Thursday

There is this huge empty lot on the corner of Broad and Washington that right around this time of year becomes overrun by thistle and Queen Anne's Lace and red clover and something that I always thought was periwinkle until this exact moment when I googled periwinkle and realized I was dead wrong.  It's some sort of weedy, stalky plant that grows flowers that are periwinkle, but that aren't periwinkles.

Broad and Washington is prime real estate.  Maybe not the primest, but pretty damned prime.  No one seems to know why it has been empty for so long or remember what was there before.  There are always rumors about what is going to happen there.  Rumors like Will Smith building a movie studio or an alternate site for the Disney complex that never got off the ground at 8th and Market, but they always sound more like urban legends that actual urban plans.
 And once a year Cirque du Soleil sets up camp there.  That happens for real.  But that's about all that happens.

Anyway, it's overrun by weeds and flowers right now and it smells just like the town where I grew up and it makes me feel summery and soccery and other less pleasant things that are probably the reason I moved 425 miles away from the town where I grew up two weeks after my 18th birthday.

Smells are funny like that.

I'm sensitive to smells.

Sometimes I wonder if I am blessed with a superhuman sense of smell or I am cursed with a lasting run of chronic mini-strokes.

I smell EVERYTHING.

***

You know your kid is growing up in the inner city when you tell him that your favorite thing to do as soon as school has let out for the summer was to throw away your busted up school shoes and he replies, "but mom, they don't have laces so how are we going to get them up on the wire?"

***

I am all for providing breastmilk for your children for as long as possible, but I feel there is a time where it is more appropriate to give it to your child in a cup rather than allow them to nurse.  And there is a time when the children aren't really getting any nutritional or emotional benefits from it so it's time to stop altogether because I don't feel it is for the betterment of the child but just fulfilling a weird psycho(logical) need for the mother.

There are a lot of things that we, as parents, do that fill our own needs rather than fill the needs of our children.  It is really bad to do that to our children, but we still do it.  All of us.  Because we are needy creatures.

What are the proper time frames for nursing?  I'm not sure. I think it varies on a child to child basis.  The powers that be at the World Health Organization encourage mothers to nurse for at least two years, but for me that wasn't ever going to happen with Jake. I think two years is an excellent goal for nursing moms, but even nursing for one day has amazing benefits for a child.  Nursing for one feeding.  Whatever you can do.  Sometimes you can do a lot, sometimes you can't do any.

When Jacob was about six months old, I took him to the pediatrician for a well baby visit and there were two children playing with those little plastic barnyard animals on the floor.  Making up adventures and precociously telling all the adults in the room random facts about safaris and other crap that kids care about but grown ups really don't worry over too much.  The mom asked the boys to come and get a drink before they go into the exam room.  The grandmom, who was also there, said to the mom as the boys were unbuttoning mom's shirt to get a drink, "so help me Jesus if this doctor doesn't tell you to stop nursing these children I'm going to throw a goddamn fit.  They are five and seven years old for chrissakes".

It was gross.  And awkward.

My mom was there too and she audibly gagged.

***

I'm going to the beach this weekend.  I should try on my bathing suit tonight to see if it still fits so I don't have to traipse around OCNJ tugging on a crotch crawler.  

There is nothing worse than crotch crawling bathing suits.  Or shorts.  It makes me audibly gag when someone is walking around in shorts and one of the legs creeps up and hooks itself up into that place where your inner thigh starts to stick out and the other leg is hanging exactly where it should be.  Or worse when both legs creep up and there is this A-shaped slant that points right to the vaginal/penile area.  It happens with shorter shorts and non-structured shorts like sweat material shorts or light cottony things that should really only be worn to bed.  I think you  know what I'm talking about, I guess I don't have to go on.

Though I could go on if you want me too.

***

I bought new sheets for my bed.
I love new sheets.
They make me feel cleaner.
Even though I'm no cleaner than I was before.
Probably less, actually.

***

Kittens are doing well.

***

Basement construction is going well, and we should get the estimate on turning the sunroom at the top of the stairs into a real room by the end of the day today.  Depending on how much that is we will either go ahead and start that now or save some money and start that when it's affordable.

***

I've been using Tumblr for awhile now, but I don't really love it.  I almost regret shifting all of my pictures over there from Google, but my Google albums were full and I didn't want to pay for space.  On the plus side, they are now saved to one of those little things you stick in the hole on the side of your computer and save stuff on.  I'm sure they  have a name, and that name isn't "floppy disc", but it's basically a non-floppy rectangle thing that acts like a disc but it's not a disc.  

I know a lot about computers.

***

I also joined Instagram but maybe I just don't get it.  It seems a lot like Tumblr, so I don't really love that either.

