bflynn

Old Stone Walls

I’ve lived in New England for approaching 14 years now. I have the sneaking suspicion that as the years pile on, I’ll never really be OF New England, although I may end up parenting native New Englanders. It’s funny how that works. Anyway, there are some parts of New England I’ve adopted. I’ve come to expect the displays of kosher food that appear in grocery stores this time of year (hint: they do not appear in grocery stores on the dry side of Washington State). I’ve fallen hard for the Red Sox, just like everyone else. I sometimes use the word “wicked” in the place of “very”, although rarely unironically.

But the charms of New England still seem novel to me. The common phenomenon of the little town center, with all the tall white buildings gathered around a common with the war monuments. The paths that run across it, where paths have run for hundreds of years since first the docile cows appeared where once the old forests stood. The neighborhoods of regular old houses, all of which are over a hundred years old. The bells that sound out over the town, the plaques in front of houses, the brick mills lining the rivers, the old burying-grounds with the skeleton-heads emblazoned upon them — all these charming things that come together to be New England.

One uniquely New England phenomenon I’ve been noticing lately are the old stone walls. My commute changed, along with my job. Now at my exit, in those wasted triangles of land between off-ramp and freeway, there is a criss-crossing tangle of old stone walls winding their way between the middle-aged trees. These walls are a wonder to me. They are so intentional, so old, so archaic. They remain almost universally only in wooded areas. You find yourself wondering how they managed to build such a straight line between so many trees before recalling that the wall came first, the trees later. They often seem a little pointless, no more than knee high. What inspired the hours of back-breaking labor that went into their crafting? A sentiment of “This is mine and that is yours?” The neat ordering or society? Or: I”, a poor immigrant whose family through the reaches of history has never even owned the dirt floor upon which we slept — I own this land and it is mine and no others!” Or is it more simply a “now that I’ve plowed this rocky soil what do I do with the big stones I turned up?”

And they are so old. In the West, if we had even one of these stone walls it would be carefully maintained, with a historical marker. People would come look, and it would be mentioned in the books. There would be fieldtrips from 6th graders. It would carry a name. Surely we should treat these walls with greater reverence and protection than their current falling-down existence in the few unused margins of our land? But no. There are so many. My rather densely populated suburban commute has example after example, and they stretch out that way across all of New England. They are old, but not rare.

So I watch them and I wonder. How long until they become rare? How ancient is that example I see? A hundred years old? Three hundred? Whose hand set those stones, one on the other. What did he think as he did so? What animals or fields were so guarded? How did New England look then — a land of far-reaching fields, where now it is scrub forests hiding housing developments? What would he, anonymous crafter, have thought of the high-tech job I scurry to as I gaze upon his labors? Would it be so alien as to be beyond his imagining? And this asymmetrical, glass-walled, cube-filled, climate-controlled building I currently occupy… what farm or field or house, hundreds of years old, did it displace?

Wherever humans have stood, for as long as they have stood there, there is history. The question is whether we know it and can see it. There were people who roamed the mountains of my youth. I once found a hand tool carved by them. But they were few and transient where I lived, and they did not build edifices that have lasted through time. There is history in those hills, but I cannot reach it. Here, I gaze left as I wait at the light, and I am brought into connection with it. I wonder what it would be like to live in a place even thickly settled with layers of history, reaching back as far as mankind set one stone upon another – a Rome or Jerusalem or Cairo. Do you grow inured? Do you gain perspective on how fleeting you are? Do you think about the feet that have trod the same stones you now traverse? Or do you only think of your destination: that place to which you are going?

I do not know. I suspect I will never become entirely used to it.

Saturday Morning

I distinctly remember Saturday mornings back at our old apartment in Roslindale. We were young, of course. I was maybe 23, had been married for a grand total of two years. I was such an adult! Living in the city! Being married! With enhanced jobishness! On those Saturday mornings, I had developed quite an arsenal of distraction tools designed to convince my husband it wasn’t time for him to get out of bed. Then when he finally stopped languishing, I would fall back asleep for an hour or two.

