...why kids don't come potty trained?
...why children will decide to "help" one by pulling off their diaper full of poop and cleaning their own bums on your clean sheets while one is desperately trying to scramble off the toilet?
...why, when a kid is tired, they actually cry and scream that they couldn't be more awake and act like they've been shot up with a lethal methamphetamine/speed combo? Lethal for the parent, really.
...why the water is so hard here in North Pole that I could clean my clothes by beating them with a rusty bar and get the same smell effect and level of cleanliness?
...why I have to be convinced by various media outlets that I am the crappiest parent alive because I a) allow my child to own a few plastic toys, b) eat some non-organic produce when there's nothing else available or c) I either let my kid cry too much or not enough? Don't I already have enough angst without making me think I'm giving my kid a nasty case of autism by just being me?
...why, when a kid has a cold, is it his mother that gets tired and wants to lay down all day?
..why bitching is so easy to conceal as ironic musings??
Monday, March 31, 2008
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Ice fishing postponed
Well, we were going to take the little nipper out to Chena Lake this morning and try to get in a good ice fishing day before break up starts to happen...which is supposed to be sometime this month. The ice is pretty thick out there...four feet or so still...but the junior jet set decided to catch the cold train and is now coughing and snuffling. It's not really a surprise. Charlie came home this week with a vicious cold, bordering on bronchitis, and it looks Connor's caught it though thankfully not the same extent.
Still, he's waking up several times in the night and he's extruding various disgusting effluents out of his face so we thought it best not to take him out in freezing weather with a serious ice fog on, despite the heated huts. I don't want to tip a minor cold into a serious one just because I had a yen for fresh trout fried in cornmeal.
I managed to get myself into a nice little back spasm too, so I'm not altogether disappointed. This happens to me once or twice a year, at least once while pregnant, and used to happen with much more frequency when I was an exec. Stress plus heavy lifting (office supplies and filing cabinets and O-6 desks weigh a lot!) used to net me one of these every three months or so. The pregnancy ones always hit around the same time and is probably the result of relaxing ligaments and the weight of my belly starting to fall forward. I've tried every home remedy on the sun, even enlisting Charlie for some Swedish-style muscular torture, but it hasn't completely gone away. I've been snivelling for a couple days...I'm lucky Charlie puts up with me at all.
We got an email from the Freels...they're leaving South Padre Island to head up home to Indiana. They missed the worst of the winter craziness up there...for awhile I thought Angela was going to have to paddle her way up here for refuge from flood waters! As much fun as South Padre is, they're going to be glad to be home, I'm sure. I hope they'll come up soon! Mom and dad are already planning on coming up the week before Memorial Day...once we get settled in the new house we'll be so glad to see them and my prodigal kitties. We've already got some plans for what to do when they're here. Angela wants to come and go dog sledding and yet isn't up for Alaska winter weather, though those two things really rather go together. We'll see if we can't get her up here in the summer...I'm eagerly awaiting this much vaunted summer weather everyone keeps bragging about!
Red Flag Alaska kicks off for the first time next week, so we don't expect to see much of Charlie. He is running about putting out fires and trying to get a handle on his people...it's really tough because about half are deployed at any given time, and the other half are rather demoralized from only being here six months out of every year. Six months on, six months off deployments are terribly enervating for all concerned. Families are tired and stressed, the troops have a hard time feeling committed to either job because as soon as they get going they know they'll be gone again, and Charlie's the head cheerleader trying to rally the team. His pom poms are a bit tattered, because he knows none of this is easy on anyone. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I hope there's one soon to ease the burden on good guys like this.
I think we are going to venture out and pick up some fruit, yogurt and bread at the store. Connor has a yogurt and fruit smoothie every night and goes through the stuff at an exponential rate. He's still not reconciled to most veggies...green and orange things are right out...but I can always get him to eat his weight in watermelon, blueberries and apples so I'm hoping that compensates. He's chubbing out a little bit, probably preparatory to shooting way up in height again. We also need to look for new shoes for him because he's nearly outgrown the pair we got in January. I think he's only got one more toddler size until he's in grown up kid shoes. Sheesh, this kid is getting big!
