Pink Prickly Pear

Disney

I got an email offer of two free days at Disney (with some other wierd package deal).  As I clicked on it, I reasoned, "Well, the girl and I will be on our own for a bit, maybe we'll have a mini-break..."

Until I scrolled down to all the packages and offerings.  Do I want Magic Your Way? or Disney's Magical Express Circus?  What's the Year of a Million Dreams?  Too many choices.  Two aquaintances went to Disney at the end of last year.  They both had these massive guidebooks and were talking about all these coupons and tickets you need to sign up for and...and...and...it all sounds way too complicated.

I think we might just hang out here.  Add a little ice cream to the grocery cart every once in a while and take in some kid flicks.  When we move to vacation land, maybe we'll drive up to Anaheim.  I heard Disneyland could fit in Disneyworld's parking lot.  I think that suits me just fine.

Willie will never sound the same again.

Last month's MOJO complilation (Love Will Tear You Apart) has a Willie Nelson song on it.  I'm not particularly a fan of Willie.  He can write sad, sad tunes and I like songs I can wallow in, but his voice is just a hair too loud for me.

We were eating our lunch and on comes Willie.  Mini-pear says, "What's this song about?"  and I'm listening to Willie sing about maybe he and Marie can find a burned out van and settle under the bridge.  Later on Marie will die, with Willie's unborn son safe inside.  He'll leave them in the sun where someone will find them easy and he'll hop a train down south.

"It's about having a hard life."

She ponders this a moment, "I still like it, even if it is a sad song."

"Some of my favorite songs are sad ones."

"Who sings it?" and then, before giving me time to answer, she adds, "Sounds like Ned Flanders from the Simpsons."

He does have  Flanders-esque intonation, doesn't he?

We got these books by chance...

We use the library a lot.  I've got a fancy educators card, which translates to a borrowing limit we could never even attempt to exceed and no overdue fees ever on children's books.  We're lucky to have three libraries within what I consider walking distance and several more we stop into when we happen to be in certain neighborhoods.  We plan trips to return and borrow books, but we also use the libraries on a more spontaneous basis.  Having what must surely be the world's smallest bladder, I carry a mental map of reasonable clean, no-questions-asked toilets in the city, quite a few of which happen to be in our library system.  We also do a fair amount of tromping about the city and libraries are wonderful places to cool down or warm up in, depending on the weather that day.  We stop a while, rest our tired feet and reconnect over a story. 

I like our organic, unplanned stops at the library.  But if we should decide we'd like to look up a certain something, we are often out of luck due to a phenomenon I can't quite fathom.  For the most part, the DC public library do not offer public access to the card catalog from the children's rooms of their branches.  The children's rooms of most branches we visit are usually on their own floor or otherwise removed from the main library.  What's the point of keeping this vital resource away from the patrons?  I know I use the card catalog myself almost every time I visit.  I certainly did when I was a student. 

If we need a book on a specific subject, we have to ask a librarian.  Not that they aren't helpful people, but this assumes that the budget allows for a children's librarian during the time we happen to be at the library.  It frequently means waiting our turn, because other library patrons (most of whom are certainly capable of learning how to use a card catalog) also need to ask the librarian to help them find a book.

In addition to this being a colossal waste of time and resources, I can't help but think it imparts an ugly lesson to juvenile would-be users of the library.  You aren't capable of using the card catalog on your own.  You need someone else to help you because you're still a kid.  If it frustrates me, an adult and long time user of the library, how does it make a kid just figuring it all out feel?  And who wants to keep having to ask someone else for help?  Who wants to have to keep waiting in line?

When we plan our trips to the library, I log on to the card catalog from my home computer.  I print out a list to take along to the library.  And I'm glad this option is available to us, but not everyone has access to a computer at home.

When I first started to think seriously about homeschooling, I determined that it was my job to give mini-pear access to the tools and to teach her how to use them, rather than pack her head full of factoids and timelines.  Empowering her to seek out the answers to her questions, rather than pretending I knew all the answers.  And then we get to the library and we have to wait for the answers to get parceled out to us.

Yeah, I know.  Time to get started on a letter.

