the downside of being an unwitting bird rehabber

Bill Weasely died this morning. I uncovered the cage, and he had his head under his wing, refusing to get up. I poked him gingerly, because he bites, and he just rocked a bit and ignored me. He looked up when I picked him up and offered water, but after a bit of gasping and shaking, it was clear he was on his way out. I put him in a basket with a warming pad and took him outside to see the trees. He died looking at the sky.

He was old, and he was disabled, so it was the gentlest way out for him. He'll get a burial in a tissue instead of being chucked over the fence like the things the cats bring in.

Birds live as long as mammals, but they die pretty abruptly. If you want to teach your kids about the fragility of life and importance of death rituals, get a bird. Cats and dogs at least tend to make a big deal about dying, and have organs large enough to tape back together at the vet's. They are sturdy. Hercules and Xebo are 19 years old, and still peeling our eyelids open at 3am, hoping for an early breakfast. Hercules has a problem with salivation, and last night he sat on my pillow, scratched his chin with a hind leg, and scattered drool all over my face. If anyone is spraying drool or vomit or poop, it usually ends up on me. It is my special skill.

Unlike, say, bird rehabilitation.

Goodbye, Bill. You were a handsome redhead, and I hope you had lots of healthy babies in your youth.

It rains

I'm having a lot of feelings about things. Fall used to be my favorite, but now it marks every crossroad I've found myself at. I remember, and regret, and write mental letters.

Oh well.

Went to a very windy bbq. Got excited about stuffed foxes at Target. Made myself sick by knitting in the car. Ate a pizelle. Researched grad school programs. Searched for jobs. Read by glow light. Got mad at George R. R. Martin again.

Yep.

LIVING THE LIFE

near-death candy wrapper

With every kid, there comes that first heart-stopping moment when something bad happens. For Leif, it was when he was 3 months old and we were almost washed off a cliff in a flash flood while driving at night in a storm. With Gavin, it was pneumonia when he was 2, speeding to the emergency room while he went limp and blue in his car seat. Zenny tried to choke to death yesterday. All kids choke on something eventually, this one was just a bit longer and harder to fix than I've had to deal with before.

My mother drinks coffee out of cups the size of small vases, then leaves them half full all over the house when she has to jump up and leave for work. After the mad scramble to get everyone in shoes and out the door yesterday, I plopped down on the couch with the baby and said, "Phew! Ok. Time for a cup of coffee." She reached over my shoulder and pulled one of my mother's giant mugs of cold coffee onto us. After stripping the couch, loading the washer, and changing clothes, I felt entitled to a mini Kit Kat bar. We sat on the floor and I put on the season finale of Breaking Bad, drinking coffee and eating candy while Zenny rolled on the floor next to me with her stuffed ferret. She rolled onto her belly, and then gagged. I swiped her mouth and felt a fragment of plastic, which slipped further down her throat when I touched it. She started choking, arching backward. I grabbed her and did baby Heimlich on my knee, searched for the fragment with my finger, moved it just enough for her to hitch a breath and scream before choking again. I hung her upside down and banged her back, swiped and pinched and finally, FINALLY, she choked it up enough for me to pinch it, and I got the damned thing out of her tiny mouth. I slapped the computer closed and we sat on the couch while she panted against my chest and I clutched her. Holy shit, kid. The little piece of plastic was from the corner of my mini Kit Kat wrapper, about half an inch square. I carried her on my hip and vacuumed everything, in case there were any other bits of plastic around. While she nursed and napped, I opened the computer back up, rewound the episode I had been watching, and saw that a choking scene had been playing the entire time we had been fighting with the piece of plastic.

I was feeling wobbly from the last of the adrenaline when I buckled Zenny into her seat and propped her outside the bathroom so I could get ready to pick up the kids from school. I was putting on eyeliner and talking to her about the inadvisability of trying to die, when suddenly my heart started gulping in my chest and everything went black. I leaned up against the doorway of the bathroom and thought, well, I'll fall to the side, and at least she's buckled up safe until someone finds us, when my heart started beating again and the world came back into focus. Not ok, heart. My aunt had a heart procedure last year, my father had one just before that, and my mother is on heart pills. It puts my infrequent mis-beats into a more worrisome light. When I was a teenager, they hooked me up to a treadmill and tried to trigger it, and when I was in grad school I had to wear a heart monitor for a couple of days to try to catch it, but they were wasted efforts. It lies in wait.

So that all sucked.

HOWEVER. Zenny is happy, and the afternoon's parent/teacher conferences confirmed that the boys are great. Leif's teacher even claims he is "soft-spoken", which was a bit of a surprise to us, since this is the kid that narrates his world in sound effects. Boy, he's got her snowed.

KIDS.

