travel and nervous drumming

The nightmares keep crowding in, I have imaginary arguments while driving, and I punch the radio and shake my iPod in search of some song to articulate my discomfort with flying back to Maui and taking a 2-hour drive with a 3 month-old to visit people I am not sure I am ready to see yet.

I don't have a song for this situation, or that place. I used to play Fuck You on the way to work when problem patrons were acting up, but I never bothered to hunt out a song for anything else. Mostly I am indifferent, except when I am not. It's like being indifferent to the color orange, until someone pelts you in the face with a bucket of orange paint.

My solution has been to throw all this over my shoulder and remind myself that we will have a cabin by the beach to hide in if it all goes down the crapper. I can lock everyone out and eat bbq in my undercrackers all weekend if I want.

Intrigue and terrible sleuthing

There is a woman who walks the road every day as I'm driving by, dressed in full hula regalia, with a little dog wearing leis on all four ankles. She dances and waves to the cars, no matter the weather. She's a bit well-groomed for a crazy person. Maybe she made a promise to someone. Maybe she's a ghost.

I took a picture of her as I drove by.

Yep, right there behind the window frame. Or maybe she doesn't show up in pictures, because GHOST. It is a mystery.

Also mysterious, the crowd of crunchy yuppies gathering silently outside the dialysis center across the street every Sunday evening. We passed by with the stroller on our walk last night, as women in wrapped skirts and Starbucks cups arrived on foot. They stood with men wearing hemp pants, everyone well groomed and beaming whole-food spirituality, clustered in a group facing inward. At the center stood a man with puffed lips and a tight tanned face, hands outspread at his sides, gazing serenely into the middle distance. Nobody spoke. There were no cars in the parking lot. the dialysis center was closed. We squeaked through the silence and around the corner, questioning each other in the language of eyebrows. Cult? One of the holy ancient alien landing spots? Prancercise gathering? I KNEW I needed to order ankle weights.

At the store nearby, I spotted our neighbor. He had to have walked by the strange gathering, as well, so I called to him. "Hey!" "...Hey?" "Did you -?" He had hustled away awkwardly. I felt rejected, then walked across his path, into a trail of pot smoke. Aha. Undeterred, I asked a cashier. "What do you know about the group of crunchy people in yoga pants gathering over by the dialysis center every Sunday?" Nothing, it turns out. As we walked home, I peered into the karaoke bar, hoping to see guru stretchy-face and his band of vegans warbling along to Blueberry Hill. If it was a bar crawl meet-up, they weren't starting here. By the time we wheeled back around the corner -only 10 minutes later - the crowd had dispersed. A sunset meeting around a silent man with plastic surgery and yoga pants. My google-fu yielded no answers. 

Next time, will put on athletic gear and sneak into the group. 

Car seat pad tutorial

I made a thing. FINALLY. My sewing machine was covered in a shroud of dust, rusted like a minibus, and it ran like a jackhammer, but it worked.

I ordered a car seat pad with a gift card someone got us, then found out we already had one in a bag of baby clothes someone else gave us. And it's only poofy on the sides, not under the back and butt, which is stoooopid.

So I made my own. 

First, I got into my stash and found big enough pieces of fabric for front and back.

Then I traced the poofy pad onto fabric with a washable marker. If someone wanted to do this without a poofy pad, they could probably trace their baby like a big gingerbread man.

Then I remembered about ironing. Probably, it would be best to iron before tracing. 

Then I cut the thing out with half an inch sewing allowance, one layer at a time so I didn't screw up all my fabric on the first go.

Then I cut two layers of batting.

The baby made sleepy murmurs on the monitor. HURRY.

Layered up for the inside-out no-binding method; batting, top fabric facing up, back fabric facing down.

It feels like it should be wrong in that order, but I pinned it like that anyway. Sewed all the layers together, leaving a 4-inch gap at the end, for turning it inside out.

Stuff it inside itself and birth it through the opening hole. I started with the legs. 

RAWR. EXPLETIVES. The man took it away from me and did it in about three seconds.

Fine. Show off. I stitched the opening shut, and DONE.

"Beautiful!" said the man, "Except it looks like she has her period." 

Damn it. 

I may add some hand quilting, but it's fine on its own.

Add baby, and -

Hang on.

She liiiiikes it!

Feeling very accomplished now. 

Summer

There is sitting. A bit.

And standing. Sort of.

And no rolling, but plenty of swimming on the carpet. 

I squeezed in some knitting while my mother told stories about goats and kings and sieges.

In two weeks we visit Maui for the first time since I abandoned ship. Mike has been manically lifting weights. I have been semi-manically dieting, to steady and unremarkable success. It takes about a year to get back into my old pants, and I'm trying to be relaxed about it, but there are folks in maui who will feel very pleased to see that I've gained weight. I know these people are assholes, but I hate it when assholes are not wrong. Need bigger sunglasses, to make head look smaller. Because nothing is as slimming as a tiny head.

