Object Permanence

Today, to make room for a new, lighted shelf I'm building to sprout seedlings for my garden, I took on a task I've been postponing for a long time— reorganizing my basement storage shelves.

I've been telling myself to do it for almost a year now. And for almost a year now, I've been telling myself I didn't want to do it because it would be tedious, because it would be time-consuming, because there could be spiders lurking, because I'm allergic to dust.

Because I needed to rake the sweetgum balls out of yard, or clean the oven, or paint the bathroom, or dig a new garden plot in the front yard instead.

But today, as I broke down old appliance boxes to recycle, and rearranged storage bins, and vacuumed up dust, and cobwebs, and even a spider or two, I remembered the real reasons why I didn't want to do it.

I didn't want to do it because I didn't want to see that big bin of fabric, full of sewing projects I started but never finished, silent monument to a habit of failing to finish things.

I didn't want to do it because I didn't want to see the moving boxes from our move to this house two years ago— every single box saved, folded neatly, stacked in organized by size and shape, ready and waiting to be used again. Because in 28 years, I've lived in 22 different houses and apartments, and the boxes stand testament to the fact that I am incapable of not expecting to have to move. Because who knows when the airport will seize my family's home or my parents will divorce or my mother will lose her job or the landlord will sell out from under us or my Dad's girlfriend will find out he's cheating or the ceiling will cave in or my bi-polar roommate will stop paying rent and start having loud sex with my ex-boyfriend in the next room or my (now very EX) fiance will fail pre-med the same year I graduate and slowly turn into an angry, controlling binge drinker, or my husband's employer will suddenly go bankrupt and his last check will bounce and four weeks later, we'll find out that I'm pregnant?

How can a happily married, stable, working adult like me possibly believe that she owns a home that will not somehow disappear when she looks in the other direction?

I didn't want to reorganize that basement storage space, because I didn't want to see the folded high chair, the covered bouncy seat, the infant car seat carefully wrapped in plastic to keep out the dust, the bins full of baby clothes, all washed, neatly folded, and sorted by size, waiting for the next baby. The next baby. Waiting for four years, now, for a next baby we haven't chosen yet. A next baby that may never come.

I didn't want to see the box of handwritten letters from friends I now never speak to.

I didn't want to see the telescope two adults who both wanted to be astronauts as kids never, ever take out of its box to look at the stars.

But I did want to start seedlings for my garden.

So I cleaned my basement anyway.

What? You Didn't Think I'd Quit, Did You?

It's just been me being inconstant, unsure of myself, and generally prone to fits of introversion, ennui and melodramatic melancholy again. I'm feeling bloggier now. Carry on.

Secession

A contingent from the Lakota Nation is attempting to secede from the U.S., citing violation of treaty agreements.

I found this story on Metafilter. Someone in the comments section said, referring to the non-Lakota people living in the disputed region:

"It also includes countless private residences and property. Imagine waking up and learning that your house is now in land claimed as part of someone else's country."

Imagine that, indeed! Waking up one morning, and finding that someone has claimed your land as their own! Without even asking! And now they want you to submit to the rule of a foreign government! Run by people who aren't even the same race or culture that you are!



(I LOLed. The sad, ironic sort of LOL.)

Exploding Grammar Headache

Okay.

Given my recent laxity in posting, what power on Earth could make me post twice in one day?

A GROCERS' APOSTROPHE, that's what. ON MY CHRISTMAS CARDS. The ones I was planning to send out TOMORROW.

Misplaced apostrophes make Mommy angry.

Bad Target photo people. Bad, bad, bad. If I had a ruler, I would smack you with it.

Now my poor husband is driving back there in the dark, in the snow, to argue grammar with a highschooler getting paid ten bucks an hour. I wish him luck, given the girl I just spoke with on the phone about the problem was about as educated as a box of rocks.

I guess you get what you pay for. Next year, I am totally making the cards myself by hand for eleventy billion cents a piece with scrapbooking crap from Archiver's.