Car Talk started at 11. I sometimes got up only to be able to listen to it. I often didn’t get up in time for it. Sometimes I didn’t get up in time for Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me at noon. I shook my head at the crazy notion of people doing things at outrageous hours like NINE AM on a SATURDAY!

Well, here it is a Saturday these many years later. I have a few more pounds, significantly more wrinkles and live in the suburbs. At 6:30 this morning, a certain small person of my acquaintance demanded a clean diaper and breakfast. This didn’t shock and stun me with it’s imperative — this happens every morning. The exact time varies (every so rarely, usually when my husband is on morning duty, which is 80% of the time, the hour is as late as EIGHT O’CLOCK if you can believe it!!!) Far from luring my husband to remain in the soft domain of sheets with me, I ungallantly say things like, “Aren’t you going to get up with him?” or “Weren’t you planning on getting up at 7?” My greatest sleeping-in indolence lasts until about 9:30. That means my husband will have been on his own for two or two and a half hours.

I admit, I really miss sleeping in. I can still pull some crazy sleep times, given opportunity. There is a magic morning, not far in the future for Grey but impossibly distant for Thane, when all the parts of the morning that are required (the turning on of tv, the making of breakfast) will be self-sustaining. I fondly remember childhoods where a block of Saturday was spent with one or two original thoughts an hour. It’s really not such a bad thing, when you’re talking before 9. But not yet.

And now to go pick my mom up at 8 am at the airport — an hour which discommodes me not a whit. YAY MOM!!!!

Hippopotamus

The Scene After the dinner table, after a lovely family dinner. Grey, as usual, is not sitting down. My husband has his back to him, attending to our youngest.

The Incident Suddenly, my husband feels something impact on his back. His is unhappy about the object that hit his back. (Grey has been throwing lots of things lately and hitting people with them, so he was already on notice.) With a touch of asperity in his voice, he says, “Grey, what was that?”

Grey: A hippopotamus
A: No really, what was that?
Grey: A hippopotamus
A: (voice taking on the glint of steel) Gregory, what did you just throw at me.
Grey: (unfazed) A hippopotamus
A: Grey, I’m not kidding. Joking time is over. WHAT WAS THAT.
Grey: (confidently) A hippopotamus
A: (is about to boil over and explain to someone what the difference between joking and for real is with a time out)
Me: Wait a minute. Grey, can you get the hippopotamus from under the table?
Grey: Descends to the subterranean depths of the table. Returns with this:

Cue riotous laughter from all quarters, after which A ruefully apologizes to Grey.

Finis

Bored with yourself

One of my friends is also the parent of two small children, working full time, volunteering at her church and generally strapped for time and kept very busy. She mentioned the other day that she felt desperately dull. Hoo boy. Do I know that one. Every parent struggles with different aspects of the changes that come with being parents. Some mothers really struggle with the changes to their body and autonomy. Some fathers have trouble changing their identity to match with “person who gets up with the kids at 6:30” and not “guy who hangs out with his buddies on Wow until 3 am”. Plenty of parents hit hard between the difference between who they think they are (and probably who they were) and the realities of the sleep-deprived, Dora-enhanced, macaroni-and-cheese-only life they currently live.

There are a few reactions to this. I think we’ve all met people who have decided the appropriate response is to sign over their entire identity to parenthood. This is an understandable reaction to the overwhelming demands of parenting, especially if you have special needs children, or more than one or two kids. There simply isn’t a lot of time for crafting and maintaining your separate personhood. The downside to this comes in about two decades, which is a long time to think about the downside. That’s when all of a sudden, your children no longer want you to identify yourself by them. They become adults. They don’t call home regularly from college. You have free time. Suddenly, the question of “who am I?”, if you have been answering that question with “Mom” for the last 20 years, can hit you like a Mack truck.

I don’t necessarily think that the absorbing parent identity is a bad or horrible thing — it can be a joyful and realistic one, I think — but it’s not what I want. Underneath the laundry, the job, the church roles, the dinner-cooking, the story reading… I still want there to be a me that uniquely belongs to me, and who I find interesting. Most critically, to be happy, I need to have something to think about.

You’d think this would be easy, wouldn’t you? How much time does it take to have interesting thoughts? I see my mind like an old grain-mill on a river, with heavy granite grindstones. You feed the wheat in. The slow, powerful river moves the stones day and night without ceasing. And out comes flour – the nourishment I so desperately need.

