My kids are really awesome.

There are just some things I want to remember about my kids.

*******
Maddy calls scissors "zizzors."
*******
Major calls Thomas the Tank Engine "Thomas the Wank Engine."
*******
A few weeks ago, in the car, my son looked at my daughter and said "I. Am going to GET YOU. I am going to wait until you're in your room and I'm going to GET YOU."

Alarmed, Maddy said, "What?!"

And Major replied, "Oh yeah. I'm going to get you."
*******

Celebrating the Big 0-3
A couple of weeks ago, we had Major's birthday party at the local Zoo. He had a few little friends from school come along. The Zoo gave him his own birthday train for just the participants in the party and he could not have been a happier little dude. Whenever someone would show up for the party, he would yell "IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!!!!!" with all the excitement of a child who had been waiting for his birthday for about four months - or since his sister's birthday. He got lots of wonderful presents and was just as absolutely thrilled as I had hoped he would be. It was a perfect party. He had a cupcake with birthday candles and we sang - it was the perfect 3rd birthday. It even had tigers.

Have You Terrified Your Three-Year-Old Today?
The next day, that Sunday, we took the children to the rodeo to ride rides and have fun. They rode the ponies, visited the petting zoo, took cowboy pictures and basically had a fantastic time. After all that, we went over so they could ride rides. They rode the carousel and a motorcycle ride and some other kiddie rides. THEN, they discovered a ride called "Ladybugs," which was a train with lots of little hills that went around in a circle and then stopped and went around that same circle backwards. It didn't look too fast or anything, and Major was tall enough to ride it. He and Maddy got on and off they went. As it went faster and faster, he looked more and more dismayed until he was full-on sobbing. Halfway through, the ride slowed down and then stopped in order to go backwards. I asked the operator if he could stop the ride so I could retrieve my hysterical boy.

He said: "Why? He ain't hurt."

I said: "You're right."

The ride carried on and then when it was over, Mike retrieved Major, who was sobbing so hard he could barely breathe.

I am a horrible mother.

I cuddled him, but he cried for nearly 20 minutes and kept saying "SO SCARED! IT WAS SO SCARY!"

It started raining right then, so we went home. I still feel terrible about it, though.
*******

I recently went on a trip. On Monday night, I was tucking Maddy into bed and she said "Mama, I missed you a really lot."

I've Read Some Things: Part 3 of 3

The other book I read this week was Anita Shreve's Light on Snow.

This one, I really, really liked. The ending was again, too quick, and the size of the print on the page really made me realize how short a book it was: it was almost like a novella to me. I'm OK with that, though, because it was on the clearance rack at Half-Price Books, and I got it for $1. You can't beat that. (Coincidentally, that's exactly how much I paid for A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, which I'm reading next, out of sheer and immutable curiosity.)

Without diving too deeply into it, Light on Snow is written in the voice of 12-year-old Nicky, who lost her mother and little sister in a car crash two years ago and was forced by her grieving father to move out in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire. One day, while taking a walk, father and daughter discover a baby, abandoned in the snow. They scoop the baby up and take her to the hospital. The paper writes a story about it and the baby's mother reads it and ends up visiting their home. She gets stuck there because of a snowstorm and it goes from there.

I thought it was one of the most genuine books I've read in awhile. Shreve captured the voice of a twelve-year-old very believably. She showed the struggle of the child to understand this horrible thing she has seen - and then the struggle to place the baby's mom in the whole puzzle, when she really just wants the baby's mom to love her and become part of the family.

There's an amazing optimism to the character of Nicky. She is the total opposite of her father - a person who, when something horrible happens to him in the loss of his wife and daughter, shuts himself off from everyone and everything. Nicky just wants to reach out and live, and it's an amazing dichotomy.

Anyway, highly recommended, that one.

Now, to talk about my kids...

I've Read Some Things: Part 2 of 3

So, next I read All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve.

