felt shaky and like I had to squint in the sunlight. The doctor's office is never an easy trip with Isaac, who hates to have his ears checked out and screams and thrashes and has to be restrained. With the need to get the inside of his nose swabbed for the flu test it was even more traumatic than usual. Then we went to the pharmacy and got out minutes before nap time. He was a mess, I was a mess, and I just wanted to get home and lie down. But as I pulled up to the house I saw something that made it worth having gotten out of bed that morning: The Grass Painter Wife was in the crazy yard mowing the grass! She had her push mower and her rake and her hedge clippers and had filled up four GIANT bags with clippings. She was moving like a person seized with righteous anger who has finally had enough. It was like in her mind, she was beating back the forces of evil right there in that yard. When I pulled into the driveway she was clearly finishing up, and she stacked those bags of clippings in a straight line at the garage door and marched back across the street, triumphant over disorder. I sat in the minivan in the garage and laughed for a minute and a half. Who said the suburbs are boring? http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/03/watching_the_grass_grow.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/03/watching_the_grass_grow.html Every day stuff Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:50:23 -0700 killed me. 2) I really need to go to Vegas soon. Did I mention that I have gotten a flu shot for five consecutive years prior to this? And that we got our official flu diagnosis on March 2, late in the flu season no matter how you look at it? And that a few days earlier I had been reading a news story about how practically no one got the flu this year and it was a miracle of science? And that when the doctor told me Isaac had the flu, his exact words were "Congratulations! He is my first flu case of the year." We win all the good prizes. 1. TamiFlu is a wonderful thing, and I wish I'd had some when it would have done me any good. Back during the great H1N1 scare of 2009, I read online a pretty hair-raising story from a family in Great Britain whose children had a really bad reaction to TamiFlu and suffered from hallucinations. It did not make me want to have my kids on that drug if I could help it. But when Isaac got sick and was diagnosed within 24 hours of the onset of the illness, our doctor felt like treating him would be the best course of action since he is under two and therefore in a high risk group for complications from the flu. I took his advice, but watched with great trepidation for any negative side effects once I gave him the first dose. And you know what? He was fine. He never seemed bothered at all, and he clearly felt better much faster than I did. Right now, a week later, I am still moving pretty slowly and he is tearing around the house like he's on wheels. As a parent I take very seriously the job of making informed decisions about my kids' health, but sometimes I feel like the Internet means I am living in the age of way too much information. It's good to know what could happen, yes, but it isn't neccesarily always helpful to read a first-hand account from the one person who had a bad experience, all in the name of being informed. And The Google will always make sure you find that one person. 4) It turns out that if you are really incapacitated you can get out of bed only to perform key child care tasks like preparing hot dogs and mac and cheese (yum!), and the rest of the time you can just let your kids do whatever the heck they want. I am pretty sure I read that in a very reputable parenting book. I may be exaggerrating slightly, but our kids surely did watch an obscene amount of television and I don't even know what they were doing that resulted in the kind of messes they made. They also apear to have dug a sizable hole under one of the bushes in our back yard one afternoon when I told them to go outside. But we all survived until Dan got home, and that is what counts. 5) Times like these are when you cannot place a value on having family members nearby. My mother-in-law Lorrae bailed me out so much while Dan was gone. She took the kids off my hands a couple of times, shuttled the very un-sick and very bored Kate to school, and even brought me soup. I owe her big. 6) Taking cold medicine and then falling asleep with the lights on while reading "Into the Wild" on a night when your husband is out of town is a recipe for some weird, fevered, confusing dreams. It was my own little homemade TamiFlu hallucination. I do not recommend it, and I may never be able to finish that book. We are a lot better this week, if a little weak, and I hope to be able to look forward to a spring featuring a few less trips to the doctor. And on that note, it's a beautiful day outside and I think I will take the kids and soak up some of that lovely sunlight. It's been too long since I've seen any. ]]> http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/03/oh_the_timing.