GASP! the bathroom...

the old kit and kaboodle...

oh, and i didn't even tidy up... notice all the missing tiles? they were gone three years ago when we bought the house, i fixed them and they lasted three years. almost to the day...

the processing of out with the old... here's our hero, Josh, at work. a good name, a good guy. wherever he is, in whatever suit he is wearing to battle the banking demons that make up his 'regular' job, he is blushing...

this is my new sink, and floor, and toilet. we Like this alot. a LOT. . .

the bathroom takes on a pinkish hue because the magnificent cherry is in bloom and completely blocks the windowlight. we LOVE this . . .

walk in fields of gold

don't you want to? walk in a field of gold? my favorite ever kids song is 'america the beautiful'... and i know, i know, we all have our ridiculous fear of crazypatriotism/indoctrinization/obsessive scary people who say that is THEIR favorite song, but really, i cry every time i hear it ... amber waves of grain? purple mountain's majesty? c'mon! and ho-ah, its better than 'i'm proud to be an americaaaaan, cuz at least i know i'm free.... '. . .
right.
we are a beautiful country, full of wild majesty... and i've never seen 98%of it. and i know you, intrepid travelers, have seen more, but i bet you haven't gotten better than 30% seen... i just bet.
i'm in some sort of mood these days. not a good one. still functioning, using a working bathroom, feeding children just barely, plopping them in front of movies during the day!@#
i wonder if the peace corps will take mothers running from their responsibilities? i think two years might just do it.

the world is too much with us

i could weep for how big and self-sufficient my older boy is becoming. this same tantrum-er, whiner, all-around troublemaker is just the sweetest lovebug that there ever has been. All you have to do to make him happy is give him everything that he requests, no matter how absurd. easy!
:) and while it is funny, it is true. and he is amazing. and big, and strong, and sweet, and so damn funny/goofy, its just a crackup.
four is something of a doozy, i have learned. its just now, as i am about two months from five, that i am realizing what a crock it was. the fluency of language matched with an astoundingly appropriate immaturity is just an earthquake-a-day experience.
and hell's bells, i have missed my kids while i was stuck in the bathroom, i have.
and at the same time, i'm slightly forlorn to be back in the saddle again. the bathroom isn't finished, a hundred things were slightly 'off' but i'm sure I'll be moving back home tomorrow. . . 'sure' being a slight exaggeration. josh has taken his family to my house and they are fixing it up as we speak. ? . hm. i am full of hope and gratitude for the week i have had, and fairly confused about the still swinging pendulum of my emotions about it. i have learned a lot, much of it general, some specific. i cut drywall, used a drill and a planer... drilled, hung, caulked... singlehandedly kept a mcdonald's open, and seriously helped the bottomline at home depot. one day, i went there three times. oh yes, i did.
see you soon , with a photo... once the plumbing is plumbed and i can move my family back home.

drywall

so, while my parents are on spring break in florida with all the whoozies and whatsits, we are sleeping in their wonderfully plumbed house. . . as ours is in a bit of a disarray, no plumbing and currently, no floor at all in the bathroom. I am spending the week with josh and we are building a new floor, putting in a new toilet and new sink, and light fixtures. I have drywalled a tiny closet, having the 'mud' on my pants forever will help me remember my role in this project...
i have realized that it is not quite a match for me, this level of 'do it yourself'... i would LOVE to make my own curtains, I'm not so certain of the need to measure something 18 times before cutting and the wild investigative journey of pulling up flooring in a hundred year old house. We were going to demolish the tile, but what was underneath caused Josh to go get his mask and to lose his normally chipper disposition... so we stopped with the whole 'its probably asbestos' thing... and the 'rebuilding' of the floor began.
ANYHOW. it is good to know i will not be a contractor in my future. one down...
ask me tomorrow if I want to be a plumber...

shell shocked, shell game...

saw the bigger-on-the-inside Chakra Carol last week, with the D... knocked me down... again. i swear, though, as literally crumbly as i feel when I leave there, over the course of the next week, i hear her words and space them out throughout my life and I find that I am able to actually see change. CHANGE.

damn, for something that is such a constant, sometimes its downright impossible to find.

so, just as a teaser for you... these are the recurring chakra carol shellshifting discoveries. . . :

1. most of the time, when you are angry, its a sign that you want someone to feel guilty.

