Creeking

Today we spent a few hours in one of my favorite local creeks. Mostly I only took pictures of little critters that I wanted to load into an app I recently added to my phone. This app is supposed to identify nature things and tell me about them. But it's not working super well.

Or I suck at taking pictures

The water was so cold and refreshing. I kind of want to go back out every day until it's too cold.

.

Our Family Zoo

So I have this label referring to the pets in our home. At one point this summer I could say that we had two cats, two rats and two aquariums. But then one of the rats died.

The first pet to join us was Milo. He was a few months old, we got him from a shelter that partnered with PetSmart.

Now he's a cranky old man of 10 years.

\

A little over a year later, a neighbor knocked on the door and offered me a handful of fluff that she'd found on her back porch. We didn't even know if he was going to make it.

Now Oliver is an old man too, 9 years.

I don't think we even got pictures of Taryn's rats. They only joined us in April of this year. Taryn turned 13 in May and it seemed like a good time to get her a pet of her own. Rats weren't what we had in mind, but that's how things went. They came with their own cage, which is significantly larger than we intended.

The aquariums are different stories. I had received an aquarium kit for Christmas, I don't even remember how long ago and finally got it set up in November 2018 with a tiny baby betta.

I didn't get any good pictures of him with his full-grown adult fins. He died in June on the anniversary of Tim's mom's passing. I was pretty broken up about it, I didn't know I could be so attached to a fish.

Once he'd died, I left the tank and snails to "cycle" for a month and then Jenny brought over some baby fish from her tank and an all black betta fish for Caelie. I don't have pictures of any of those fish either. I started with 4 adult guppies in different colors and patterns, then 4 orange babies and 4 white babies. That was mid-July. Currently I have 8 adult guppies, the 4 orange ones aren't full grown yet, plus 3 mid sized baby guppies that were born in my tank and another 5 tiny baby guppies that were born more recently. I'm going to have to start feeding fish to Caelie's betta soon and I have mixed feelings about it. 

Oh, I lied, I have a picture of Caelie's tank with a blurry betta in it. I kind of feel like his tank is thematically prepared for the population control that is coming soon.

Yarny

I like to express myself in yarn. But it's kind of slow going sometimes, so I like to know things in advance. The good news is I'm freakishly good at noticing things and putting puzzle pieces together. While I was still working on my writing project, it was super hard to settle down and crochet, but now that it's done the yarn is flying more freely. I still don't know if I can get finished in time, but I've done more in the last two days than in the 2.5 weeks prior. Here's a sneak peek at some of the pieces of this project.

Family

Four Years Ago Today:

Caelie accidentally put my hair on Daddy

Four years ago today I had already been dealing with some weird health stuff for over a year. Today I saw my doctor and she's putting in a referral for me to talk to someone about having my uterus removed.

Tim has always known he only wanted two children. I have never been convinced that I was really done. My body is really bad at a lot of stuff, but it's really really good at making babies. But I hit 33 and things got weirder and harder to deal with. Now I'm like so done with having a uterus.

I'm so done, that mentally I don't even have one anymore. Like all that's left to do is get a doctor to physically do the job. Also, we haven't had to change a diaper or wake up at odd hours to feed anyone for such a LONG time. And, these girls are so old that I can go do what I want without worrying about car seats and babysitters and so many other weird little things that were my whole existence at one point.

I actually kinda dig my current existence. Just, you know, not the uterus parts. That I could do without.

DONE

So I finished my writing project. It's like my whole life story that I'm going to share at Celebrate Recovery soon. I thought about posting it here, but I want to give it in person first.

A few days ago we went to Call Hall Dairy Bar. It's been on K-State campus for a long time. The building is very old. So old that certain things need to be explained to current generation of college students.

I stayed up very late last night to finish writing and then slept through my alarm this morning.

But now that it's done, I don't even know what to do with my life.

A New Chapter

So this happened today:

So far she says her eyes feel less strained but everything is blurry. I guess there is some fine tuning yet to do, but I was busy with other things and didn't get a chance to check in with her until after the office was closed for the day.

george woshingtin's howes

Seven Years Ago Today:

Taryn's summation of our weekend (her journal assignment): When i Woke up my mom said we have speshle plans. and we went to ant janet's howes. and we went to george woshingtin's howes. and i playd a game cald shot the boX.

Living in the DC area, we were surrounded by so many opportunities and we didn't take most of them. But there was this one day that we went to Mount Vernon and toured the property while some kind of festival or other was taking place on the lawn. There were all kinds of demonstrations of different historical activities.