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/03/oh_the_timing.html Every day stuff Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:07:29 -0700 For the first few months of his life, Isaac was an incredible eater. Really I should say he was an incredible exclusive nurser, because that's all he was doing. But dang if he wasn't doing a lot of it. He was pudgy and had fat rolls and grew like a champ. Assuming that this would be his approach to all forms of sustenance I dutifully introduced him to solids some time after he was six months old, confident that he would smack his lips with joy and get right to it. But nothing doing. He didn't hate food, he just didn't want any fed to him with a spoon. Unfortunately, it took me weeks to figure out that the problem was that he didn't like spoon feeding. Once he learned to pick up finger foods by himself, we were in business, and so things proceeded for a while. This should have been my first red flag that underneath all those fat rolls was a stubborn little Wachdorf temperament that would choose its own way over basic needs like nutrition. But I really thought it was all about the spoon and I had figured that out, so no harm, right? He wasn't the world's most devoted solids eater, but he ate enough that I didn't worry and he still nursed so I figured he was getting what he needed. Fast forward to the tail end of 2011. I can't pinpoint exactly when this happened, only that it was somewhere during all the melee of holiday chaos that Isaac suddenly seemed to lose interest in food completely. Now remember that this is not this my first trip around the my-kid-won't-eat block. Kate was a selective and sporadic eater from the word go, interspersing lengthy hunger strikes with days when she would consume enough food to feed a village of toddlers. It freaked me out but eventually I realized that this is just how she is and if I wait for her to get hungry, she will eat. There are still days when she eats like a bird, but she is growing, and as our pediatrician so succinctly pointed out to me: "She isn't going to let herself starve. Kids don't." So at first I wasn't that freaked out by Isaac's shutdown about food. It was frustrating because no sooner would we all sit down for dinner than he would start saying "all done" and demanding to get down from his high chair. He also majorly increased his demands to nurse, which wasn't convenient. But on the whole I figured he would snap out of it if I just gave him time. Then it was Christmas and he still wasn't eating that much. And then it was January and pants that had fit him last month were suddenly falling off his waist. At the end of January the kids and I loaded up for our most recent trip to Mississippi. We spent almost two weeks at my mom and dad's house and at the end of it Dan, who had been away on a business trip, joined us for a few days. During that trip Isaac took his not eating to a whole new level. There were days when he honestly did not eat anything other than a goldfish cracker here and there. Even Dan, who is typically the more laid back and non panic-prone of the two of us, was worried. So when we got back to San Antonio, I scheduled a doctor's appointment so we could go in and make sure that we weren't missing something. Leading up to the appointment I actually kept a log where I wrote down every bite Isaac consumed so that I would have documentation of how much this kid was not eating. A weight and growth check revealed that Isaac had only gained a few ounces since his last major checkup in October, but that he was growing taller, which was a relief. Our doctor was very careful to rule out symptoms of major problems and really took his time to talk with us and ensure that in all other respects Isaac is healthy. And then he basically diagnosed him with a whopping case of being a hardheaded toddler who will eat when he gets hungry. (See aforementioned "stubborn Wachdorf baby.") We talked through some strategies for getting him to eat and left feeling very reassured, which is certainly how you want to leave all doctor's appointments for your children. Realizing that Isaac wasn't suffering from anything serious gave us the ability to stop freaking out about the eating issue and even find some humor in it. One morning not long after the doctor's visit, Dan was trying to sell Isaac on the idea of having some breakfast for a change. There is no point in asking Isaac if he wants a particular food because he is almost always going to say no, but sometimes we do it anyway just to amuse ourselves while we rummage around in the fridge. Dan: Do you want Cheerios? Isaac: No. Dan: Yogurt? Isaac: No. Apples? No. Bananas? No. Cheese? No. Blueberries? No. And so on. But then Dan had a brilliant idea. "Hey buddy," he said. "Do you want some fried elephant noses?" Isaac, on autopilot: "No! .... Yes! Noses!" So Dan walked into the kitchen, poured that kid a bowl of the same Honey Nut Cheerios he had just declined, and plunked it down on the table. And. He. Freaking. Ate. It. I am not even kidding you. I nearly died from the shock. As promised, this story does have a happy ending. For whatever reason the hunger strike appears to be over or at least on temporary hiatus. In the grand tradition of cars that stop making the weird noise as soon as you go to the mechanic, Isaac started eating much much better the week after his doctor's appointment. Lately the first thing he says to me every morning is "Hungry! Eat!" We generally start the day off with a bowl of Fried Elephant Noses. ]]> http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/02/elephant_noses.