One of the things I hated about Facebook and Twitter were what I called the bologna sandwich posts.  It's where people tell you the most non-important things going on in their lives, like what they are eating or where they are eating it or who they are eating it with or that they are stuck at a red light or in the line at the grocer.

So now with Instagram and Tumblr I don't have to read about bologna sandwiches, I see pictures of bologna sandwiches.

Which is somehow worse.

But at least I can put the Tumblr and Instagram feeds I do like on my Google Reader.
I think you can't follow someone and block them at the same time, so you get stuck looking at a bunch of crap if you want to be polite and follow back everyone that follows you.

 *** 

I think I've reached the end of the internet.

Or the end of my patience.  

I'll decide and let you know.

ovophobia

This morning on the radio show they were talking about irrational childhood fears.  They laughed about girls who were afraid of bananas and pickles (which I don't think is very funny at all, but that's probably because of my line of work) and kids who were afraid of the holes in doughnuts and hair curlers and honeycombs.

My irrational childhood fear was fried eggs.  I was terrified of fried eggs.  Specifically, the crispy brown edges of fried eggs.  I thought that's where bees came from. (I sort of related to the honeycomb girl) Fried eggs made me cry and  hyperventilate and hide.  My grandpa used to make bacon and then fry some eggs in the grease.  The smell of bacon made me puke and the eggs made me cry and you could usually find me crouched behind the toilet on Saturday mornings if I was at his house.  Which was often because we lived there for a good chunk of time.

That stopped when I was about 11.  Mostly because I knew there weren't bees in there but partly because could leave the house without a chaperone.  And a little bit because I got tired of crying and puking once a week.  Have you ever cried and puked?  It's gross.  Snot and tears and stuff coming out of the majority of your head holes.

I had a non-interview job, um, "discussion" yesterday.  The job sounded wonderful.  I'd have been responsible for a large and successful child sexual abuse prevention/education program.  Teaching classes to parents and providers and writing cutting edge sex abuse materials and curricula and stuff.  I couldn't be better networked with Philadelphia social service/public health service provision agencies than I am now, so the job would be a natural step for me.  But the pay is the same as what I'm making now and the benefits aren't as beneficial.  Even though the job is bigger.  Sometimes things don't make sense.  Plus the funding is just as unsteady as the funding for the job I have now so I don't think the move would be worth it.  Pennsylvania has an ultra-Conservative Governor right now who pretty much doesn't believe in educating people who aren't well off (or married.  Or men.  Or already educated.  Or straight. Or or or or).  He does believe in incarcerating them, so at least there is a plan in place.  Things don't look good around these parts for children, the elderly, the poor, the infirm, the unemployed, the underemployed, the uneducated, well- pretty much for anyone who isn't our Governor.  Things look great for guys like him.  And our budget cuts reflect that.

I'm glad that all my grandparents are dead because I'm scared what their lives could have turned out to be if they weren't. 
My dad lives down south and I'm not sure how things are down there and my mom probably has a great pension plan because she has worked for her county for nearly as long as I've been alive but who knows what that will mean ten years from now.

Anyway.  Kittens!  Right now there are four in my house.  I love them all but I will be glad on Sunday night when I'm down to two.  Four is a lot.  They are living in my bedroom because the construction has started in the basement.  Monday there were new steps, which were definitely in order because the ones in there- based on the looks of the left over laminate that was there when we moved in- were probably from the late 40s or early 50s.  Yesterday some of the new walls was framed out.  And today the plumbers come in and replace the 100 year old sewer line and start laying the pipes for the new bathroom. 

You have no idea how badly we need a second toilet in our house.  Right now our second toilet is the tub.  Or the utility sink.  Or the drain hole in the alley behind the house. 
We are a disgusting people.

*Alfred Hitchcock was afraid of eggs too.

supper

My mom was in town last night.  Just quickly, there was a transport from Delaware County Prison to Muncie State and she took the job so she could have dinner with us.  It was Tuesday, which means Cut up Stuff for dinner.  Strawberries, carrots, apples, blueberries, oranges, grapes, tomatoes, cheddar cheese, hummus, and crackers.  It's my favorite dinner, and a great way to clean out the fridge.

She's a deputy sheriff.  That's probably important to the story, that's why she was transporting and prison hopping.

Even though I'm not sure why someone from Erie would have to drive seven  hours to Delco, pick a bad guy up and drive them 3 or so hours upstate, and then the 4 hours back home from Muncy.  That's your tax dollars working for you but whatever.

Anyway, my mom was in town last night and she brought me the farmhouse table.  Her grandmother's dining room table from the farmhouse.  It's big and round and oak and complicated to put together and she can't find the slat insert leaf embiggener things but that's okay.  They probably got lost in one of our billions of moves while I was growing up.

And now I have a dinner table that isn't from Ikea.
Officially an adult.
May 8th, 2012.

