Langer Loksh

Thum, Sucking

If you know Summer, you know she has a certain habit, one she has had since she was three months old, one that cannot be mailedto the kittens in Sweden because it is attached to her hand. I have grown less patient with this habit of late. Probably it's just time for her to go back to school and stop breathing my air.

If you know me you know that I am as subtle about my feelings as a white rhino. It's become rather obvious to Summer that I cannot stand to be in the same room with her when she's engaged in her habit. Grandma Joyce told Summer that when she was about Summer's age, her thumb-sucking cousin Janey applied a pepper-flavored deterrent, and it worked. So Summer asked me to get some of the stuff.

It's called Thum and you paint it on your kid's fingernails twice a day. "What flavor is it?" I asked the pharmacy clerk. "Nasty," she answered.

Apparently not nasty enough. It did not work even a little. The slurping noise emanating from behind my driver's seat has not diminished in frequency or intensity.

Notes from New Jersey

The bulge, it swells and enlarges. Charlie is fine. I give him candy if he takes his yucky medicine.

Summer and Charlie take turns walking Fleetwood.

I am ignoring my too-serious book club book in favor of my mom's stash of chick lit. Also I am sucking the Times through my eyeballs every day.

Of her NJ cousins, Summer gets along best with nine-and-a-half-year-old Caroline, perhaps because they are both first children.

Charlie calls my mom's bedroom, on the top floor of the house, as "the room up in the sky."

Summer and Charlie do not go to sleep until very late. There is no point in trying. Their eyes are bright, they chatter, they watch late movies on tv and eat ice cream and generally do not act like people who are anywhere near ready for sleep. Next week: major shock to the system as we return to school. Mostly for me.

Hey La, Hey La, The Bulge is Back!

We are in New Jersey for a little late-summer reverie, where my mom is hobbling around with a big black boot due to her recent bunionectomy. The weather is spectacular and we are heading to Yankee Stadium tonight so that our kids can tell their great-grandkids that they sat in The House That Ruth Built.

Yesterday I noticed the bulge re-forming on Charlie's ear. I called Dr. J., who called in a prescription for Bactrim to my mom's pharmacy and then tried to convince me to take Charlie to an "urgent care center" to have the bulge drained. "I don't like anyone to touch his ear," I said, adding, "Maybe you." Really I don't want anyone but our ear doc, Dr. Kenna at Children's, getting anywhere near the little mushroom. So Dr.  Unfamiliar at Random Urgent Care is not going to get the chance.

So I called Dr. Kenna for reassurance. She was on vacation but between the  nurses and her assistant managed to get word through via email that yes, it's fine to not drain the bulge.

As with past bulges I am thinking a lot about future surgery and whether the bulging will be a problem. What if we fly to Los Angeles and pay $20,000 for a new ear, and then the bulge comes back and wrecks the results?

Charlie is, as usual, unbothered by all of this, and even let me apply a warm compress to his ear last night while he watched the Sox vs. Yanks with Uncle Joey on TV. This morning he went with Uncle Joey to the vet because Fleetwood has a yeast infection in--of course--his ear. While they were gone I thought about strangers asking about his ear. (Charlie's ear, not Fleetwood's.)

If someone asked me about his ear this week, I would say, "The red bump is an infection that we are treating, but the shape of his ear is just the way he came out." Back in my Early Intervention support group, we used to talk about whether or not we wanted people to come right out and ask us questions about our kids' differences. I realized that I don't mind at all. But now I'm wondering if Charlie will mind.

Maybe I should start talking to Charlie about it, so he can answer for himself. He really never talks about it, though recently he pointed to his eyes in turn and said to me, "Mom, is this my big eye and this my little eye?" I told him he had it backwards but really, they were very very close in size, and then he scampered off to mow the lawn with his plastic lawnmower, clad in his usual uniform of skin-tight Buzz Lightyear shortie pajamas and rubber rainboots even though it was 85 degress and sunny. Which is what most people ask about when they see Charlie. They say, "Hey Spiderman!" or "Love the boots!"  

More Chocolately Goodness

Summer was surprised that when the Sox played in Baltimore, she could hear fans chanting "Let's go Red Sox!" She said, "Shouldn't they be saying 'Let's go... Cookies?'"

Now Batting, the Centerfielder...

Number 10...

Cos-cos...

CRIP!

Three Things That Have Nothing Whatsoever to Do With Each Other

After dinner we went out in the pedal boat and Jeff caught two fish, one very small and one practically microscopic, but still! We caught fish! In our own pond! Every day I feel like this move was the best decision we ever made.

Yesterday we visited Charlie's old Early Intervention group. The babies who were babies three months ago are now toddlers, and there are new babies that I don't know. It was nice to see everyone but I don't really miss it.

And last week when Summer finished her summer reading program at the library, she had the opportunity to enter a final ticket in the prize raffle jars. She chose to put her ticket in the jar for the Spiderman blanket "for my brother." Cue Mom's tears.