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/02/elephant_noses.html Sun, 26 Feb 2012 19:08:43 -0700 It is 75 degrees in South Texas today and as I am typing this the kids are playing out back in the faux springtime weather. They are running around to the side of the house and waving their hands in the kitchen window and then laughing themselves into fits when I pop my head over the ledge to catch them. Some time in the last six months they have become excellent little playmates for one another and it has been a huge turning point in our lives. And by "our lives," I mean "The new part of our lives where Dan and I can sometimes sit still for ten minutes and speak entire sentences to one another." Not that we get to engage in this luxury all the time but it does occasionally happen that they keep one another occupied and we can converse. It is quite a novelty. This weekend Dan bought me a new laptop and it is making me want to break my year-long writing drought and type and type just for the pure joy of how nicely my sleek new little laptop goes along. Our old laptop was developing the annoying habit of crashing during Skype conversations and thinking for an extremely long period about simple tasks like opening a document. So it's nice to have a handy little tool. I think there are a lot of reasons I haven't been writing for the last little while. None of them are bad -- there isn't any hidden drama behind that statement. There's just the fact that for a long time I wanted to write and didn't have time, then when I did find some time I didn't really have a lot to say. Not that I have anything profound to contribute to the Interent now, either. So moving on: Like everyone else in the Western Hemisphere I have gotten sucked into Downton Abbey. I would be embarrassed to be watching what is clearly a soap opera if it weren't for the fancy clothes and British accents. But since those save my credibility, I am OK with admitting that I am addicted. I am currently putting off watching the season finale that is on my DVR for sheer grief that I will have to wait the rest of the YEAR for new episodes. It is too cruel. But so far I like the experience of watching Downton Abbey better than I liked watching LOST, the last show I got hopelessly sucked into. At least they tell you stuff on this show, and you don't have to invest four years of your life just to figure out what the basic premise of the show really is. I still want those years back. I have now done the drive back to Mississippi on my own with the kids twice. It has gone pretty smoothly with the exception of one scene in a Cracker Barrell somewhere in Louisiana were Isaac decided he was done sitting in his high chair right about the time our food arrived and illustrated this point by arching his back, waving his hands and screaming "ALL DONE! ALL DONE!" until I let him get up and wander around the room. Obviously there is a pretty short clock on how long you can let an almost two-year-old child wander unassisted through a restaurant with a working fireplace before people begin to question your parenting skills, so in short order we were out in the retail display area test driving noisemakers and novelty candy containers that someone who is a marketing evil genius places right at the eye level of irritable small children who have been on long car rides. It took me about ten minutes to talk the kids away from that and back to the table, by which time our food was cold. I don't know why I even order food for the kids on these trips because they don't eat it. But I was starving, so I shoveled as much of my meal down as I could in five minutes while whipping my head around every three seconds to try to see what in the world the kids were doing when they weren't sitting in their seats. We barely made it through check out without another candy related scene and on the way out the door Isaac picked up a wooden duck toy that he clearly intended to take to the car with him had I not noticed it. In our travels I have noticed that newer Target stores now have family restrooms located right near the exits, and this makes me want a write a love letter to Target. Family restrooms are so nice because you don't have to wrangle in and out of a stall with your kids and there are more places for them to stand without requiring you to say "Don't touch that! Do NOT touch that. Oh my heavenly gracious do not under ANY circumstances put your hands on that!" There is just such a new Target in Lafayette, Louisiana and we now stop there every time because we can do a bathroom break and then let the kids run up and down the aisles for a while and burn off steam. On this last trip the kids and I stopped there during an absolutely pounding rainstorm and it was a huge relief to be out of the car for just a few minutes before taking on the Atchafalaya Basin bridge. I don't know how big the basin is, but the bridge is miles and miles long extending over swampland with no place to stop. So far we've never needed to stop, but I'm just waiting for the day when one of the kids pulls the "I have to go potty" trump card while we're on the bridge. It's not going to be pretty. http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/02/february_spring_2.