Salt and Pickles

dear patrick, 

our family will now  have a giant patrick shaped hole in it. You will be deeply missed.

If this baby girl inside me has half of your zest, wit, vibrancy, childlike wonder and humor.. she will be an incredible kid. I wish we cousins had listened to you and tried harder to all get together more often.

I love you,
your oldest cousin - H.

So, even if all you crave are a few crisp juicy pickles and lovely fat green olives (the really neon green gorgeous kind that can be found at Whole Foods right now and taste like butter olives) . Don’t do it. Do not decide to eat only pickles and olives for dinner.but if you do, once you’ve finished puking up the lovely green.. eat a bagel and all will be right with the world again. 

tomorrow we are flying to Baltimore. I don’t really want to fly anywhere, but we have a family obligation (and that part will be fun) so fly I will. I hope to get an aisle seat and a few barf bags.  

If we don’t have a vanishing twin, and both decide to stick around. We’ve been house hunting. .. which is horribly sad because we love our gorgeous loft and haven’t even been here a year yet. But going up and down two sets of loft stairs with two babies wouldn’t be fun or easy.

well i had more to say but Godzilla the cat just settled down on my chest, which basically puts him right in the way of my seeing my computer screen.

my travel bag tomorrow: saltines & books.

Tahoe is quite the balm for the itchy brain. I was able to play with a 2 year old and 5 month old. play board games (actually I didn’t do much of that, but I watched others) .. roast 3 chickens (there were 10 of us) … make grilled cheese & soups for lunches. and just all around relax with some of my favorite people. My tribe. It was great and I’m totally in love with the 2 year old. She’s a sunny force of personality.

The house we stayed at was gorgeous. huge. although it had really poor taste in art. The main painting in the living room was aproximately 10 feet by 10 feet . Huge. It was of two people in a boat on a lake in the moonlght with a huge torch in the prow of the row boat. They were rowing towards a small cove. It was remniscent of hobbits, bootleggers & an early century prison break… all at the same time.

So now I’m in the second week of the two week wait. Let’s see how many days I can go without giving in to the siren call of the pee stick.

Also, can I just share this. I found it very powerful and it made me cry. Granted, i’m all hopped up on hormones, but I think I would have cried anyway.

Today on BART there was a woman sitting in seats diagonally across from me. She was wearing a beautifully tailored suit, a red and yellow scarf fashionably tossed around her neck, gold glinting glasses and sparkling jewelry. She was quite lovely and polished. She was working on some spreadsheets, bent over with concentration. I tend to people watch a lot on trains. I forget that people can see me watching them. very solipsistic of me. anyway.. as i was watching her, i noticed that her jaw was working overtime. She was chewing and chewing and chewing at a piece of gum. It made my jaws watch just to watch her.

I hate gum. It is ugly. it makes people look stupid .. their jaw working up and down over and over and over.
ugh. i hate gum. i hate the sound of the chewing. I hate the look of the chewing. hate. This is something I should probably deal with, since most kids like bubble gum. (maybe i can avoid their ever even finding out about the existence of gum?)

People who wait until a train comes and then just go straight to the door, completely ignoring the fact that there was a queue.

on a larger scale, I’ve realized my mother raised me into a conflicted snob. My mom was a luddite my entire years growing up. She spent her time thusly: teaching english, hiking/backpacking/rock climbing/running, cooking very wholesome from-scratch meals, gardening, reading literature (never bubblegum books for her), sewing me handmade stuffed animals and occasionally clothes, keeping a very clean house, taking me to ballet/puppet shows/festivals/etc, taking baths, always waking up early, living life fully.

We had one small black & white tv that I was allowed to watch a few hours a week on. They watched MASH and that was about it. As i grew older I was allowed a little more TV but not much. I bought my first computer in 1994 when I was 24.

So, this is the issue now. I find that I have a negative view of any time suck/passing that is not industrious/productive/creative/active or literary. My husband loves video games, and I (underneath somewhere) struggle with this sometimes because I see it as a negative time suck. (I don’t struggle with them because of loss of time with him. He’s very good at spending time with me and balancing all that … although we’ll fall into habits where we will spend less time together due to our interests, but if i ask.. he’s right there). I curl my lip. I inwardly scoff. This is bad enough. snobby and snotty.

But I also look down on myself. I read a lot of literature, ,but I also like trashier books (hell, sometimes i even like a good bodice ripper). We haven’t watched TV in a few years, but I want it back and when we have it I know i’ll watch it. I take lots of baths. I surf the internet A LOT. I avoid being creative, and I only cook a few times a week. I spend much of my outside-of-work (and probably inside-of-work) time doing very superficial time sucks. Things that are easy and occupy my attention so that I don’t have to do anything.
The thing is, I know inside that this is ok, but at the same time i don’t FEEL that it is ok. To be a successful worthy human, I seem to feel that people need to be like my mother. This seems to be a deeply ingrained belief. DEEPLY. i can never convince myself fully that it’s wrong. I’m not sure how to deal with that, when I like the internet. I like watching 7 seasons of Buffy in 2 months. I like drinking red wine, singing karaoke with friends, and reading a trashy book.

