Polarized

I'm getting a little sick and tired of multi-tasking. I even multi-task when thinking these thoughts. On the one hand, I lash out with complaints, why is everything always so frenzied?! On the other hand, I chastise myself for not being more grateful, it's frenzied because you asked for all this! Right now I'm simultaneously trying to relax and write. This is consistent with my attempts at writing for the past several weeks, which is why I've basically puked over everything I've posted here since January. I don't want to stop writing, but I know I need to fool my brain into thinking I've had "down time" so I don't end up in a straightjacket with drool running down my chin. So I prop myself up on the couch with the laptop, turn on the T.V., and proceed to feel frustrated about how the deafening commercials are distracting me from my attempts at writing. Relaxing, yes! This is a brilliant solution!

I'm constantly on the edge of either falling into an exhausted coma or exploding into some kind of irrational, psychotic tantrum; I'm like a narcoleptic rabid dog. I didn't think the kids had noticed, but last weekend during Quinn's nap, he hid under Hannah's bed, which is across the house from his bedroom, where I assumed he would stay and from where I ran frantically shrieking his name after I glanced upstairs and noticed his door was open. There was no possible way he could have passed by my sentry post on the living room couch without my seeing or hearing him, and so my first reaction was more of anger and frustration, but after I'd checked every known upstairs hiding place, my exhaustion and rabies took over. I was running through all the possible scenarios in my stress-addled mind, and here is what I narrowed them down to:

1.) The alien abduction stories really are true, and now I'd have a horrible explanation for the mysterious unchanging birthmark on the bottom of his right foot (a beacon to our future overlords, of course).
2.) Someone had made their way into our house and was holding my three-year-old hostage in the attic. They were terrified by my shrieking, which was why they hadn't demanded any payment yet.
3.) Quinn was always only a figment of my imagination. Maybe everyone was!

In this sorry state, slamming doors, ripping curtains out of my way, probably foaming at the mouth, a flash of brilliance came to me and I yelled, "Quinn, say, 'what mom?'!"

Quinn is sneaky. He is manipulative. He is apparently a champion hider. But he is a sucker for words, and so my flash of brilliance was immediately rewarded with a muffled, amused, dusty "What, Mom?"

I bolted toward the sound, "WHERE ARE YOU??? I'VE BEEN CALLING YOU! YOU COME WHEN YOU'RE CALLED! AAAAAAAAAGRGHGHGHRGGHGHGG!!!"

Silence.

"Hmm," I thought. "He seems to be, what's the word, afraid? What kid would be afraid of a narcoleptic rabid dog? Uh. Oh yeah." Once I stood still and the stress volcanoes stopped spewing deadly lava all over every living thing in my path, Quinn crawled, giggling, out from under Hannah's bed - a place I never would have checked.

There is nothing really "bad" among the list of things on which I'm blaming the stress volcanoes -- in fact, everything causing my head to spin simultaneously in eight directions is all good. I'm busy at work because I have a good job; I'm busy at home because my kids are healthy and they like to spend time with me, and because we found a house we love and there are countless things to do before we jump into an eternal pit of debt (weeee!). The winter blues are being replaced by moving plans, arrangements for business travel to places I'm happy to see for the first time, trips to the thawed, breezy parks with the kids, birthday celebrations, and, after discovering I'm capable of both holding a book and walking on an inclined treadmill, actual reading! I just wish I had more time to enjoy each one of these things at a time, rather than witnessing the full range of experience like a fast-forwarded movie, or feeling like I'm trying to shovel in too much food all at once, dessert and dinner together, the clashing but delicious tastes of each trying to ruin the other one for me.

Holy Mole-y

A few months ago I made reference to a night when we found some adorably tiny baby rabbits in our back yard. We briefly considered the fact that they could be moles -- after all, we never knew rabbits could have such short ears, even as babies, not to mention the fact that they were burrowed in their soft, mewing cuteness into a hole in the ground, one that might have been connected to a system of tunnels under the suspiciously soft and lumpy soil of our yard. But that flash of reality we allowed ourselves to consider was quickly extinguished when we remembered that our back yard is just a formality, not something we actually use like normal people, and also we needed to go open a bottle of wine: "I'm sure they're just rabbits. Their ears are small because they're babies. There are no tunnels, that's crazy! We just need to take better of our grass. I'm sure these holes out here are entirely related to the fact that we haven't fertilized. So it's settled. Now, Pinot or Cabernet?"