Oh and on cool kid accomplishments...he added at least ten more words to his vocabulary this week: home, all right, car, watermelon, book, green, blue, yellow, purple, puzzle, boy, boat, square, star, circle, etc. Some of them probably wouldn't be very clear to someone who wasn't around him much, but he's trying so hard to really talk. And he adds the signs if he thinks you're unclear on his meaning anyway. He's known his signs for all his colors for six months or so, but it's fun to hear him say them and actively identify them. My favorite is please...it comes out "peez" and instead of circling a fist on his tummy, he does a funkified Queen of England wave above his head. If he's really desperate -- if, for example, cookies are at stake -- he'll yell "peez" in his most ingratiating Bambi voice and looks like he's trying to lasso something over his head. Yesterday was the first time that he tried to count independently without being prompted...he got a car as a reward for being a good boy during a haircut and was told he could pick one. He solemnly held up a finger and said, "one car?" I told him that was right, one car...so he grabbed a package of five cars that were all in one wrapper. I had him count and we agreed very seriously that there was more than one car, so that was not okay. You could see his little brain thinking I had somehow snookered him in semantics, but he gallantly accepted a little gray VW beetle as his reward for a job well done.
Wow, kids are cool.
Still, he's waking up several times in the night and he's extruding various disgusting effluents out of his face so we thought it best not to take him out in freezing weather with a serious ice fog on, despite the heated huts. I don't want to tip a minor cold into a serious one just because I had a yen for fresh trout fried in cornmeal.
I managed to get myself into a nice little back spasm too, so I'm not altogether disappointed. This happens to me once or twice a year, at least once while pregnant, and used to happen with much more frequency when I was an exec. Stress plus heavy lifting (office supplies and filing cabinets and O-6 desks weigh a lot!) used to net me one of these every three months or so. The pregnancy ones always hit around the same time and is probably the result of relaxing ligaments and the weight of my belly starting to fall forward. I've tried every home remedy on the sun, even enlisting Charlie for some Swedish-style muscular torture, but it hasn't completely gone away. I've been snivelling for a couple days...I'm lucky Charlie puts up with me at all.
We got an email from the Freels...they're leaving South Padre Island to head up home to Indiana. They missed the worst of the winter craziness up there...for awhile I thought Angela was going to have to paddle her way up here for refuge from flood waters! As much fun as South Padre is, they're going to be glad to be home, I'm sure. I hope they'll come up soon! Mom and dad are already planning on coming up the week before Memorial Day...once we get settled in the new house we'll be so glad to see them and my prodigal kitties. We've already got some plans for what to do when they're here. Angela wants to come and go dog sledding and yet isn't up for Alaska winter weather, though those two things really rather go together. We'll see if we can't get her up here in the summer...I'm eagerly awaiting this much vaunted summer weather everyone keeps bragging about!
Red Flag Alaska kicks off for the first time next week, so we don't expect to see much of Charlie. He is running about putting out fires and trying to get a handle on his people...it's really tough because about half are deployed at any given time, and the other half are rather demoralized from only being here six months out of every year. Six months on, six months off deployments are terribly enervating for all concerned. Families are tired and stressed, the troops have a hard time feeling committed to either job because as soon as they get going they know they'll be gone again, and Charlie's the head cheerleader trying to rally the team. His pom poms are a bit tattered, because he knows none of this is easy on anyone. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I hope there's one soon to ease the burden on good guys like this.
I think we are going to venture out and pick up some fruit, yogurt and bread at the store. Connor has a yogurt and fruit smoothie every night and goes through the stuff at an exponential rate. He's still not reconciled to most veggies...green and orange things are right out...but I can always get him to eat his weight in watermelon, blueberries and apples so I'm hoping that compensates. He's chubbing out a little bit, probably preparatory to shooting way up in height again. We also need to look for new shoes for him because he's nearly outgrown the pair we got in January. I think he's only got one more toddler size until he's in grown up kid shoes. Sheesh, this kid is getting big!