I do know that If i get old and what i look back on in my life is a lot of tv watching, internet surfing and bath taking.. I will be sad. So, on some level I’m right. I need to make sure that I’m creating a life that I’m proud of. But at the same time, it’s not bad that my husband likes to exert his energy and creativity in video games. and this is something I’m going to have to approach with myself when we have kids. Kids like to do fun simple things like play video games or watch the occasional tv show.

but as is obvious by many of the links on my blogroll, I also want to be the sort of mama who has that simple industrious waldorfy lifestyle for her kids.

and i want to stop being such a snob about the things people do (including me) to fill their time.
My mother now, i realize.. is addicted to being busy. She runs every day, she does lesson plans all night, she never (or rarely) takes a few hours for herself to just fill her time with lazy time. with mindless fun. She’s not actually the bastion of health that I have revered her to be.

ah. it all comes back to that thing they call ‘balance’. the biggest struggle of my life.

Nothing IVF related in this entry because: blah blah blah waiting waiting. two estrogen patches instead of one, but still. blah blah.

Last night in bed, Hans and I came up with my new title for when I quit working and stay at home. I will be one of the following: DOE (Domestic Operations Engineer), CDO (Chief of Domestic Operations), DOM (Domestic Operations Manager) , DDO (Director of Domestic Operations). which one do you think has the most pizazz?

I have other plans for that time besides, you know.. domestic operatioins. (like potentially being a Doula and starting a very small event planning biz for those looking for a non-cookie cutter event.) but I think I’ll feel less resentful if i have a fancy title, when the crappy stuff comes up. I wonder when I get to hire my first employee?

that’s what this FET cycle is. interminable! If i weren’t an injection pumpkin.. having to be home by 10pm every night for lupron. I don’t think I’d even remember that I’m cycling again.

My acupuncturist gives me these powdered herbs that I mix in hot water, and why must they be so nasty? Perhaps so we feel more like we’re taking medicine, but really..it’s just a big mug of dirt water. hot dirt water.

I feel better than I did a few days ago. I still hate the waiting, but I’m not so depressed. I went to bed early a few nights (and last night I slept extremely hard. Usually movement or sounds wake me if even for a second, but last night I wasn’t even aware of Hans coming to bed after me. I was out cold)… my period started, and I have plans to do things this weekend.

My best friend since childhood is moving to california. She’s lived in Vermont most of our lives, although she went to UCSC for a few years and also lived in Hawaii for about 2 years. I’ve always envied her idyllic vermont lifestyle (she had an organic farm on her land, two beautiful kids, lots of creative outlets) but now she’s moving to LA. The anti-vermont! It will be great to have her here on my coast though.

Hans and I often daydream of a future rural life. I hope this wont’ be just a daydream, but it’s hard to know. We have it good here. We have a gorgeous loft (although i’d guess we’d have to leave it by the time our kid is 4. It’s wonderful but not great for a child once they’re reached running-around age), his mom is 15 minutes away.. mine is 2 hours away. and we have a hugesupport system right here in the bay area. but i daydream of goats, a horse, fresh eggs from our own chickens.. and space to explore/garden/hike/etc.

I’m having major gadget lust for the kindle. I’d never fully give up on paper books, but this would be super handy for me. I spend most of my money on food & books. Digital food will never do me much good, but having 200 books in a slender little 10.3 ounce package would be awesome.

i also promise that your life will be full of stuff like this:

http://www.babylovesdisco.com/bldusa/winners.html#videolink

oh boy do I hope you dance at least a little like your papa. that kid max seems to be channeling him.

My acupuncturist, the internet and my IVF paperwork from the hospital. They all have something in common. They all tell me to use ‘visualization’ to help me get through the stress of IVF. The waiting and wondering. The hoping. The doubt.

I visualize with lists. I love lists. When things feel the most out of control, i write lists. Lists don’t always create a solution, but they usually create calm. I see order in the confusion.

Right now the hippie dance jam is going on behind our loft. I can hear drum beats and the howling of the local hippies. They are there with their bare feet, yoga pants, and abandon. Someday we’ll make our way over there and join the hippie dance jam for a night.

to visualize, they tell me to imagine myself pregnant. I visualize myself pregnant. I meditate on pregnant.
to make a list .. I say.. with a cringe at sounding hokey:

Please let us and our baby-to-be find each other soon. this cycle preferably.
and if this happens, i promise to:

us. a family. Hans, Heather and whoever you are to be.

Now the hippie dance jam beats on. me, I’m going to bed. Jam on, hippies.

under water, with my hearbeat
submerged in warm water
with Hans, just about anywhere
in the kitchen, creating something
with friends, drinking a delicious wine
bed on a saturday morning