"When in the Big Bang were Dogs Created?" and other questions of note.

Its been a long ten day winter break with the kids home.  They have had fun but I can't say we did anything spectacular.  We kind of lurked around in the low light and stayed out of the rain, when it rained, and the wind, when it winded.  That was quite often.  We ate lots of cookies, drank coffee (well, I did, not the kids) and generated a mountain of laundry.

Frost had a few days of rolling playdates and sleepovers. 

Wren played lots of minecraft and chess.

Everyone whined and complained at least once.  If they didn't have something to complain about personally, they complained about someone else complaining and those eddies of discontent just about did me in from time to time.

Joshua took a few days of and played quietly on his laptop, his computer CPU (we hope its the CPU) being broken.

Beezle is fat.  I am not going to say more about it other than both the pets want to eat more than they should.  Kitty has taken to foraging for leftover food from the stovetop and I had a disgusting experience today where I snacked on a piece of toast Wren had leftover from lunch - it had cream cheese and smoked copper river sockeye on it - but found it a bit soggy so I threw it away.

"Kitty really enjoyed Wren's leftover toast" Josh mentioned, hours later.

So, I had eaten kitty saliva.  Tasty.

In other weird news, I was walking at Magnuson Park with Beezle and Wren when we met another pair of Dachshunds and walked with them.  The young women who owned them was named Amy and while we were walking alongside her Wren asked "When in the Big Bang were dogs created?" and rather than allowing my rather rambling "around the time humans came into being" explanation, she launched into a detailed exposition of the origin of dogs 50 million years ago and how they branched off from other furry critters and then from wolves.  Wren was not expecting so much information.

"How do you know so much?" I asked. 

It turned out she was an archeologist doing her dissertation at UW.

AND

She was working in Indonesia.

No, not just Indonesia, but on the very micro-sized dot of an island I lived on for a year long ago.  Its crazy that she had just returned from Banda Neira in September!   She had a picture of Gunung Api on her smartphone.

So that was weird.

I thought I had cracked my tooth but it was just a guava pip wedged in a crevasse.  Wren and I both love canned guavas from Mexico.  These were a favorite desert of mine growing up and I have recently discovered them in Safeway.

Frost needs a book to read.  He's all hooked on digital media.  If he gets a moment he watches Yogscast videos on Youtube instead of reading.  I am dismayed and wish I didn't have to police everything.  Screens are everywhere. 

Wren says "I need to poop!"  (he tells me because he still needs help wiping) and then keeps on saying "I am not ready yet!"   After he's been in the toilet long enough to hardboil an egg I check on him to find him all done but playing iPad on the toilet!  In fine silence.

Argh!

Anyway, at least he draws and plays chess and shoots the air and makes popping noises.  He is also very interested in faeries and potions.

We were very impressed by the local parochial (Catholic) school when we interviewed there last week.  We think we will apply and hope Wren is accepted to give us the choice to send him there.  He would probably become a bit Catholic but not entirely.  He is quite adept at making up his own epistemology.  Here is his theory of emotion:

Wren:  You know the body seasons?
Me:  What?
Wren:  You know the way you feel things in your body, different things... like the body SEASONS?
Frost:  You mean 'emotions'.  They are called emotions.
Wren:  Well, yes... emotions.  Emotions are body seasons and they are ruled by a heart which has pipes to different parts of the body and they have core alliances where the energy flows, it flows through the popes.  There are different parts it flows for the sadness and parts for the angry and parts for the different motions. 
Me:  How do you know this stuff, Wren?
Wren:  I know this because when I grow up I am gonna be a scientist of all the body stuff.

That is as well as a Tibetan Buddhist and a minecraft player.

Its late, I just wanted to catch up a bit and now I am :)

Overbeezing

Frost coined a new word this morning - overbeezing.  Its used to describe the behavior when a dog leaps on a reclining person and goes crazy with love, licking them, standing on their face and trying to poke a tongue in your ear.   As in:

Frost:  "Oh, hold him Wren, hold him... we have to stop him from overbeezing me!"

We are all well.  I am working more than usual for a few weeks.   In the circus act of our life, I am also balancing a seal on my head, planning vacations with family for later in the year (shall we go to the Olympics or the Rockies?) and trying to teach Frost good test-taking behaviors.

For Valentine's day we are eating Jelly Beans in a little tray that has the colors separated.  This is the kind of thing that causes a child great joy and wonder!   All these little Jelly Beans for me!   Last night, for pre-Valentine's, I bought some steaks for Wren and Joshua and Beezle and even ate a bite.

"Mum, Beezle was slowly and sneakily pushing me off the couch and I didn't even notice until I fell off!" says Frost. 