Oh and on cool kid accomplishments...he added at least ten more words to his vocabulary this week: home, all right, car, watermelon, book, green, blue, yellow, purple, puzzle, boy, boat, square, star, circle, etc. Some of them probably wouldn't be very clear to someone who wasn't around him much, but he's trying so hard to really talk. And he adds the signs if he thinks you're unclear on his meaning anyway. He's known his signs for all his colors for six months or so, but it's fun to hear him say them and actively identify them. My favorite is please...it comes out "peez" and instead of circling a fist on his tummy, he does a funkified Queen of England wave above his head. If he's really desperate -- if, for example, cookies are at stake -- he'll yell "peez" in his most ingratiating Bambi voice and looks like he's trying to lasso something over his head. Yesterday was the first time that he tried to count independently without being prompted...he got a car as a reward for being a good boy during a haircut and was told he could pick one. He solemnly held up a finger and said, "one car?" I told him that was right, one car...so he grabbed a package of five cars that were all in one wrapper. I had him count and we agreed very seriously that there was more than one car, so that was not okay. You could see his little brain thinking I had somehow snookered him in semantics, but he gallantly accepted a little gray VW beetle as his reward for a job well done.
Wow, kids are cool.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Spring will never come!
I have not even gone through a whole winter here, but it NEVER ENDS. It snowed yesterday. It's in the 20s now. So warmer, but come on now...it's almost April! Okay, complaints over.
The positive part is that daddy and Connor get to go ice fishing well into April. Connor went for the first time this past Saturday and had a great time. They caught about 25 little silver salmon...about 8-1
0 inches each...and divided the
m with the other kid and dad set that they went with. They have little heated wood huts they drag out on to Chena Lake and drill four holes through the ice. Luckily they cover the holes they aren't using, so no baby down a texas well incidents! Mommies still worry about little boys getting chilled, so I trussed him up like the kid in Christmas Story. He smelled like fish and had scales in his hair when he came home -- dirty, smelly and fish all in one day!? Kid bonanza! Of course he refused to do more than nibble the fish we cooked up last night but they're pretty tasty!
Then Easter came...and we needed to decorate eggs. If the pictures look blurry it's because Connor rarely slows down enough to take a still picture. Eggs are EXCITING! You can make a mess and throw around delicate objects all at the same time.
We were very excited about the Easter Bunny concept, especially since in a quest to get a forbidden movie down while mommy was in the shower, Connor used a chair and rolling pin to knock tons of items down from the closet shelf, including his Easter present stash. I let him keep the Thomas train, but the rest had to go back because the Easter Bunny hid them there to keep til Sunday morning. He talked the whole time about the puzzles he was getting when the Easter Bunny came back to give them to him. Sigh...maybe next year the Easter Bunny will get a titanium lock box for the present stash.
The positive part is that daddy and Connor get to go ice fishing well into April. Connor went for the first time this past Saturday and had a great time. They caught about 25 little silver salmon...about 8-1
0 inches each...and divided the
m with the other kid and dad set that they went with. They have little heated wood huts they drag out on to Chena Lake and drill four holes through the ice. Luckily they cover the holes they aren't using, so no baby down a texas well incidents! Mommies still worry about little boys getting chilled, so I trussed him up like the kid in Christmas Story. He smelled like fish and had scales in his hair when he came home -- dirty, smelly and fish all in one day!? Kid bonanza! Of course he refused to do more than nibble the fish we cooked up last night but they're pretty tasty!Then Easter came...and we needed to decorate eggs. If the pictures look blurry it's because Connor rarely slows down enough to take a still picture. Eggs are EXCITING! You can make a mess and throw around delicate objects all at the same time.