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/02/february_spring_2.html Every day stuff Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:35:39 -0700 It is 75 degrees in South Texas today and as I am typing this the kids are playing out back in the faux springtime weather. They are running around to the side of the house and waving their hands in the kitchen window and then laughing themselves into fits when I pop my head over the ledge to catch them. Some time in the last six months they have become excellent little playmates for one another and it has been a huge turning point in our lives. And by "our lives," I mean "The new part of our lives where Dan can sometimes sit still for ten minutes and speak entire sentences to one another." Not that we get to engage in this luxury all the time but it does occasionally happen that they keep one another occupied and we can converse. It is quite a novelty. This weekend Dan bought me a new laptop and it is making me want to break my year-long writing drought and type and type just for the pure joy of how nicely my sleek new little laptop goes along. Our old laptop was developing the annoying habit of crashing during Skype conversations and thinking for an extremely long period about simple tasks like opening a document. So it's nice to have a handy little tool. I think there are a lot of reasons I haven't been writing for the last little while. None of them are bad -- there isn't any hidden drama behind that statement. There's just the fact that for a long time I wanted to write and didn't have time, then when I did find some time I didn't really have a lot to say. Not that I have anything profound to contribute to the Interent now, either. So moving on: Like everyone else in the Western Hemisphere I have gotten sucked into Downton Abbey. I would be embarrassed to be watching what is clearly a soap opera if it weren't for the fancy clothes and British accents. But since those save my credibility, I am OK with admitting that I am addicted. I am currently putting off watching the season finale that is on my DVR for sheer grief that I will have to wait the rest of the YEAR for new episodes. It is too cruel. But so far I like the experience of watching Downton Abbey better than I liked watching LOST, the last show I got hopelessly sucked into. At least they tell you stuff on this show, and you don't have to invest four years of your life just to figure out what the basic premise of the show really is. I still want those years back. I have now done the drive back to Mississippi on my own with the kids twice. It has gone pretty smoothly with the exception of one scene in a Cracker Barrell somewhere in Louisiana were Isaac decided he was done sitting in his high chair right about the time our food arrived and illustrated this point by arching his back, waving his hands and screaming "ALL DONE! ALL DONE!" until I let him get up and wander around the room. Obviously there is a pretty short clock on how long you can let an almost two-year-old child wander unassisted through a restaurant with a working fireplace before people begin to question your parenting skills, so in short order we were out in the retail display area test driving noisemakers and novelty candy containers that someone who is a marketing evil genius places right at the eye level of irritable small children who have been on long car rides. It took me about ten minutes to talk the kids away from that and back to the table, by which time our food was cold. I don't know why I even order food for the kids on these trips because they don't eat it. But I was starving, so I shoveled as much of my meal down as I could in five minutes while whipping my head around every three seconds to try to see what in the world the kids were doing when they weren't sitting in their seats. We barely made it through check out without another candy related scene and on the way out the door Isaac picked up a wooden duck toy that he clearly intended to take to the car with him had I not noticed it. In our travels I have noticed that newer Target stores now have family restrooms located right near the exits, and this makes me want a write a love letter to Target. Family restrooms are so nice because you don't have to wrangle in and out of a stall with your kids and there are more places for them to stand without requiring you to say "Don't touch that! Do NOT touch that. Oh my heavenly gracious do not under ANY circumstances put your hands on that!" There is just such a new Target in Lafayette, Louisiana and we now stop there every time because we can do a bathroom break and then let the kids run up and down the aisles for a while and burn off steam. On this last trip the kids and I stopped there during an absolutely pounding rainstorm and it was a huge relief to be out of the car for just a few minutes before taking on the Atchafalaya Basin bridge. I don't know how big the basin is, but the bridge is miles and miles long extending over swampland with no place to stop. So far we've never needed to stop, but I'm just waiting for the day when one of the kids pulls the "I have to go potty" trump card while we're on the bridge. It's not going to be pretty. http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/02/february_spring.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2012/02/february_spring.html Every day stuff Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:35:39 -0700 Kate with our friend Abigail during our trip to Albuquerque. (As usual for me these days, I started writing this eons ago, so some of the information is dated. For instance, tomorrow it will be October. The trip I'm talking about and showing photos of happened at the end of July. But the part about it being 108 degrees? Yeah, that happened, and it seems like it was just yesterday.) Recently we returned from a trip to Albuquerque, and while I am happy to say that our trip was a smashing success, I have been suffering a bit of post-high-desert depression upon returning to the absolutely smothering heat that is engulfing South Texas right now. The weather app on my phone says it is going to be 108 degrees tomorrow. One-zero-eight. That is just inhumane. So since my current plans involve camping out in my air conditioned home