Junk Funk

A lot of things have been falling apart around my house lately.

In the past two months:

-One brand new plastic colander cracked when I tried to pick it up after filling it half-full with green beans from my garden.

-Another brand new metal colander that was supposedly stainless steel started to rust. (I mean, really, now. Who makes a colander that corrodes in the presence of water? Who does that? Why, apparently, the same people who make a plastic colander that cracks under the massive weight of a small pile of green beans-- Chefmate.)

-A pricey supposedly rust-proof silicon-coated whisk that I purchased less than six months ago ALSO began to rust.

-A two-month-old pair of my husband's pants began to fray at a seam sufficiently that I could not repair them.

-A nightlight in the bathroom stopped working-- not the bulb, but the light itself. When my husband tried to test it with his multimeter to see if it conducted any current, he discovered that--

-My husband's multimeter has mysteriously stopped working.

-The toilet AND the sink in the master bath clogged at the same time. When tried to unclog them with the auger we bought for months ago, we couldn't, because the auger, despite having been thoroughly cleaned and stored in a dryish place, had completely rusted.

-The remote control to my son's totally awesome remote control moon night light that shows all the different phases of the moon stopped functioning.

-A package of brand new, Disney licensed big-boy underpants for my son came with two of the three pairs already coming apart at the seams.

-My computer hard drive died such a thoroughly tragic death that even my major computer mojo master husband could not resuscitate it.

-The hard drive to my husband's Linux server in the basement ALSO somehow got corrupted to the point that my husband had to reinstall the operating system.

All of these recent unhappy accidents-- along with the rash of recent toy recalls the mainstream media have gleefully gone about terrifying us all with-- have set me to thinking a fair bit lately about how difficult it has become in the past several years for ordinary middle-class people like myself to buy decently made things that last.

Though I have pretty much always, out of necessity, been a mostly* thrifty sort of shopper, I am not the sort to value low cost over quality. When given the choice-- i.e., the cash-- to choose between a low-cost item that is obviously cheaply made and a higher-cost item that is clearly crafted to last, I will nearly always choose the latter. From a practical standpoint, I know paying a bit extra for better quality is likely to save me money in the long run.

And, from an environmentalist standpoint, I know that buying well-made goods that last is better for the environment than buying cheap goods that will soon be thrown out and replaced.

But from a philosophical standpoint, too, I simply appreciate objects that are well-made. I find it much more pleasing to buy a thing when I feel as though another human being really put some thought, effort and skill into creating it. This preference of mine is one of the reasons I like living in my fifty-year-old house. When I look at the hand-troweled patterns in the mud over the drywall, for instance, I think of all the time some person spent making sure those whorls looked just right fifty years ago, I feel a deep appreciation for that unknown man's dedication to his craft. I never felt this way looking at the hastily slapped-together walls so common in more recent construction.

So, whether I am purchasing a house, a table, or a kitchen knife I am willing to spend a little extra time searching, and spend a little extra money, if I have it, to get something that was made with a little extra care.

But I feel like lately it is becoming next-to-impossible for a middle-income person such as myself to buy everyday items, like household goods and clothing, that are made to last. It's not so much that prices have gone up-- it's that the quality of consumer goods across the board seems, at least in my personal experience, to have gone down.

I remember when I could buy a pair of khaki pants at Target or Old Navy, and have those pants last me for three years even if I wore them twice a week. Now it seems like no matter where I go to shop for clothing-- even if I go someplace slightly more upscale, like The Gap, or a fancy department store-- everywhere I look I see garments made of the cheapest possible fabric, or clothes that are already sporting loose threads, frayed seams, or missing buttons right there on the rack. And no item of clothing I buy anymore seems to last me more than a year. I have shirts I bought five years ago that still look new, and shirts I bought six months ago that are falling apart.

I remember when I could plunk down $10-$15 on a stainless steel colander and have it turn out to be, well, a stainless steel colander.