That's a man acting as a rat catcher, with a real live rat in his trap. Foreshadowing of Taryn's current pet rat adventure? Maybe.

They liked the drumming, but hated the guns going off.

I don't remember it, but apparently there were horseback rides. I found some old pictures I'd saved from Tim's phone.

This is the Potomac River. Bodies of water make me mega nervous but one of my parenting goals is to let my kids develop their own anxieties rather than just copy mine.

I remember being pretty impressed with the hands on history play room. Those costumes are more detailed than usual kids' costumes and they tie in the back so they go on and off really fast. I also had a weird experience that temporarily made me consider blogging again, in fact, I may have started a blog and then deleted it because it isn't in my history.

A few days later, I shared the following story with Facebook:

So last Saturday we're at Mount Vernon and there are people from all over the world gathered there learning stuff and seeing the pretty stuff. It's all very exciting. And this lady is trying to subtly catch my eye and finally leans in and asks "Where are you from?" And I always stutter a bit because I'm not sure how much information the person is really asking for, but I temporarily forget that this in international crowd and the woman could be from anywhere, so I say "Andrews" and she doesn't know what that means and so I have to explain "Andrews, Air Force Base....Maryland....it's practically next door." And when she's finally managed to tack "She's from around this local area" into her mind she's so traumatized by the fact that she just struck up a conversation with a stranger that she abruptly walks off. A few minutes later she's giving me that funny look again and just blurts out "How old are you??!?!?" I'm thinking "What on earth?" but I just say "30" with a bit of a shrug. And then she's just gushing on about how she's from California and she's never met anyone with grey hair before and she thinks that people should just learn to age gracefully.

I do have one lovely picture that Tim took of me a few weeks after this incident, which shows off how grey my hair was and wasn't at the time. It's the very best kind of picture. The kind you always hope someone will take to really immortalize you at your very best.

 

Unicorns

Today I saw a unicorn. I couldn't get a picture because it was a bit dark outside. Now I will admit that I got less than 5 hours of sleep last night. I also spent two hours standing at a food packing activity. It looked kind of like this:

And then I spent the rest of the day outside telling tons of people about Celebrate Recovery.

Well, ok, full disclosure, I told a few people about CR and spent a lot of time hanging out and crocheting.

This was an event called Flint Hills Praisefest. It's a day of concerts and all kinds of fun. It was at the very end when Tenth Avenue North was performing that I saw her. A beautiful purple unicorn. The best color of unicorn. Very much like this:

walmart and target both sell it

....except...you know....more purple.

And now you know the other reason I didn't take a picture, I didn't want to be a creepy weirdo.

Eggs

On This Day 2010:

it is 1:30am Caelie required a change of pajamas. The shirt has Curious George on it, I asked her who it was and she said, very enthusiastically "Uncle George!"

In 2010, I was in the middle of my MOPS years. I was on the team then as I recall. I haven't been to MOPS for several years until this morning. Apparently they've expanded the program to include mothers of older children. It's a little awkward to be there after so many years away. And I forgot that they would be serving breakfast.

On the breakfast table, there was a bowl of eggs with a variety of colors and different spots and speckles. They were beautiful. I know one of the mentor moms has chickens, so I'm pretty sure those weren't store bought eggs. I grabbed one for myself.

Something about those beautiful eggs, reminded me of my first ever hard boiled egg. I was pretty young. Maybe 3 or 4 years old. In addition to never having had a hard boiled egg, I had never had an Easter egg. An elderly woman at our church had boiled and decorated a few for my brothers and I to hunt for in the church yard. I remember my older brother jumping up and down and pointing, "don't you see it?" or something similar.

I didn't know what I was supposed to do with this beautiful egg. I held it in the car and marveled at it. Then I looked at my brother. He was cracking his egg! In the car! I knew what was inside an egg and I knew it didn't belong in the car.

"Mama! Jack is breaking his egg!"

She gave him something. A bread bag? A bag they put over newspapers in bad weather? I don't know. Something to put the egg shell in and then she took my egg. My beautiful Easter egg. And she cracked it! Destroyed! She explained that the inside was cooked and after peeling the shell off I could eat it.

I'm not going to lie, I'm still a bit sad at the loss. Even though eggs are delicious.

But the egg this morning, decorated naturally with brown speckles, didn't crack as easily. I was trying to stay engaged in a conversation and quietly, unobtrusively, peel this egg. I rolled it on my styrofoam plate and that did not work. I tapped and pressed it at different angles. I briefly wondered whether this egg actually was hard boiled. I mean, maybe there was a mistake. Maybe the eggs on the table with all the food had actually been meant for decorations.

