Silly Poem

I must be starting to lose it. This morning while I was nursing Ethan at 5:30 as I was drifting in and out of sleep, my thoughts started moving to the rhythm of the rocking chair. This was more or less what my half-asleep brain came up with:

Runny noses,

Snotty faces.

Hints of urine waft through

Certain places.

Sticky fingers,

Gummy smiles.

I feel my heart

Stretch out for miles.

Endless cleaning,

PB&J.

At least one person

Crying all day.

The heart is a house

With many rooms.

Look, my children

One for each of you.

To do

To do before midnight, Sunday:

• Create 4-slide presentation on the feasibility of creating a community "victory garden" on the Navajo reservation in partnership with the Indian Diabetic Initiative
• Finish editing paper on providing pictorial-based documents to illiterate diabetics in Tucson
• Finish making what is essentially a power-point scrapbook of "how I spent my semester in my Public Health Nursing class" (I need approximately 10 more slides)
• Write a critical analysis of a mainstream article about Mormonism
• Find a mainstream article about Mormonism to write about
• Contemplate DEEPLY (I loathe my professor's use of caps, and the word "deeply") the issues surrounding how the Church views and treats its history
• Write 200 words about how such views and treatment make it difficult to attract new members (or something).

Also:

• Take care of my children
• Sweep and mop my floors because they are driving me crazy
• Figure out something to cook for the missionaries tomorrow
• Go to the store and buy ingredients for said dinner
• Make some time on Saturday so Tyler can work in the backyard, because I want this thing to get DONE. I'm SOOOooooOOOOooo sick of the dirt.

Bike Ride Fail

Lillian on Christmas day, riding her new bike

Lillian likes the idea of riding a bike. She likes to find her shoes and put on her helmet. She proudly rolls her bike down the driveway, and that's mostly where the bonhomie ends. If I actually make her get on her bike, she starts crying. If I coax her to pedal, she starts to scream.

If you ask her what the problem is, she'll tell you any number of things: the wind is blowing too hard, and she's afraid it will blow her over; a car might come and run her over; the garbage truck will come and hit her (this is a surprisingly strong phobia); she'll forget how to break so she can't go very fast; and so forth.

I got tired of the dramatics, so I told her she couldn't ride her bike until she was over it. We waited a few months and on Friday, she begged and begged to go for a ride. We got on shoes and helmet, marched the bike to the end of the driveway. She got on and biked about 3 houses down, then started freaking out. I told her that she just needed to bike down to the for sale sign a few more houses away, and then she could turn around. That done, she got back to her original 3-houses-down-freak-out spot. She got off her bike, crying that she couldn't do it anymore. I told her that she could get back on her bike and take it home, push it home, or we could just leave it there and someone might steal it, but I wasn't going to take it home. Oh the tears. The stamping of the feet. The hysterics.

My neighbor peeked out of his house to see if I was torturing her. She was screaming so much, she wet her pants, which caused more screaming. She cut such a pitiful picture, I took her home and put her in her bed, and I did, in fact, push her bike home.

We tried to give her a "brave necklace" (courtesy my lovely sister-in-law Chantel), and that worked wonders for a while, but it doesn't work for bike riding.

I guess we'll be walking to kindergarten.

How's your backyard?

This represents about 4 weekends of work. By Tyler. He's nice to have around.

Toy Purge

Lillian likes to explode her toys; she pulls out the bins and dumps them out in rapid succession. I think this is fairly common, but it drives me absolutely crazy.

On Monday, I told Lillian that I would help her clean up the toy room for 30 minutes, and whatever wasn't picked up, we were going to take to DI. "Oh good, let's take them all," came her reply.

No, really. You will never. see. them. again. "I know mom, let's do it! I'll find a box."

I helped her clean up by walking around and saying things like, "OK, let's find all the cars and put them into the car bin. Oh! I see another one over here!" and when the timer went off, she had only picked up about 2/3 of the toys.