It would be easy to blame all the shoddiness I seem to see on store shelves lately on global free markets and the outsourcing of U.S. manufacturing jobs to foreign countries. But, to tell the truth, when I DO make a point of trying to buy American-made goods (an effort which has become increasingly challenging, given how few tangible goods are actually made here these days), I generally find that THOSE products are cheap junk, too. Like the "Made in the USA!!!" steel storage shelves we bought for our basement recently that were so warped it took two people three hours, a vise and a hammer to put a simple six-shelf unit together. Or the domestically made flag-and-pole set I bought on the Fourth of July that has already practically rusted in half.

I can only conclude that pretty much no company, anywhere, cares anymore about making quality products. And that few business people, anywhere, care anymore about such concepts as pride in workmanship, integrity, or honor. Which is kind of a discouraging thought regarding the moral state of global human society.

I do have some hope left, though. After I tracked down the company that made my son's moon light, and emailed them asking for a replacement remote control, a customer service representative named Jenn actually wrote me back, personally, and sent me a new remote that actually worked in less than a week. I didn't even have to send the broken remote back in. No receipts, proof-of-purchase, mother's maiden name, or ownership rights to first-born children required.

It was practically a miracle.


*Good haircuts, high-heeled boots, books, and gardening accessories notably excepted

I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself

Last week, my son turned three. My husband turned . . . twenty-something (I'll never tell). My sister graduated from college. Some in-laws we haven't seen in several months came into town from Kansas. And I had my third Mother's Day. (Did I mention I spent my first Mother's Day giving birth?) And I had an existential crisis about what I want to do with my life, including whether I ought to be getting to making another baby right now, or trying to finally get back on the fast track with my currently mommy-tracked career. (Which is? What is that I wanted to be when I grew up again, exactly?)

I have meaningful things to write about all of these events. But, today, my frazzled brain has chosen to gift you instead with the lyrics of the song that Isaac spontaneously composed this evening while getting ready for his bath:

You wanna see something, little girl?
I'm gonna make a game.
You can't see me anywhere--
you can only see the rain.

Heavens. Am I raising the next Burt Bacharach?

The Blahs

See the title of my blog?

I've been feeling especially discontented lately.

I'm sorry I haven't been around much. I hope I'll be back soon.

Discombobulated

I am sorry; I just can't seem to write here right now. My head is full of things to write about, but I can't seem to bring my thoughts together coherently enough lately to post. I would say I haven't had time to post lately, but that's not entirely true. It is true that I have been terribly busy over the past two weeks, but I have left a couple of marathon comments on other people's blogs over the last couple of days and I could easily have spent that time posting here instead. But for some reason, I nearly always find it easier to respond to other people's thoughts than I do to organize my own. And the truth is, I enjoy reading and responding to other people's work a great deal more than I do composing my own.

I am not giving up; I will return. I have just been under a lot of stress lately, with a new work project, the prospect of buying a house, and all sorts of other random challenges popping up lately, as they are wont to, where I least expect or want them.

(For example, my glasses malfunctioned the other day. One of the lenses, which has never been quite secure since I got this pair a few months ago, popped clear out. I tried to fix it with my trusty screw kit, but the lens wouldn't stay in. So I took a trip to the not-so-close store where I'd gotten the glasses, and tried to get them fixed there. They fixed the lens, but in the process, they obviously scratched my not-cheap designer frames. When I complained about this, the technician who had made the error proceeded trying lamely and rudely to minimize his mistake, attempting to make fun of me by saying, "Do you actually need glasses if you are going to notice a scratch that small?" It was two scratches, and they were not small. After I glared at him he agreed to try to fix them. He made them even worse. The new gouge in my frames was so bad, he rushed out of the lab to search the inventory surreptitiously for a replacement frame, and then, realizing they were out, sheepishly offered to order me new frames before even showing my old ones to me. It will take two weeks to get new ones. Then I will have to risk my expensive, "you're so blind we have to send out to the out of state lab for your prescription, and that will take three weeks" polycarbonate lenses in the hands of this assclown or one of his associates once more. Joy. All sorts of random things like that have been happening lately).