I kept trying to crack this egg quietly until I decided there was nothing for it, I'd have to beat it against the table. Well, by this point, I was a tad over-enthusiastic and basically, very loudly, crushed one end of this poor egg. Everyone stopped talking and looked at me for a whole second.

I wonder what on Earth they're feeding those chickens to make their shells nearly impenetrable.

Adult Craft Night

I made button art at the library's Adult Craft Night. It's not my usual stuff but I like to go to these things and try something different.

Memories.

I remember the first writing project I was assigned in fifth grade. I don't remember what I was supposed to be writing, exactly, but I remember that we were supposed to finish our introduction before recess. And I remember staying in at recess to write my introduction.

At that point in my life I always wrote the introduction last. I had most of my paper written but I also really liked rules and preferred writing to recess. 

I'm a total weirdo.

As I recall, our second writing assignment went something more like "you have to have half a page written before recess".

I've been changing the world for a long time.

My current writing assignment isn't going as well or as quickly. And I've developed some new techniques since fifth grade. I've written the introductory parts. Then today I wrote some more but I'm pretty sure with two to three more sentences, it's my conclusion. The middle parts are what elude me now.

Maybe I should throw the whole thing out and grab a piece of wide ruled paper, skip the top half and start with the middle like I used to.

Or maybe I should start skipping all my recesses until I get it done.

Miarly CAL Part 2

The van problems really impacted my ability to get yarn when I wanted. So it took a while for me to get what I needed to finish the first part of the CAL which was just 5 squares. It turns out that I made a mistake in the first four that no one but me will notice even though I corrected it in the last square.

 Then I moved on to Part 2 of the pattern which is a series of rows back and forth. They aren't complicated but somehow it took way more time than I thought it would. The designer was ill during part of the time that I was unable to continue and she pushed back the schedule of releases. So I'm not as far behind as I would have been.

No Title

I don't even know what to say about today. It's possibly the second Sunday all summer that I made it through the day without taking a nap, accidental or on purpose. I feel like I was busy most of the day.

Spending time with people is tricky. The more time I spend with others, the more words I say out loud. The more words I speak, the more likely it is that I've said something dumb. Trying not to torture myself over the stupid things that come out of my mouth is also on my to-do list.

Here's a picture of a random bug we saw today

Oh, I forgot. The second to last project on my past project list is called the "Ugly Christmas Sweater" Blanket. I began it in December 2018 with the center peppermint candy and my recent task was meant to represent Christmas lights. I didn't commit to a color scheme, I figured I would choose colors as I go:

Day is Done

I put off trying to think of something to post, because I was going to finish the part of the crochet project I'm working on and then post about that....and that didn't happen. So I looked back over all my previous blogs and my Facebook history to see if there is anything noteworthy to re-share here. And there's nothing.

I don't have a lot of online activity in September. Apparently I've had a lot of Septembers that were really hard and I didn't feel like sharing about it. I mean, most of the time there are things that I shared in one place or the other, but they just aren't the sort of things I want to memorialize here for whatever reason. But this month has barely anything posted at all. Which is a thing I do when I'm down and hiding from the world.

September 2018, a couple weeks after a flash flood

I've been trying to figure out what it is about September that is so hard every year. What weird anniversary am I celebrating without remembering why? The biggest trauma I can think of is that, when I was in 6th grade, we moved across the state. That was a hard time, but mostly September was a relief. September was going back to school and not spending all day every day trapped at home. So it seems like it should be the happy kind of anniversary. The evidence says no.

May 2019...I guess time does things

I don't know what to do with this kind of stuff. But maybe this is the first September of life not being quite as hard as the previous Septembers.

Shedding

Cicadas. "They're very vulnerable when they emerge, because the body of the adult starts out soft. It takes awhile to harden up and for the wings to fully push out and develop." This one didn't even make to that point, it died before it could even get that vulnerable.

I'm supposed to be writing my whole life story in 9 to 12 pages, double-spaced, 12 point font. I'm finding it very difficult to get past the childhood parts.

Last night I remembered something. My earliest memory comes from when I was 17 months old. It was a moment that terrified me so deeply that I can remember it. And it made me wonder. How much of my childhood trauma is "just" PTSD from that moment?

It really messes up my entire understanding if that moment explains a lot of other things. 

Of course, in the light of today, there are a lot of things that can't be explained by one moment of terror when I was 17 months old. But apparently I like to distract myself with all these weird little things instead of doing the thing I need and want to do. 