She has a lot to live up to.

These wooden puzzles belonged to my brother, my sister and myself.   I believe two of the puzzles in our collection date as far back as my mother's younger sister, perhaps even my mother.  Out of all of them (there are eight) there is only one piece missing and that piece was missing when it came to us.

You can bet we put our toys away when we were finished playing with them.  Although some of the time we must have acted like real, human kids and left things out for a while.  I remember this one time that my mother threatened to come through with a garbage bag and scoop up anything that was left out.  I didn't believe her.  Should have.

Somehow the puzzles have survived mini-pear's early childhood intact.  One more kid to go.  Can she do it?  Or will she be a flusher of toys?  A triumphant friend of kitchen bins everywhere? 

It's quiet here as I try and process some really awful news about some old friends. 

It was a mediocre day.

I got my dates wrong.  Our orphan visa should take nine weeks to process.  Nine weeks is next Tuesday, not this past Tuesday.  Bah!

Other than that, things are moving along.  Mr. Pear's enormous bicycle case arrived yesterday.  I woke up in the middle of the night and woke him up, "Your bike case is never going to fit in our car!"  This is a frequent problem with our miniscule little car-for-the-people.  He insists he can make it work.  I think he's going to have to get another ride to the airport.

I shipped a box of stuff to California.  We kind of have to move now, don't we?

Shopping for a shower curtain and macaroni and cheese and packing tape, I spied the first Cadbury's cream eggs of the season.  It's kind of sad that a gooey chocolate egg was the high point of my day.

The low point?  Lifting Mr. Pear's ginger beer onto the conveyor belt at Whole Foods, having the carboard bottom of the four-pack give way, and having four glass bottles of ginger beer crash down onto the floor, shattering into a million little pieces and soaking me in sticky ginger beer.

I tried a new wine.  It's not good. 

So close...

Who needs a barometer when you've got my head? 

I got my first migraine when I was about fifteen.  I remember standing at my locker, waiting for some friends so we could grab some lunch.  I was feeling fine, bored, a little hungry, maybe, but otherwise fine.  Suddenly, I ran down the hall and vomited in the water fountain.  Then I ran to the bathroom and vomited again.  Washing my face, I looked in the mirror, only to discover half of my face was missing.  I remember laying down on a cold vinyl bed in the nurses office, waiting for someone to come and pick me up.  The florescent lights overhead buzzed and every last sound was amplified until it echoed around my skull.  At home, I ground my head into my mattress, trying anything to make the horrible pain go away.

As the years passed, the headaches developed a pattern.  I would get them seasonally, as the weather changed.  I'd get them in a series, usually two or three in a row, with wobbly, barely-there days in between, where I'd function just enough to get by. 

By the time I was in college I'd had enough to recognize very specific warning signs that a full-blown headache was coming.  The first, a distinct smell of rotting citrus, and the second, dancing splotches of vision loss that increased until I could barely see out of my right eye.  From the first whiff of citrus, I knew I had about 45 minutes to get myself to a safe dark place where I could lay down for at least four hours.  And laying down in a dark place was pretty much all I could do.  Reading or watching television were out, listening to anything was impossible.  I'd drink a cup of strong coffee and take 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, hang towels or blankets over the window shades and lay in bed, breathing and counting down the hours until I could hobble out of the bedroom and sit in an exhausted heap on the couch.

I'm lucky.  I don't get them that often anymore.  I had one last year.  I don't really know why.  My diet is different.  My stress levels are different.  I do get bad headaches, but they are not completely debilitating in the way a migraine would literally put me to bed.

Yesterday the weather was suddenly warm.  Monday night, I felt a stiffness in my neck, an overwhelming tiredness and then yesterday morning, the very idea of getting up and facing the day?  More coffee, please.  The pain was intense, but I was able to drive mini-pear to the dentist and then to singing class, but I dropped her at the door and went and sat in the car.  No reading, no knitting, no radio, eyes closed.  Just quiet space to try and push the pain away with deep breaths.  I came home and napped.  I call them small brain aches, because it feels like my brain has shrunk a little and is now free to slosh around and bash into my skull.  Climbing stairs, bending over, walking?  All sloshes the brain about in a most disconcerting manner.