(Wow, I just wrote a lot there, didn't I? Does this count as a post? I guess so. There you go, fans.)

(Now I am going to sleep, because it is already morning, and I have 50 billion things to do tomorrow).

Sooo Tired

Oy . . . will I ever finish that post I keep talking about? Now I feel bad for mentioning it. I really thought I'd have it done and up the very next day when I first mentioned it, and now look at me. I'm such a blog tease. You're all going to start smacking me around at some point. Or maybe you'll come by and spray "BLOG TEASE" on my house in whipped cream.

Today has been a very mentally exhausting day. Husband and I were trying to go over finances and work plans and possible pre-school plans for the boy this morning and I feel like I am just faced with so many important choices over the next several months, and I just can't seem to figure out which choices make the most sense. I feel so immature in the face of so much of my life lately.

When do people actually start feeling like competent, responsible adults? I am beginning to think the answer must be: never. All those people who acted like competent, responsible adults in front of me when I was a child were just putting on a big show to make it seem like they had everything under control, when in reality they were just confused and overwhelmed by life on a regular basis. If I am lucky enough to live to be 100, in my mind, if it still functions at that point at all, I will probably still be about 16.

Then also today we had to deal with an emergency "fix my computer" call from my sister. One of the benefits/hazards of being married to a computer genius is that everyone you know is always calling your husband to come perform CPR on their broken machines. I was actually glad to visit her as I don't see her very often. But the woman has no concept of childproofing. None whatsoever. She and her boyfriend are anthropology students. Who, in their early 20s, have already managed to travel most of the western hemisphere. And filled their house with all sorts of unique art and artifacts from their travels.

Many of which they keep at the eye-level of a child.

So, it was mostly a night of me running around behind an over-stimulated just-back-from-vacation two-year-old, hissing:

"Sharp!"
"Fragile!"
"Expensive!"
"Hot!"
"Look with your EYES, not with your HANDS."
"DON'T %*#$*&% #*@#& TOUCH THAT!"

And now, I just want to sleep . . .

Testing, Testing . . .

Is this thing still on?

Okay, so, yeah, uh, my husband was out of town last week, and, because we are poor souls with no lives and therefore almost never go anywhere, this was the first time either one of us had been gone for longer than a day, and so my son was all freaking out and refusing to sleep at night and constantly asking where Daddy was, and it kinda sucked.

During this time despite the suckiness I wrote out this whole elaborate outline for an audio post based on a meme I got tagged for, and then I fought with a decidedly cranky Blogger to get my audio post account working, and then I decided my post idea sucked and I needed to do it better, and I came up with this really brilliant idea to write a series of vibrant, descriptive, touching present-tense personal narrative vignettes describing moments in my past and read them out loud, and then I didn't follow through.

(Have you noticed this theme? This theme of me working really hard on something, and then trashing it, and then trying to do it better, but not following through? Yeah. This is the story of my life. I am a perfectionist with little drive (outside of paid work, that is) and no self-confidence. These traits do not play well together. Blogging was supposed to be my lazy outlet, a playground for my mind where I could hang out and write stuff and not care if it was any good or made any sense to anyone but myself. And then I realized that, like, people, cool people, awesomely talented wonderful beautiful admirable people, ACTUALLY READ THIS SHIT. Uh. Oh . . . ).

Also, this weekend, being Father's Day weekend, was kind of booked.

Anyway, just wanted to say: I love my husband-- he's the best dad ever; I my readers-- you're the best readers ever-- and I promise promise promise I will write lots this week! And maybe even finish that post I was tagged for.

A Week Late and Several Marbles Short

Where has The Discontented One been?

1.) Sulking, discontentedly. Hiding in a deep, dark mental cave. Basking, if you will, in a long dark teatime of the soul.