So, I did it. It was kind of an empty threat at the time, but I knew I had to follow through. I got a big box and Lillian was very enthusiastic about putting the toys in. I saved a few prized toys and parts of sets (I rescued a few of Handy Manny's tools and some errant puzzle pieces), but everything else went in the box. I tried to make Lillian feel some sort of loss by pointing out the toys as I put them in, but it didn't work. She didn't care, and as far as I can tell, she hasn't missed them.

I like her not having very many toys as it brings out more of her creativity. In the top picture you can see our well-loved Weeble-Wobble tree house. This has alternatively served as a tree house, cash register, carnival ride, doll house, baby crib, grocery store, and stove.

This picture is what remains of the Wonder Pets mobile that Lillian and the neighbor boy made yesterday. It had a sail made out of a triangle of paper and a pen, but I think Nora destroyed that part. I cut out the sail and gave them the tape, and they constructed it all themselves. They were pretending that the afore mentioned Weeble-Wobbles were the Wonder Pets and came up with all sorts of elaborate rescue scenarios. I tend to think that this sort of creativity is good for their brains, thus making the toy purge win-win by forcing more creativity and resulting is less toys for me to clean up.

I do have a problem, but it's not that bad

Have I ever told you I have something like obsessive compulsive disorder. I've been diagnosed, but that was by a doctor who spent all of 3 minutes talking to me. So either I have it so bad that it is completely obvious in 3 minutes of conversation, or he got it wrong. I learned in nursing school that to have a diagnosis of OCD, your compulsions need to take up an hour or more per day, and I don't have that, so I'm thinking that he got it wrong, or just, not quite right.

Let me tell you 3 stories that illustrate my problem.

1. It was my junior year of high school. That was a hard year for me; my parents got divorced and my mom and I moved out of my dad's house on the day that I was scheduled to take the SAT II. I was thinking that the ward members coming over to help were mostly going to move family things: couches, pots and pans, lamps. I was frazzled and I got all the way to school and realized that I forgot my ID, which I needed to take the test. I sped back home and saw that one of the ward ladies had started boxing up MY things in MY room, probably thinking she was being helpful because I had been studying and hadn't started packing. I freaked out. Fighting back hot tears, I told her to stop packing and that I would do it. Then, in the car I started sobbing. I called my mom and in a fit of teenaged self-centeredness I asked her how DARE she let someone touch MY stuff. I felt really bad as soon as the words had left my mouth because the day was undoubtedly stressful and incredibly sad for her as well.

2. When I was 19, I went to the doctor for some problem that I don't remember what it was. The doctor, probably in an effort to be friendly (or maybe it had something to do with my problem) was asking me about my personal life. I was going through a kind of rough patch with my then-boyfriend (not Tyler), and was probably reluctant to talk about it. I dealt with my anxiety by picking at a loose string on my jeans. The medical problem was such that I had to come back a few days later, and it was that visit that the doctor told me he had been thinking about our conversation, and that he strongly felt I had OCD and told me I should go on medication. I took the prescription, but never filled it.

3. Last night. It was the first Monday in the new quarter, so it was flip the bed day. I took off the sheets, flipped the bed, and washed the pillows and mattress cover. I got busy with my day and didn't put the bed back together. After dinner, I sat down to do homework, and I could hear Tyler upstairs putting the sheets on the bed. I like him. (Note: We have a duvet on our bed. It's getting hot here, so we took the comforter out of it, and just put the cover on the bed.) When I came up to bed, I saw that the duvet cover was inside out. On the bed. Inside out on the bed. Made. I had a strong desire to take it off and fix it, but Tyler had put it on, and my keen wife senses told me that it would hurt his feelings (and discourage him from helping out in the future) if I re-did it. So I got into bed. I laid awake, knowing that the cover was on wrong. I tried to convince myself that it was silly, but I had a hard time falling asleep. When I made the bed this morning, I took it off and fixed it.

That's the kind of thing that is sort of funny later; Tyler can't figure out why it would bother me, and I can't figure out how it doesn't bother him.

In short, I realize I have a problem, but it's not that bad.