We were very excited about the Easter Bunny concept, especially since in a quest to get a forbidden movie down while mommy was in the shower, Connor used a chair and rolling pin to knock tons of items down from the closet shelf, including his Easter present stash. I let him keep the Thomas train, but the rest had to go back because the Easter Bunny hid them there to keep til Sunday morning. He talked the whole time about the puzzles he was getting when the Easter Bunny came back to give them to him. Sigh...maybe next year the Easter Bunny will get a titanium lock box for the present stash.
Friday, March 14, 2008
I haven't posted in forever...
Things were a mess for a couple weeks...between severe morning sickness on my part, Connor's mono, trying to fix this place up to something livable for the next two months, and house selling stuff, I just have not had time. I've been promising people some pics on Alaska stuff, and new Connor pictures, so this post is devoted entirely to that.
We got offered a house on base and we're able to move in on 25 April...yay! So it's six more weeks in the ghetto (do NOT expect to see a pic, we're ashamed!) but worth it for this big gorgeous base house with about 1.5 more room than we've ever had, with a custom basement playroom for Connor.
It's on the corner of Sundog Court, and backs up directly to Moose Lake, so we'll need to make doubly sure Connor can't get out there without help. There's two parks within walking distance, and two blocks away is the community center with a lovely indoor playground when it's crazy cold. The street is full of field gr
aders; both of us keep getting struck by the fact that we're the grown ups now. Eesh, scary thought. We have a nice big lot...of course Charlie immediately thought with a sigh of the extra mowing...but I remind him that's what teen boys are for. Now everyone send the people living there now strong "get out!" vibes!
Here's the view of the house from across Moose Lake. I think it's more pond than lake, but that's me I guess. Apparently people fish there, but I'm not sure I would eat what came out of there...Chena Lake fine, but Air Force minds in the 1960s and 1970s were not always as environmentally aware as they should have been, so I'm wary. It's very pretty though and will be even more so in the summer.
Here's a photo of where Charlie works. The wing headquarters building is just enormous and houses most of the admin and co
mmand functions of the base. Charlie also has people in Red Flag and the CTS, but the bulk of them are in the wing vault. Well, those that aren't deployed anyway! Eielson is a strange little base...tiny, they love to hide things (who would have guess the drycleaners was on the basement 2nd floor of the 2nd dorm across the street from the dining hall? Not me, as I spent 45 minutes trying to find it!), and yet has absurdly high-ranking people in charge of some things, and absurdly low ranking people in charge of other things. The place is also near about dead for several months in the winter. I wondered aloud one day about why the aircraft hardly ever flew...after all, most of them are technically all-weather and withstand very low temps at altitude. Was it a lift problem, I wondered? Charlie then enlightened me -- it was because downrange the weather was so bitterly cold (at least 20 to 30 below what it is here) that in certain temp ranges, that made the chances of recovering a guy alive who made it out of the jet in an accident virtually nil, no matter how fast they mobilized rescue. This is a very cool but rather dangerous place sometimes.
Anyway, I digress. One of the big tourist attractions in winter here is the Ice Art Festival. It's over behind Pioneer Park off Peger Rd, and it's pretty amazing. We did not r
ealize that the vast majority of the place was a kids' ice playground, but since Connor was NOT enthused about sliding down bitterly cold slides, that turned out okay. We should have had him in snow pants since he did want to play in the ice sleds, but it was so warm (45+) we didn't want to make him Randy from Christmas Story when we left the house. Ah well, lesson learned for next year! Next year, I think he'll probably be much more likely to want to play and actually wear the cold weather gear he needs to play safely. We eventually transitioned over to looking at the ice art competition sculptures, with some protestations from the junior jet set.
They were GORGEOUS! I can't believe what artists can do with something as simple as a block of ice. The unfortunate part was t
hat the weather 
was so dramatically warm for a week that many of the sculptures were cracked and damaged terribly. You could see how lovely they were though from display pictures. There were several different competitions -- single block, multi-block, amateur, and junior -- though a couple hadn't yet happened. The festival goes for a month, but the professionals do the contests in the first week so there is something pretty to look at for everyone coming. I snapped a few pics of my favorites. Connor wanted to pick up every pieces of broken ice he found, and tried to abscond with a small carved bunny. Luckily it proved to weigh much more than he could lift, but it was a close run thing!