"I am the Beeze God," says Wren.  "I can make any amount of Beezles at any time."

The dog is still very important.

"When Beezle barks at other dogs, Frost, his is just saying hello!  He is not being mean."
"No, Wren, dogs say hello by sniffing!"
"Oh, okay" says Wren.

I am going to become late if I don't stop typing about now.   Frost and Wren are advancing towards the kitchen singing "Jelly bean, jelly bean" to the tune of 'we will, we will, rock you ... rock you."

I should move fast to advocate for breakfast!

Wren shouts  "DUDE!  There are enough Jelly Beans for a week!  DUDE, its in plastic!"

That is the WORST THING

Wren is such a worry-wort.  This evening, as I bent to kiss him goodnight he whimpered and moaned.

"What's wrong?"  I asked him.

"A splinter in the eye is the WORST thing," he said, clutching his eye dramatically.

"It is.  You don't want a splinter in the eye.   But it won't happen to you because you are right here and I am keeping you safe."  I said, placatingly.

He whimpered and groaned.

"It is so bad....an eye splinter!"  he thrashed around a bit in bed.

"Where did you get this idea from?" I asked, hoping to blame popular culture [aka Adventure Time] or Joshua.

"I just THUNK it."  He said, disarmingly.  "Now I can't unthunk it from my mind."

"Its okay," said Josh, coming in to sing the next song.  "You only get splinters like that from woodworking and that's why you wear goggles when you do woodwork.  When I do cutting with a saw I always wear safety glasses or goggles.   Just this weekend I did cutting wood and I wore goggles."

He appeared satisfied with that.

I share his worry.  Since our visit to the URGENT CARE at Children's to check for Strep throat, I have been worrying about his low blood pressure readings.  One of Wren's active issues in his heart is his aortic stenosis.  This narrowing in the outflow of the left ventricle makes his heart work harder to push the necessary blood volume to his body.   Over time, the heart grows thicker as it has to work harder (hypertrophy) and a side effect of this intensification of muscle fibre is that the wall of the heart is less elastic and cannot either open as widely or push as hard.   As this advances it is called Heart Failure and is measured in stages.  I believe that Wren has been in a very early stage of it all along as his heart is a little thicker and at times he has had issues with early pulmonary hypertension (backward failure of the left side).  Anyway, low blood pressure can be a symptom of heart failure.  Wren's BPs may be normal for him but to me it looks as though they are drifting downwards.  18 months ago I have a reading for him of 100/60 while the doc in Urgent Care got 90/50 and 85/45. 

So, I guess I have to buy myself some safety goggles to prevent any Bad Things from happening and try and keep my center for another month or so as we prepare for the next cardiology clinic.  Hopefully, there heart things will be more or less clarified or at least taken out of my hands by someone who knows which splinters in the heart are the worst ones.

Sore Throat and Sunshine

We are having 3 days of fake spring in Seattle and Wren continues to have a sore throat.

This morning I am taking him to the after-hours clinic at the Hospital to have a strep test.  Its ironic, because his fever is gone for the first time since this started on Wednesday night but apparently this is still a good idea.

He has had all the symptoms.

Meanwhile, all this time at home with Wren has given me a chance to do some housecleaning and resume typing up the diary of my great-grandfather. 

The iPad and Tylenol cure.

Wren woke early this morning and called out "Mom, mom?"

"Yeeees" I called back, from bed.

"Mom"  he called, his voice wavering "my neck feels funny."

"Come and show me" I called back, causing baby dog (aka Beezle) to come out from under the heavy covers to see what was wrong.

Wren plodded into the dark room dragging his sleeping companions - soft shirt and big bunny.  I felt his neck in the dark.

"Is it sore here?"

"No"

"Is it sore when you swallow?"

"I haven't SWALLOWED ANYTHING today."

"Okay, swallow this water."

He sipped some of my bedside water and told me it was not sore but still felt funny.

"I have a square bubble that is thick in my neck," he explained.

I inferred from feeling his glands that his throat is a bit swollen and sore and he has a fever.   I have to do two school tours today so Josh will work a half day and do morning patient care.   Wren is doing well on a diet of iPad and Tylenol.  I am touring middle school with Frost.

Being the Big One

This morning I am googling "how reseat toilet".   The toilet in our 'family' bathroom has started leaking blue water onto the tiles.  It didn't bother me terribly until Joshua taped the lid shut with blue tape and I decided something should be done.

Josh said he will fix the toilet this weekend.    I know he can, probably, because he fixed one before when Frost flushed his toothbrush down it and it became lodged in the U-bend.   But I thought, perhaps, I could get started today and said this to Wren.