Hey, Mrs. Tambourine Mom

Apparently I was making it MUCH harder than necessary. I thought I had to put each of my fingers in a different fret, stretching them out across four frets for every chord. In fact you can squash your fingers into three, maybe two frets--there's even a chord where your second, third, and fourth finger are all  smushed into one fret. Fabulous.

Teacher Dan taught me how to pluck in addition to strumming, and then wrote out the chords for Mr. Tambourine Man--G/A/D/G etc. etc. He predicts that by Thursday I will be indistinguishable from Roger McGuinn.

The Face of Evil?

I ask you, is this the face of evil? Poor Becky. Now that she is trapped in the basement and no longer defiling my place of sleep and my gorgeous rugs, I feel a little less inclined to donate her to the satanic ritual people (wherever they are).

I called the vet, figuring she would help me plan an elaborate re-socialization ritual. She shocked me by telling me to take the cat back to the shelter "That's not a pet," she said.

First of all, the shelter would never take her back! We've had her for a year, and shelters make no guarantees about how cats will behave when you traumatize them by setting them loose in a weird-smelling house twice the size of their old digs. Second, I kind of feel just a tiny bit responsible for this animal. I mean, as much fun as it would be, I can't really see myself hurling her out the window as I drive by the pound doing 35. Mostly because I don't know how I would pry her off the shelf where she's taken up residence and get her into the car. And if anyone knows what it's like to feel utterly destroyed by anxiety, it's moi. And Summer loves her. So we're giving her a chance.

Applesauce, meanwhile, had a few short, supervised visits, and after demonstrating that she had no interested in relieving herself anywhere but the litter box--as I type this, I am watching her actually force the bathroom door open with her head so she can use the box--she has been welcomed back to life upstairs. She bats at toys, rubs against our legs, purrs, the whole bit. I put her in the basement at night to keep Becky company.

So for now we have a well-adjusted normal cat upstairs, and a very freaked out, fur-covered gargoyle on a high shelf in the laundry room. My ultimate plan is to reincorporate the Beckster back into the house, but it might take years. It's OK though. I no longer suck in my breath in terror when I see that my bedroom door is ajar. The cat will have to wait.

CelebWatch for Nerds

Mary has taken Summer and Charlie to Ogunquit overnight. Jeff and I stood slack-jawed in the driveway, waving. We did not know what to do with ourselves. We figured we'd better go out for dinner. Funds, however, are light, what with the new manse. Then Jeff pulled a gift certificate to Serafina out of thin air. We'd bought it at the charity auction for the preschool over a year ago and I have no idea why it wasn't buried deeper in the desk piles. I mean, considering I can't find things like, my bright yellow Crocs, or our life-size stuffed Clifford the Big Red Dog.

I put on mascara.

The hostess seated us two tables away from Doris Kearns Goodwin. It was all I could do not to leap over the booth between us. When she got up to go to the ladies room, Jeff said "Now's your chance!" But it didn't seem appropriate to accost a Pulitzer-prize winning author in the loo and gush, "I just LOVED No Ordinary Time!" I considered sending her a cocktail, or perhaps a slice of chocolate cake, but in the end I chickened out. So Doris, if you're out there ego-surfing and you come upon my humble blog... I just LOVED No Ordinary Time! And Wait Till Next Year! And I haven't read your others but I am totally going to, I swear. Oh, and you look fantastic.

On the way home we passed the state police barracks and I said, rather lamely, "Massachusetts is a really long word," and then Jeff proceeded to count the letters in Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, California, North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia, and conclude that with 13 letters, those first three are tied for the longest state names he could think of (except for the bogus Rhode Island and Providence Plantation). "So my statement was accurate," I said. "Massachusetts is a long word." Jeff agreed, but pointed out that it's not as long as Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. "But that's in a different language," I complained. Jeff said, "Yeah--the same language as Massachusetts!"

"AH! You got me!" I cried.

And now you may be officially mortified that you know us.

P.S. I've been meaning to mention that I now know why Yo-Yo Ma carries his own cello on the plane. It's because it costs $2.5 million dollars!

You Only Need 10% of What You Own!

Until you need the rest! And then you're like, crap! Everything I own is wadded up in Hefty bags in a basement room that smells like wood smoke from the not-up-to-code wood stove down there!

We've been living with a few plates and glasses, one frying pan, one spaghetti pot, and whatever clothes we had in our dressers; the kids play with sticks and rocks outside. But yesterday Jeff had to attend the wedding of an employee, and could not find his suit or the iron. We ripped apart the Hefty bags until we found a suit, and by some miracle I came upon the iron in a box full of those twisty new light bulbs, and Jeff made it to New Bege in the nick of time.

I guess we'd better start unpacking for real. I do wish the boxes of plastic, battery-operated toys would mysteriously disappear.