2.) Re-reading The Da Vinci Code, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, and Borges' Ficciones. In an attempt to reorder her brain cells in such a fashion as to make them cease to wish sulking. It didn't really work.

(Yes, fellow book snobs, I know The Da Vinci Code sucks, from a literary standpoint, in terms of writing quality, but the twisted plotting is fun, and I was in a free-speechy stick-it-to-the-whiny-establishment sort of mood this week, even though I wasn't doing much talking).

Of course, like all of you other MommyBloggers out there, I thought Her Bad Mother had an excellent idea in her Mother's Day Mommy-Blogger Love-In. I found out about this whole beautiful bloglove exchange when Andrea over at Little Bald Doctors put me (*blush*) on her Mother's Day honor roll.

But did I post? No. I drafted. I dawdled. I re-drafted. I edited.

I finally got fed up with these sort of delay tactics, and turned off my computer for three days.

Now, here I am, swimming frantically in the fading wake of the Love Boat (By the by, did I mention I can't really swim?) Chasing the caboose of the meme train. Arriving at the blog party just as the DJ packs up and the waiters start collecting empty champagne bottles and ushering the last few weepy drunks out the door.

However, I am nothing if not one of the world's greatest procrastinators.

And some people need some props here, and I suppose they come better belated than never.

So, here they come, the women you've all been waiting for:

Mommybloggers who've made a difference. In my life, and I suspect, in the lives of many other women looking for the wit, wisdom and companionship of other mothers online.

I'll start with one of my earliest supporters in blogland: Andrea of Little Bald Doctors

An amazingly prolific blogger, Andrea never ceases to amaze me with the consistent beauty and coherence of her long, frequent, essay-quality posts. Despite coping with her own stressful day job and her husband's erratic work schedule on top of the trials and tribulations of mothering a two-year-old, this woman is a regular blogging machine who puts weaker blogbeings such as myself to shame.

She is also one of the most versatile bloggers I've come across. I never know when I visit whether I'll find a charming anecdote about her son's freakish obsession with Spongebob, or blistering social commentary about the state of mainstream journalism. I will not be at all surprised to see her name on the NYT Bestsellers list as soon as she finds time to finish that thriller she's working on.

Then there are Lisa, of Midwestern Mommy, and Dawn, of I Am Doing The Best I Can.

I can honestly say that finding Dawn's and Lisa's blogs really actually seriously and truly rescued me from a black pit of despair.

When I started blogging here at Blogger, I was still struggling to come to terms with my son's serious eating problems, trying to wrap my head around the fact that I was trying to mother a baby who JUST WOULDN'T EAT. My very first entry on this blog was a sort of a cry in the wilderness, searching for understanding I felt might never come. After months of healthcare professionals running invasive, often painful tests on my child, shaking their heads in befuddlement, and nearly always finally insisting that all of my son's problems must just come down to "manipulative behavioral issues" on my son's behalf which they could only attribute to "inexperienced parenting" on mine, finally, I found a group of occupational therapists who were able to give me a true diagnosis: my son had Sensory Integration Disorder, and it actually wasn't my fault.

And then, hard on the heels of this much sought-after diagnosis, who should appear almost instantly from the internet ether with words of support and wisdom but Lisa and Dawn? Women who also each had a child with this disorder. Kind strangers who showed more understanding and compassion about what my son and I were going through than I'd received even from some close friends and family members.

Lisa, a powerfully (if occasionally oddly) funny woman who seems to constantly wear her wry sense of humor as an impenetrable armor against the slings and arrows of parenting, makes me laugh out loud with almost every single post, and she handles the hurdles of raising a child with special needs with a grace and perspective I aspire to daily. Lisa radiates positive energy into the world through her computer.

And Dawn, whose daughter has learning disabilities and ADD on top of Sensory Integration Disorder. Dawn who had been a professional childcare expert before being a mother, who thought she knew how to handle any kid on the planet until her own came along. Dawn who had to wait not my measly eighteen months, but FIVE YEARS before finally getting a diagnosis for her daughter's many health and behavioral problems.