until January, I thought I would go ahead and share a little horror story from my recent brush with airline travel. I need to note at the start that I am acting in solidarity with my sister Hannah and my sister-in-law Kelly, who have both recently blogged terrible travel stories of their own. Both of their stories make me look like a whiner, but in the Rice family, storytelling is a sport and Kelly said she would only blog hers if I would blog mine, so here we are. Game on. We started making plans for a return trip to Albuquerque back in April. This is important because in April, Isaac was not walking. That small fact explains a lot. Specifically, it explains why I chose to have all four of us travel to Albuquerque together, but for the kids and I to stay in Albuquerque an additional three days after Dan went back to Texas for work. This means that I would be doing the return trip to Texas without Dan. In my mind, when I was planning this day of solo flying for me and the kids, I was picturing Isaac being happy in the stroller and Kate being the model veteran air traveler that she is. Isaac and his buddy Owen shared a snack at the Albuquerque Zoo. Well, it turns out that babies change all the time. I am not sure if you knew that or not, but it's true. You might want to write that down and tape it up somewhere in your house if you have small kids. Because by the time July rolled around and I was watching Isaac sprint all over my house like Thing One every minute of the day, I was starting to wonder what had ever possessed me to sign up for this. But tickets were already bought and there wasn't really any backing out of it. So off we went. Our time in Albuquerque was so much fun, so worth the travel and deserving of another post on its own. To illustrate that point, I will intersperse some photos from our trip through this post of us and our Albuquerque peeps. Dan went back to Texas on Sunday, the kids and I stayed a couple more days and then it was time for the big return trip. Since realizing what I was in for, I had spent a lot of time planning how I would survive, but in fact many of my plans turned out to be unneccesary because Mike and Susan, who were already hosting us for our trip, rode to the rescue, as they always do. It turned out that Susan was leaving for a trip on the very day we returned to San Antonio, and our flights left Albuquerque within 15 minutes of one another. It would have been amazing enough just to have another adult to go through the security line with me and the kids, but going above and beyond as they usually do, Mike and Susan managed the return of my rental car and helped me get us and all our luggage checked in. Then Susan, who could have been having a totally reasonable pre-flight period of eating a meal sitting down or reading a book, chose instead to go through security with me and my three-ring circus, then help us get breakfast and do bathroom breaks before it was time to board. May her reward be great in heaven. Seriously. Mike and Susan also hosted a cookout at their house during our visit and all these kiddos ran around in a screaming pack in the rain and had a completely wonderful time. Here they are in a brief moment of stillness. So my fretting was largely in vain, but when I was still in fretting mode I had come up with a solution for almost every travel issue that could arise, save one. I could not, for the life of me, figure out what in the world I would do if myself or one of the kids had to visit the lavatory on the airplane. We've all seen these things. You can barely fit yourself in there, much less yourself and a kid. Add a second kid in and the whole thing starts to sound like a clown car act. No, I decided, there was no way to do it, so I just wouldn't, Our flights were reasonably short. I would make darn sure we went to the bathroom immediately before boarding and just avoid the whole issue entirely. When I made this plan, it should have set off red flags in my mind, since every other parenting strategy I have ever come up with based purely on denial has backfired spectacularly (Santa, anyone?) but I really thought it was reasonable. Thus, on the morning of our flights, we made multiple trips to the bathroom. Minutes before we boarded I made one last trip for insurance. And, sensing my desperation, Kate did what any three year old would do in that situation -- she refused to go to the bathroom. I put her up on the toilet and sat there, telling her why it was important for her to go now. But all to no avail. She really didn't have to go, she said. Kate with her good friend Bonny, who mails her letters. I think you all know what happened next. We got on the plane. I performed the one-handed folding up of our stroller at the end of the jetway with Isaac in my arms. We got into our seats and got our seatbelts on. Then, in a miracle of timing, Isaac stopped bouncing around like a ping pong ball, nursed and fell asleep during takeoff. He was out like a light and I was starting to feel like there was a really good chance he would sleep through the whole flight if I just ignored the tingling pain of my arm falling asleep and didn't move a muscle. Kate was happily watching "Annie" on the i-Pod. We were about 45 minutes into the flight, and I was about to breathe a sigh of relief. (We celebrated Katie's Lilevjen's birthday while we were in town, which made me almost as happy as getting to see all the Lilevjens again!) And then Kate turned to me and said the words all parents dread hearing on a trip. "Mommy, I have to go potty." Well, that's