He’s more like his mommy than he knows.

D started kindergarten this week, which is a full day program here where we live.

I’m packing him a lunch from home, so far. I’d first been worried about his peanut allergy (come to find out, they only have one, very apparent, item that has peanuts in it – a peanut butter and jelly sandwich). Then I was then worried about all the other hippie stuff I worry about, high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated bullshit. But that’s sort of beside the point though – the point being that D broke his brand new Transformers lunch box zipper on the second day he used it. That was kind of tragic for him, because he loved that lunch box and was very excited when we found it.

You know, it’s Transformers. (more…)

Out hiking in the woods. It’s dark and ominous, about to storm, the kind of day that inspires stories… No, really, we’re a mile from home and about to get rained on.

Chapter 5 continues to be this big fat black hole, where I keep putting things into it, and nothing ever comes out.

Reading my first Janet Fitch (Paint it Black), she’s amazing! Every sentence is so nuanced and alive! Oh, *sigh* I want to write like this!

Bought some fresh, organic, local strawberries today from the farmers’ market, and they came with a fresh, still alive and wiggling worm… Cut your strawberries open before eating, people! You know, unless you like the extra protein… :\

Dylan says, “Mommy, I’m getting bigger. I’m almost a man.”

Dylan, on his bug bite medicine, “Like lotion for vampire bites.” – and it even doubles as a good title for a short story too, lol!

Pilot Speed are my new favorite band of the moment! (Remind me a lot of Radiohead, or Muse) Love, love, LOVE!

Note to self: probably not possible to finish both five novel chapters and six LH updates before this trip, in two weeks, just so you know.

Well, at least I accomplished something before the monkey-child started climbing on me. Maybe more later.

This has never been a very personal blog, apart from telling you how much of my novel hasn’t been written, or some adorable thing my child did. I feel much more comfortable masking my personal life in writing by wrapping it up in fiction.

There are things I want to write about, but none of them are describing what’s going on with my dad right now, especially when I hardly understand most of this to begin with. Writing about all of that, how fast things can go from one thing, to another, to another, makes me feel kind of panicky. So instead, I’ll carefully skirt around what you’re probably most curious to know, and tell you everything else…

I want to say that it was nice to catch up with family again, even if it is under the most stressful of circumstances. I’m always surprised at what a BIG family we have, when you add us all together, my dad’s side, my step-mom’s, and even my mom’s side, closer than ever even after she’s been gone thirteen years. We’re a regular circus, let me tell you!

I’ll tell you that Dylan spent four days in the ICU waiting room, and came home snotty with a temperature of 100.5, which isn’t even a real fever (is it?) and now I’m worried he might have swine flu or that flesh eating bacterial infection you get from hospitals, when really, it’s probably just a cold from playing with his cousins and random strange children. And now he’s cranky and needy, and hugely spoiled on attention from the past week.

But he seems to have gotten even smarter, cuter, and a little more mature in the past five days, if that’s even possible…

Which leads me to say that this child needs to potty train! I think it’s not his choice anymore. He turned three in July, and he’s way too smart to be wearing diapers like a baby. Just like all his other growing up steps, giving up bottles, moving to a big boy bed, giving up his binky, we’ve had to just give him a firm push towards it (= make him do it, lol!). Because left to his own devices, it’s looking like he’ll be quite happy to wear diapers until he’s in college.

I want to say that I’ve always been more of a thinker than a talker. I’ve been called shy, but as a child, my teachers called me reserved, and I think that’s much more fitting a term for it. So even when my dad’s nurses say, “Talk to him, he can hear you,” I still don’t have much to say, not after the first or the second or the third time. I don’t say much under normal circumstances. So I sang a couple songs instead. I never sing for anybody without begging, so maybe that counts enough.

I’ll tell you that for as long as I can remember, I’ve been prepared to receive a phone call like I got Sunday night (and that alone is enough to make me feel terrible.) Maybe that’s partly because I’ve already lost my mom, and that I know these things – parents – don’t last forever. Some barely live long enough to see their own children reach adulthood. The other part is that people have faults. People have bad habits, and lifelong bad habits have consequences.

And I’ll tell you that three year-olds say the most heartbreaking things sometimes, and of course they don’t know what they’re saying when they say it – in fact, from their point of view, it’s all quite simple. The most heartbreaking thing I’ve heard all week is when Dylan said, “Grandpa just needs some x-rays and some medicine, and then he’ll wake up, and be all better, and we’ll say, Yay!”

We took a nice quiet stroll through DC after the fireworks, waiting for the trains to clear up – that didn’t happen, by the way. We walked for an hour after the fireworks and still waited for half an hour to get on a train back home. Everyone said it would be unbelievably, insanely busy. I guess it’s a learn from experience kind of thing – so hey, folks, guess what? The DC fireworks are insanely, unbelievably busy!