The problem is that in my life as it is right now, there’s no grain coming in. The stones mill the few kernels I pass in finer and finer. Eventually the stones grind only against each other. There’s no flour coming out. The mill threatens to bind and break. And I don’t have enough time to go gather and bring the plentiful wheat in the fields. When this happens, my life gets dreary and boring. I don’t have anything to daydream about. I don’t have anything to write about. I don’t have anything to think about. I don’t (this is the worst) have anything to dream about. My dreams grow terribly prosaic and boring. There is no space between the reality of my day and the escapes of my sleeping mind.

The grain in my mill analogy could be anything. It could be literature, or Economist articles, theological concepts, or interesting concepts on NPR. Some things have heavier harvests than others. For example, rereading Tolkein for the 93rd time, while fun, is pretty slim-pickings for grain harvest. The bounty that came from reading the Odyssey for the first time, however, kept my mill happily humming for about two months. Lately I have been feeding it with all the new things I’ve been learning at work. While there is a great deal of volume in these new people, technologies and places, the flour that comes out isn’t particularly nourishing. The night’s dreams are too much like the day’s realities.

I want the Me — now buried under the mounds of laundry in the basement, the piles of dishes rising above the filthy kitchen floor, the edifices of un-put-away blocks — to be an interesting person when she has a chance to re-emerge. I want to have vibrant dreams. I want the boundaries of my world to keep pushing out and expanding. The universe is so large the walls of my world would never have to stop growing, so long as I continue to push. There truly are nearly an infinite number of interesting ideas to pursue.

For example, one of the best harvest-books I’ve read in the last ten years was Power, Sex and Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. It had all these amazing new ideas and concepts, but was written so a non-scientist like me could approach and learn. More recently, The Happiness Project has given me good thinking. The Sarantine Mosaic was full of rich images and ways of looking at the world. I look upon Lois McMaster Bujold as a great, gift-bringing prophetess of new thoughts. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve mulled over Miles’ personality quirks or had an astonishing revelation about the naming of Sergyar, thanks to her rich, idea-filled writing.

I am time-broke. I’m pulling time-pennies out from under couch cushions and hitting my relatives up for loans. I’m doing without and buying the economy version, when it comes to time. I cannot afford to invest in something that doesn’t work. I can’t reread a book for comfort, or nostalgia. I have to be heartless when it comes to tossing aside the dregs of books that do not inspire, or who have great stuff if only I had the patience to get to it. I need dense, accessible, rich works. These are actually harder to come by than you might think.

For my friend, I came up with my criteria for fields to harvest, books to read.

1) It should be new. Although rereading books means that the quantity and quality are known, you won’t get as much new stuff to think about (unless you were like 12 the last time you read it).
2) It should have depth. I love reading the pattern-heavy romances and fictions as well as the next girl, and probably better. But when starving for thoughts, you can’t afford to spend your time eating cotton candy.
3) It should be lovely. I would not want to find enough time to read and invest your scarce energy into a book, only to have it be full of the DEPRESSING DOOM OF DESPAIR (for example, from what I’ve heard, The Doomsday Book would qualify easily for 1 & 2, but it fails my criteria for depressing).
4) It should be readable. I love Chaucer in Middle English. Now is not the time of my life when I have the unbroken concentration and energy to plow through remembering that “eke” means “also” and “yclepd” means “called”. That was a once-and-future time.

The Odyssey was a great example of a book that met these criteria. It was full of new thoughts and delightful turns of mind. I’d never read it before. (I KNOW!) It was truly lovely. And thanks to a good translation, it was eminently readable. Next up will be Plato’s Republic, for a reading group a friend is putting together.

So what about you? Are you a parent whose identity risks submersion? Have you come out the far side of parenthood and had to rethink who you are? Does your sleeping mind starve for new thoughts? How do you feed it? Do you dream astonishing dreams, or prosaic ones? What should I read to ride on the wings of new dreams?