2. we are far too tolerant of our own minds wandering.

3. We let far too many unacceptable things pass through our minds. . . its just a matter of time before we believe them or let them stay.

so chew on that one.. or three. . .

Colors and Hope

here's to hope. and what we make of it...

Just shots...

hatchets and hammers, fascinations with tools and work... Boys with their knobby knees, chubby knees, aching knees... men work... (for the sake of the post, we are neglecting the 'shapely' knees that did the bulk of the cleanup inside...but not really... :)

get Grammie on the phone, please.

I've been thinking loads about my grandmother lately. I think, last year at this time, she was going through a whole big transition, lots of nursing home crud and everyone upset at her deterioration but blahblah, a whole lot of upheaval and change.
Anyhow, I've been thinking about her in very personal, conversational sort of way. As in, in her life, she experienced many of the same things as I am right now with many differences and many exclusions. She did not have to cart the kids all around, it was just not part of her job description, and I'm not even sure she drove when they were young, actually. She had a whole lot more kids than I do, six... and a whole lot more work to do in the house, bread, laundry, dinner, etc... being wholly without the 'conveniences' of washing machines, bread machines, convenience marts... :) that last one was mostly a joke, although my kids ate tater tots and strawberries for lunch yesterday... mmm good.
I wonder how she did it, how she sustained herself throughout the years she was workerbee for the family. She didn't particularly like her husband, as far as I understand, but they were married for long time and she never thought about doing such a thing again, after he died. He died pretty young, in his early fifties.
I have so many questions for her, the conversations in my mind are fairly satisfying believe it or not, but I have so SO many questions, I can't even fit them all into my dreamlife, I'd like her help. . . wish i could call her, thats all.
boy, would she be wacked out to hear these questions. would she ever. she'd probably tell me to go do something, get busy, stop perseverating on my own thoughts. . .
oh well.

bring on the funk

so. still not out of my slump, but trying. working. just finished the big fundraiser late late last night for my kid's school which entailed lots of little bits of work and the wrap up of a babyquilt that sold at the auction for a hundred fifty big ones. how rockin' is that? so, along with sumppumps and handsaws, i've gotten shit done.
heh.
the yard is pretty much cleared out but for a pile of brush and i'm still in my same mood. never took the st. john's more than once because i've got the memory of a goldfish. i've never been on the pill for that same reason, i know myself too well... i'd never ever remember to take it and so what the hell is the point?
i'm trying to set up babysitting in house for the next week of spring break, and i am going to rip the bathroom floor out and put in a new sink and new toilet. my highschool friend josh will help me as he has all the know-how and i've got all the destructive desires.... if it all works out with babysitting and so on, it'll be really fantastic to get that all fixed up and to get my hands significantly banged up. I think i could have a real future in demo.
again, or, firstly, i apologize for the lameness of the post, just had to fling a lifeline. grappling hook style.
i've switched strategies and have begun praying for other people, rather than myself, and but for momentary glimpses of light, its moving very slowly on the uplift. hm.
swing it babies. grappling hook AWAY...

struggle struggle guffaw, part two

believe it or not, there was a part one... i had to go look it up to see what it was. it was much funnier than this one. . . my mind must be on a much wider loop than I thought. although this time i am not cracking myself up so much as just simply cracking up. oh hell .
today was the first actually HOT day of the year. we pulled out the kiddy pool and dodged the yard's debris to run barefoot in the huge mud puddle surrounding the leaky blue plastic disc. yep, just what the yard needed, a little mud.
just in case you were wondering, it HAS been a bit damp around here. my four year old dumped a cup of water onto the steps of the basement and I nearly choked. . .
then i put my feet in the coldness of the pool and it was almost as good as a beer.
almost.
and then, after our group moment of bliss, the heat sent the children straight to hell and i honestly, joined them after much resistance and we all beat the crap out of each other. I must say, my 'beating the crap out of...' involves one spank. BUT#1: i wanted to throw the elder into the wall. BUT#2-- i was pummelled. many times, throughout the afternoon, evening and bedtime... at the slightest hitch, in a sometimes passionless manner!, by BOTH my kids, the younger learning from watching the elder.
so... all you crazy feminists out there, (and by that, i mean, thinking, breathing, women.) how do you maintain equanimity in this situation? how do you keep your cool ? with the hitting thing, i think one must be directly involved, no hiding in the bathroom, etc... except when I AM LOSING MY MIND... but one time, in the very early years of my innocence in mothering, i wrote the question to a mama website 'how do you keep your cool with your kids?'... whoooowee. all the answers pertained to how to discipline my kids, how to get THEM to keep their cool, how bad a mother i must be to spank or not timeout or To timeout, etc. . . all of which i now know to be a great dodge and not to mention, an emotional impossibility for a four year old (keeping one's cool, that is) ... J. no help at all , got home late, at the very end of my rope, except that he dragged the elder to bed. which was something.
what say YOU? wiser bunch? hm.