While I think I liked the book (I'm strangely undecided about most of what I've read of Shreve's work), I struggled with the male voice of the protagonist because it's stereotypical. Then I start thinking about it and, for the time in which the book was set (1900s), it's understandable that the male voice would be stereotypical, and an effort to break free from that stereotype could be seen as not genuine to the time period. So it's a struggle for me, and I think I may be looking at it very narrowly.

The other problem I had was that it wrapped up SO quickly! All of these tangled webs, and the resolution was happened so fast! And while I sort of understood the impetus for the big throwdown at the end, it seems sort of a weak reason for all of the waves it caused, if that makes sense.

All in all, I think it was a solid book. Maybe I should read it again.

I've Read Some Things: Part 1 of 3

Sorry - this is going to be about a month's worth of posts in one single day. I've been slacking, but I've got a lot to talk about.

I'm attempting to read 100 new books from 1 December 2006 to 1 December 2007. I've read 25 so far, so I think I'm doing pretty well.

I read a book this month by Barbara Chase-Riboud called The President's Daughter.

The book was about Thomas Jefferson's natural daughter, Harriet Hemings, born to Sally Hemings in the late 1780s or early 1790s. Jefferson allowed her to run away at the age of 21, but she was never freed. He freed a couple of his sons upon his death, but not Sally Hemings (although the book alleges she didn't want to be free), and not his daughter. Nothing really is known about Harriet Hemings after she ran away, so Chase-Riboud created a life for her based on one of her brothers' "confessions" that was published in a newspaper long after Jefferson's death.

An interesting thing I learned in the book is that the Hemings children were only one-sixteenth black, so none of them had African-American features at all. Harriet Hemings was said to resemble Jefferson so strongly that visitors to the house were completely taken aback by it.

So, the hardest part of the story for me to understand was why this woman seemed to dwell so seriously on getting caught or getting outed or her secret. Her life went on for years and years after she ran away, but she was never able to just bury that within herself. I think that might speak more to my ability to self-deceive than any actual problems with the concept, though.

And then I finally figured it out - the reason she couldn't get it out of her head was because she was raised a slave. So black was not only a color to her, it was an entire state of being, because she was raised so completely differently from her white half-sister.

So, now I get it. And I recommend the book - it was very, very engrossing. I read it in two days.

And then I read two Anita Shreve books, which are upcoming in this space.

Just Write.

For months, I've been wrestling with myself - with my muse, I guess - sometimes trying to write, sometimes trying not to write. In any case, the blank page is indeed like a bull, just like Papa Hemingway said.

Ideas are there. Ideas are always there. It's getting them out the way that I want them that's the hard part.

It's also hard recognizing when something is just a small something, or when it's a larger something, needing time and fleshing out.

Add in the pressure I put on myself to write and it starts to feel like a duty more than a gift.

When I was a kid, I just wrote. That's what I did. I had a Trapper Keeper full of stuff - things I never wanted anyone to see. Sometimes people saw them anyway. But I never had this sort of verbal bottleneck that I have now. If it was there to be written, I wrote it.

It's harder now. I'm sure that part of it is a fear of rejection - part of it's an idea that I know what's "marketable" and what isn't. As if marketability has ever been my reason to write. Writing, for me, has just been what I do. I wrote my first poem at the age of five, and I've never stopped writing since.

Is it crap? Yeah. A lot of it's crap. Some of it is even award-winning crap. One piece is award-winning, published crap. But I wrote it.

I'm trying to remember that writing is what I do. And I'm trying to straighten out the bottleneck.

It's not as easy as it used to be.

It's Farther Down Than You Think.

Tonight, I finished reading A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. It was a really thought-provoking book for me, apart from the fact that I've about decided that Nick Hornby is one of the most insightful authors I've read in a long while and I'll probably end up reading everything he's ever written (probably by the end of the year, because that will count towards my New Year's Resolution of 100 Books This Year [16 down, 84 to go!]).

The book is about four people who meet on New Year's Eve on top of a tower. They've all gone there for the sole purpose of flinging themselves from said top-of-tower. Three of them are British, one American. They sort of band together and become a little family unit in and of themselves, stemming directly from the single moment where they all simultaneously chose to go on living.

