toddlerspit

Addi doesn’t have “chicken pops” after all.  It turns out she developed a violent allergy to the antibiotics she was on for the ear infections, and that it caused her to break out in hideous hives, and for her little hands and feet to swell up like balloons.  And she had no idea what was happening to her.  “Mama!  My hands and feet hurt a lot!” she’d cry, waddling to me on her little hamhock feet.  “When am I going to turn into chicken pops?” she’d ask.  I have no idea what she had envisioned–that she was going to, in fact, become a chicken? 

Anyway, the hives are starting to go away, and the swelling is going down.  She’s eating again and is in much better spirits.

And, by some miracle, we are all moved into our amazing new house.  I look out my windows and see beautiful trees and mountains and green space (which, okay, also happens to be cemetary land.  But who cares?  The dead people are quiet).  Addie can run around outside all day if she wants, and there is so much room for all of us to live together and play and not step on each other every minute.  The kids have a play area where they actually play!  There is a great room so I can keep an eye on the kids while I cook!  We have a deck!

Things, really, are so, so great.  It scares me a little, if I’m honest, because I think deep down I still wonder if I “deserve” such a life.  I don’t even like framing it that way–everyone deserves comfort and happiness, of course.  But this is like some amazing dream has come true, and I’m not exactly even sure how it all happened.  I’m trying to accept and affirm it, mostly, but am still afraid that it will all disappear somehow.  That we have tempted fate too much?  I don’t know.  I’m in my new, huge office, listening to Eric and Addie chase each other around in the great room downstairs, and just feeling like all is good, for us, in this moment.

I drove back to the old house once more today to clean up the massive amounts of cat hair floating around once all the furniture that had anchored it down was removed, and to say my goodbye.  As I was getting in the car to leave, a bee divebombed my face, and I ducked my head to miss it.  At that same moment, the heavy car door swung shut, and I knocked my head against the top of the driver’s side window, on my ear.  This hurt like a son of a bitch, and I found myself doing an owie dance, like Addie does when she gets hurt.  Then I noticed much blood pouring from my ear, and got scared and woozy, not from blood loss but because I had to figure out what to do.  Stay in Denver and get stitches, losing precious time and money?  Or drive back to Arvada, dripping blood all over from a huge gash in my ear?

The Van Gogh in me won out.  I headed back to Arvada and have a giant tissue plastered to the side of my head as we speak.  I feel all soft and vulnerable, reminded that my body is indeed made of flesh and bone, is permeable.  And also grateful that this was the worst to happen around this move–everything else was so amazingly easy.  A little gash in the ear is a small price to pay.

Ernesto, the Amazing Dining Room Tree 

We went to do our final walk through at Zang today.  Addie and Eric played in the little fort in the yard, and Nolie and I lay on the porch while she drank her bottle.  I felt so peaceful there, looking up at the sky from our porch, surrounded by huge, old-growth trees, at the house that will soon be ours.  I patted the tree in the dining room, dreamed about where my desk would go, about tucking Addie into her new bed in her new room at night.

There seems to be so much work between us and moving into that new place–the moving and the cleaning and the unpacking.  And I need to finish grading and prep for a meeting next week, too.  But I’m so looking forward to getting in there, and futzing with where everything is going to go, and with making plans for what we’ll work on first.  I’m excited to be out of debt (other than this new, big mortgage, and student loans, of course, but I think of those as good debt.  Cheap debt.  Is that self-delusional?).  I’m excited for our vacation in June, for the new space this house gives all of us, for our neighborhood with its horses and sheep and fresh eggs for sale down the street. 

Today, I’m wandering around this old house, cleaning things up and packing things away, and silently saying goodbye to each crooked old wall, each splintered window casing, each notch in the hardwood floor.  I’m like a kid before a very big Christmas, impatient and flush, and so am busying myself with little tasks and the girls, and trying not to get too overwhelmed with the thrill of it all.

48 hours to go.  Not that I’m counting.

Well, that’s it!  It looks like we got the house.  Barring any freak occurrences at inspection, in thirty days, we’ll be living in a new space in a new town.  So it’s getting time to say goodbye to this place.

Here’s what Vine St. looked like when we moved in:

There was no kitchen to speak of–only a big, empty, canary-yellow room with a small metal sink on one side.  There was paint splattered everywhere, the carpets were new but so cheap walking on them left huge indents that didn’t go away.  There was sticky linoleum peeling up over the wood floors.  The house had been stripped; there was almost no hardware or light fixtures.  The only appliance left was the hot water heater, and it died a few days after we moved in.  And there was the corpse of a cat in the crawl space under the backyard.  Vine St. was your quintessential money pit.