argh...and I love my job. no, i really don't. nope.

i'll have you know that the current running joke in my family is that my backyard looks like the backdrop for a 'Cops' episode.
I have reached saturation. I am completely stalled and can't pick up or wipe off ONE MORE THING.
thats right.
The puking of the four year old stopped on Saturday and the fever lingered through Sunday and egghunting proceeded. we rocked those eggs. small E. ran wild, shoveling sand and jellybeans into his mouth with seeming indifference. But believe me, he has 'candy?' downpat.
So. the backyard has also been wildly abandoned and I have moved on to sorting the thousand pounds of babyclothing that got wet. And I have reached the conclusion that today is not the day to figure out why I can't give any of it away. I really can't. Its like the dirty call of the candy in the cupboard. that dirty whore who tempts me into the crack den... I just can't make myself resist. The little onesie with the duck wearing a sleeping cap? keeping it.
The jumper with the green dinosaur that both my boys wore when they were 6 months old? still in its box, clean and folded.
yep.
keeping em.
damnit.
the basement will soon be completely filled with my neuroses, and there is literally, nothing I can do. I'm lying on the floor in the crack den, happy as a clam.

Good Friday

So- i feel a sermon coming on...

Every year on this day I drive around/do the errands/clean the house and feel a sort of pervading gloom... its not that I feel it emotionally (although, damn, don't get me started) but its a feeling that lingers on the outskirts of the frame...just enough to see the grey in my peripheral visions... I think a lot about Haiti, the people of Tsunami living, New Orleans, unemployment, poverty and all the people currently watching the waters subside nearby us here. We don't live near a river. Or rather, we do, but we are several hundred feet, straight up, nearby. But downstream, there are still ponds and lakes where there should be industry and business and home. gone.

I sat for hours watching the water in my basement rising, one minute at a time, every ten minutes or so. Watching it rise up the stairs was terrifying, in a foundational sort of way. (only two stairs ended submerged - 12 inches) It doesn't matter how many times you tell yourself that there isn't anything you can do. It came UP through the floor. the world of earth was too full of this water, so I am taking it on and moving it around... finding a new place...

The wonder of perspective and hindsight and foreknowledge are that even in the darkness of Good Friday, we cannot pretend we do not know that Easter is coming. wild bright lights shooting through the night and so on and so forth... ribbons and sugar..cakes and daffodils...

So we knew the sun would come. we KNEW. we could not pretend not to...we still know, we still need the sun to come. it arrives like the mailman this morning, so calm in its familiarity with us and our home...

what i learned is this: sump pumps are wonderful small black engine cylinders. wet vacs are in fact, one of god's technological gifts to the world, at the top of the bulkhead basement stairs it is better to blindly step right into the cherry tree when carrying the 40gal bucket because the cherry tree branches are actually soft. they are soft. smooth, like a piece of linen on your face. a joy. The coldness of the stone floor is what gets you, even if you have to wreck your 15 year old hiking boots, you cannot work barefoot or you'll get the chills. big. I learned that I cannot take photos of my christmas ornaments floating. I don't see the joy in losing the advent calendar. Rubbermaid bins ARE safe things to leave in a basement filling with water, until the stack tips because the water is making the first one in the pile float. This will be an opportunity to purge some things I have held on to for strange reasons and . I will clean house. Today will be another day of wetvaccing as we still have one place with several inches and I had to take a break to tend a vomiter. slow. We are all falling apart this good friday. but we are not pretending the light isn't shining.