Wednesday's Week in Pictures (and Words)

I've got a mixed bag for you this week: school events, family events, and random awesomeness found on the streets of New York City. Enjoy!

An independent pharmacy's nostalgic storefront display

Would you ever see this (and the typewriter at the top) in the window at a CVS? No. Support your local small businesses, people. They are the lifeblood of your communities!

Jacob said "Make me black & white!"

This week's "Streets of New York WTF" moment:

INVASION!

Ethan's class had a Revolutionary War Stories puppet show on Friday, the culmination of a long project in which they each researched and wrote original short plays about a historical figure from colonial & revolutionary times. Ethan's assigned person? None other than Nathan Hale.

Remember? The "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country!" guy? Yes, he was caught while spying for us, and hanged at 21. Which Ethan, of course, re-enacted with his puppet. With glee. Thanks, wonderful, creative 4th grade teacher.

But next time? Maybe pick a better role model for my kid?

 

 

We had lots of rain.

Rain

After the rain

Saturday night we had FREE tickets to the hottest new show in town:

Of course we were running late, and trying to hustle boys through Times Square on a Saturday night was, well, trying. Emerging from the subway at 50th street, Broadway was packed. Walking four abreast clearly impossible, we split into teams of two, hustled our buns, and made it to the show on time, literally sliding into our seats at 8:04 as the lights went down.

Ethan & Dan on Broadway

Peter and the Starcatcher was a great show. Wonderful acting, brilliant and creative and very playful staging. An enjoyable evening for all. (Thanks for the tickets Aunt Patty.)

The Dress

I'm clearing out my closets. Trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. Trying to lighten up our load, to dispossess ourselves of some of our excess possessions, the clutter that that has taken over our lives.

I could claim it's the children and all their attendant... things. I could claim it's autism, citing how long we have to hold onto toys Ethan has long outgrown, because Jake has still not yet grown into them, or is so fondly attached to and revisits from time to time the toys of a much younger child. (Thomas, anyone?)

But this would be a big fat lie.

I have always been this way, surrounded by too much stuff. Not quite ready to be featured on an episode of Hoarders, but not quite NOT either. If there were a show called "They're serious collectors and clutterers but CAN throw out paper and trash and WILL donate outgrown clothes to others who can use them" you could sign me up.

It doesn't help that we live in a small apartment, no longer have a storage space downtown, and both my husband and I have had recent parental deaths land a lifetime of memory-filled THINGS into our laps. What we release now is never coming back. There is no ancestral attic or basement for the detritus of our and their (and our grandparents') lives.

There is just one small, overstuffed apartment, that we also need to live in.

Right now I am coming to terms with the fact that I am unlikely to ever again be the size or shape that I was in my twenties and thirties. And so all the clothes in the back of my closet, the stuff that has survived twenty years of previous purges, has to go.

Even lovely favorites, filled with memories... I bought that shirt at my first Sundance Festival... I used to go clubbing in the 80s in that crushed velvet jacket... that's the sundress I wore when I met my husband on Memorial Day weekend at Fire Island, fourteen years ago...

It's too much to hang onto. 

And yet.. and yet... there's one dress I cannot part with.

This:

The green velvet dress I wore to Thanksgiving, 2001.

My parents were in town. We were at my in-laws. And I was in a foul, foul, horrible mood. Just despondent.

You see, I had done a terrible thing that morning, had cheated and taken a home pregnancy test. Even though it was still days before it would be accurate. Even though we had been admonished, in no uncertain terms, to NOT DO THAT by the fertility clinic. We were just 23 days into our IVF cycle, a week and a day since the embryo transfer. Too. damn. soon.

But the box of pee sticks in the bathroom cabinet had sung their siren song of temptation to me that morning. I had been feeling so pregnant, surely there would be confirmation on a stick.

Really, I had been floating on the air of rising expectations for days. There had been signs and portents that yes, the IVF was successful.

And then that Thursday, Thanksgiving morning, I was just plummeted into the black pit of despair. Once more, a lone pink line on the pee-stick.

I lay on the sofa moaning and groaning, in mourning. I barely roused myself in time to shower and dress for Thanksgiving dinner across town. But I made sure to throw on a beloved dress that I always felt good in: the crushed green velvet.

That year, unlike the one just past, I was not spending Thanksgiving with my beloved cousins, but with my husband's family - who I am thoroughly fond of, but much less intimate with, so I couldn't really talk about what was going on.

I didn't even tell my husband what I'd done, as it was so against the rules and I didn't want to admit to being bad, bad, bad. Explaining my mood, I just mumbled something about having an ominous feeling, and that I was starting to think that maybe the IVF hadn't been successful.

I managed to eat my dinner and engage in some minimal, polite conversation. But then right afterward I withdrew and joined my elderly father in the living room as he was taking his traditional post-turkey sofa nap. I don't think I even got up for dessert, feeling thoroughly rotten, thinking to sleep off my funk.

So why would I possibly be nostalgic about this dress then, commemorating such a dreadful day?

Because two days later, on Saturday morning I peed on another stick and saw the most beautiful sight in the world: two pink lines, one fainter than the other but definitely, undeniably, there.

I was pregnant.

Very, in fact.

(yes, the twins)

And suddenly Thanksgiving Day was cast in a whole new light...

My mood swings, sudden despondency, near hysterics? Clearly a sign that the pregnancy hormones were starting to kick in, big time.

My need to nap after dinner? That the intense first trimester exhaustion had likewise begun.

So the dress, to me now, has magical qualities, evoking the beginning of my noticeable pregnancy. I'm keeping it. If I can wear it again someday, so much the better (green has always been a good color on me).

But until then? It's going in a box, alongside a photograph of five two-day-old embryos, a pair of tiny blue hospital bracelets with "Baby A" and "Baby B" on them. And a little white plastic stick with two pink lines on it.

What? You didn't think I could throw THAT out, did you?

And, for the first time in a long time, I'm linking up with Yeah, Write because I sorta kinda like this post and hope you did too. (But I'm on the Hang-out grid, not the challenge grid, because I missed being one of the first 50. Because I had to wait 'til the kids were asleep to edit and re-write. Damn my perfectionist ways!)

SOC Sunday: Feverish

I am struggling a bit right now. I wrote a really tough post about depression yesterday, the absolutely most beautiful day of the year when I stayed inside in my PJs. But it is just too raw, and I am not ready to publish it yet. So for now, this from today: 

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I lift Ethan's sweat-soaked body from my bed to carry him back to his.  Although his shirt is drenched through, his back feels cooler now. The fever's broken. Finally.

I silently wish him sweet dreams and an easy rest of the night's sleep. I start to make plans to scotch all my plans for tomorrow. I'll have a sick kid home with me to attend to, and he'll need lots of attention as well as chicken soup and saltines. I am deeply praying it's just a random 24-hour viral fever thing, and not the flu. Please. not. the. flu!

We have been, HE has been, lucky. So far in his nearly ten years on the planet he has had one flu, two strep throats, a few handfuls of colds, three maybe four stomach bugs. (Yes I *AM* knocking on wood and spitting over my left shoulder as I write this.)

We have had no stitches, no broken bones, no trips to the emergency room. And not for his brother Jacob either, and for a sensory seeking kid with autism that;s quite a miracle, I am well aware.  (Rest assured: more knocking and spitting.)

But the downside of tihs is feeling ill hits Ethan really hard, feels very abnormal to him, deeply frightening. He came to me in the bathroom this afternoon as I was FINALLY going to get to take my shower. He burst in crying "Mom, somethings wrong! My teeth are chattering and I feel hot one minute and cold the next and then both at the same time! What's wrong with me?!?"

He was genuinely perplexed and panicked, it had been that long since he'd had a spiky fever. When I went to feel him he was massively hot clear to halfway down his belly. That's between 101 and 102 in my mom guestimation book.

I calmed him down by reassuring him it was "just a fever" and started the alternating motrin & tylenol train rolling. Within an hour he was slurping ginger ale and playing a calm Wii game. But by bedtime he was pretty punk. And I was wiped out too.

And, on top of this?  Jacob was in massive meltdown mode all day because he lost TV for the WHOLE day due to some early bad behavior. Because I, like an idiot, had said - "If you do that ONE more time you will lose TV for the whole day!" - and then I had to follow through. And tihs was before Ethan got sick. We survived. But that's a whole other story for another day.

I never did get my shower.

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New to SOCS?  It’s five minutes of your time and a brain dump.  Want to try it?  Here are the rules…

• Set a timer and write for 5 minutes only.
• Write an intro to the post if you want but don’t edit the post. No proofreading or spell-checking. This is writing in the raw.

You can do it, too!  Click on the picture link and let's hear your 5 minutes of brilliance...

Z is for Zzzzzzzzzz

Z is for Zzzzzzzzzz

Catching a few delightful zees.

Or?

Asleep at the wheel.

It's how I'm feeling these days, quite often.

A victim of insomnia; though I am also sleep's bully, keeping it from its proper place in my life quite willfully.

For, you see, it's not so much that I can't fall asleep, it's that I won't let myself go to bed. Night-owl Ethan often does not go down until 10 or 10:30. That's when my "me time" begins. And there is so very, very much to be done.

When I do manage to put myself to bed at a decent hour? A nighttime's rise up to consciousness - whether to relieve a bladder or turn from an aching hip - will no longer be a brief blip in my slumbers; will now result in extended wakefulness. If you have gotten an email from me at 3 am? Yes. This.

And then there is unfortunate circumstance: a child's middle-of-the-night projectile vomit; my mother's ER visits, always an all-night affair, occasionally even 36 hours when hospital beds are scarce.

All conspiring to rob me of my rightful slumber.

I used to be a good sleeper, once.

The sandman and I enjoyed an easy, cozy relationship.

Before kids.

Before autism.

Before ADD.

Before peri-menopause.

Before elderly parents.

Before death.

Before blogging.

Aye, there's the rub: I confess I write best at about two am. It's not just the quiet in my household, kids tucked away in their beds. Even though I live in the city that never does, in this mostly residential, very family neighborhood, even though it is, yes, Manhattan, most of the people all around me are fast asleep.

Not all, certainly not that. Somewhere in my building there is surely a teenager chatting away on Facebook, an old man raiding the refrigerator, a new mother pacing the floorboards with her restless babe.

Yet still, it is enough. There is a psychic calm all about. Cars along Riverside swoosh by sporadically. The doormen are ensconced in lobby chairs, struggling to remain alert to the rare late arrivals, no longer jauntily calling out to each other from beneath sidewalk awnings. The brainwave patterns surrounding me are buzzing in the deep deltas of sleep. 

And my words, which serve such pragmatic purposes during the day, find themselves bubbling up from deeper pools in the dark; flowing into channels that delight and surprise me, swirling eddies carrying me along to places I have only glimpsed before, maybe in dreams.

And so, when I awaken at three am, having fallen asleep bolt upright on the couch while attempting to watch a movie on TV with my husband, I don't just pop myself into bed. I sit down at the computer: prime writing time has begun.

There's a reason I'm sleepwalking through my days sometimes, and its name is blog.

And I like this writing life so much, yes I do, that I'm willing to sacrifice a standard good night's sleep to it; catch my z's when and where I can.

And, please note:

Z is also for something really important to me... Zygotes.

Those are the earliest bits of us, what happens when a pair of compatible gametes meet cute, get happy together; existing for four days only before they become blastocysts, then embryos, then fetuses. (And then, eventually, if all goes according to plan: babies.)

I have zygotes on the brain right now because, having just realized that I've never truly told the tale here, I'm busy writing out the story of my twin boys' conception. Not a terribly sexy story I'm afraid, as it was a highly technical affair involving petri dishes, not mood lighting. Yes, IVF. Stay tuned...

This post has been inspired by and linked up to Jenny Matlock's Alphabe-Thursday writing meme, the letter of the week most obviously "Z." And yes, after this she's going to start back at the beginning with "A" again. Join in!

Wordless Wednesday: Things that made me smile

I was out and about the city today; places to go, people to meet, errands to run. And my handy little iPhone camera came with me. 

I just shot the things that caught my eye. 

I like things that look like other things - a shrub that takes on the shape of a mighty tree, a sidewalk crack that becomes a textured abstract painting. Familiar objects whose graphic qualities please me.

And people too, with heads or without.

Woman on the M79 bus

Reflection

completely random stranger in motion

And of course, some flowers. There will always be urban flowers.

Photographing like this makes me think of my father. Until the very end, he was never out and about without his camera, viewing the world with the eye of an artist.

I take you with me, Dad.

You would have really liked that sidewalk crack.

This is Not a Post

This is not a real blog post.

I just don't have time for that right now. Neither the time nor the energy. So I'll just sketch things out. You can fill in the details.

I thought things would slow down after Listen to Your Mother had come and gone.

Not hardly. There's always something. All the little things I didn't do in those last frantic weeks of preparing for the show? Still needed to be done.

Mountains of laundry. Sinkloads of dishes. A living room that looks like a toystore threw up in it. The house elves did not come in and magically take care of all that shit.

And in the midst of it all I decamped for an overnight to Philly to hear THEIR own LTYM.  A one day road trip with my producing partner Holly, the Culture Mom, which couldn't have been more fun.

The wonderful LTYM - Philly Producing Team

But I returned to the same workload I had left, and then some. (Dad in charge. Need I say more?)

And then there was Mothers Day. More work. A brunch in New Jersey with the in-laws.

If this were a post I would tell you how tough it was this year on Mothers Day, being with my mother, who is a mere ghost of herself. She has forgotten who nearly everybody is. She could barely walk, gets less steady on her feet each passing week, yet won't use the rollator walker - of which she has THREE - out of stubborn pride.

Mothers Day

It makes me really sad to be around her. I want my Mommy back. Even the befuddled, filter-less mom I've been taking care of these past few years was still feisty, funny. I'll take her.

This subdued old woman who just sits and vaguely smiles with nothing to say and no idea where she is or why she's there? Just breaks my heart.

She appreciated the sunshine and greenery on the backyard deck. She smiled at our niece's toddler twin boys who so remind us all of toddler Ethan & Jake, simultaneously so long ago and just a blink away.

But she no longer plays with my boys. Doesn't know how to talk to them, their interests incomprehensible to her now limited comprehension.

If this were a post I would tell you about how Jacob has developed a whole new panoply of annoying habits this spring, including a frequent maniacal loud giggling laugh that we call "the silly laugh" because calling it "the maniacal creepy laugh" is just too... creepy.

I would tell you how the medicine that was helping Ethan to focus all year started to make him paranoid and angry so we had to stop it, and now we're back to square one.

I would tell you.

But I'm too tired to write that post. You'll have to fill in the blanks. I'm sure you can.

Now, sit down here and take a little nap with me. There, that's nice. And when we wake up we can fold some laundry. And I will tell you...
 

I am linking this up with Just Write, because this was ... just written.

Talking about Screen-love at Hopeful Parents

It's not the 10th of the month, it's the 12th. But I'm over at Hopeful Parents today. I may be a day late (well, 2 days actually), but at least I'm not a dollar short.

My post: No screen-free for me

All about how we were so NOT participating in screen free week over here. But I am working to accept that, for TV is what taught Jake to talk and for that I will always be grateful.

It has been some week - my Listen to Your Mother Show happening last Sunday, My NYT Motherlode Blog post appearing last Monday, and then an overnight road trip yesterday to see Philly's LTYM sister show. (I never go away overnight!) Whew.

Hopefully things will settle down a bit soon. Meanwhile, go read me over there today. OK? Thanks.