As I read her archives I discovered that nearly every difficult, scary thing I was going through with my own child, Dawn had already been through with her daughter-- in fact, that Dawn and her daughter had already both been through far worse-- and they were both still alive and kicking. Kicking serious ass, in fact. In tandem. I always imagine their house is sort of like The Matrix.

I started reading I Am Doing the Best I Can because it made me feel like my family and I weren't alone with my son's mysterious illness.

I keep reading it because it's one of the best damn blogs I've ever found.

I am sure by now that Dawn realizes I've been stalking her like a madwoman since the day she first left a comment on my site, and yet, she's much too polite to question me about my mental health. She's just classy like that. (Although I'm sure if she saw me in person wearing, say, an oversized track suit and worn-out tennis shoes from Target, she wouldn't hesitate to turn me in to the Fashion Police).

More recently, I've become positively addicted to Liz at Mom-101, who is probably one of the best writers on Earth, and most assuredly deserves whatever astronomical salary I hope to high heaven someone is actually paying her for flying between New York and L.A. weekly for her supercool advertising job, often having to leave the second most adorable baby I've ever seen behind for several days.

Liz describes her struggle to balance her home life with her career with such pathos-inspiring immediacy and such breathtaking beauty that I sometimes feel convinced if enough corporate overlords were forced to read her blog, Congress would suddenly pass a law declaring every day a Take Your Baby to Work Day.

But I'm probably giving the corporate overlords too much credit.

And my newest blog crush is Lildb over at I Obsess, a fairly new blogger whose well-composed musings remind me a lot of myself a little over a year ago, when my son was the same age her son is now. Only she writes better.

But you know, the sappy truth is, Mommybloggers, I love all of you. (And Daddybloggers, I love you too!)

One of the main reasons it's taken me a week to finish this post is that I actually wanted to write about my whole damn blogroll. And a lot of people who aren't on my blogroll. Even a couple of people whose blogs touched me months or a year ago, who sadly don't have time to write anymore.

So much in my life changed when I became a parent, and so many of my real life friends have since drifted away, unable to handle my new child-altered lifestyle. One of the hardest parts of parenting my son, for me, has been the feeling of isolation I've felt from the adult world since I quit my job and began working from home.

And yet, through the parenting blog community, I have been able to find so much amazing advice, support, and companionship. I never believed a virtual world could be so fulfilling. I am grateful to so many of you for helping me keep my own sanity, often by publicly sharing how close you've come to losing your own.

Thanks, friends.

This Is Not a Post

Okay, so this morning, realizing that I hadn't posted in a week, and fearing that any cool kids here in blogland who've been checking me out lately to see if I might be hip enough to blogroll were probably all about to drop me like a bad habit if I didn't post something interesting TODAY, I started racking my brain for something to post about.

Should I steal Dawn's idea from many weeks back, as I've been meaning to ever since I saw it, and post photos of my bathroom, or, say, my ridiculously overstocked linen/utility closet, alongside some witty, self-deprecating commentary? Oh crap, that's right. The boy has been throwing screaming fits every time I bring out the camera lately, because he wants to play with it (and yes, he has a toy camera. In fact it's not even a toy camera-- it's a REAL, cheap film camera my husband doesn't use anymore. But he doesn't WANT that dumb old camera, because it doesn't have a nifty digital display). I don't know if I'm up for that sort of craziness before noon, thanks. We're out of milk, too, so I haven't had my coffee. Because my stomach wasn't up for black coffee today.

Should I post a long explanatory Public Service post, all about the symptoms of Sensory Integration Disorder, for those who come here and aren't quite sure what I'm talking about when I mention it? Peter Nacken asked me about this earlier today, and I've been meaning to do something like this for a while. But I want to link to all these other sites for that one, and I'm not in the mood do do research.