Welcome spring

So spring this year decided to start off by jumping to the end and giving us the first day of summer. I suspect it got up near 80 degrees today, which seems anomalous as you walk under bare branches and through winter-cleared meadows. And walk we did! I broke out the sunscreen today, and liberally applied it to all and sundry. Grey played alone in our backyard – a recent graduate to the privilege. He built an “experiment” with bricks and bocce balls that consumed his attentions for nearly an hour. I brought his PB&J down to him, so as to not interrupt the scientist mid-experiment. (The subject seemed to be gravity and the slope of the yard.)

The boys and I walked our errands this morning: library, bank and post office. Grey told me a long story about the friendly Goblins he knew who didn’t eat people, but ate people food and some goblin food. Some of this goblin food was Goblin Mashed Potatoes, which taste like your favorite things ever: beef barley stew and chocolate cake and lemonade. I only hope that they don’t taste that way all at once!

There was some goofing off at aikido, but I was proud of my eldest for taking correction from sensei with grace and without the fit-pitching that would’ve been our lot 6 months ago in the same way.

Then, en famile, we went for a walk in the Middlesex Fells reservation. Now, one thing my husband and I have noticed we have not done well is teaching Thane to walk. Mechanically, he walks just fine. He runs on toddler legs from room to room. But this is not a useful form of locomotion without the ability to walk where you wish him to go, in such a way you have confidence he’s not going to dart into traffic. Basically, he doesn’t know how to walk holding a grownup’s hand. So today initiates the start of the “You have two perfectly good legs, so use them” training for Thane. Sturdly little toddler feet traversed nearly a quarter mile of the Fells before quarter was granted. He learned the joy of 1-2-3-whee. (Grey, sadly, is nearly on the other side of that beloved tradition.) Grey befriended a local rock, adopted him, and named him Leo. As we took a break and Thane’s father chased him around to attempt to prevent the falling-off-cliffs option, Grey looked at me and said, “I love my baby brother. I hope he stays safe.” Then he offered said baby brother tangible proofs of love in the form of cheese and pretzels. Greater love, my friends.

And now I’m sitting in the back yard, thanks to the miracles of technology and wireless, watching my husband rake up the detritus of winter, thanks to his fine efforts. I have a novel lined up next, and an internet friend who I’ve known for probably 7 years but never met coming over for dinner tonight. There’s babysitting on tap for tomorrow after church, and my mom is coming out next weekend.

Life, my friends, is very very good.

Talking about the weather

There is something fundamental to humanity that we notice and talk about the weather. Even though we are climate-controlled dwellers of enclosed homes, we will turn on our televisions to discover whether the 25 feet between our car and our place of work will be a sunny or damp sojourn. We never tire of talking about the weather: praising, blaming, complaining.

This week, however, the weather has made a real impact on my life, and more so on the lives of my friends. This weekend, it rained. It was epic. There were the standard jokes about ark-building (which actually DO get old, thanks). Still the deluge continued. By the time it was all over, we’d had more than 10 inches of rain. (Thank HEAVENS it didn’t come down as snow!) On Monday, as it was supposed to stop raining and wasn’t, I got a call from a friend. The water was coming up through the floorboards. Did I have any advice? Of course my advice was to get out and come to my home. Thus it was that three people and four cats joined us for two days. I’d love to say there’s a happy ending, but in truth they’re still displaced. All of their furniture is ruined, many of their belongings are, and they aren’t likely to be back in their own home until next month sometime.

Then, on Tuesday, the weather has been trying to win us back by being the most lovely, clement, soft, gentle, comfortable version of itself you can imagine. The last three nights the boys have come home by way of the park, where they have run and laughed and slid down slides and climbed and NOT WORN THEIR JACKETS because it was so warm. The extra light has been a halo of joy in my evenings.

On our walk home, I’ve watched with great interest the progress of the bulbs. By the bank, where there’s obviously a heat leak, the tulips and daffodils are likely only a week away. There’s a bank of snowdrops on a south-facing lawn. In my own front garden, the irises are out and lovely (I do not remember planting them, I confess!). The crocuses are significantly behind them. The daffodils are about 2 inches high. The hyacinth will bloom this weekend. I suspect the 70 degree weather on Saturday will also bring forth the first of the forsythia, which would be unlovely at any other time but in the newest days of Spring is a shocking delight of sunlight in flower form. I may find an excuse to travel along a local road, once on my commute, which I know is early to the forsythia party.