We were using the Grimaldi table in the dining room lately.  That was passed down to my parents from one of their friend's moms (Mrs. Grimaldi) and I'm sad to throw that out because there has been a lot of dinners eaten on that thing.  I'm guessing at least fifty years worth of dinners.  Which pales to the one hundred and fifty so years worth of dinners on the farmhouse table but it's pretty substantial.  My brother had the Grimaldi table for a few years in college.  I had something else less sentimental that I begged off my mom but it turned out I didn't want it because it reminded me of a few years worth of dinners that weren't so great so I traded Brian the bad table for the Grimaldi Table and all was well in the world.  Sometimes it was a dining room table, sometimes a kitchen table, sometimes a laundry table, but always something in my house.  And now it's trash.  But not today, because the trash trucks came while I was still in my underpants and there was a mad scramble to get the regular garbage out the door without offending the neighbors by showing them that my underwear might not be the newest things I own because I have reached a certain point in my life where underwear isn't a purchase priority and it's sometimes a little bit traumatic to buy so I make do with what I have and the table was forgotten in the chaos.

The big dining room table, the rectangle one from Ikea, was moved to the kitchen in September so it could be a homework table because it is more desk-like than the drop leaf round Grimaldi table.  That one is still a keeper, even though it has surpassed its five-year life-expectancy that comes with Ikea stuff.  People complained at our big holiday party in December that the Grimaldi table wasn't big enough to fit around but no one was really willing to get off their asses to switch the tables so that was that, and it will never be a problem again. And Jake still gets his homework spot.

There are chairs too, at my moms house, that go with the table.  She will be bringing those down this summer, or if I go up there I'll load them in the car and get them home that way.  Although my Ikea chairs look okay with the table so it's not a big deal.  I'm no less of an adult because I have Ikea chairs around the farmhouse table.

This probably all sounds like a bunch of nonsense, but tables are important to me.  Everything happens around the table.  Everything good and bad and easy and hard.  Business deals are struck and paperwork is signed and friends gather and family unites.  Important life decisions are made with stiff drinks in front of us and elbows propping up heads while we chose our words carefully.  Or not so carefully, depending on the height of our moods.  We laugh about things we've done while we lean away from the table, wrists at the edge while we play with a fork, our napkins, our drinks that aren't so stiff.  We talk about our days, the stuff that will only matter for minutes but serves for Family Bonding and Teachable Moments and Collective Remembering.  We feed our bodies and our hearts.  All over the table.  All over the years.  All over the planks of wood that used to be a living growing tree but has been repurposed for something no less important, no less useful.  Alive in a different way.

You can't really say that about the couch.  They don't tend to last so long.

But couches are soft, and tables and chairs tend to be made of wood, and sometimes it isn't comfortable to sit on wood for so long and sometimes you don't have the luxury of a dining room apart from your kitchen and your kitchen is where you keep the bulk of the household garbage and when you think of it like that, it's a little weird to invite the people you love best to sit on something with no cushioning, next to your potato peels and used kleenex and dirty bandaids and discarded papertowels and browning applecores and the other nasty stuff you don't want anywhere else in your home so maybe the couch has merit after all.  Plus it holds you when you fall asleep at 8.30 because you weren't tired enough to go to bed but too tired to sit up straight.  Sleeping at the table is frowned upon.  It makes you look like a degenerate.  Unless you are under the age of three.  Then it makes for a good photo op.

the boys

Those two go to Dave's mom.  She was only going to take one but I convinced her that kittens come better in pairs.  I think it's better for them.  She is naming them Tim and something else.  After country musicians.  I disapprove.  Country music runs against my ethical code.

Back when I was in high school, friends of mine and I would send each other letters for no particular reason other than to scam the post.  (I probably shouldn't admit to this here)

We would write a note, seal it in an envelope, address it to ourselves with the return address reflecting where we wanted it to go, and drop it in the box with no stamp.  A few days later the letter would show up labeled "Return to Sender/ Insufficient Postage".

Done and done.

I'm noticing a lot of my bills are coming with the self-addressed enveloped self-addressed in both the To: spot and the From: spot and you have no idea how tempted I am just to drop it in the box stampless and see if my bill gets paid on time.  But now I have a soft spot for the US Mail (mostly a fascination of the inner-workings of it.  How the heck do they do it?  No matter how illegible the handwriting, it seems to end up in the right place in a reasonable amount of days.  I guess it's like pharmacists.  No matter how scrawly the script, it seems there is a shortage of drug mix-ups and confusion.) and I try to post as much as I can.  Within reason.  I pay most of my bills online or with autopay.  I've neglected to send Christmas cards for a couple years.  I am so far removed from writing letters that I hardly check my email anymore. Did  you know that email is a dying thing?  I didn't believe it until two interns at two separate agencies laughed at me when I asked them for their email in the past year.  One said "um, yeah.  My MOM does email.  I don't have that.  Gross.".  So I guess I don't post as much as I can.  But I never use UPS or Fed Ex if I'm sending something out.  And I always request that anything sent to me at my house is done through the US Mail.  I don't buy those Forever Stamps, even though I accidentally did this time because I wanted the cherry blossom ones and those are Forevers.  I feel guilty.