Halloween 2013

In 10 years of trick-or-treating, we've seen a picture of the economy in stop-motion. The over-the-top haunted constructions dwindled into dark doorsteps and a few stalwart holdfasts. Then a ripple of buckets left unattended with "take 1" signs, the smallest of efforts to participate in lean times. Then neighbors rallied and put up tents for pizza and music and a communal cauldron of candy. New crops of military families appeared where homes had to be sold, and lights began to go on again, with beefy young men getting spirited with beer and horror props. This year the kids were chased around by a man in a hockey mask and fake chainsaw while his buddies facepalmed in the doorway with cups of beer and yelled, "Dude! The babies! You're scaring the little kids!" over the braying roar. The candy haul has diminished from two pillowcases to half a plastic pumpkin over the course of a decade, but the life is back in the neighborhood. 

My kids are weenies about putting their hands in pumpkin guts. They draw the designs on with marker and then run away when I pull out the knives, leaving me to carve them with a face full of mini Snickers poached from the trick-or-treat bucket. The system works for me.

We left my mother and aunt to hand out loot and ran off with the herd of children. The cousins only had to be reminded a couple times not to complain about the candy going into their buckets and not to wail, "PENCILS?!" at the neighbor across the street. You would think that after 10 years, that lady would get tired of ungrateful kids yelling "PENCILS?!" at her, but she is on a crusade.

Zenny opted out of her stroller and finished the tour of the neighborhood on my hip, arm outstretched to lead the way, calling, "YEAH YEAH YEAH." She's pretty great.

Also, she likes me better. Ha.

The boys unloaded their loot. The small cousin sprawled on the floor and crammed candy grimly into his face, promising that he planned to throw up - until we promised to take away his candy; the large cousin started rummaging everyone else's piles and trying to wheedle away their best bits. We broke it all up with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and glasses of milk while I chucked the baby into bed.

It was a good year.

2 months early - I WIN

I made a stocking for the baby.

It is bigger than the baby. Santa had better stuff it with wadded up wrapping paper and stuffed animals.

ponies and birds

First, a note to the cat: You know, cat, if you're going to tangle yourself around someone's legs while they are holding a baby, you run the risk of being barfed on. Don't act so surprised. I've been barfed on three times today, and I am not biting anyone.

So,  I've been trying to get Halloween squared away. I don't know what to do in costume aisles. None of the merchandise is clever or good quality, and yet most of it is something I want to buy anyway. I would have a whole menagerie of plastic rats and mangy crows and giant rubber spiders, all dressed in little handmade sweaters. But I get overwhelmed, and then angry at the toddler French maid costumes, and I just start grabbing things and run for it. This time, I left with a dwarf beard, tattoo sleeves, green face paint, and latex viking armor. The kids can figure out what to do with it, or I will wear it all by myself.

I was planning on dressing Zenny as Lydia the Tattooed Lady, one of her lullabies, but then I got sidetracked by paper mache.

Kids are sleeping, make ponies!

I didn't wait until the paint was dry to try it on her, and it turns out acrylic is really hard to get off of babies. I am working on it. 

OH BOY MORE BIRDS

I have put it out there that we need to focus on raptor rehabilitation and get some owls or hawks in here, because they are much more exciting and could keep the cats in line, but my mother keeps coming home with little weenie birds. A week after releasing a pigeon, the cat caught a ratty old mynah bird with a bad wing. Then two days after returning Mundungus the Mynah to the wild, someone gave us an orphaned zebra dove. 

The next day, someone made us take an injured cardinal. 

He's kind of pissy about it, and bites a lot. So now we have three Java finches, three rice birds, a surly cardinal, and a fledging dove. All of them chirping and throwing seeds and shaking bath water everywhere, and none of them producing wool or eggs or anything useful. I'm just putting in my time as caretaker until I can upgrade to a falcon and wear big leather mitts. I will name my falcon Simon, and train it to pluck out the eyes of my enemies. And then I will go make some enemies. Probably by sending a falcon after them. It all works out pretty neatly.

Costuming and kitty litter

The large boy wanted to be Doctor Who, until we said he could make his own sonic screwdriver instead of buying one. The small boy wants to be Michelangelo the ninja turtle, because of nunchucks. He is narrowing his eyes at me when I offer to make them out of toilet paper tubes, but still has enough belief in my magical craft skills that he imagines I'll pull off a real pair of them somehow. "It isn't about getting toys!" I howl. "It's about getting candy. Focus, children." 

So this morning I asked again, "what do you want to be for Halloween?" 

And the boy said, "A ghost! And Zenny is a cherry, and dad is Pacman."

"Oh! Ok. Maybe a banana, because cherries have connotations I don't think are - *cough* - hey, so what am I?"

"A dot."

Great.

So that's where we are with that. Nowhere.