If past experience holds true, I will likely get very optimistic and convinced that really! This is Spring! I will go and buy some bedding plants. Then we will get 2 feet of snow.

This has never stopped me. In my defense, it also has never stopped Lowe’s from enabling my optimistic bedding-plant behavior.

I love this time of year. It is so miraculous. Through the winter I have looked at pictures of my sons, nearly naked in a lake, and wondered what sort of abusive mother I was to permit them to do that. Weren’t they cold? Imagination and memory fail to stretch to a time of warmth, or even heat — of overhead fans whirring and windows wide. We have stopped believing it is possible by the time spring comes. And yet, here it comes. Full of delights and remorse for the way we have been treated through the cold winter. And we fall in love all over again.

The Marathon

Sometimes your schedule sneaks up on you. Husband gone for 5 days, no problem! Hosting 20 – 30 people for pie? Sounds like fun! Bring it on! Church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night? But of course! Regularly scheduled roleplaying game? I do love some Deadlands (this game in particular)! But then all of a sudden you look at your calendar, and you realize that these things are happening back-to-back-to-back-to-back, with no unscheduled or off days in between. Oops.

I’m just getting off of one of those. While I could outline exactly why I’ve been super duper crazy busy every single night for the last week and a half (and every day of the weekend), let’s say that last night at 7:30 was the first full hour I could sit down and do something non-productive in about 7 days. And booooy was I ready for it!

On the upside, most of the stuff I’ve been so incredibly busy doing was a ton of fun. I’m happy to report that Piemas was a success. (Of course, you’d have to be an idiot to have Piemas be a failure. Make pie. Have other people bring pie. Eat pie. It’s not rocket science.) There was, to my great surprise, a preponderance of sweet pies. I thought that the savories would be overabundant, but no. They went quickly. There were also, as will surprise no one who has attended any sort of gathering at my house, a number of games going on. We did a quick an innovative redesign of the kitchen layout to permit the epic 2.5 hours of Agricola in which I was fortunate enough to get my hat handed to me.

My only regret with these fake holidays I love so much is that I don’t get a chance to talk to all of my friends in as in-depth a manner as I would wish.

In other news, my job is going super duper well (I think). The analogy I’m using is that I’m like a plant that’s been repotted. I was root-bound in my last position. Switching jobs has taken me out of that pot, broken the old root ball, and put me in this new, larger pot. In response, I’m throwing out new growth from all angles. I love it. It’s making me super happy. In the three weeks I’ve been here, I’ve met probably 150 people, learned an entirely new programming language and paradigm (and delivered real code to production!), participated in oodles of meetings, done the voice-acting for a quarterly presentation for the web team (which, for the record, I am not on), asked an apparently high profile question at the Town Hall meeting when we met the folks who will be our new bosses, and been asked by the Sustainability Director if I’d be willing to be in a video employee highlight discussing the role sustainability played in my decision to sign on here. New people, new tools, new technologies and I feel like I’m thriving. Hopefully my boss feels the same way!

The boys are doing pretty well. This was not my finest parenting weekend. I keep telling myself that as long as the boys do get focused attention, are loved, and it isn’t the only way life works — that learning to entertain one’s self is not a bad skill to work on. Grey seems to mostly really like his new preschool. It has the ups and downs that relationships with other children do have. Someone calls him a name and he’s down in the mouth. He plays tag with a new friend and he’s jazzed. But academically it seems superior. He’s just so much more alert to the social aspects, that he’s bound to spot any problems.

The DS is usually restricted to car use only

Thane. Ah, my Thane! What a giggly joy you can be. How frustrated you are getting. This was a hard weekend for him. He wanted to play the board games too! (Note: dice are a fantastic choking hazard!) He wanted to be with me at all times. He wanted to be down, he wanted to be up. I suspect he really wants to get out of the house. The deluge of rain this weekend was not amenable to this.