not entirely accurate. What she said first was "I don't want to wear this seatbelt." Then when I told her she had to keep wearing the seatbelt because it is one of the airplane rules to be safe, she pondered that for a moment and then pulled out the potty trump card. I could see the thoughts forming in her brain -- "If I say I have to go potty Mom will have to let me out of the seat belt!" -- and it made me want to bang my head on the seat because I knew that it was total fiction. I don't want to give you more information than you need, but Kate has demonstrated many times since she got full potty trained that she can hold it for incredible amounts of time when she wants to. Key words: Wants to. My attempts to convince her to use her bladder-holding superpowers for good ended in increasingly high-pitched proclamations of "I need to go POOOOOOOOOTTTTY!" And really, to your fellow airline passengers there is no way to get through that without sounding like you are A) torturing your child and B) about to ruin a perfectly good airplane seat. So there was nothing for it but to unbuckle all three of us and start the trek to the front of the plane, where there was not, as far as I could tell, any line for the bathroom. Isaac woke up in the process and started doing that angry, disoriented thrashing move that small children do when woken from a deep sleep. Kate was doing little dance steps up the aisle while I tried to keep Isaac from kicking people in the head. It was a long walk to the front of the plane, only to find once we were there that the lavatory was, in fact, occupied. This fact was relayed to me by a flight attendant who I had not seen sitting there until that moment. "It's occupied," she said, glancing up from her book. I want to take a moment to state that I have flown a lot in my life, and never once have I been anything but charming to airline personnel. For the most part, they have been nothing but charming to me. And maybe this woman and I were just not having the best day, but we surely did get off on the wrong foot. Because when I paused there in the empty space next to the bathroom with my two children, trying to determine what would be the best thing to do in the probably 10 seconds before whoever was in the bathroom came out, Book Reading Flight Attendant glanced up again to say, "Ma'am? You can't stand here. You'll have to wait in your seat." Yes, she did. I don't know if I should be sorry that I could not contain the exaggerated eye-rolling that this statement provoked in me or proud that I did contain the desire to reach over there and smack that book out of her hand. Either way, we had a very tense exchange wherein I gestured to the back of the plane and asked if I could go back there and join the absolute CROWD that was standing around idly by that lavatory door. Seriously, there were two flight attendants and some other person just hanging out, shooting the breeze, and I didn't notice TSA coming to arrest them. So we started the long hike to the other end of the plane. Dance, kick, dance, kick, squawk of indignation from toddler, repeat. Man, people on that plane LOVED us. Me and my friend Erika in the blue light of the seal and sea lion exhibit at the zoo. The look on my face is one of joy over being with Erika. This stands in stark contrast to the look on my face during the incident I am describing.) Once we got back to the block party and pried the lavatory door open, I realized I had another problem. Airplane toilets are absurdly high off the ground, and there was no way Kate would be able to sit on one unassisted. Meanwhile Isaac had reached a critical juncture in his flailing that required him to try to bang his head on the walls of the plane. Clearly there was no way I could deal with him and Kate at the same time. Thankfully at this point a flight attendant redeemed the name of Southwest Airlines forever for me and bravely offered to hold Isaac while I helped Kate. Isaac, of course, was thrilled with this plan, right? No. He screamed his head off for the entire time it took me to assist Kate, which, by the way, I had to do with the lavatory door wide open because there was no way to get us both in and close the door. So in summary, flying with both kids overall went much, much better than I could have imagined. Except that the part about the bathroom was every bit as horrible as I thought it would be. I am trying not to read too much into this as I ponder attempting my first drive to Mississippi alone with both kids in the near future. I am assuming the whole two-kids-to-the-public-restroom experience doesn't improve much in, say, a gas station in rural Louisiana. I'll let you know. ]]> http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2011/10/fly_me_to_the_bathroom.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2011/10/fly_me_to_the_bathroom.html Every day stuff Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:35:59 -0700 ]]> http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2011/09/dance_party_1.