When we put the house on the market, the realtor told us we would probably have better luck selling the place if we took the time to remove from our back yard the two or three dozen faded, broken plastic walkers and lawnmowers and sandbox toys that haven't been touched in three years so it wouldn't look quite so much like a garbage dump. People apparently don't like to purchase homes with garbage dumps in the back yard. (People are so picky and demanding, GAH!) When I walked out there to start gathering it all up, I thought it felt pretty weird walking across the grass. Hmm, yes, I'm pretty sure my shoes didn't used to sink six inches into the ground out here. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.

Yeah, we have moles. I'm surprised they haven't popped up through the wood floors in the house by now, to be honest. The guy who came to "get rid" of them (I like to imagine he "gets rid" of them by luring them out with lots of yummy mole food, maybe some nice field greens or shallots thrown in for extra enticement) placed bright orange flags everywhere he "treated" the yard. Being the deceptive and sneaky homeowners that we are, we removed all the flags before two potential buyers walked through yesterday. Oh, WHAT?! We're paying for all three of the gourmet field green "treatments". The moles will have moved to a new mole condo in Florida by the time the house sells. I just thought it might be a little unsettling for someone to look out the back door and find a sea of orange flags flapping in the breeze, harbingers of doom that say eerily, moles and rabbits are not the same thing.

Eustress

Cliche thought of the moment: Everything changes so fast.


Seriously, though. You're going along, content to drop a complaint about boredom or fatigue every few days, whining here and there about the hum drum nature of your life, comfortable in your spoiled, western guilt over complaining about a life 90% of the world will never have the luxury of pretending to scoff at. And then all of a sudden, you look up and realize that all of those fake complaints are becoming null and void, sinking into oblivion under the weight of - what's this? - a lot of really good, exciting things happening all at once. It all happens so quickly and feels so unreal that you're completely in the thick of major life changes before you realize that your heart seems to be a lot more woodpecker-like than usual. You wonder, "Self, what is wrong? Everything is going right ALL AT THE SAME TIME!" You fight off paranoia and the temptation to seek out the inevitable tragedy sure to befall you as soon as the universe lulls you into a false sense of security regarding the recent and sudden set of unbelievably good and exciting things happening to you: "What will it be that finally ruins everything, self? A fire? A heart attack? A kidnapping? Cancer?" You talk to yourself like Annette Benning in American Beauty, but instead of "I will sell this house today" (which would be entirely appropriate), your mantra is, "I will not mentally sabotage myself with paranoia." But you can't help it. You've grown so accustomed to defending yourself against threatening changes, bad changes, changes requiring rapid response and slashing of resources, be they financial, emotional, logistical, that good changes don't compute. Your body and mind respond with the same fight-or-flight mechanism they've spent years perfecting.

Kid stories of the moment: Too numerous to recount, but I'll try.

Yesterday after Quinn's nap, he was incensed that John had dared to close the laptop and put away the mouse while tidying up in preparation for someone to look at our house. He remedied the situation by re-opening the laptop, finding the mouse, hooking it up to the laptop correctly, and resuming whatever game he had been playing on pbskids.org before being so rudely interrupted for a nap. I live with this not-quite-four-year-old kid, and yet I still find it patently unnatural that I'm telling a story about him 1.) playing an online game 2.) hooking everything back up correctly in his huffy, "the-world-burdens-me" frustration after his nap.


During dinner last night, Bryce informed me that the way he knew the grapes on his plate were clean was that he himself had washed them a day or two before: "They looked thilthy," he stated with his clear and simultaneously incorrect pronunciation of the word filthy, "so I decided to wash them." I beamed in pride at his attempt at maturity, and five minutes later when we told him to eat one single black-eyed pea, he gingerly, with his front teeth, bit off half of one, sloshed the nearby glass of water to his lips while his eyes filled with tears of disgust and near-nausea, choked dramatically, and then yelled, sputtering, with his arms flailing about his head in a final black-eyed pea-related decree, "I told you I do NOT like black-eyed peas. I will NEVER. Eat them! Again! They are disgusting and I might THROW UP."

Final thought of the day: Just a wafer thin mint.

John and I went to the Cheesecake Factory over the weekend to celebrate my birthday. Avocado eggrolls + cheesecake + wine = no more stress. In theory that sounds great, but it's really because your entire body's focus is on surviving the impending Monty Python explosion. Whatever works, though. Whatever works.

Who knew?

So, it turns out that buying a house involves a lot more than writing a check and moving. Yeah, can you believe it? It takes, like, work and thinking and time and stuff. And you know, sometimes there's only so much work and thinking I can take in one single week. By the time we get to the closing table, we'll be so confused, exhausted, and frazzled that we'd probably sign off on a $5,000 breathing fee without noticing, or caring. In fact, we'd probably find some way to justify it: "A breathing fee? Well, we DO like air, after all."

In addition to trading in unknown piles of money for pretty kitchen counter tops and a mud room the size of Texas, we've lost any spare time we may have thought we had at one time before two weeks ago. I have the best intentions of sitting down to write every evening, but after restoring the house to "show" condition, writhing in agony over financing decisions that just won't make themselves already, and researching time travel to determine how best to wake up after all the money has been spent and all the thinking has been done and all the heavy lifting is over, I'm barely capable of keeping my eyes open, let alone typing, let alone thinking a coherent and complete sentence.

Speaking of finishing a thought, those two paragraphs you just read have been sitting in draft form for THREE DAYS. I've added a paragraph here and there when I have ten unused minutes at work, but when I go back and re-read, I start dry-heaving in disgust and end up deleting whatever crap it was that I just added, saving the whole thing as draft, AGAIN, and going back to pretending there is no blog, there is no "sit down and write" goal, there is only work and keeping a house show-ready. As it turns out, those two things have quite effectively taken up my time, and by "taken up my time" I mean taken over my entire life. Kids? What kids? Are those the little beings whose encrusted dinner mess I'm frantically cleaning off the dining room table and floor every night? They must also be the ones whose sharp, tiny legos I step on right before I launch into my red-faced, foot-holding, profanity-screaming sessions. Yeah, I think I remember the good ol' days when I used to spend my time telling them to stop throwing things down the stairs as opposed to scrubbing baseboards and ceiling fans.

Maybe it's just the recent house buying excitement warping my perception of time, but I get the feeling I'm entering into a phase of life that will require one of two things: sleeplessness or no more writing. So far when given the choice of sleep vs. something else, something else has always been the loser. So, given the fact that it's taken me three days just to come up with a post that says, "buying a house takes time" and "I'm brain dead and uncreative," I'm thinking my goal of posting here at least once a week is becoming more and more unrealistic. Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am, because when I'm not writing here, I'm not writing at all, and I think for me that's a bad thing. I'd like to think work would start to calm down, or we'd find a comfortable groove for the next six weeks (before we move out of the show-ready house and into the house nobody else will set eyes on until we've got boxes unpacked, hopefully by next Christmas), but I'd also like to think I could go through life consuming potato flautas, nachos, and margaritas every night with no negative repercussions, so I'm not exactly getting my hopes up.

The Latest from the Fringe

Watch out, because some day he's going to be in authority.
Just as I'd finished getting ready for work and had sat down to check e-mail this morning, I heard some muffled knocking at the bedroom door. I knew it was Bryce, since Quinn just barges confidently in regardless of the time of day or level of fatigue. I opened the door, and Bryce stood there, holding his wadded blanket under his chin and squinting as his eyes adjusted to the lights in my room. Before I could even speak, he said, "Can I tell you a story about me and Connor?" I ushered him into the room and he kept talking. "At lunch, he really infuriates me? And when the teachers clap to tell us how long we have left at lunch, we're all supposed to clap with them like this, CLAP-CLAP-clapclapclap, but Connor just says BOP-BOP-bopbopbop instead of clapping." John walked in from the gym and I told him about Connor "infuriating" Bryce, and Bryce began to re-tell the story while John and I tried to giggle and shake our heads in disbelief as subtly as possible.

As much as I've talked about his intensity and his constant struggle for power, it doesn't seem like I would ever call Bryce a rule-follower, but he definitely is. It drives him absolutely insane if he knows there are clear expectations for a group of people, and certain individuals choose not to meet them. We are supposed to clap with the teachers, NOT SAY BOP! The other night on the way to his piano lesson, a motorcycle passed us right before Bryce started a 20-minute monologue from the back seat consisting of variations on THOSE PEOPLE AREN'T WEARING HELMETS! THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE WEARING HELMETS. IF THEY WERE TO FALL OFF THE MOTORCYCLE THEY WOULD BE HURT AND WOULD HAVE TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL BECAUSE CONCRETE IS HARD! I DON'T THINK THEY SHOULD BE RIDING THAT MOTORCYCLE WITHOUT HELMETS ON BECAUSE THEY AREN'T SAFE!

We are masochists.
Last Saturday, as John and I walked through a newly built house for sale, the realtor representing the builder asked, in that prodding, unavoidable way, "how long have you been looking for a new house?"

"Seven years," I said seriously. She looked at me with a little fear and uncertainty, like she wasn't sure how to continue a conversation with a psycho. She did anyway. "Well, what is your motivation for looking for a new house?"

I kept walking and looking around. "We need more space. We need a better layout. JOHN! OHMYGODHAVEYOUSEENTHISLAUNDRYROOMINHERE? AND THE MASTER CLOSET IS THE SIZE OF A FOOTBALL FIELD!" She ran out of the house at that point, but only after throwing her business card at me. I'm sure she thought doing business with us over the phone would be fairly safe.

Meanwhile, between keeping Quinn from swinging on the chandelier in the dining room and keeping Bryce from climbing on the fire place, John was busy measuring the study and drooling over the size of the pantry in the kitchen. There is so much closet space that Hide and Seek in this house could last for hours. Given that fact, if we lived there, I might actually find some time to read again.

We put in an offer and haggled for a few days before we settled on a price. Aren't those games fun?!

--Ten dollars!
--Fifteen dollars!
--Okay, Eleven Fifty plus you have to add a phone jack and bring a dollar to closing.
--Fifteen and we'll add the phone jack and bring the dollar.
--Sigh. Twelve, no dollar at closing, but we still want the phone jack.
--Thirteen dollars and the phone jack.
--If we say okay does the madness end here?

So, we're going to buy our "dream" house. Of course, there is one tiny detail we have to address first. It's just a minor thing, really; it probably won't affect our lives at all. We have. To sell. Our house. The one full of tiny sharp objects strewn everywhere by three-foot-tall dictators. Also the one with the room occupied by a sullen, pack rat teenager.

Oh god.

What horror have we brought upon ourselves?

Don't worry. I'm sure it will be documented thoroughly for your "better them than me" pleasure. Glad we can help.

Somebody pray to the real estate gods for us. Maybe sacrifice a couch or something, too. We need everything we can get over here. Seriously.

Mutiny

Tuesdays are piano lesson nights, and as much as I appreciate the hour of shooting the breeze with a few parents of Bryce's classmates, the return to the music teacher's house and the subsequent 10-15 minutes of hissing at Bryce to stop writhing on the floor while I try to listen to the piano teacher's varying methods of politely reminding us that the kids are supposed to practice, and hahaha, they're still pretty rowdy, these little quirky kids! really sucks every last drop of energy from my crazy little introverted self. By the time I get home with Bryce on Tuesday nights, he's asking for food and yawning, and I'm stumbling around trying to change out of my work clothes (no time before music class, yippeee!), finding him an appropriate snack (not a pop-tart), and trying to fight my guilt and make up for the evening I missed with Quinn (read: yanking his unnaturally strong pre-school arms from around my thigh every two minutes), all at the same time.

Usually by the time the kids are in bed, after Quinn has inevitably remembered that he Has To Tell Me Something, Uummm at least four times, my head is pounding and my eyes are glazed over, and even though I really want to do a better job of writing here on a regular basis, I just can't bring myself to do it. I mean, sometimes I even (pathetically) stare at the blank screen and try to force words to appear there through sheer willpower, but of course nothing ever shows up and I end up slamming the laptop closed in disgust with my stupid lack of magical powers.

Tonight, just before I shook my fist at the universe (with not much passion, given my near comatose state after the nighttime piano lesson energy-sucking session), John walked in with the wine and the Thai food (recent commitment to spend less money be damned!), looked at the (blank) screen and said, mischieviously, "did you see my pictures? Did you check the blog?"

I'll admit it, I was concerned. If you haven't all been transfixed and/or confused by the left column before now, then let your eyes wander over there and take a look-see. For months, he's threatened to post his urinal collection but I've managed to distract him with shiny things until now. He used my Tuesday night weakness against me. Traitor.

Let's start right here.

Hi, friend.

I thought you'd written me off. Eight months ago I even wrote about it here; I realize now you may have read those words, which ironically means I could have instigated or exacerbated the very abandonment I railed against without even knowing it at the time (though I've suspected it, and knew there was a slight chance when I wrote those words in pain and self protection). I have no way to contact you directly other than in writing, and I thought since I might have inadvertendly begun this lonely phase of our relationship here, I should come here to end it, and (hopefully) start a new phase.

I dreamt about you several weeks ago. I was driving in my neighborhood and saw your son run across a yard - it made no sense because you're hundreds of miles away. My heart stopped, the car stopped, and I ran to him, asking where you were. He pointed you out, in the shadows of your open garage. You weren't yourself. You'd been sick, you said. Your body had grown dependent on things that would eventually kill it, but you weren't ready to change that. I tried to relate to you and I tried to compare my situation to yours, but you weren't really there. I saw a flicker, but then you sat back and your eyes glazed over in complacency, for now, for then. It was too much for you to deal with - that was the implication. This relationship was just one more thing you couldn't juggle. I told you how close I lived, and that I hoped you would visit me, or would welcome my visits, and I left. I wasn't angry or hurt anymore; I felt sad and hopeful for you at the same time. And then I went back to my own rather insane juggling.

John and I were recently talking about Dylan, and the fact that he has essentially removed himself from our family. He won't return phone calls (when he has a working phone), and even locating him is difficult and only possible through mutual contacts (which grow fewer by the day). I asked him if he was going to call the one remaining friend of Dylan's whose contact information we still have, but John just shook his head. "It won't do any good. When Dylan works out whatever he needs to work out, he will contact us." This felt like giving up to me; it felt like accepting the unacceptable. But I recognize now that what he was saying was that you can't force someone else to love you, or to communicate with you, or to be with you. It isn't right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable: it just is.

I've started to think in the past few years that I'm some kind of weird category of friend. It felt over time that people befriended me out of convenience. I was able to fill some need - usually therapeutic or philosophical or professional in nature - and then once that need was filled, I was kind of a guilty pain to keep around. My friendships with other people seemed to be perceived as high-maintenance and burdensome to all involved besides me - the one left alone looking like a deer in the headlights when everyone else had gone on their merry way. This felt grossly unfair given the amount of effort and energy I thought I'd put into the friendships - and that train of thought lead me to believe I was some horrifying Saturday Night Live, Mary Katherine Gallagher version of myself - just clinging to people in annoyingly breathless, desperate attempts to have someone like me, to force someone to be my friend - the thought of it was enough to make me vomit and then bury my head in the sand, in shame, and in hiding (a la Kramer's Look away, I'm hideous!).

Given all this, imagine my shock and wonder when I saw your name pop up in my inbox. The sadness, defensiveness, guilt, and shame all came rushing back, and then I remembered the dream I'd had about you and everything fell away except concern for you. I don't know how much you've read from this site, and I'm sure you know that even it doesn't contain all significant details, but it sounds like our lives have run similar courses over the past year. (That would be consistent for us, wouldn't it?) I wish you had contacted me to let me know. If nothing else, I could have reminded you that you weren't alone, despite how I know you probably felt. I've missed you, friend. I'm sorry you were hurting, and that you didn't tell me, and that you thought I'd moved on in anger and had closed the door. The door is always open, no matter how much the surroundings may change over time.

Should Be Outlawed

Some details about the pit in my stomach.
A few nights ago John's out-of-town sister called and asked if Hannah would be interested in coming down for a visit this weekend. It was tentatively planned: Hannah would accompany John's other (mildly developmentally disabled) sister for a weekend of shopping and babysitting her younger cousins. The next morning, when John checked Hannah's grades online and found that she was failing three of her six classes (three weeks into the semester), he called his sister to tell her that Hannah wouldn't be able to make the trip. I've thought about detailing the reasons why (for those without similar parenting philosophies who won't fill in the blanks on their own), providing in detailed written form all of the justification for his decision, our decision - but I finally realized that the reason and justification don't matter or make one bit of difference to this story.

When he called to tell his sister not to make the flight arrangements for Hannah, here were her responses:

"What difference is one weekend going to make? Would she be studying over the weekend anyway?"

"What if you hadn't looked at the grades this morning?"

"Wouldn't a 'natural consequence' be her failing and being forced to wait tables for the rest of her life?"

If John's sister weren't pictured in our mental dictionary next to the entries of "self-centered," "flighty," and "shallow," these responses would have puzzled us, possibly even made us question our decision. But in this case, they only served to add to the heap of exemplary reasons why we avoid discussing anything related to parenting with her whenever humanly possible. John's mom was involved in the planning, so he called to let her know the disappointing news as well: "Hannah's not going to be able to go out of town - she's failing three classes... again." This is going to seem impossible, but her answers were suspiciously familiar.

"What does the trip have to do with her grades?"

"Would she be studying if she were home anyway?"

Not long after this series of conversations that made John want to cut himself off from all society, his sister called me: "He needs to take a Prozac. Why did he have to look at her grades today anyway?"

Those chills down your spine? That was the result of my metaphysical transformation into RUNFORYOURLIFESHE'SPISSEDNOW (henceforth known as RFYLSPN, or more visually simple and faster for me to type, Rifflespin). Rifflespin is not confined by space or time because Rifflespin is fueled by eight years of pent-up rage and the desire to inform my in-laws that I know their dirty little secret of dysfunction hidden behind the thin veil of utter bullcrap. Rifflespin wasted no time in verbally ripping John's sister limb from limb, and then I took over when Rifflespin needed a rest.

During a conversation with his brother the next day, John learned something: his sister had wanted Hannah to come visit mainly so she could help escort her other aunt through the airports. Well my, my! Doesn't this change things? Nobody ever mentioned THIS as a problem when Hannah suddenly couldn't come! No, it was all about how harsh John was, how inappropriate this punishment was, how she should get to go on this trip JUST BECAUSE! "Well I'm just sure we made it clear that that's what we needed," said John's mom when he called to address the issue. No, you didn't make it clear. If you'd made it clear, the conversation would have been about the fact that you needed Hannah's help, not that John was a horrible ogre-parent. Of course, if you'd made it clear, you couldn't look like such selfless advocates for poor, victimized just-going-through-a-hard-time (even though that hard time has lasted seven years and makes up her entire mentality) Hannah, now could you?

There is so much more, and maybe I'll expound in a later post, but I think you get the gist - the gist being, wow, where's the wine?!

Rock out, knock out.
Because of all this, I walked in the door from work like I was drowning in a sea of rocks. Rocks in my stomach, pebbles I'd swallowed in the struggle; rocks on my back, bruising me with every muscle twitch; rocks on my chest and even in my chest, squeezing on my heart and making it impossible to breathe comfortably; rocks in my hair and somehow oozing, plopping sharply out of my ears in blasts of pain. When I spoke, the rocks shot out of my mouth but they were in the shape of deadly arrow-heads, having been chiseled to lethal perfection by the rocky chaos inside - so whoever I spoke to winced in pain and stepped back, at once hurt and worried about my imminent rock-drowning death. I could see what was happening and tried to stop it, but finally removed myself from the vulnerable creatures and spewed my rocks at the inanimate objects in the kitchen while I unintentionally burned, par for the course of this week, every frozen convenience food item known to humankind.

While we sat at the table eating our burned, dried black bean burgers and charred crinkle-cut french fries, Quinn said, "Knock knock." Most of the rocks were gone, but I felt a few try to arm themselves at the back of my throat. The kids don't understand knock knock jokes - they always get them wrong. When you say, "banana who?" or "lamp who?" they string a series of random words together ("banana lips house magnet!") and crack up laughing, leaving you to wonder a.) what the hell they were talking about, and b.) if they'll be intellectually compromised as adults if you don't more effectively explain what makes a knock knock joke work. I didn't want to open my mouth and start lecturing him on the finer points of proper joke-telling, but I didn't have to. John stepped in: "Who's there?"

"Cargo."

"Cargo who?"

"Car go beep beep!"

The arrowheads in the back of my throat dissolved next to the remnants of dried out black bean patty and burned fries, and the entire table erupted into laughter, and shocked glee: "THAT WAS AN AWESOME JOKE, QUINN!" "WOW!" "Good job!" "That was so funny!"

Bryce was ready to try. He could barely contain his excitement and almost fell over trying to get us to listen to his joke. "Knock knock," he said through excited, gaspy laughter.

"Who's there?"

"Stairs!"

"Stairs who?"

"Stairs table head hair!"

The rocks tried to re-form, but I thought of something I'd seen on a blog in the past several weeks. "Bryce, knock knock!"

"Who's there?"

"Interrupting Cow."

"Interrupt--"

"MOO!"

We all slapped the table and squealed in the hilarity. Bryce was ready to try again, he told us he had a joke like mine, only different: "Knock knock!"

"Who's there?"

"Horse."

"Horse who?"

"..... uh. Oh. Neigh! Neigh!! Hahahaha!"

Oh, we were all rolling now. If I hadn't been cracking apart with laughter, the arrowheads probably would have come back, because if I hadn't been laughing, I would have sounded critical. "Bryce, here's what you might try next time... say 'interrupting horse' and when I start to answer, make sure you actually interrupt me when you say, 'neigh, neigh.'" I was laughing so hard when I said it, and he was laughing so hard at his perceived comedic victory, that this just seemed like another joke. And now Quinn wanted back in: "Knock knock!"

"Who's there?"

"Cargo."

"Cargo who?"

"Car go LIP LIP ahahahahahah!!!!!!"

I realize now why the kids don't understand knock knock jokes. His nonsense ad-lib was confirmation that the first successful delivery had been just a memorized set of words, but we laughed so hard after the series of randomness leading up to this that the kids assumed, as they apparently do every time, that knock knock jokes are a blank canvas that should only be filled with stream-of-consciousness brilliance.

-----------------------------
I don't know how to end this. I know that this morning before I left for work, John and I were discussing the need to cultivate some couple friendships, the need to force ourselves to socialize and stop hiding behind the excuse of being busy. By noon, we had discussed and or dealt with the issue of Hannah going out of town at least once each. By 5 p.m., we had discussed the general lack of motivation in Hannah, the fact that John's sister is clueless about such, and the fact that she had called the entire family to tattle on John's too-strict parenting rules since she wasn't getting her way. By 8 p.m., we were catching our breath after a rowdy game of "hide Elmo under the bed while one kid is out of the room and see if he notices" so we didn't have to role-play AS Elmo, which was our alternate option. And I think I remember now why we don't have a whole collection of couple friends knocking down our door to invite us to dinner parties and wine tastings, or even just over for Friday night pizza. We can barely keep a handle on the family obligations - the logistical, emotional, financial, and physical requirements of this household demand more of us than we can consistently give - hence, my near rock-drowning, hence, no social life. At least we have nonsense knock knock jokes to help us keep our perspective. Car go lip lip, indeed.

The pit of my stomach: where anxiety goes to die.

Hi, nervousness! You've been missing me, haven't you? All those months of predictability were really getting you down, making you jealous, but I've learned my lesson. Oh yes. Do not leave Nervousness out in the cold. Nervousness loves company. Nervousness loves Kristen. Today alone, every single aspect of my life has welcomed Nervousness back in: personal, professional emotional - Nervousness all around! Weeeee!! Aren't I lucky that I have naturally low blood pressure? Yes, I am. Also, wine helps.

Not enough family dynamics making your heart beat a little faster? Well, why don't we bring back the issue of the disagreements between the in-laws and the parenting of the stepdaughter? That should get the ol' blood pumping again!

Getting too complacent with the nice people at work thinking you're "hard-working" and "worthy" and "deserving of a salary for another year"? A quick teaming up with an incompetent co-worker to bring your work ethic into question should do the trick!

Starting to be too damned optimistic about the future of your quirky children's education? Here's a thought: submit an application for your younger child to the school your older child attends. Then, when the school calls and says, vaguely, "uh, would you consider placing your younger kid - who consequently doesn't have the right numbers printed on this test paper - placed in a class 18 months below his chronological age?" go ahead and express your honest opinion that, no, that would not be a good option, because putting your then four-year-old into a class full of three-year-olds seems like it would be detrimental to a kid who clearly needs more challenge, not less, and wait in silent, nail-biting anticipation for the reaction on the other end of the phone. "Hmm. We might have to put him on the waiting list, then." Yeah, that'll bring Nervousness right back in to warm its hands by the raging fire of unknowns.

And after a day like today, all I can do is thank my lucky stars that I have naturally low blood pressure. I think it's what's keeping me alive at this point.