That post exploring the intricacies regarding teaching your American meltingpot children about their diverse racial, cultural and religious heritage I've been knocking around in my head? Aww, too heavy. How about next week?

Something on being a feminist SAHM? Am I too late to jump on this feminism meme? Is that so last week?

Argh!

Can you tell? I've been feeling so uninspired lately!

So why don't I just whine about my week, as usual?

Isaac's getting his last set of molars in, and therefore has been rockin' the premature terrible twos, and pretty much refusing to sleep when it's dark outside.

My husband has been sucked into a computer game all week, and I can't complain, because he really deserves some time to himself, and I'm actually quite glad he's been getting it, but it's sort of been cramping my internet addict style.

And yes, we have three computers in this house. But one of them is my husband's laptop, about which he is somewhat territorial, and anyway it's slow as molasses and only runs Linux. I have nothing against Linux, mind you, but it doesn't run Dreamweaver, or Photoshop, which I've been pretending to work in lately while I actually read blogs.

And the other computer only recently got reassembled after I finished refinishing the desk it lives on, and one of its speakers is broken because my husband knocked it off the monitor the other day, and I think I need to run an antivirus on it or something because Firefox keeps acting up.

I've been trying to finish a seemingly endless list of random chores that have been put off too long around the house, like spackling some nail holes, framing and hanging some photographs, fixing a door that hangs funny, reorganizing my pantry, reorganizing my study-in-the-bedroom to accommodate space for my husband's new electronic-device-building hobby, etcetera.

When my husband's not been on the good computer and I haven't been otherwise occupied, I've been messing with my new site graphics, which, after talking to this exceedingly picky and critical friend of mine who I used to do magazine layout with, I now think are HOPELESSLY AWFUL, and I feel like I might just have to scrap the whole theme.

And when not fixing up my house or sneaking onto the good computer I've been calling family member after family member trying to figure out what one day in the enitre 31 day month of May will somehow magically work out for all of them for Isaac's birthday, because apparently, not only do 50 family members expect to be invited, but they also expect us to schedule our son's birthday around ALL of their work and social schedules for the month.

My mother-in-law at one point even seriously suggested to me that we should just have the party more than three weeks after his birthday. More than. THREE WEEKS. AFTER. "He's too young to even know when his birthday is," she insisted. "You could even do it a whole month later and he wouldn't notice."

She may have been right, but this reminded me far too much of my own mother's sudden "epiphany" right around my much-younger brother's second birthday that she could really just skip all holidays outside of Christmas until my brother was in elementary school, because he "wouldn't even know the difference anyway." Not because of any religious issues, mind you, but just because she thought hiding Easter eggs and such for such a small person was "too much hassle."

(Please note that this wasn't because my mother was a bad parent. She was just burned out on kid wrangling after single-parenting two girls while working her way through school, and after her third kid turned out to have serious behavioral and health problems, well, let's just say the poor woman was sort of kicking off a decade-long nervous breakdown at the time).

But guess what? I was talking to little bro on the phone recently. He is now almost thirteen years old, and turns out he DOES remember those years.

In that, he remembers that his oldest sister painted and hid Easter eggs, made Valentine's decorations and cards for him, and made sure he went trick-or-treating every year ;) He recently made a point to thank me for this.

(What, did you honestly think I'd let the kid go without holidays? What kind of a big sister do you think I am? Pul-lease).

So, regarding Isaac's birthday, finally, I put my foot down, and . . .

Told a co-worker of John's we can't go to his wedding but might be able to make it to the reception, so I can have Isaac's birthday party on a Saturday, even though I wanted to have it on a Sunday, during the middle of the day, even though I wanted to have it in the late afternoon or early evening, so that all of Isaac's grandparents and aunts and uncles (excepting the ones on my side) can come without having to rearrange a single thing on any of their schedules.

I am such a wimp.

But at least my son's party will be in the same week as his actual birthday.

So, anyway, that's been my week. How was yours?