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2011/09/dance_party_1.html Baby Isaac Mon, 26 Sep 2011 20:14:03 -0700 As I am typing this I am sitting on my bed. Beside the bed stands Isaac, who is clawing the sheets, whining, stamping his feet and generally doing his 17-month-old best to convey the message that me ever writing another sentence in this world is down pretty low on his personal priority list and I should give it up. This is a pretty good word picture for what happened to this blog and any other writing I was doing. But having reached into the bedside table to hand Isaac a baby monitor charging cord, I have momentarily distracted him and so in spite of the very real possibility that he will use it to harm himself or someone else, I will seize the five seconds of quiet to tell you some very boring things. I will not overthink them and they will not be deep and whenever Isaac comes back I will hit "publish" and thus will have ended my two month long dry spell. Random thing No. 1: The shower in our master bathroom has been broken for going on four months. It looks a little better than this right now, but this was the view a few weeks ago: If my blog were anonymous, I would write the entire absurd story in detail with much commentary on the worthlessness of various supposed professionals, but since I am readily available on Google, I will just give you this advice: If a crack ever opens up in the floor of your shower, you should get out, dry off, walk out of the house, lock the door and never come back again. (You should probably also get dressed before that part about leaving the house.) You will have to find a new place to live and get all new stuff but believe me, that will be way less annoying and expensive than trying to fix the shower. Just walk away. Thank goodness we are renting. Random thing No. 2: Kate recently turned four and as her big gift from Dan and I she got this outrageous dress made by the Disney Marketing Mothership that is a wedding dress modeled on the one in Cinderella. It is pretty fabulous and she loves it, which is great. What is not great is what I discovered moments after she unwrapped it and put it on, which is that this dress has approximately 50 pounds of glitter embedded in the fabric and the decorations, such that her ever move results in a sprinkling of glitter drifting to the floor like magic fairy dust from the wand of a fairy godmother. Maybe this is part of the charm, but my OCD can't handle it. Now if I had to list my hobbies the first one would have to be "Researching the best ways to clean up glitter off every surface of my life." Random thing No. 3: The only thing Kate is more interested in than her Cinderella Wedding Dress right now is the movie Tangled. That is part of the reason why in the picture with the Cinderella wedding dress, she is wearing a blonde dollar store headband/hair extension piece. It's her long Rapunzel hair. I will write an entire post about this soon, using my newly-discovered method of making time for writing via ignoring my children and not editing anything. Random thing No. 4: Last weekend Dan and I left the kids with my in-laws and went on our first overnight trip together since Isaac was born. We went to a day of the Austin City Limits music festival and then stayed in historic Gruene, which is very charming in a flea market kind of way. We had a great time, we saw some great musical artists and the people-watching was incredible. Maybe I don't get out enough anymore, but that was almost my favorite part. However, it did remind me of my number one concert attendance peeve, and I thought I would share it here. At a festival the size of ACL, obviously you are going to be exposed to some artists who are not your all-time favorite. But here's the thing -- that artist probably is someone's all-time favorite, so it would be the height of rudeness for you to talk through that artist's entire set without interruption. Please shut it. And now it's time to make dinner. If I ever pull this off again, I can post some pictures of Kate's birthday party. Don't get too excited, though. I think we all know I am about as reliable as the people who have been fixing the shower for four months. ]]> http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2011/09/several_consecutive_sentences.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2011/09/several_consecutive_sentences.html Every day stuff Sun, 25 Sep 2011 14:58:32 -0700 about living in Texas and leave it at that. I love being close to our families and the increased contact my kids get to have with their grandparents now that there aren't two plane rides standing between us at all times. Dan's job is working out really well. We have found a vibrant church and been welcomed with open arms by a wonderful group of believers. I like our house. I like HEB grocery stores. Texas has amazing Interstates. I want to kiss whoever invented their frontage road system. But recently, after I had listed all those great things about Texas, someone asked me a slightly different question - "Does it feel like home yet?" and without thinking about it at all, I said no. No, it really does not. Now that sounds like a way of saying that we're not happy here, but that's not true. We are happy, and yet it does not feel like home to me. I am trying to just be OK living in that tension. Recently I realized that it's not just me who is still working on feeling at home. Just a few months after we moved here, my brother and sister-in-law moved to a town about 45 minutes away from us. It is surreal. After eight years living without a single family member within 500 miles, we now have several branches of the family nearby, and I cannot get over it. Today, the kids and I drove up to see my brother and his wife and check out their new place. It was really, really fun. We ate lunch in their apartment which is so pretty thanks to my sister-in-law and her excellent taste and impeccable style. (I would give my brother some credit for that, but I saw his bachelor apartments and they were not nearly this