Anyway, we’re all doing well! I’m having a fantastic time professionally, and my life personally is full full full of love, joy, friendship and board games. I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Today is Piemas

The Saturday closest to 3/14, at 1:59 pm, is Piemas. This is a very complicated concept, but basically Piemas is a day dedicated to the eating of pie. For the purposes of Piemas, a pie is defined as a circular food object with at least one crust: so quiche, shepherd’s pie, cheesecake and tartes would all qualify. We usually have nearly equal number of savory and sweet pies. And basically we sit around all day and eat pie.

It’s a fantastic holiday. And it starts in about an hour. I made only four pies this year: lemon merangue, pecan pie (which is practically cheating it’s so easy), and two chicken pot pies which are in the ‘fridge to cook as appropriate. Everything is in readiness for a long day of dedicated pie-consumption.

Let the pie begin.

Hey, that’s me!

I’m always interested in the spots where I seem to react differently than other people do. I wonder why, what part of my personality and upbringing combine to create this unusual reactions. I’ve lately been thinking about my astonishment when I see something I know in other circumstances.

What do I mean? For example, recently a celebrity crime occurred, which got a moderate amount of news coverage. By that I mean that you could go to the CNN home page at the time and find a link to the issue. Well, that crime happened not only in my town, but in a house that I can see from my bedroom window. For a week or two, there were news vans circling our neighborhood. I could tell whether the affected family was home or not by just looking up and seeing lights. I debating whether bringing cookies to a neighbor I’d never met was an appropriate response. But I got this odd shock and thrill at hearing the name of my town, the picture of my neighborhood uttered by these national media outlets. People I’d never met from faraway walks of life knew the name of my town! I was surprisingly surprised by it all.

Then came the acquisition. I have a few media sources I access regularly: NPR, The Economist, CNN.com, Boston.com. On my morning drive in, I heard NPR make the announcement (thank heavens I already knew from having checked my email the night before or who knows how my driving would’ve been affected!). The Economist has it in the first page summaries. CNN didn’t carry much coverage, but the Boston Globe had a big ol’ story, with a picture of my office highlighted on it. It felt really weird, as though I’m a part a big important multinational company, or something.

Oh, wait.

So I got to thinking about why I don’t expect to ever hear about my town, or my company. I was raised in a town of 400 people. We got bused over a mountain pass for Junior High and High School to a booming metropolis with fewer than 2000 people. You can live in the town that has the closest cinema, and never have heard of the town I grew up in. It’s off the road on a dead end, and only has something to offer if you like fishing and beer, preferably simultaneously. (The town roughly quadruples in size on the opening day of fishing season.) When people ask me where I grew up, I usually either lie and say Seattle, or ask them how well they know Washington geography. This town is so remote that it wasn’t covered by any meteorologist or weather report. (I mean, my dad has a weather station now, but when I was a kid? Not so much.) Can you imagine if you listen to the radio to catch the weather report, and it’s for a place 60 miles away and 2000 feet of elevation change lower? You could gather the big patterns, but you shouldn’t expect to ever hear the name of your town uttered, or know about the weather in advance, or even hear news coverage about something that happened.

Then there’s the companies I’ve worked for. The first one, professionally, had a grand total of 5 people. Most of the rest of the company was related to the founder. (I just checked. They still have 5 people, most of whom are related to the founder…) After I was laid off on Mother’s Day, I went to a much bigger company. I mean, there must’ve been 15 or 20 people there! Through acquisitions, it might’ve gotten up to 40 by the time I left… to go to a company where I was employee #6. Again, there was growth in that company as well, but never past the point where we could all meet in one conference room. So three small to very small companies, that stayed small companies. Of course they weren’t usually profiled in big business journals or the Economist — the impact they had on the wider world was limited. This is the first time I’ve worked with a company big enough to make the news. So no wonder I’m surprised when I see and hear my company talked about in a large audience.

I come from a small town and have always worked in small companies. I expect no one to know where I come from or where I work. It’s surprising to find in my adult life that neither of those is true.

How about you? When you tell people where you’re from, do you expect them to know where that is? When you talk about your company, do you have give the 5 minute elevator speech explaining what it does, or does everyone already know? When you see something you recognize in the news, is it “of course” or “omg I can’t believe it! I know where that is!”