Disaster litter

Our philosophy with allowances is that everyone does normal chores just for being part a household, and kids get paid extra for (competently) doing things we really, really don't want to do. The small boy can't do anything competently yet, and has almost broken all our necks while learning to spray oil on the wood furniture. The large boy gets to do kitty litter for a dollar a day, because it's gross and we don't want to do it. We have litter upstairs for the old arthritic cats, and litter downstairs for the assholes who would rather pee on the stove than walk upstairs. Twice a week, the garbage goes out, and the boy has to add bathroom trash to the litter bag. So on garbage day, I yelled up, "Don't forget the dirty diapers!" and he obligingly dumped them on top of the dirty litter, then he came downstairs swinging the heavy bag. Leif was playing Legos in the livingroom, and looked up just in time for Gavin to turn the corner, the bag sailing out gracefully in an arc to smack him square in the face like - well, a sack full of poop. The boy walked over his stunned brother. While I helped Leif up, my mother praised Gavin for his dutiful garbage collection, and he hoisted the bag and beamed, "It even has Leif's face imprinted on it!" Brothers, I tell you.

On the next garbage day, we asked him to empty the litter pans and refill them with clean stuff. "Dump the litter into a garbage bag," we said. Surprisingly soon, he was finished, and came in with his brow furrowed.

"Wow, done already?"

"Um, yeah."

"Great, do you need help taking the garbage bag outside?" 

"Um, no." 

"Really? That must have been heavy." 

"Well, the pan was heavy."

"But you put the litter in the garbage, right?"

"... Most of it?"

"Wut."

As it turns out, he had decided that a plastic grocery bag was easier to reach than the roll of garbage bags, and took the pan of litter outside, in case some spilled. Which it did. Because he was dumping a big pan of litter into a little plastic grocery bag. So there was a big pile of dirty clay litter on the grass behind the house. And it was raining. It turns out that raking clay sludge out of grass is harder than it sounds. The boy cried in embarrassment while we tried to clean it up, and then we all hid from the yard men when they came to collect the garbage bags from the outdoor bin. There was a WHOOP and someone sailed past the window. We hosed off the evidence afterward and pretended to know nothing. 

It's a learning curve. I consoled the boy by telling about how I had discovered as a child that if it was too cold to take out the cat litter, I could open the door and hurl the turds outside, and feral dogs would come sailing out of nowhere to snap them out of the air and hork them down like bacon treats. The downside of this, besides being revolting, was that when I did go out to put the litter bags in the trash, I had to do it at a sprint, chased by hungry dogs. I did not always make it. 

A learning curve, I say.

fall happenings

Pumpkin Patch 2013: the Sweatening

I get a bit pissy when people assume I'm military, just because I'm white and overrun with kids. So once again, my Molokai High pride cost us a discount when, at Military Appreciation Day at the pumpkin patch, all the minivans ahead of us were waved in without charge and I demanded to throw money at them because RAWR NO, I'M FROM HERE. My integrity looks a lot like my pig-headedness.

It was the first day of the season, and there were so many huge pumpkins. The cousins tried to lift every pumpkin they came across before finally resigning themselves to small ones.

The walk back through the fields was a huffing stream of complaint. Especially when we passed the kiddie field right next to the gates, full of perfect little round pumpkins. The kids stuck with their warty little squashes out of spite.

The man chose as big a pumpkin as he could carry. I am suspicious that he plans to put the baby in it.

And then there was beer

The Märzen has been in the closet for a month, failing to ferment properly. The yeast did something weird, and the man had to syphon as much off the top as he could to save the batch.

There was a lot of grumbling over a beaker about gravity and clarity, but it's in the bottles and carbonating, which is the part of this process I am most attentive to. 

In the meantime

Caramel apples. I added vanilla and sea salt to the melted candies, because I felt fancy.

Gathering good memories like bricks and mortar to wall off the bad year.

nope

It's fall break, and I've already lost track of the days, thrown off by the blur of the passing school year and a seasonal head cold. We don't have falling leaves and snow to mark the seasons, but we like to keep the illnesses.

The tooth came in at 2:00am, riding a fever, and I was woken by hot little hands. Small dose of baby Tylenol, diaper change, tucked back into bed against me, and she murmured off to sleep again while my brain stayed awake, composing long arguments with people who were Wrong on the Internet. 

'Do whatever the fuck you want' is terrible, terrible life advice, my brain clacked.
Pleasure and happiness are not the same thing. 
Babies do not need flowers bigger than their heads strapped to them to show they are female. Let her just be a baby for a while, ffs.

Everyone is wrong at 2am. Nobody more so than yourself. Some words are etched night after night, and burn like the letters of the One Ring in the darkness. When these started up, I drag a pillow over my head and smother the noise.

And then it is day again.

My sense of immobility and failure is starting to make my family restless.

"I have to go to Anaheim for work in a few months, come with me!"
"Thanks, no."
"Let's sell the house and buy a farm in Washington! We can have apple trees and drive to Vancouver!"
"Nope."

I'm a trapped bear wrapped in a wet banket. No quick movements, I have learned. We had to come to Oahu to get Gavin. We had to go to California to retrieve Leif. We had to be on Maui to find Zenny. I'm finished with wandering for a while. The hiring freeze will lift. The new illustration site will be done soon. The next book is blocked out.

I'm not moving a muscle.

Teeth

Up since 3:30am.

3:30 am, I say again.

I had lunch at 8am, because it had been 4 hours since breakfast. My eyelids have started making a clicking noise when I blink. 

Teeth, man.