Life on the farm

TB and Daddy at the wedding

We were away for a while visiting family and helping my best friend get married.

The Boy had a grand old time going to the zoo, feeding the giraffes, going for a ride in Papa's airplane and on his tractors, playing with his cousins, etc.. Life on the farm is good. I miss having all that space! It was so wonderful for The Boy to have all that room to run! And other than a few times making sure he didn't go towards the road, he could do all of this with out me feeling I had to be right on top of him. The only really rough time was when he tried to take a chunk out of his youngest cousins arms when they both wanted the same stick that Papa had just cut down while tree trimming. He also found MomMom's secret cookie stash, which she thought was cute when he come out holding as many cookies as he could in his two chubby hands.

Life is just different on the farm. It's a waste to wear my expensive "designer" ripped up jeans. Mom just wanted to know what I'd been doing that was so rough on my clothes.

And don't forget, they don't get cable in the country. And they only have dial-up. I lost any nostalgia I had when I tried to check my mail and it took minutes to refresh each page. Any desire I had to "move back home" completely disappeared.

Magical Mommy Moment

I had one of those magical Mommy moments last night. One of those moments that I had always dreamed about, even years before becoming a mommy.

Last night The Boy woke up crying so I went in to him. I covered him back up and rubbed his back and sang "All the pretty little horses" to him. He calmed right down and just lay there looking at me. Then said "night night mommy" and went back to sleep.

Such a little thing, but oh so powerful.

This is why I am a mommy. This makes the years of fertility treatments, the disappointments and failures, then the stress and anxiety of the adoption, all worth while.

Oh how I love my little boy!

Maybe the only thing worse would be if I was a man!

Originally I wasn't going to talk about work on here, but considering no one reads my blog, I don't think it matters. What's a little venting among friends huh?

Although part of a larger organization, there are five of us that make up a separate company within it. Five women, consisting right now of two pregnant woman (one with twins, the other in her first trimester), one going through fertility treatments, one going through menopause (she'd be the one in charge) and me (fertility treatments - done that, pregnant - only if miracles exist, menopause - better be years away).

The truly scary part is that I may be the normal one among us right now. The only rational, clear headed, won't turn a molehill into a mountain, one of us.

Do I really need to say anything more? Men should fear us. There should be force fields up preventing anyone with the Y chromosome from entering our wing. Loud sirens should blare when we step away from our offices in to another part of the building.

Can you say WOMAN! Can you say HORMONAL! Can you say IRRATIONAL!!!!

Oh my child, how quickly you learn what you shouldn't.

I try not to swear, I really do. (See early post) But I am my fathers daughter. And he is the King of the swear phrase. Come on - by the time I was five, maybe earlier, I could whip off his favorite phrase without batting an eye. God d*mn, mother f*cking, c*ck sucking, son of a b*tch. Oh yeah, it's impressive. By my teenage years I could recite it and make my head spin around, at least so my mother says.

Well imagine my surprise when this afternoon The Boy was trying to push a large laundry basket full of clothes. It was about three times his size and clearly heavy...as evidenced by his "Ohhh jeeeesssuuusss" as he pushed it. Although certainly not as impressive in length or composition as my above example, he is clearly, at only 2&1/2, well on his way!

And believe me, he didn't hear that coming from our bedroom!

There really aren't words to describe the disgust, just my honest thoughts.

I've been silent since last week, since Katrina. I think many who blog can understand this silence, and perhaps have found it difficult themselves to find the right words.

I'm a novice blogger. I'm not a great writer. My grammar is lacking. I'm not smooth and witty as I write. I don't paint word pictures. I'm not politically savvy. I'm not a great humanitarian.

However, I am a mother. I am a compassionate person. I think I am a person of reason. I can find no "reason" for this disaster. No explanation for the disgraceful response our government and our "leaders" have shown in its wake.

I feel helpless, and in part I feel helpless because I am a mother. If I did not have a child I would have headed for the Gulf Coast last week, hand in hand with my husband. As health care professionals we would be able to help. As a woman and mother, I would be able to lead! I know...I know...it is easy to say that, especially since as a mother, I can not find it in me to leave my child, a child who already deals with reactive attachment disorder as a result of his early life in an orphanage.