Shedding the nymphal skin is no joke.

Oblivious

The reason I took the Target mirror selfie in my previous post is that I was walking along minding my own business and noticed that small children were staring at me and looking excited. I was like "what is happening? Did I spill something on myself? Is there something weird on my face? Is it my face?" Then I passed the mirror and I was like "OOOOOOOHHHHH! I'm wearing a giant unicorn dress!" Because sometimes I forget.

Jenny took this picture.

Tonight I was walking along, minding my own business, and I heard a small excited voice interrupting her mother's adult conversation. And I didn't stop and pay attention because I'm usually pretty sure that not everything is about me all the time. Until I had gotten further away and heard "Yes, that lady is wearing a unicorn dress!" in the exasperated voice of a mom who has been interrupted a million times today and just can't take it anymore.

To that mom, I'm so sorry that I interrupted your evening with my fabulous unicorn dress.

But not really.

At least I don't have a dress in this obnoxious pink fabric.

My Van Can Go!

This has been the weirdest two weeks. Not having a vehicle is no joke. It's hard work and the resources that are intended to help...well...they're not really accessible when you've got 23 cents in your bank account and critical streets are blocked off (sidewalks included) for construction.

We're very fortunate to have some friends in our corner who could give us rides when we needed them and had tools and experiences with home vehicle repairs. I'm going to go ahead and share a couple of pictures without strictly having permission to do so, their faces aren't visible, so their identities should be secure.

This right here is community and I'm so humbled and grateful to be a part of it.

Wonder

The other day a friend came by to help with our van. We discussed a mutual affection for the music of Weird Al Yankovic. I was in the middle of making an epic YouTube playlist of every song I could find starting from the beginning.

I find that I'm fairly poor at things like "thank you" notes. I prefer to express myself in yarn. But it's hard to come up with something timely. In this case I had the brilliant idea to crochet Harvey the Wonder Hamster. I should have re-watched this clip first though because it turns out he's grey: https://youtu.be/AT7TE4E0hyA

That's a bit of fiber art that comes with it's own theme song. I do manage to keep myself entertained. By the way, Harvey did not get thrown over my friend's shoulder and I'm not going to lie, I'm a tiny bit disappointed by that.

What's In A Name

It's always a little awkward for me when people ask me about my name. The name itself sounds nice enough on the surface. It's the follow up questions that are the problem.

"Are you named after anyone?"

Well. Sort of. I'm named after Marie Antoinette. It's really clever. My first middle name is Antoinette and my first name rhymes with Marie. Nothing says "I hope to marry you off at a young age so that you can live among strangers who will relentlessly abuse you for being a foreigner who doesn't speak their language until they finally cut your head off" like naming your child after Marie Antoinette. My second middle name means "born again".

And let's just pretend for a moment that I'm wrong about this connection. It's worth noting that my brothers all have strong German names that directly tie into our paternal family tree. And my name is French.

"What does it mean?"

Well, it's a French word that's an endearment but it's in the masculine form. My second middle name is also in the masculine form. It's kind of a funny thing. I took a year of French in high school and one of the few things I remember is what my teacher called the ne pas sandwich. You take a word, like run, and you want to say don't run, so you put ne in front of it and pas after it. Ne (French word for run) pas. And now it's don't run. There's just something about my name being masculine, feminine, masculine that reminds me of that ne pas sandwich. Antoinette means "beyond praise" unless I'm right about that ne pas thing and it's meant to mean unworthy of praise.

Maybe you think that nobody thinks things through like this, but if I can think it up, where did I learn to think this way?

Anyway, it's just an awkward little moment. Usually I say that I'm not named after anyone in my family tree and my name is a French endearment. All the other stuff is just too heavy for small talk.

The name of this blog is much more straightforward for anyone who has seen me in real life recently:

I had some weird ideas about when and how I would start telling more people about my blog. But part of my fight against perfectionism is letting go of those kinds of ideas. So here I go....

More Memories

On this day ten years ago:

Tonight's kidism: "God made the moon, and the stars, and the sun, and the daytime, and the fish and the trees, and the <bunch of different animals> and um, um....um...
ME: "what about cats? Did God make cats too?"
TARYN: "No"
ME: "Oh He didn't? Well then where do cats come from?"
TARYN: "The store."
<should have seen that one coming>

We had adopted Milo only a couple of months before this conversation. Here's a picture of the two of them in September 2009:

And six years ago today, our little artist:

Caelie saw this picture at church this morning. Here in a minute I'm going to upload her artistic representation of this picture.

And Caelie's version: