So, I'm in Love Again...

This is Sammy. Isn't he beautiful? (Hint: The answer is "Why, yes, Tiff. He's perfect.")

And, as if this tiny being weren't enough of a delight in and of himself, his older brother (age 3) whispered to me at bedtime that him and me were best friends.

I'm just bubbling over with love, really. If you don't have any grandchildren, you should probably run out and get some or rent a few to see how you like it. I haven't experienced anything better since...well...I had babies.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

So, depending on where you left off, you may or may not be aware that my beautiful grandchildren have been staying with me for a little over a week.



And you may or may not be aware that however cute and innocent they might look, Caleb (the LITTLE one!) managed to land me in the hospital on Friday night with a concussion. It wasn't an accident, either: I was flat on my back on the couch with a bad case of the flu, and he picked up a hard plastic toy and swung it like a baseball bat, cracking right across the top of my head so hard that my daughter heard it from across the room.

So that was fun.

Saturday I was back down, this time resting for 24 hours on doctor's orders, and by Sunday my absolutely amazing super-hero mom-stand-in daughter was a little frayed and I had a serious backlog of work to get done. Oh, and there were a lot of dishes in the sink.

But guess what? That's all just background--I haven't started the story I sat down here to tell yet. Kind of long-winded? Blame the concussion. Or brain damage from the gas.

Yes, that's where today's saga begins. I left the house to do some laundry and hadn't been gone for fifteen minutes--I had actually just unloaded my laundry at the laundromat--when my daughter called me to tell me that the house smelled like gas, and not just a little. In a matter of minutes, the smell had spread from one corner of the kitchen throughout the lower level of the house.

I told her to get the kids out of the house and that I'd be right home. Because I live in this lovely little midwestern town, I left my laundry right where I'd unloaded it and hopped back in the car. (Well, probably I would have done that anyway, but since I live where I live, I did it without concern for our clothes.) On my way home, I realized that I hadn't said, "And the dog" and considered calling my daughter back to make sure she got him, but you're not really supposed to use a cell phone in a house full of gas, so I decided to just hurry home instead.

Turns out that she'd figured out that we didn't want the dog to blow up all by herself. He was happily on his leash. Andrew (3) was running in circles around the Whoville tree in an oversized t-shirt, his jacket and a pair of snow boots. Caleb (18 months) was sitting on a lawn chair in a similar t-shirt and his winter coat wearing only socks on his feet. Tori was also in her pajamas, and had had the wisdom not to stop and brush her hair.

I took a deep breath and popped back inside to grab Caleb's shoes and a blanket for him, and then we waited around outside for NICOR to come and tell us everything was fine. Because that's what they do, right? I mean, I've called the gas company because I smelled gas before. They come in with their little machines and run them around your house and then either tell you that a pilot light is out and fix it in half a second or tell you there was never any gas to begin with, and you go on with your life.

Except today. Today they said, "Your furnace is leaking."

Fortunately, they were able to just shut down the furnace, which meant we could all go back inside and everyone could get dressed. Unfortunately, they shut down the furnace, and it was 39 degrees today. Oh, and I had my doors propped open the whole time we waited for the gas company, trying to clear the gas out of the house.

Hey, at least I rent. That furnace was someone else's problem. So...the morning was a hassle, but it's all over now, right?

Ha.

While we were waiting outside, Jake had some sort of...ummm...stomach malfunction. Because he has his long winter coat on and we were a little preoccupied as it happened and didn't address it immediately, he ended up with his own disgustingly mushy waste all tangled up in his fur.

My still-heroic daughter volunteered to bathe him while I dropped by the property management company with the threatening notice from the gas company. But Jake had had all the trauma he could take for one day, and he escaped, dripping and smearing everything he was trailing across the bathroom floor and then running for downstairs. So then she had to wash not only the dog but also the tub, his leash and harness, and the bathroom floor. She opted to just throw away the towel he'd rolled on.

As soon as I came in from the rental office (which turned out to have closed for lunch 4 minutes before I arrived), she called me upstairs to tell her this story. While I was upstairs, Andrew called up that he needed to use the bathroom and I told him to use the one downstairs (since the one upstairs wasn't fit for humans). He said okay, but a moment later let out a wail that had me down the stairs at a dead run.

He was standing in front of the toilet, but his clothing was soaked and there was a puddle on the floor to rival what the dog had left behind upstairs (though this round, thankfully, was just urine). "Me pee everywhere," he sobbed. And he had. I think with all the chaos, he'd waited just a bit too long and then barely made it in the bathroom door before it let loose. It took me some time to convince him that it wasn't the end of the world and we could just wipe it up and wipe him up and get him into some clean clothes. Or so I thought.

While I wiped up the floor, Tori sat him down for lunch and he told her he'd been bad and peed on everything. ("Really?" I'm thinking. "You still think you're bad? After I picked you up and hugged your naked little urine-soaked self? That accomplished NOTHING other than creating a need for me to change my clothes?") So we all had a talk about how accidents weren't bad ("Oh! Okay.") and then I looked around and decided enough was enough. The temperature was dropping, someone would be working on the furnace, the bathtub needed a good scrubbing and we were all so far past the ends of our ropes that we didn't remember having them.

So I'm writing this from a hotel, where everyone had a nice swim and we had pizza delivered for dinner and it doesn't smell like gas and no one had to clean anything.

Well, almost nothing. Earlier this evening, a little voice called out from the bathroom, "Tori's mom! Me peed everywhere again!"

A New Year Indeed

Honestly, I wasn't all that optimistic about 2012. It wasn't that we'd been warned that the world would end--that seems to happen all the time. And it wasn't that by the end of the year I'd been unemployed for more than three months. I'm bizarrely unconcerned about that. It might have been in part due to the fact that I was sick for both Christmas and New Year's Eve, we didn't have any snow for the holidays and when 2012 began it seemed like there was a lot of unfinished 2011 business hanging on. And it was partly, I'm sure, due to the state of the world. When most new years dawn, I'm thinking about what the year ahead holds for me and my family. This year, more than most, I was thinking about what 2012 would hold for the country and the world; my expectations on those fronts were pretty bleak. That's still true.

But something changed for me with the new year, something I didn't plan for or resolve about or even anticipate.

2012 became the year to finish all of those dangling projects of the past, to clear out my filing cabinets and find a home for whatever was in them, to clean house not by tossing things and donating things as I usually do but by following a thousand paths mapped out in the past and interrupted or abandoned.

For example:

• In November of 2006, I wrote a romance novel on the train. I did it for no reason other than that a lot of women I knew were participating in NaNoWriMo and I wanted to find out whether I could write an entire novel in a month. Because I had a full time job and a 2+ hour round-trip commute and was a single parent, I didn't have a lot of time to write...but I managed to wrap up that novel largely during my commute (by train) that month. Then I basically let it sit on my hard drive for five years. During the first week of the year, I reviewed it, proofread it and added about 5,000 words; then I uploaded it to the Amazon Kindle store.
• During that same week, I vetted the children's books my daughter and I had written together during her early childhood--books that have been sitting around much longer than that romance novel had. These, in fact, only existed in hard copy. I picked the two we wanted to publish first, sent one off to get a quote from an illustrator I'm super-excited to be working with, and set Tori about making illustration notes on the second.
• This week, I finished creating e-book files, uploading them to my website and creating Paypal code and then created a sales page for my law school admissions e-books. Mike Gifford turned that content into an actual web page for me and added it to my site this evening.

I have two freelance projects to wrap up over the weekend, so that's probably it for this week, but really...I can't wait to see what next week holds.

Everyone Is Alive

When my kids were in elementary and middle school, we went around the table at dinner every night and each of us told the best thing that had happened to us that day. My theory was that sometimes there's something great to share, but there's always something at least a little bit good, and the smaller good things tend to get lost. A friend giving you a cookie at lunchtime or making it to the top of the monkey bars for the first time might pale in comparison with getting yelled at unfairly or someone pushing you down on the playground, and you just might come home focused on the negative--especially in middle school, where negative experiences outstrip positive by about 50 to 1 for a lot of kids.

Sometimes talking about the good thing can turn your whole view of the day around, or at least the way you're feeling in that moment.

Now that it's just me and Tori, it's not something we do all the time. We're always talking about the things that are going on in our lives, good and bad, and with only two of us in the house I don't have to work so hard to make sure everyone is heard. But every now and then, I'll pull it out.

So that headline there...that's mine for today. No one is dead. And please don't think I'm being cynical or using this as a backhanded way to say nothing good happened. I couldn't be happier that everyone is alive.

See, we were supposed to take my grandson Andrew home this morning, but yesterday afternoon while my son-in-law was on his way to work, his timing belt snapped. Fortunately, a relative loaned them a van almost immediately; if she hadn't, my stepdaughter Beth would have been home alone with no transportation when my younger grandson, Caleb (1), stuck a ruler in his mouth and turned to run from her, tripping before she could grab him and jabbing it through the roof of his mouth. But that didn't happen. She had the van available and swept him right out to the emergency room, where they shipped him to Indianapolis for some frightening testing and then determined that the blood supply to his brain had NOT been affected and they could just stitch him up, rehydrate him and, as soon as he was able to eat soft food and drink, send him on his way.

That hasn't happened yet. That means that his mommy (who is 6 months pregnant) was up all night at the hospital and Andrew didn't get to go home this morning...and he took it hard. So hard that when he told me at McDonald's Playland this morning that he had to go to the bathroom and I said, "Okay, let's get your shoes on," he threw a fit instead and stood his ground until he peed all over the floor. And that, of course, made him all the more hysterical, not to mention pretty darned uncomfortable when we went out in the freezing cold to take him back to my house and change him.

And Tori, who was up most of the night waiting for calls or exchanging texts with her sister at the hospital (and hasn't gotten a whole lot of sleep since she's been playing aunt-in-residence this week, anyway), actually fell asleep in the shower this morning and woke as she was falling. She managed to protect her head, but hurt her wrist a little and her ankle quite a bit.

So that's my good news for the day. We're all alive. If that's still true at the dinner table tonight, I'll be counting my blessings...if I can stay awake long enough to get dinner on the table.

Update: Though we're all still alive, I told the story of our day just a bit prematurely. Andrew took a flying leap into Tori's nose about 8:00 this evening and we ended up at the emergency room having her checked out for a broken nose. Verdict: maybe it's broken, but it's straight and her nasal passages are open, so no need to take any action. Go home, take some Motrin, put some ice on it, and stop envisioning slivers of nasal cartilege in your brain.

A Few Things I'd Forgotten

1. Sitting in the car for an hour or driving in circle because I know what the rest of the day will be like if I interrupt an unexpected nap.


2. Really sticky kisses that for some reason aren't icky at all.

3. How long something like watching a train pass by can remain interesting to a three-year-old.

4. The warm weight of a sleeping child.

5. How HIGH UP tiny children look when they climb almost anything.

6. The smell of Johnson's Baby Shampoo.

7. The extreme difficulty of staying focused on the misdeed at hand while looking into big, shiny brown eyes.

8. The willingness to appear in public wearing antlers.

9. The fact that a small child will scream "help!" when the television goes fuzzy with the same tone and degree of urgency he might employ were he trapped in a burning building.

10. The immeasurable value of fresh-from-the-bath-in-clean-pajamas hugs.

11. The endless capacity for repetition.

12. Being unable to remember when I last found time to take a shower.

The Best Things in Life are Three

Yesterday, as you know if you read this blog, know me in real life, are friends with me on Facebook or have crossed within 100 yards of me in the past few weeks, I picked up my three-year-old grandson from Indiana. He'll be staying with us for a week, and there are a lot of firsts involved: the longest he's been away from mom and dad, the longest car ride he's been on, his first trip out of state (and a few more to come).

Here's a little snapshot of our first twelve hours together:



I'm not really prejudiced, though. Some of the best things in life are also one.

Double the Power of Your Christmas Gifts

I suspect I'm not alone in that I always feel a bit torn at Christmas. Yes, I love buying shiny, expensive things for my children and grandchildren and watching them exclaim over them; yes, I love all the bright lights and sparkles of the season. And yet, it always feels a bit much, a bit greedy in light of what's going on all around us and far beyond our borders.

I love the idea of making charitable donations at Christmas, but they're hard to wrap and you can't hand them out around the tree, which typically means that I'm spending double the money every year, buying stuff for my loved ones and handing out cash to feed and clothe and otherwise support all those folks we should think about all year but often forget about until food drives and fundraisers put them back in our line of vision.

And that's okay; I'll probably do the same thing this year and feel good about it, too. I want my kids and grandkids to have shiny packages that make their eyes light up on Christmas morning. I want everyone else's kids to, too.

But this year, at least, I've found one option that covers all the bases. If you're a regular reader here, you've undoubtedly heard me mention Kwagala Project before. Kwagala (fka Purse of Hope) is an organization that provides aftercare to young victims of the commercial sex trade in Africa.

I first became involved with Kwagala because my former employer, Total Attorneys, funded a house in Gulu where these girls could live, learn, become a family and prepare for their new lives. In the intervening four years, I have been consistently amazed by the resilience and capacity for joy in these young women. Many of them were kidnapped, sold or forced by desperation into prostitution at an age when our girls are still playing with Polly Pockets and dressing up as princesses. But instead of holding on to bitterness and focusing on what they've been through, these dauntless young women work hard, play hard, laugh, sing and are endlessly grateful for the support they receive and the new lives ahead of them.

I don't think anything has made me cry quite so often as the hearts of these girls.

One of the first things the girls can do, while they're starting to transition, when they have little training or limited time, is to make jewelry. For many, this jewelry-making is the first paid work they've ever done outside of prostitution, and their first step toward saving money to build new lives for themselves.

Now, Kwagala is offering that jewelry for sale in time for Christmas. Please check it out, and check back over the next few days--we'll be adding many more items. Wouldn't you and the recipients of your gifts like to know that you're supporting a courageous young woman in her new life as you shop?