I watched TV with growing frustration last week. Unable to understand why someone did not take control! We see now that there were individuals that did take control and were able to make a difference. Yet it continues to confound me that no one from our government was able to do that. Again and again we see and hear how the people of the Gulf Coast were failed by their government.

Yet at the same time as I hear these accusations, and watch the finger pointing, I can't help but think that each "individual" in the government must have been doing what he or she thought was right. But again, I wonder why someone with the power didn't just say "get those people some help damnit, and do it NOW!"

I do believe, that despite the disgust we feel at our "leaders," we need to move beyond it now and deal with the problem at hand. But do not let us forget this experience. We must make sure we learn from it. Our "leaders" must make sure they learn from it.

I feel guilty as I sit on my comfortable couch and watch a scene on TV that I can not relate to. I can not even begin to imagine what those people are going through. The closest I can come is the times I spent my spring break in college working on Appalachian Service Projects. That's about the roughest I've had it. A nice middle class, liberal arts college kid, roughing it for a week in sleeping bags in a barn, or church rec room, with limited bathroom facilities. Shocked by the conditions of the families we were helping. Thinking we had done such a wonderful thing, taking one week out of our privileged lives.

And as I sit here thinking, I realize that not only is the fact that the response to this disaster was disgraceful, we now are forced to look at the class distinctions so many of us like to ignore. There is, and probably will continue to be, debate over whether this was a "race" issue, or a "class" issue. I believe it is both, but more so, it highlites that all to often, class and race are intertwined in our society. Do any of us sitting so comfortably in our safe, dry homes, find it easy to look at and listen to what we are told are the majority of the survivors? Yes we hurt for them, we hurt for their loss of homes, and families, of any security they may have had. But is it also because they "sound" different from us, appear to be uneducated, poor, perhaps in our minds lazy, or helpless. We all have pictures in our minds of what that part of "society" looks like. How many of us have stepped around a homeless man in a doorway or alley? Looked right through a woman in the subway begging for money? Will this finally make us look clearly at the structure of our society? Will we finally do something?

As we all said we will never forget, after September 11, 2001. We must not forget Hurricane Katrina. We must learn from this disaster, make sure we are prepared for another, be it natural or not. But, we must also all take a hard look at all levels of society and DO SOMETHING about it.

These are my opinions. As I said, I feel helpless, yet am unwilling to sacrifice my family to physically go there and help. We have donated to several charities and will continue to help monetarily as we can. I hold my son and husband closer to me and remind myself to appreciate what I have.

Yucky raisins

The Boy came upstairs from the basement the other day holding out his hands saying "yucky raisins, yucky raisins." Fortunately he was holding it out to his father! 'Cause it wasn't raisins. It was cat poop. Most likely a "cling-on," or as one of my coworkers calls it, a "hitcher," as in hitchhiker. Fortunately, TB was fairly grossed out when he realized it was poop. Despite what is probably a normal fascination with poop, heaven forbid you forget to show him his poopy diaper when you take it off, he has no interest in actually touching it. One episode of sticking his hand down his diaper and pulling it out dirty cured that. Although he has left a couple butt prints on our window ledges when he was going through his naked phase, and would hide behind the couch in our front window and take everything off. Only a real problem when his desire to be naked was at the same time he was using that spot as his pooping spot. Nother better than poopy butt prints!

I think TB comes by his poop fascination naturally, as my husband has an equal fascination. Last night he came upstairs from cleaning the litter boxes and asked where the camera was. Of course I had to ask why...and he said that there was the biggest turd in the litter box that he had ever seen and he needed to document it. He was sure that there most be a "Worlds greatest poops" show or website. At a minimum he said, he was going to take it to our vet to show off. I'm regretting now that I didn't let him take the picture, or even go see it myself. Now I'm curious.

Amazing Daddy called me at work a couple weeks ago just to tell me about the shit he took. He said it was the BIGGEST and BEST shit he had ever had. In fact, he figured his colon had never been cleaner. How exactly do you respond to that? "Great job honey, I knew you had it in you!"?, or "Well you know babe, thats one of the reasons I married you."?

Reminds me of the old highschool come back "do you want a medal for that? Or just a chest to pin it on."