Now that the migraines are (hopefully) behind me, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to just get it all over with in a five hour smackdown, rather than this three day long slow build up to pain, the teary eye and the brains sloshing, the stiff neck, full jaw, and the earache that never quite manifests into anything.

yum

A few years ago, I sat in my friend Stephanie's quiet dining room, chatting as we rolled out fresh pasta dough, dropping little spoonfuls of homemade pumpkin puree and pressing the edges of the little pockets with the tines of our forks.  We cooked them up, just the two of us - no dinner party, no fancy table settings - and then we sat and ate our ravioli, quickly tossed with a bit of olive oil and pepper.   

I was reminded of that calm, quiet, satisfying afternoon this evening, as the family sat around the kitchen table, listening to music as we folded minced tofu and vegetables into wonton skins.  A hearty miso soup and we had ourselves a meal.

The filling: shitake mushrooms, grated ginger, anise, grated carrots, shredded cabbage, diced portabella mushrooms, minced garlic, crumbled tofu, scallions, soy and hoisin sauces.

There were plenty for freezing but I have a feeling they won't last long.

Party time;)

There are some good friends we're leaving behind in DC.  The kind of people who will drive an hour out to the boonies first thing on a freezing Saturday morning to tramp around some dilapidated stables and subject their children's tender ears to horrific stories of equine neglect.

Mini-pear turned seven at the beginning of February.  Mama did not plan a party.  The apartment is tiny and ill-equipped for a drop-off, sugar-fueled shindig with the various children in our life.  At home parties are for people with yards. 

Instead we decided to meet a few friends up at Days End Horse Farm Rescue.  We had a tour of their facilities, got to meet some of the horses and ended with a pony ride around the barn for the kids (and some of the adults, too!).  So mini-pear got to have her much wished for pony ride party without the "my parents rented me a pony for my special day" vibe (I hope).

It was getting on for lunch when we finished up, so our guide recommended a local diner.  Off we went, me feeling slightly nervous about having not made a reservation or anything for the seventeen people in our party.  Seventeen must just be size of a regular family get together out in farm country.  The career waitresses hardly batted an eye and steered the kids to the $3 breakfast buffet. 

Came home, zonked out with the paper, then zonked out in bath with MOJO and now I'm off to walk the dog (hot tea in to travel mug a must).

Tonight I have some masochistic hankering to make vegetable dumplings.

It's go time.

Our adoption counselor called me this afternoon.  She was just checking in.  Didn't I say I'd mail the remainder of our dossier to her mid-February?  I had to tell her that I'm still waiting on our orphan visa.  If I've calculated processing times correctly and there is nothing unforseen holding up our file, we should get that from USCIS at the beginning of next week.  Everything else is already in my FedEx envelope ready to go.  If that envelope doesn't go by the beginning of March documents are going to start expiring on us.  I don't relish the thought of re-aquiring any of them.  I'll have to do some as it is for our homestudy update.  This is what we get for moving mid-adoption, not that there's anything we can do about it.  So next week.  I'm saying Tuesday the 20th, maybe Wednesday since Monday is a holiday.

I hope. 

I really, really, really hope, because come March 1st, we're paying rent on two residences.  We have to stay at this address until USCIS is finished with our file.  Mr. Pear is actually shipping out some household goods and his bike so he can settle in there as early as the end of next week.  Parenting unassisted 24/7 is something I can do, but we all function much better as a family unit.

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I get to be a tattletale!

It snowed on Tuesday and Wednesday, right?  And DC law says you are responsible for clearing the sidewalk along your residence within 24 hours.  Dick Cheney didn't have his hired goons out there until this afternoon.  Friday!

What's the hold up?

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I did take a picture of my lunch but it was so disappointing.  Five Guys Burgers and Fries - I think they have opened too many new locations too quickly.  The cheese in my grilled cheese was not melted.  The outside sort of overcooked.  Our fries were dark brown and heavily salted.  I'm doubly mad because I try not to eat a lot of fried foods.  When I do, I want it to be worth my while.