The choice to go on living is one that some of us have to choose to make on a daily basis. You can take that in a broad sense ("Today I choose not to lay down in front of that bus.") or in a narrower sense ("Today I choose to pay attention when my kids/husband/boss is/are talking to me and really plug into this world.").

I'm the narrower sort.

I sometimes feel like my entire brain is wrapped in cotton. I have to make a conscious effort not to check out and listen to the wind-chimes in my head while people are talking to me. Sometimes, I have to make a conscious effort to live in the now.

I don't know that that makes me special - I think it just makes me tired.

At one point in the book, the little group reconvenes on the top of the tower, whereupon they witness someone actually doing what they contemplated. They try to talk him down - try to get him to join the "gang," but he stares at them and then scoots over the edge. This single event brings utter clarity to the group as a whole: whatever store of courage one has to have to actually end it, none of them truly have that.

This brings up another interesting, and, sadly, timely issue for me. To me, this is the difference between people who actually eat the gun, actually asphyxiate, actually overdose, and people who fuck around in bars doing recreational drugs, sleeping with dangerous people, drinking themselves stupid and riding on the hoods of cars around the block. (I have done two of those things - can you guess which ones?)

It's the difference between people who do these things not because they truly want to kill themselves, but more because they want someone to look and say "wow - she has a real death wish" and wonder why - just take an interest in them, no matter how fleeting - and the people who have a very serious and real desire to end it all right this second because nothing will ever change their minds.

It's the people who don't care what other people think about them anymore who have the nuts to actually do it.

My mother's cousin actually did it on Christmas Eve. She ate the gun. She quit caring what other people thought - she just did it.

She also thought my grandmother is a prophet.

What's the point? There is no point. There is only food for thought. I'm not saying you have to reach out to every unstable self-hater shooting smack in the bathroom of your favorite club. I'm not even saying you have to suddenly understand Paris Hilton. (And if you do suddenly understand her, I demand to know what brought this little epiphany on, and if we should keep you away from bars and dangerous people.)

I'm just saying, think about it.

Maddy is a Big Kid.

Tonight, after the Super Bowl, we were brushing Maddy's teeth and she decided that now would be a good time for me to pull her incredibly-loose bottom-front tooth. She cried about it, because she was scared, but she held her Daddy's hand and I pulled it.

It didn't take much pulling, and there it was, in the palm of my hand.

The tears stopped immediately and were replaced with a beaming, if a little soggy, smile and all the pride a five-year-old girl can muster.

There was a little blood, but we took care of that quickly and with a minimum of fuss. She couldn't quit looking at the new space in the mirror - the pride was just shining through that brand-new gap in her teeth.

"Next year," she says, "a new tooth will grow in. A big tooth. Next year."

"Sooner than that, I hope," I reply.

"And now, the Tooth Fairy is going to give me money." Money is a bit of an abstract concept to her right now. It's mainly something she puts in her piggy bank.

We looked around a little bit and found a black silk pouch that my grandmother had given me. It used to hold one of her necklaces - a piece of jewelry I'll always associate with her, because it was a signature item of hers for a long time. We put the tooth in the pouch, and put the pouch under her Cinderella pillow, close to the edge, so the Tooth Fairy won't have to root around under there for very long.

Then we called Grandma, and we called Nana and Maddy told them her news. Not so very long ago, we were calling so two-year-old Maddy could announce delightedly "I pee-pee on the potty!" Now she says with quiet pride: "My tooth was loose, and then it came out!"

In the morning, she'll find two Sacagawea gold dollars in the pouch under her pillow. I wanted to give her five dollars, but her dad said that he had gotten twenty-five cents per tooth, and inflation wasn't quite that bad. (We compromised at two.) Tomorrow, she'll show all her friends at pre-school her new dental profile. Tomorrow night, she'll show all her friends at band practice.

Tonight, I blink back some tears and try to hold on to my little girl. She's not-so-little anymore, and getting bigger faster than I can get myself ready.