Will stop thinking about all that, and go back to making up captions for my cat.

INVISIBLE HOSE SPRAY

I am not good at captions. 

Bunked

I am not living the crafty blogger lifestyle. We are crammed into too-small spaces with too-small budgets. When we finally succeed in stacking all our things and children into neat cubes, it will be just in time to move into a bigger place. This is the way of things.

The bedroom, partly torn up:

And with bunk bed (panoramic view makes the crib look huuuuge. Bonus: spot the baby):

It is really dark and smells like paint. I slept like a paranoid, non-sleeping thing, waiting for the bed to collapse and kill us all. I don't do well with changes to sleeping environment. Will get used to it. If we survive.

bad ideas

I am three weeks from (extended) deadline, and have decided I have to CHANGE EVERYTHING. And so I drew a new page to prove to myself that the different style wouldn't work and OF COURSE it looks way better. So now I have to find a way to keep all these children occupied without actually parenting them, so I can get this thing done.

Luckily, my aunt's solution to summer parenting is to add more children, to keep hers from killing each other. She ran off with the boys yesterday and has not returned them. In their absence, we are assembling a full/twin bunk bed, to get this 4 year old ball of knees and elbows out of our bed. The baby will get chucked in her crib, and we will prop a device in the underside bars of the bunk so we can lay around watching Game of Thrones with the subtitles on. Fancy!

This bunk bed has been An Ordeal. We could have bought a new one. Oh, yes, that would have made sense. But why buy a new one when you can meet all the local bunk-bed-selling crazy people on Craigslist? 

Attempt #1: Mike drives an hour out to waianae to meet a guy who tried to charge $100 for an old metal frame he had been storing outside in the rain until it was rusted hollow. Pass.

Attempt #2: Mike drives to kalihi to some run-down house with nobody home. A man shows up as he's leaving and explains that his non-English-speaking brother is moving back to the Philippines at the end of the month, and we can have the bed frame for $30 in three weeks. Whatever, cheap enough and we are in no hurry.

Attempt #3: guy calls at midnight the night before pickup to say his brother missed his flight and needs the bed one more night. A bunk bed. For one guy. Who can't drag a mattress onto the floor for some reason. 

Attempt #4: I tell Mike not to come back without a bunk bed, one way or another. The guy explains that technically his brother has been evicted and the house is locked. Manages to get in anyway. Mike disassembles the frame and gets it into the car, crushing our new baby-car-seat-spying mirror in the process. Flees.

One month + driving + $30 + $15 baby mirror = still cheaper than a new bed frame, so we count this as a win. It was kind of faded, though, so we decided to buy a can of spray paint. At the hardware store, I was tickled by a display of pickles, and just HAD to make fun of it and take a picture.

Made it all the way outside and over to the auto store before realizing that the butt of my jeans had completely torn out at some point, and I had been walking around with my cheeks flapping. Felt the pickles had something to do with this.

So now, FINALLY, the bed frame is here, the materials are assembled, I am wearing pants that don't look like chaps, and the man is sanding the eau de hobo off the frame before spray-painting  it.

We will tear up the bedroom and get this thing in before the boys get home, and there will be much rejoicing, of both the vertical and the horizontal variety.

Update on outcome soon - hopefully not from the emergency room.

Toes are superfluous anyway

The kids went off to the water park with the cousins, leaving me home alone with the baby, and of course I immediately forgot everything I used to like to do. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, because the baby forgot how to sleep. I carried her around while doing housework. She tried crying, but it didn't make her sleepier, so she sighed and sucked her hands. I did not try crying, because I didn't want her to take it personally, and wasn't sure I would be able to stop anyway. The day went on like this until my mother came and dragged me off to the mall - then smashed my foot with a bistro chair at Teddy's Burgers and broke my toe. Maybe it was the surprise, or the adrenaline, or senility, but that cheered me right up. I will keep a hammer on hand, to bash in my remaining toes when I'm sad. Cheaper than sky diving.

nailed it

Leif has started making jokes by changing words into made-up nonsense. Dinner/bo-bimmer, diaper/fiperpiper, play/cucu-poo-pay, etc. They are not very good jokes.

granny: I need some cereal.
Leif: I need some bereal. HAHAHA.
granny: Hmm. That's not really funny.
Leif: Yeah, it's co-cunny.
granny: ok, so, maybe if you were on a playground, other kids would laugh?
Leif: yep.
granny: So, like, if they said, "have a snack!" and you said, "have a mack!" they would laugh?
Leif: Yep.
granny: They'd say, "Feed the cat!"
Leif: Yeah, and I'd say, "FUCK! A BAT!"