The less glorious times of parenthood

I think Thane may end up killing me. I debate, as I practice my breathing exercises, whether he’s different than Grey was at the same age or whether I’ve simply blocked it from my mind. I suspect, as is so often the case, a mixture of both.

I’m on my own this weekend. My husband is in Washington DC for a work conference. Thursday night, shortly before said spouse left, Thane spiked a fever of 104. The high fever point actually wasn’t so bad. As long as you were holding him, he was ok. Snuggly even. And he slept a lot. But then Saturday he woke up sans fever but with a wicked fierce grump going. Saturday had great weather — in the 50s and sunny. We went for a walk, went to the park, went for another walk. He was pretty happy in the stroller (I thought maybe this wasn’t the right weekend to start Project Teach Thane To Use His Own Two Feet, Already), but at the park, he just wanted to be held. He pitched a royal fit when I took him out at the graveyard and refused to walk.

When we weren’t walking, there was a lot of screaming. Disconsolate wailing at his high chair when presented with (oh, the woe!) his favorite foods. Bitter, bitter tears when his brother was playing with a toy he desired. That particular episode lasted about 20 minutes. Screeching, wailing and agony.

Then dinner time came. I’d made the mistake of telling Grey I’d take him to The 99 — a treat on par with few others in the 4 year old pantheon. It’s a step below Chuck E Cheese, but a step above even McDonalds, if you can believe it. I should have held my peace — I faced oath-breaking to a 4 year old, or bringing the hydra-handed fury of screech with us. Since I really didn’t feel like making dinner, I opted for the latter. Big. Mistake. Oh, the waiting! The gnashing of teeth! And that was just my reaction to Thane’s behavior! Even Grey was bothered by it.

Pity and forgiveness, fellow diners. At least acknowledge that I got us out of there FAST.

This morning, I permitted myself to hope. Maybe he would sleep late and wake cheery? Such things have been known to happen! Perhaps the sun would rise in his crib, leaving the sturm-und-drang as an operatic memory, washed away by humming the chorus to that silly sewing song in the second act? No such luck. Worse, this morning it seemed temperament-based screaming. He DROPPED a CAR on the FLOOR!!!! Has ever a child known such WOE!

And I’m left to discern whether he’s actually still in pain or discomfort in some way, whether it’s a phase, or whether he’s just arrived at 2 awfully early. Moreover, I can’t really go anywhere, and staying here is driving me nuts. I’m headed to church shortly with the boys. You’d think this would be some nice respite, but no. I’m on nursery duty. I’m contemplating begging someone to switch with me, but somehow there’s something in “Help! My kid’s driving me nuts! You take ’em for an hour!” that seems rather, I don’t know, unChristian.

I’d been hoping the ear tubes would make this sort of tantruming a thing of the past. While they’ve been fantastic in terms of verbal development, apparently they do not fix all. The truth is that Thane is focused. He wants this one particular thing, and he will expend vast amounts of effort to obtain it. It doesn’t matter if he can’t have the thing because he is not permitted to, or if he has simply failed to communicate his desires. Quite often the problem is that he wants something he can’t have (the butter dish at the 99, the toy his brother is playing with, etc.) So the ability to communicate will only eliminate a small problem.

The great thing, though, is that this same trait will be an excellent one (applied correctly) later in life. This focus and determination, turned to a scientific problem, obtaining tenure, running a marathon, becoming an Olympic athlete, or finally writing that perfect gaming system will be a tremendous asset to him. We just have to survive to get there.

On our way to the Children's Museum last week

Edited to add: Then Thane skipped his morning AND afternoon nap. Shortly after being allowed to get up from his attempt at an afternoon nap, as I was on the phone with his father, he fell down four stairs and cut open his eyebrow, leading to lots of blood and a call to the nurse line, which recommends I wake him every 2 hours tonight. (He’s probably fine, but I was alarmed.) Poor husband was totally in the dark about the seriousness (or lack thereof) of his condition for about 15 minutes as I staunched the bloodflow, which must have been really nerve-wracking for him. My cell phone finally ran out of battery. The cat vomited on the stairs. All this is to say: I’m really forward looking to Monday.

On the plus side — Dominos delivers.