lissmo . dot . com

It’s totally cliché to say that I’ve been busy, but…well, I’ve been busy. I was working full-time, and also freelancing almost full-time. There was a vacation in there somewhere, and a lot of other busy-ness both boring and less boring. We moved - that was not boring, but not a picnic.

Oh, and then there was this:

Caroline Amelia
October 3, 2008

I won’t say “and now I’m back!” but hopefully I’ll be around a little bit more.

My baby is not a baby anymore. I know that, and one of these days I will actually accept it. Possibly she will have children of her own at that point, but I’m sure that one day I will be willing to admit that she is really, truly not a baby anymore.

Eh, who am I kidding? She will always be my baby. Even though she is TWO YEARS OLD NOW. Seriously, wasn’t I still pregnant - like, yesterday?

She had her two-year checkup this morning, and she is growing fabulously (finally!). She has made it all the way to the 49th percentile in weight at just over 26 pounds; she’s on the tall side at just over 35 inches, and she still has a big old melon for a head (the better to hold her stupendous brain). She’s smart, she’s happy, she’s adorable (everyone says so! it’s not just me being a doting mama!) and she is far and away the best thing that ever happened to me.

I always said the one thing I really wanted was to be a mother. Now all I really want is to find a way to become the mother that my daughter deserves.

The word “uninspired” does not even begin to cover my mental state today. My desk is a disaster looking for a cause, my daughter FINALLY napped today after two solid days of refusing to even consider it, and I am fresh out of ideas.

Here, have a picture instead:

Cousins

My little brother and his family drive me absolutely insane. I love them, I really do, but…insane. My brother is the only sibling I have, and so he “gets” me in a way that no one else possibly can. Some of the things that I do that drive other people (see: my husband) insane seem totally normal to my brother. There are things that I just don’t have to explain - he just knows where I’m coming from.

The truth is that he is now and always will be my little brother, and I really want to protect him and take care of him and make sure that he has what he needs. Unfortunately, he’s also in his thirties and married with kids of his own, and he’s free to make his own mistakes and ignore my advice just like he always has. And he does, and it drives me up a wall. I’m glad he still listens to what I say, even if he’s going to ignore it later, but it’s hard to watch him make mistakes that I see coming miles away.

We had dinner with him and the kids tonight to celebrate his two older kids’ birthdays (both on the 27th - the oldest will be six and my niece will be five) and catch up with him before he heads back to Georgia. Things have been really tough for him lately. Not my story to tell, by a long shot, but when a story starts with “The good news is that you won’t be deploying with your unit to Iraq; the bad news is that you might have MS or a brain tumor…” and pretty much goes downhill from there, you can see that life isn’t easy for them right now.

We’re as supportive as we can be - a lot of their troubles are of their own making, but they have plenty of troubles that aren’t. I think at some point you just give up; you feel as if nothing you do makes things better anyway, so why bother? Unfortunately it’s hard to argue with that perspective, and we’re pretty limited in what we could do to help them anyway. All I can do is hope that being here for them is enough and that their luck takes a hard turn for the better really soon.

We were supposed to have eleven people here for Thanksgiving dinner. We ended up with six.

At one point this afternoon I more or less uninvited my brother and his family, which made me very sad but not entirely surprised. Some people have a really hard time understanding that the things they do impact other people, and I’ve reached a point of just not taking it any more. I can only hope that at some level he understands why I said what I did, and that we’ll get to see them at some point this weekend to catch up before he heads back to Georgia.

We have a crazy amount of leftovers now, though.

My mom called last night to talk. Not unusual or noteworthy in itself, except that they left this morning to fly to Australia, where they will be living for the next three or four months. They’re excited about the whole thing, for sure, but I think it was setting in a bit for my mom that they were really going to go through birthdays, Thanksgiving, and the entire holiday season without seeing any of their family.

I’m sure that once they get there and get settled in, they’ll be so busy exploring and having adventures that they won’t even miss us.