Except it wasn’t.  I mean, it took us a long time to fix up, but it did eventually fix up.  And we have a lot of memories here.  It was the first house either Eric or I owned; I went into labor in this house more times than I care to count, and we brought both Addie and Nolie home from the hospital here.  Burley lived here with us.  We know our neighbors, and we know all the neighborhood restaurants and coffee shops and parks.  We’re just a few blocks from the zoo, and minutes from downtown.  We’re close to dear, dear friends. 

There is much to speak for this house.  It’s over a hundred years old now, and still has sheltered us and kept us warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  We believed in it and in this neighborhood, and leaving will be bittersweet. 

When we first moved in here, there were stickers on every surface, little girl barrettes stuck in odd places, and doll remnants in the backyard.  I liked finding these treasures, liked thinking about all the families and all the little girls who had lived here before us.  I don’t know if it’s true or not, but our realtor said he heard the young woman who is buying this place talking about how she loves this house, and wants to bring her babies home to this place someday, to raise her kids here.  It doesn’t really matter if it’s true.  I’m going to believe it anyway.

I’ve been lousy at posting lately.  But it’s not because I’ve abandoned toddlerspit.  Oh no.  It’s because I’ve been ricocheting off the walls, like a bat with bells tied to her wings.  And a ricocheting bat finds it difficult to sit down at her laptop to type.  A ricocheting bat must do things like scrub toilets and drink more coffee and pick incessantly at her little bat children and chew lots of tums.

I’m ricocheting because (thank you for asking) our house officially goes on the market today, and we’ve already had two pretty nice offers, and got into a bidding war, and now we’re up to full-price and may go higher by midnight tonight.  We also both have the sneaking suspicion that we identified our dream house today, and we’re probably putting in an offer tomorrow.

Some people (Eric) are tired of hearing this story, but I just can’t get over it, so I’m going to tell it again.  You know how a few weeks ago we found our dog Burley a good home right after I gave that donation to the animal shelter in honor of our friend’s dog, Gatsby?  And I felt like that happened because I released a very specific intention to the universe?  Well, around that same time (February 24, to be exact), in the little notebook I carry around with me everywhere, I wrote these two things on a “wishlist to the universe:”

“a beautiful, spacious, zen house that is close to the ‘outdoors’ and that looks like it’s in the mountains”  (The house we want to buy has cedar siding, is surrounded by old-growth trees, is close to the foothills, backs to open space, and has a real, live ficus tree growing up through the dining room floor.  No shit).

“a sale that is easy and joyous, selling at full price, with the buyer paying closing costs, and selling in less than sixty days”  (Yep.  ‘Cept if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t put a limit on the sale price.  Why not “selling at more than full price”?  Greedy?  Maybe.  But who am I to underestimate what is possible?)

[Update:  as I was reading over this, Eric called me on my cell to tell me we got another offer, for above our asking price.  Go figure.]

Well.  How about that.  The cynics among you are saying, “Well, duh.  You wanted a house that looked a certain way, and so you found it.  You wanted your house to sell, so you did the work you needed to do, and it sold.  It’s not the universe, it’s you, dummy.”

Yes and no.  It was us, to the extent that we did what we needed to do to get the house ready for sale and looked for houses to buy.  And, since I am a divine part of the universe (stick that in you craw, daddio), I helped create this reality that is so exciting.  But I think also about the me of five years ago.  The me of five years ago was a sad little pessimist who always assumed the worst.  I explained every little rotten thing (not finding a job, Eric not asking me to marry him, our run-down little house, you name it) as part of a long pattern of loserness.  Anything good–meeting Eric, moving to Colorado, going to grad school–was considered an exception to my loserness rule.

I remember exactly the moment when I stood in the upstairs hall of our house, sobbing at Eric because my job as personal assistant to Mr. Asscrack of the universe sucked, or I didn’t want to finish my dissertation, or thought I was really ugly, and I was yelling at him how I was worthless and he should leave me.  He looked at me and said, “You know what?  You’re not allowed to talk like that.  Any.  More.”

I could tell he was serious.  It straightened me out, was a grand epiphany for me, shining light on the fact that I had some control in how I looked at events, in how I would be permitted to look at events.  Then I got serious, and started to read some books on cognitive psychology (especially this one) and got dragged to unchurch by Nancy.  It’s taken me a long time to go from total pessimist to someone who believes in positive intention.

And still, even given how great things have gone and how good life is, it’s hard for me to believe it all.

Except, there is that full price offer, staring us in the face.  There is the house on Zang Street (no kidding) waiting for us to buy it.  So I’m beginning to think there is something to it.  Does this mean nothing bad will ever happen?  Maybe Zang Street is ridden with termites.  Maybe the buyer of our house will skip town.  The universe can be a trickster some time.

But I’m not too worried about it.  There are good things coming to me, and flowing through me, and that is good.  I’m believing, I’m believing.

Fragments, from the last twenty-four hours.

***

Addie woke up howling last night, which she hasn’t done much of since recovering from her surgery.  It was my turn to get up and soothe her, so I went into her room and crawled into her bed.  “What’s wrong, Addie?” I asked, smoothing her hair back, holding her hand.

“I miss Burley, mama.”

I wasn’t even sure she had noticed he was gone, really, so this answer took me by surprise.  We talked again about how Burley was in a happy new place, and how he was getting to go on walks every day, and how we should be glad that he had a nice new family.  We talked about how someday we might get another dog.

Addie was quiet for a few minutes, running her hand over my fingers.  She is getting more and more affectionate and loving all the time now, rubbing our backs and hugging and kissing us, telling us she loves us.

“Mama?”

“Yes, Addie?”

“You have beautiful fingers.”

“Addie.  Thank you.  So do you.”

Why does this kill me so much?  Because it’s proof that she sees me as separate from her, and yet she still feels so much like part of me?  Because I remember loving my own beautiful mom so much?  Because I’m proud of my sweet, sweet girl, and the innocence of this comment is too much?  It doesn’t matter, I guess. 

***

We got the kids in the car this morning and headed out to look at neighborhoods we might want to move to once this house sells.  We explained to Addie that we were going to look at houses because soon we might be moving.  This wasn’t the first time we’ve had a conversation about moving, but it was the first time we were actually going to check out neighborhoods, and the words “buying a new house” must have circulated one time too many.

The kids were real troopers about all the driving.  We were out for around two hours–Nolie slept most of the time, and Addie talked to us, or ate her snacks and looked out the window.  Finally, we felt like we’d had enough and started to head home. 

This led to incredible wails of protest from the backseat.  “I waaaaaant to liiiiiive in our neeeeeewwwww hooooouuuuuusee!!!!!!”  Let me tell you, when Addie has a fit, it is no small thing.  It is a screeching, throw the hands in the air, cry the eyes out, end of the world sort of drama.  It’s something to behold.  I have to work some serious mama mojo to calm her down when these tantrums happen, breathing with her, or getting her to “count elephants” with me.  But even these things fail sometimes, and then we just have to leave her to work it out.  She’ll usually come to us minutes later, beaming.  “Mama!  I’m not sad anymore!”

But this is a good example of the dozens of little failures of communication that happen between us and her throughout the day.  We are trying to explain more and more complex concepts to her (giving away Burley, moving to a new house, what it means to be “patient”–which I still don’t understand, personally) and she is grasping them in her own ways.  It’s just that her ways of grasping them and our ways don’t always match up.   And this leads to much frustration for her.  I can empathize.

***

Can someone tell me why Target can’t sell a decent bra?  Who is this Gilligan O’Malley, anyway? 

Addie and I headed to the “big red balls,” as she calls Target, to get me some new undershirts and underwear.  Eric doesn’t give one whistle what sort of underclothes I have on, but I was starting to get pretty sick of my cotton underwear from last year, all pilled and stretchy, so I decided to make the trek.  I also finally tossed my nursing and pregnancy bras and felt like I probably couldn’t fit in my pre-having-kids bras because of the droopage factor, so off we went.

(Aside:  I hate buying bras.  I always have.  My parents like to tell the story of me going to buy my first training bra and wadding it up, throwing it in a corner, and sobbing, “It’s little and stinky and I won’t wear it!”  But I still feel like doing that.  I feel the same way about having to get my hair cut.  It is just one of those details in life that I would be happy never taking care of again.  I think this is because I’m really picky about what I like in these areas, and yet hate spending money on them).

We must have spent 45 minutes circling the underwear section there.  I kept muttering, “They have got to have a decent bra here.  There are thousands of bras here.  Why can’t I find one I like?  What’s wrong with this place?  What’s wrong with me?”  And, really?  There were no bras there I liked.  Most of the padded ones were seriously padded–they seemed almost bullet-proof.  The unpadded ones provided no support for the droopy girls, or had weird cross-hatching that would show through a shirt, or cut weird and gave me hubba-dubba boob.  I was disgusted.  I left the changing room wanting to cry, and it was only by dint of an extended conversation with Addie about why the lady gave us a card with a “5″ on it (to note how many items we took in) that I didn’t totally sink into despair.

The good news is that I got home and dug out all my pre-pregnancy bras and, lo and behold, they fit after all.  So, I’m happy, my boobs are happy, and I don’t have to deal with the trauma of bra shopping for another year.  At least.

This is such an intense period right now, with so much begun but unresolved, and a little scary and a lot exciting.  I’m having a lot of nervous energy, which is making it difficult to sit down and grade the jabba-sized mound of freshman papers on my desk.  Really, we’re just doing a lot of waiting, and trying to keep all of our balls in the air at the same time. 

You know what I mean.

We’re busier than we’ve ever been in our lives.  Most days I can’t even tell you what day it is.  Seriously.

Addie drooled through four shirts today and was a bloody pistol to deal with.  Every four hours she needs to take her medicine, and every four hours we plead, cajole, demand, threaten, and lose our minds through the process.  Then, when the whim strikes her, she’ll down the medicine and look up at us, beaming.  “Yum!” she says.  “That tastes good!“  Right! we say.  Maybe you’ll remember that in four hours so we don’t have to take minutes off our lives going through this again.

I am hoping soon to go in to Addie’s room while she’s sleeping and to not hear a death rattle, to see her breathing through her nose.  I am ferverently (man is that a weird word.  I had to look it up) hoping for this.  But as of tonight, she is still rattling and snurgling away in there, as if the tonsils and adenoids have magically grown back. 

Nolie has a horrible cold, with a fever and a barking-seal cough that is just short of croupish.  We’re sort of pretending it isn’t happening, but the words “emergency room” did pass through my lips today, which made us both shudder.  No no Nolie.  Don’t get sick.  Wake up tomorrow and be much, much better.  It doesn’t help matters that she is doing her best to push that little tooth through.  And still she smiles and laughs at us, and is getting more adorable everyday.

Here she is asleep on Eric.  I can’t decide who is more precious.  It’s a dead heat.

We also started loading up our storage unit today, and our realtor comes tomorrow to get our price and list date, and to give us the low-down on some houses in Golden.  We’ve started spackling up nail holes and cleaning floors and hiding stuff behind cupboard doors.  It’s starting to feel really real, which also makes me feel a little like I have to barf.  Also knowing that we could have a long wait ahead of us is strange, given that we’re pushing so hard to get the house ready to sell.

The bad news continues to be Burley, who bit me today.  He had eaten some of Addie’s cheese, sending her into yet another drooly cryfest, and I moved the dining room chair to “invite” him to get out from under the table where she was sitting.  He viewed this as an “invitation” to bite me.  So now we’re considering the possibility of turning him over to a shelter, since nobody we know can take him right now.  Which sucks so hugely.  I just want him out of here, and also just want him to be happy in a new home.

But I’m not losing my mind yet, even though it sounds like I may be.  I’m hanging in there, and even enjoying the chaos here and there. 

I just can’t believe how fast it’s all going.

We’re moving into overdrive to try to get the house ready to put on the market in April.  All the million and one little projects left undone over the past four years are now being revisited:  a new faucet for the clawfoot; finishing work on the built-in bookshelves; getting the wood floors refinished.  I’ve packed away boxes and boxes of photos and knick-knacks and extras and extras and extras.  We’ll get a storage unit next month to put all of our “extra” stuff in.  Here’s what the living room used to look like, furniture in every corner, this horrid, geometric-patterned rug that I keep begging Eric to let me get rid of:

So, although we seem to maintain a puzzling level of clutter around the house (kids, dogs, cats, and all their necessary stuff), things are definitely looking thinned out and, well, finished.  And I really, really like it.

I know I’ll be happy to see all our stuff when we move, that I’ll unwrap yet another duvet cover or set of coffee mugs and say, “Hey!  I love these!  Glad to see you, old friends!”  But for now I’m equally pleased to pack it all away, to live a simpler life for a while.  The house looks pretty darn zen, with the exception of our basement, which looks like a tornado hit Kmart and deposited all of its detritus there. 

It’s also exciting to see things a little more polished–I can’t wait to see the floors free of paint splatters and splinters, to see the railing on the Juliet balcony completed, to see all the nail-holes filled.

It’s strange, of course, to know that we’re doing all of this for someone else–whoever owns our house next.  I know there’s an outside chance we won’t sell, and then I guess we’ll get to enjoy all of this for another year.  But chances are, someone will buy this place at some point, and we’ll move on to a new house (and new house projects).  So I’m looking around at this old house, which has no right angles and uneven plaster, and missing it a little, already.  Our first house.

Nolie Sleep Quest 2007 

Are you wondering how things are going with Nolie?  Well, we have mixed results.  She’s went down unswaddled fine last night.  She woke up twice, but put herself back to sleep both times.  Then, she woke up at 11:30 inconsolable, and I gave in and swaddled and nursed her back down.  Same thing at 4am.  But then she woke two more times before 8am, and put herself back to sleep both times.  I view this as an awkward sort of progress.

Both naps today, she went down unswaddled, no problem.  She’s really starting to bond with her Gigi blanky, and is falling asleep in my arms without too much problem (before, she’d only go down for Eric, who nearly had to suffocate her to get her asleep).

Baby steps, in other words.  But this feels much better than just throwing her in her crib and letting her howl it out.  That just wasn’t working for any of us.  I’m still getting up at night, but feel like there’s forward progress, however incremental.