Me:  Wren, I think we could start to fix the toilet today.
Wren:  No, Mommy, Daddy is The Big One.  I have to tell you, you are a little bit smaller and so Daddy does the big jobs.
Me:  Oh?   But.... erm
Wren: You do 'portant work and be with school and Beezle but Dad does fixing the house and working with METAL and SAVING FROM FIRE.
Me:  What big jobs do I do?
Wren:  In a 'mergency you could cut down a tree!   And you can also go BIRDWATCHING!

This conversation goaded me further in my quest to unseat the toilet.  But truly, it is hard to be the big one with Wren about.  I fear that once I unseat the toilet I will face a gaping maw of poop which will distress both of us.  Despite newspapering the room, there may be some hands on work required that would be better done with two Big Ones present.

I am going to try and reposition myself in a powerful domestic role without getting my hands dirty.   I can shop for supplies for the worker of metals.  According to the web, he might need:

Tools / Materials (See Below for Applicability):

• Appropriate wax ring (with a sleeve) replacement
• Appropriate toilet floor flange replacement
• Appropriate flush valve replacement
• Power drill with the appropriate drill bit (to drill through any stubborn screws)
• Carpenter's level
• Adjustable wrench
• Screwdriver
• Locking pliers / Channellock® pliers by Channellock, Inc.
• Caulking gun
• White caulking tube (that is waterproof)
• Putty knife / joint knife
• Teflon tape / plumber's tape
• Food dye
• Penetrating oil (for loosening)
• Cloths/rags
• Scrap cardboard (to lay toilet upside down)
• Tarp (to lay toilet upside down)
• Wood shims

  For now, I note.  I am not The Big One.  I am the domestic sidekick.

Hiding the Garbage Day

Its garbage day, the day I wake to the sound of heaving and grinding of gears drifting and receding through the sound of rain.   The noise always gives me a shot of adrenaline as my sleeping mind catches up with the meaning of the sound and asks "Have you put the garbage out?" in dread that, as is sometimes the case, I have forgotten.

The bump and grind of garbage day.

As the big green trucks squeeze their way around the neighborhood - holding up cars and blocking intersections - its my reminder that for all my green intentions - the recycled toilet-paper, the bulk foods, the folded cardboard boxes - without garbage day we would be swimming in our own *kerplink*.

From my warm bed, I am taken by the analogy between garbage day and meditation.  On garbage day we are faced with our accumulated yucky stuff generated by stream-of-consumption living much as  meditation shows us stream-of-mindlessness thinking. 

Unwilling to face these realities more than necessary, I stagger out in the rain half dressed in pajamas and snow-boots to put out all the cardboard we have accumulated since Christmas.  I prop it next to the huge green waste bin, the 30 gallon garbage bin and the 30 gallon bag of extra garbage since we missed collection last week with Snowpocalypse.

I look at it.   One can say that the recycling 'doesn't count.'   The leaves and food waste 'don't count' either, right?   That leaves the 60 gallons of who knows what from the past weeks.  I take it on as my karma.

Frost is sniffing.  He says "I think I have a cold" and looks downward, sighs.  It is a silent plea for me to diagnose him with illness to be off school but he isn't really sick enough for that.

[Update:  His plea became more active at 9am.  He said, "I don't like the mental image you have of me.  Its insulting" (as I implied he was hamming it up for a day off).   I questioned that.  He said "I feel pretty sick and we have PE."  I said "Well, you have a little cold but if you feel pretty sick and have PE you can stay home.  But home = Bed and home = do the homework anyway."  So, Frost is in bed.]

He and I sit at the kitchen island staring balefully out the window at our garbage knowing that pretty soon someone will come and hide it away in the earth for us so we won't have to face it any more.  At least in the most immediate sense.  Garbagageddon is always a possibility - the earth rebelling against its incarceration and, long after we are extinct, some future species doing an archaeology of our debris and wondering what it all meant.

Its time to send my roots into the earth and hide this tiredness in coffee.

Breath Arising, Kids Arising

A shrine in the forest at Cloud Mountain Retreat Center

Yesterday, I returned from a 72 hour silent-retreat in a snowy forest center near Portland.   It was lovely but life is a study in contrast  and silence has a way of making noise more... well... noisy.

Coming home, one of the  of things I have noticed is how frantic and noisy my boys are.   I am saying that without judgement, really.   Would I prefer them to be quieter?   I am going to take the 5th.

See, on retreat the teacher explained that we are not here to change life but to be changed by it.  This paradigm shift is very exciting but not a concept which is easy to follow-through with them kids.

On the one hand, of course kids change you.  Everyone has that "well, you'll understand when you're a parent" story - the sleepless nights, the interdependence, the sense that you will never read a book or watch a movie all the way through every again but it doesn't matter because you want to seize every moment and make them stay small forever and just BE.

But even more, isn't the societal narrative also about the need to shape children - which is to say we amend their apparent aptitude for danger, destruction and intrusion on our adult way of being?  Our role as Parents is to change the amount of screen time they incline to, change their rude attitudes, their messy rooms, their neglected homework.  In recent trends we are also admonished to change their vagueness and lack of "Executive Skills".  So what does it mean to be changed by a life that has kids in it?  

To be changed with them?

On my first morning back in Mom-Reality I faced this question with Wren in the family room.  We were late and for me, lateness is the enemy of mindfulness.  In lateness there is already the implication that this moment IS less important than the one coming next.  The moment is already labeled with a big digital clock on it saying SCHOOL STARTS NOW.  This moment should be got-the-hell-over-with to get to the going-to-the-late-place moment to get to the REAL moment.   I am already impatient because I know I am going to be in the now labeled LATE for a while and I don't find it as comfortable as the being-relaxed with coffee-time, or after-bedtime like now. 

So, in best parenting-English I told Wren we must put his socks on in this very-fucking-moment-now-already!

And took a breath.

No doubt sharing my urgency, he fell over backwards on the floor and started laughing and kicking his feet wildly in excitement.    I put one sock on a foot as it kicked and flung about.  Beezle became excited by the proximity of socks and started tugging this sock OFF just as I put the other sock ON.   It was a zero sum gain.   I told Frost to get the sock.  He did but when I got Wren's sock on he took Frost's sock.  Frost was yelling that he couldn't get his sock from Beezle.

He's a dog the size of a loaf of bread?  You can't get a sock from his deathly grasp?  

I took a breath to shout but tried to deflect it to a nice accepting awareness OF THE KIDS.   Awareness of Kids.  The breath.  Awareness of kids.

Parents, this is the wrong strategy. 

My first insight with the kids was that I can't yet meet them with my awareness.   Trying to hold awareness to a pulsating kid-dog-sock nexus is like a trying to harness a tornado to make a glass of pop. 

It is a foolish quest for the novitiate.

But allowing my awareness to expand to the room made the situation more workable and the kids less overwhelming.  Calmer.  But still late.   Present in the Lateness as is so often the case.  Lateness arising rather than chaos.  So, there is a positive side to these efforts if you pitch your awareness at things that arise less abruptly than children.

I am also noticing that by being present I discover nice normal things.  For example, butternut peels.   Did you know how brilliantly orange and cadmium yellow they are?  Brilliant!

I told Wren to stop playing Minecraft and play a game of making pictures with butternut peel on a black tray.  I made a forest and a sun.  Wren made a map to an X-marks-the-spot.  We made a flower.   We made an octopus!

Wren creates an octopus of peels.

This is more like the real color!

How about pomegranate seeds?  Wren (in his boredom) played his own game of picking pomegranate seeds and placing them in a bowl.  Counting them, then eating them.  After the bowl is empty he put in an incrementally larger number of pomegranate seeds and eats those.  Starting at 6 seeds, I think he got to 13.

Okay, truthfully, my mindful non-digital games lasted about 30 minutes.  It wasn't a total transformation.  I have not found the way.  But it was a nice little thing.

Due to traffic, I missed the first SIMS meeting since the retreat.  I had an intention to attend but Josh was caught in traffic so I didn't make it.  I decided to meditate in the living room, some distance from the kitchen, but soon realized this would not work as Frost talks to himself while doing his homework.

"This is an ADVERB.   He is going.... is GOING....   Hrmmm...."

Josh said "Well, you can't pick what you meditate too.   Why not just meditate to The Bachelor on TV."

I said something abrupt and retreated to the basement guest room and shut the door.   During my 45 minutes of quiet I could occasionally hear a shriek, a thud, a raised voice "WHERE IS MOM!" - a perennial question that sounded like part of a koan. 

"What is the sound of one mother meditating?"

Puzzle that, ye parents!

When I came back up, Wren (5) sat on the kitchen floor and said "I want to learn Meditating."   He said "I know it is easy.  It is like the Buddha you sit like this."

He sat on the tiled floor and shut his eyes and crossed his legs.

"But how do you do it?"  He asked.

"I said that you watch your breath and notice, don't just sit and think."

"But if I don't think there is nothing there!"  said Wren.   "I can't not think of my breath or it isn't ANYTHING!!!"