Did you know that Philadelphia has amazing cherry blossoms?  We don't get a stamp or anything, dammit. DC steals our thunder.  We also have incredible azaleas and hydrangeas that are out of this world.  We originally got the cherry trees as a gift from Japan, but they grow so well now that the city plants them all over the place.  And I'm not sure about the azaleas, but we do have an azalea garden that I've been meaning to get too.  Hydrangeas, I hear, are dependent on the acidity of the soil they grow in.  I'm not sure if that is true but the hydrangeas that grow in some of the worst neighborhoods in this town blow away anything that I've ever seen anywhere else.  The colors are stunning and the bushes grow a story tall in abandoned lots, blooming from spring to fall.

Put that on a stamp and suck it.
Lick it.

Layla

Two or three weeks.  That's when the kittens will come home.  First they have to be spayed and inoculated and all the other vet stuff and then I can finally get my hands on them. 

I'm having a hard time because I think I'm going to be a cool mom and let them sleep in Jake's bed, but I really want them in mine.  Maybe they will be like Bailey was, and bed hop throughout the night.  She would take us in shifts. 
Feeding the cats will be Jake's job, so I'm guessing that will help them love him more.

I want them to love me more.
I need a way to get over this.

Also, this:
Jacob: Mom, do butterflies make milk?
Me: No, only mammals.  A mom makes a milk if the baby grows inside of her, but not if she lays eggs.  (I think that's right, right?)
J: I have another question?  Do babies get milk from their moms like we get it from a cow?  Like do they squeeze it like this (does udder milking technique) into their bottle or something?  Because I think that would be really uncomfortable for the mom to bend over like that so the baby could reach. 
M: That would be really funny to watch, but babies can just suck the milk right out of their moms boobs.  That's why women have bigger and darker nipples than men, so their babies can find the milk holes.
J:  Mom, mom... Mom.  OH MY GOD MOM.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  YOU MEAN I'VE HAD YOUR BOOBS IN MY MOUTH?!? (sticks out tongue and wipes it on sleeve and gags).  Oh my gosh.  I can practically taste it.  This is so wrong.  Now I'm thinking about putting your boob in my mouth.  Now I'm thinking about how your boobs taste.  This is not good for my brain.  Oh my gosh.  OMG.  I can't even talk about this right now.  I don't even know what to think.  How could that ever be okay?  Please tell me I don't ever have to do that again.  I can't even... My brain... My mouth... Your boobs... Mom!  Seriously?  Why couldn't you just squeeze it into a bottle?

And then we talked about how healthy it is for moms and babies and how it's better for babies to get it right out of the breast because of skin-to-skin contact and brain development and how by the time that kids are old enough to think that is gross moms usually stop breastfeeding and he said that he has seen moms nursing their kids before but he never thought that the baby was actually sucking on the mom's boob but he wasn't sure what they were doing and didn't want to stare and then it was over and we were on to something equally important like is Bowser Jr. in Mario Party 9 or how surprising it was that Lloyd Garmadon is the Green Ninja or something.

It's funny what you know or what you see and how different it can be from the way your brain processes that information.

It reminds me of how I learned about the mechanics of sex.  From a kid I was babysitting.

My parents were always very open about sex and sexuality and emotions and hormones and orgasms and protection and feelings and clitori and testicli and puberty and periods and boobs and bras and stuff, and I had grade-appropriate sex ed in school so I felt really comfortable with everything that I knew, but it seems that no one had ever really mentioned the penetration part of it all.

Until I was a couple weeks shy of 14 years old and babysitting these kids and the little boy found an empty condom box on the street and said something about putting them on your penis before you stick it inside a vagina and I was all "why would anyone stick anything inside a vagina?" and then the clouds cleared and birds fell silent and the wind stood still and the ground started shaking or maybe it was just a rumbling in my guts and it all sort of made sense.  Inside, of course.  Not just near.  Not just, like, a tickle dance or a private rub party.  Of course.

Anyway.  Kittens!  In two or three weeks!

Emily

I don't have her yet, but hopefully soon.

More later.  They are making me work at work and the house is full of chores.  Sports and theater are keeping us all busy and one of these days it just has to get warm so we can start enjoying the outdoors properly.  Rest assured things are well and everyone is happy and healthy.