Hope everyone had a safe and fun 4th of July

Dylan was funny this morning. We looked out the window to find that the very persistent 18-inches of snow had finally melted away. Dylan’s reaction: “Oh, grass!” I wish I could even put as much enthusiasm into the word as he did. It was like he’d given up all hope he’d ever see it again

Yes, people GRASS! I don’t think we’ve seen it since November.

But grass isn’t the only thing exciting. We’re moving!!! (and OMG, OMG, OMG!) Hubby got a job in Alexandria, VA, and we have pretty much no clue what we’re doing, so any advice would be welcomed.

1.) How do you find an apartment when you live four states away? We’re taking a road-trip out there next week to do some apartment searching, to see what neighborhoods we might like (or afford) to live in. We’re thinking about the Chantilly, Centreville, Fairfax, Burke areas… maybe? Anyone care to share some thoughts on those areas?

And crap, it’s expensive there!!!

2.) How do you move your stuff? It sounds like a simple questions, but we’re quite stumped. I’m too scared to drive a U-Haul truck. We need more than a U-Haul van? I don’t think we could probably afford movers, nor do we really have enough stuff to warrant it. What about those Pods things? Anyone used those before?

And what the heck do we do once we get there, and have to unload the damn thing by ourselves with a toddler running around???

3.) Does anybody want to buy my barely functioning treadmill for $10?

Or my perfectly functioning washer and dryer for cheap?

Or does anybody want to come pick out some free baby toys?

4.) How do you keep a toddler occupied in a car for 9 hours?

5.) And where do you get cheap/free boxes without having to root through the trash?

And please tell me anything else I need to know. Thank you

I used to write songs about love, and loss, and God, and the tragic but hopeful state of the world.

Today, Dylan and I wrote a song, and the lyrics go: “Apple tree, apple tree. Apple juice, apple juice.”

I’ll save love and loss and tragedy and God for the novel, I think.

“Whoes saur.” It’s two words, pronounced: (whoes, rhymes with clothes, and saur like from dinosaur). I have no idea where he heard it. He’s been saying it forever, and we had no idea what he was talking about for the longest time. We still don’t know really. “Whoes” we think is a small blue cloth cooler underneath his old high chair. Because sometimes he’ll go to it and say, “Open the whoes.” The “saur” part is still anybody’s guess.

It’s just a little freaky, because you know how they say little children can see things that grown-ups cant? I just hope a “whoes saur” isn’t some interdimensionary being living in our cooler. Ack!

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 13
19826 words (on track = 21671)

Dylan is holding a red block, with a green block snapped on top. I wonder what he imagines it is? It might be a car, or a space ship, or a boat… we play this game sometimes.

“What is it?” I ask.

He says, very decidedly, “Green block.” How’s that for imagination?

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 5

9189 words (on track = 8335)

On track and a good deal ahead

I had no idea what I would write yesterday, and oddly, ended up writing a good portion of a chapter, a huge crisis moment for Lexi, all the way ahead in part 5! (I’m only on part 2 at the moment) Which means the scene is only hypothetical at this point, but I do have the next few parts pretty well sketched, so it’s likely to stick I think.

I don’t really feel confident writing these kinds of intense, fearful, high-danger kind of moments. How do you pull those off without being melodramatic? How do you make them believable? That’s the question of the day

My child plays with his trucks and tries to make a “vroom” noise, but instead ends up sounding like the “grrr” of a monster. It’s funny

I don’t know how he ended up being such a boy – trucks, cars, tractors, airplanes, digging in the mud, bugs! Oh the bugs! There must be something to cultural gender stereotypes, because I swear we had nothing to do with this. We’re computer nerds, people!

not a writer:

novel stats:
52,500 wds.
159 pages
ch. 5 of 13

Chapter five is coming along. Chapter five is a boy chapter – well, he’s not a boy, but a young man I guess. And it’s really fun to try to dig into a male mind, imagine how on earth one manages to get pee on the rim of the toilet, especially when you’ve been doing it for twenty-something years, lol. And what, exactly, is the fascination with lesbians to a man anyway? Considering the fact that they have no interest in men! Hubby is probably sick of all the questions I’m asking him.

These next few chapters are the part of the book I’m nervous about writing – where people are going to be mad, but I don’t want it to turn into a soap opera. Where people will be sad, but I don’t want anyone crying, “oh, pity me!” Where people make mistakes (and I have to let them!), and deal with the consequences. Eeek!

I guess if I end up turning it into melodrama, I can always try again. That’s why we have second drafts, right?