So that's it for this entry...I'll try to get my act together and post more often from here on out!
We got offered a house on base and we're able to move in on 25 April...yay! So it's six more weeks in the ghetto (do NOT expect to see a pic, we're ashamed!) but worth it for this big gorgeous base house with about 1.5 more room than we've ever had, with a custom basement playroom for Connor.
It's on the corner of Sundog Court, and backs up directly to Moose Lake, so we'll need to make doubly sure Connor can't get out there without help. There's two parks within walking distance, and two blocks away is the community center with a lovely indoor playground when it's crazy cold. The street is full of field gr
aders; both of us keep getting struck by the fact that we're the grown ups now. Eesh, scary thought. We have a nice big lot...of course Charlie immediately thought with a sigh of the extra mowing...but I remind him that's what teen boys are for. Now everyone send the people living there now strong "get out!" vibes!Here's the view of the house from across Moose Lake. I think it's more pond than lake, but that's me I guess. Apparently people fish there, but I'm not sure I would eat what came out of there...Chena Lake fine, but Air Force minds in the 1960s and 1970s were not always as environmentally aware as they should have been, so I'm wary. It's very pretty though and will be even more so in the summer.
Here's a photo of where Charlie works. The wing headquarters building is just enormous and houses most of the admin and co
mmand functions of the base. Charlie also has people in Red Flag and the CTS, but the bulk of them are in the wing vault. Well, those that aren't deployed anyway! Eielson is a strange little base...tiny, they love to hide things (who would have guess the drycleaners was on the basement 2nd floor of the 2nd dorm across the street from the dining hall? Not me, as I spent 45 minutes trying to find it!), and yet has absurdly high-ranking people in charge of some things, and absurdly low ranking people in charge of other things. The place is also near about dead for several months in the winter. I wondered aloud one day about why the aircraft hardly ever flew...after all, most of them are technically all-weather and withstand very low temps at altitude. Was it a lift problem, I wondered? Charlie then enlightened me -- it was because downrange the weather was so bitterly cold (at least 20 to 30 below what it is here) that in certain temp ranges, that made the chances of recovering a guy alive who made it out of the jet in an accident virtually nil, no matter how fast they mobilized rescue. This is a very cool but rather dangerous place sometimes.Anyway, I digress. One of the big tourist attractions in winter here is the Ice Art Festival. It's over behind Pioneer Park off Peger Rd, and it's pretty amazing. We did not r
ealize that the vast majority of the place was a kids' ice playground, but since Connor was NOT enthused about sliding down bitterly cold slides, that turned out okay. We should have had him in snow pants since he did want to play in the ice sleds, but it was so warm (45+) we didn't want to make him Randy from Christmas Story when we left the house. Ah well, lesson learned for next year! Next year, I think he'll probably be much more likely to want to play and actually wear the cold weather gear he needs to play safely. We eventually transitioned over to looking at the ice art competition sculptures, with some protestations from the junior jet set.They were GORGEOUS! I can't believe what artists can do with something as simple as a block of ice. The unfortunate part was t
hat the weather 
was so dramatically warm for a week that many of the sculptures were cracked and damaged terribly. You could see how lovely they were though from display pictures. There were several different competitions -- single block, multi-block, amateur, and junior -- though a couple hadn't yet happened. The festival goes for a month, but the professionals do the contests in the first week so there is something pretty to look at for everyone coming. I snapped a few pics of my favorites. Connor wanted to pick up every pieces of broken ice he found, and tried to abscond with a small carved bunny. Luckily it proved to weigh much more than he could lift, but it was a close run thing!So that's it for this entry...I'll try to get my act together and post more often from here on out!
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