My parents were here today for an all-too-brief visit before they take off to Australia for a few months. My brother’s kids had been with them for the weekend, so my parents brought the kids here and arranged for my sister-in-law to come here to reclaim them. That meant that for about five hours, there were four children under the age of six terrorising wreaking havoc

playing in my oh-so-small house. It was simultaneously awesome and sort of horrifying.

One thing that I really love is watching Abby with my older nephew. He’ll turn six in a couple of weeks - the day before Abby turns two - and the two of them just adore each other. He takes care of her wherever they go, and she follows him around like he has all of the answers in the universe. I think that she’s still young enough - and they see each other just rarely enough - that she’s not annoying in the way that his sister and brother are. And since Abby is usually around kids her own age, having a big kid who’s willing to play with her (and not just around her) is fascinating to her. Don’t get me wrong - Abby loves all of her cousins, and all three of them love her, but there’s something between the two of them, oldest and youngest, that I just love. I know that there will come a time when they all think that cousins are just irritating and silly, but I really hope that they stay close as they grow up and end up as friends once they’re adults.

My parents are not going to be at my daughter’s second birthday party. They will not share Thanksgiving dinner with us. They will not visit us for any reason during the holidays, and we will not be seeing them at their home. All of that makes me a little bit sad, and I really want to be angry with them about it, but I can’t.

Because they’ll be in Australia for three months instead, while my (sort-of but not-really) retired father helps a client with a project. The client will provide an apartment for the duration, so the only real cost to my parents is my mother’s plane ticket. (And the sightseeing and inevitable shopping that will occur.) While my dad will almost certainly be working a good bit, they’ll have weekends and holidays to explore and will probabably stay an extra week or two when the project is done. It’s really the chance of a lifetime in some ways for them, so even though I want to be upset about it I really can’t quite work up to it.

Angry, no. Jealous? Oh yeah. (And I sent them an invitation to the party anyway, just to make them jealous in return. Because my baby is way cuter than anything Australia has to offer, I’m sure!)

I was really hoping that for Abby’s first birthday party, we would actually have the whole family in one place. For a good while, I thought that it would happen - I’d changed the party time to accommodate half of the family, and had strong promises from everyone that they’d be there. Until yesterday, it was all going to work.

Then I got the phone call from my sister-in-law letting me know that she, my brother and their three kids weren’t going to make it. For once, though, I figure that their reason is good enough. My niece - who turns four years old on Monday - has the chicken pox. She really feels miserable, and the risk of Abby getting it at her age is just a little too high for anyone’s comfort, even though the contagious period has probably passed.

With three birthdays in two days - my nephew will be five on Monday when his sister turns four, and Abby’s birthday on Tuesday - the last week of November is always going to be a slightly crazy time in our family. We’ll just have to delay that craziness a week or two until everyone is feeling better!

Tonight a bunch of the mothers in my mom’s group are going out. Now, we don’t generally need an excuse to dump

leave the babies at home with their dads while we go out and get crazy, in that way where sitting around a table talking and drinking a single glass of wine apiece is “crazy”. Tonight, though, we have an excuse. One of us is leaving - her husband has a new job (promotion? something like that) and they’re moving out west at the end of the week. It’s a good move for them - a better job for him, and a move to a place where they have family and a lower cost of living.

It’s made us all think about what’s keeping us here. We’ve all thought - seriously at times - about moving away. The DC area can be a hard place to live. It’s expensive, no matter how you slice it. The traffic is usually a nightmare, even way out here in the boonies where we all live, and while we can escape the worst of it by timing our trips well, we all live with people who have to deal with a regular commute. (And we’ve all been there - we know what we’re (not) missing!) We could move somewhere else and get twice as much house, better schools, and eliminate a ton of financial stress.

So why do we stay? More and more…we stay because of each other. These women have kept me sane for the last year, and I can’t imagine how I could find such a supportive, fun group of friends if we went somewhere else. I’m sure I would, at some point, but it would never be quite the same.