cute.) After that we loaded up and went to get sno-cones from a street vendor. You have not lived until you have fed a one year old his first blue sno-cone. Isaac was delirious with joy and sugar. It was hot, and the city was bustling and colorful and when it was over the kids and I went home. No sweat. No security lines. No luggage carousel. It was pretty much my dream come true. After the kids' naps, we loaded up in the van again and went to meet Dan for dinner. He is helping some of our friends from church pack their moving truck tonight. One of the things our life in Albuquerque prepared us very well for about our new life in Texas was the experience of having a lot of friends who are in the military and are, therefore, always moving. San Antonio isn't Military City USA for nothing, and more than half of the folks we are getting to know now are military and will eventually move away. One of our friends is moving next week. I hadn't been trying to keep that fact from Kate, but it just hadn't come up yet, and while Dan was buckling Kate into her car seat, he told her where he was going later. As we were driving away, Kate asked me why our friends had to move. I thought she just really wanted to know what their reason for moving was, so I was explaining that their daddy's job is to be a solider, and the military tells them where to move every few years as part of his job. I was expanding on that theme when I heard Kate kind of sniffling. "But why did we move from Albuquerque? I don't... want... to ... moooooooove! I miss Albuquerque!" I was completely taken aback. Since we moved, I have definitely had some conversations with Kate where she expressed sadness about the friends she left behind. I have encouraged her to talk about them and stay in touch in the ways that three-year-olds can -- nonsensical Skype conversations and mailing one another crayon drawings festooned with stickers. But it has been a long time since she has said anything about feeling sad about the move. Lately, when she refers to it, it's in a chronological way, like she is just talking about something that happened before we moved or after we moved. So I was shocked to stumble upon so much grief in her heart about it eight months after the fact. It never ceases to amaze me how these crucial parenting moments come up when you are in the middle of something else and you have to deal with the whole thing while multitasking. In this case, we were zipping along the freeway at 70 miles an hour in rush hour traffic. Not exactly a moment for calm reflection. So I said that frantic mom prayer that I am sure is uttered from the driver's seats of more minivans than mine -- the one that just says "Help! Help! Help!" Then I asked Kate why she was sad, and I tried to shut up and listen to her. She told me she misses our friends. And that it is hard for her to go to our new church because it is different from our old church. She asked me if I ever moved when I was a little girl and I told her that I moved to different houses but only moved to a new town one time and that was hard. We talked about how when we looked at our new house before our stuff came on the truck, our voices echoed off the tile and they sounded so loud and it made her feel scared. She asked when we would have to move again, so we talked about how we will need to move to a different house in San Antonio in a couple of years, but that we won't go very far away. She asked about what happened to our house in Albuquerque. Apparently, we never really explained that, and she had this sweet little worry in her heart that it was sitting there empty where we left it. I told her that no, some people who needed a home had come to live in it just like we had found our house to live in when we needed a new home in San Antonio. We talked about it all for the whole drive home, and I was struck by two things: how much Kate's grief about all the change is like my own, and how there are really no easy answers for it. So instead of rushing to point out to her all the reasons the move has been a good thing for us, I just told her that I feel sad about it all sometimes too, and I think it's OK to feel that way. By the time we got home, she seemed to have talked about it as much as she needed to, and since I needed to go start putting Isaac to bed I left her on the couch watching a movie. Then I walked to Isaac's room and collapsed onto the chair where I nurse him, wrung out by the sadness I had felt coming from Kate about something I thought she was done with. I think that is where I keep going wrong in this whole process. I want to be done feeling conflicted about all of it, and some days I think I am. But my grief about it surfaces at strange moments when I am least expecting it -- and I might need to start letting go of my timeline for how long we're allowed to feel a little weird here, those of us who are three and those of us who are thirty(one). So that is how I feel about Texas right now. The next day Kate got up and had a Skype tea party with her good buddy Lily, which did much to cheer her up, as do my Skype un-tea-party chats with Lily's mom, Erika. We are actually planning a trip back to Albuquerque next month, and I am hoping it is helpful for Kate to see that all of our friends are still there and not just on the computer. We look forward to seeing you all! ]]> http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2011/07/up_and_down.html http://www.wachdorf.com/haley-blog/2011/07/up_and_down.html Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:59:04 -0700