I asked him if he could feel his legs.  He said "Yes."  So I told him to shut his eyes and feel his legs for a bit.   After a few seconds I rang the Tibetan meditation chime app on my phone.

When he saw the app I told him it was special, for meditating and he wanted to meditate again to use the app, again.

I am ordering a book about teaching kids to meditate and told Wren that he can choose a real Tibetan bell when we start at Level 1.

No, I am not going to start blogging my dreams but...

... just this once, I want to.

I had this dream last night that I visited a township in South Africa.   It was a shanty-town and there were many homes side-by-side.  Somehow I ended up in the studio of an artist I have admired for a long while.   The studio was all disorganized and casual.   I was really impressed - seeing the artworks that had been displayed in Roq La Rue gallery only weeks before, now hung and stacked on the walls of a shack! 

The best thing was the painter said I could have any one.  I picked one and bought one and all the time in the dream I was thinking "can this really be happening?"  Is this for-real?

The artist had milky-blind eyes.

Actually, the paintings were awful - strange smudges like bird-squirt under a rookery,   charcoal blurs where a child might have rubbed a dirty hand,  geometric lines in exactly that pale blue from old paintings and contemporary fabrics.


So, I think my subconscious is saying "if a blind man in poverty can paint (badly), so can a mother have a life of the mind."

We just have to lower our standards.

Can a mother have a life of the mind?

As I sat down to write this post both boys burst into the office drowning out the hum of the heater and the quietly brutal cries of Josh's Star Wars computer game.

"Can we have bars for desert?"  they asked, carrying the tin of energy bars and protein boosting nut bars I keep for lunches and emergency hungers.

"No" said Joshua. "Those are for snacks."

"Awwwww..." they both sighed, crestfallen.

"What can we have then?"

"You can have a Pepperidge Farm cookie." said Josh.

"Er, I think we ate them all this afternoon." I admitted.

"What, the whole bag?  That's... impressive."

"You can have a biscotti, or hot chocolate."  I suggested and Frost goes off to boil the kettle.

A great deal of hot chocolate is consumed during snow-cations even if one is not cold, there is some kind of subliminal association in the US between hot chocolate and snow.  Some days the entire top rack of the dishwasher is filled with mugs of kids and friends who have drunken themselves silly on hot chocolate.  Oddly, most of the little kids don't even drink more than a few sips plus the cream and marshmallows on the top.  This evening, they make them with the last broken candy canes that made if off the Christmas tree and have been hidden with the fancy cutlery for just this kind of emergency.

The question I have been asking, in the intervals between laundry and hot-chocolating, is this: can a mother - an in-the-trenches NW type of mother not one with a housekeeper and a babysitter and an agent or one with a spouse who makes everyone else doubt their marriages - can this mother have a life of the mind?

I guess I need to explain myself.

Josh and I were watching this movie - Another Earth - and the whole thing builds to the moment that the protagonist literally meets another version of herself.  My thought on viewing it was "Oh no!"   I would not want to meet myself.

Much of my life I have done creative things.  I have done interesting things and had a kind of freedom.  Since having children this has largely ceased.  Of course, I have my annual mushroom mania and draw fungi but its descriptive art.   I am not spending any time reflecting on my life (beyond who to consult for plans for the back deck and when to watch the next episode of Downtown Abbey).  I do not have anything to say as an artist (or writer, or potter or whatever).

My theory is that art comes from self-awareness and a bit of separation, separation that allows you to objectify whatever it is you think or see and self-awareness that lets you know you are feeling it.  But when kids are in your life all the time with only short blocks of time 'off' to work or cook or shop or clean or read a book to escape from doing these things, its hard to find either of these things.

When I was a kid I think my mother was in the grips of just this realization.  She made it clear to me that it was important to have a fulfilling life rather than marrying and having children.  I remember thinking how futile it was to make your life's work making kids when the kids would go on and make their life's work making their kids.  I mean, somewhere along the line someone has to have fun?  Right?

So, I had kids late to make sure I got some life of the mind in and now I want some back.

Anyway, I haven't figured out the answer yet but tomorrow I am heading out for a 4 day meditation retreat with a Vipassana teacher.  I used to sit daily but I haven't for years so I predict that I will get to see my mind up close and personal over the next few days.  I will report back if I find any answers.

I will not tell you if the answer is to stop seeking a life of the mind, because that would be depressing for all of you who didn't get to go on the retreat.

Meanwhile, in move guaranteed to lead to fun (if not self-awareness and creative expression) Tara and I have decided to buy cross-country skis and go cross-country skiing.

We may even take the kids.

My mind walking to the corner store to buy candy