It's Coming

I come home and tell my family I can smell it, spring, pink cherry blossoms and light, in the distance of three months the hot smell of plum trees and nights that start well after bedtime.

It’s because I farted, Bryan says.

But it’s not and I shake my head annoyed. I feel safest in the summertime, and already I am biting blueberries in two and pushing the crushed halves into Ozzy’s open mouth. It has hardly rained all winter, though a few nights ago it did just a little. In the morning Zoey woke up and said she heard gumdrops falling on the roof while she slept, and when I laughed and told her it was actually rain, she looked at me as if I were the crazy one.

And maybe I am. For remembering the temperature of smell. For waiting on the ionic taste of pavement at night and how I want to wrap it around me like a towel.
1970something, sitting on the cement edge of a drained pond at a neighbor's house sometime in August. We threw dirt clods down the hill and the yarn in my hair was bright yellow. If I think hard enough I can still hear the slack tymbal sound of the cicadas.

At Least It's Not Kim Richards

Some weeks can only be summed up by the rubbery hot dog muse that is the mouth of Taylor Armstrong. Because Monday was so totally this:
Followed quickly by the bitch-just-you-try-and-flatten-me-down that is this clammy low (dude, it was bad)...And as is my wont (who even says that anymore?), my mood rapidly switched...A slippery slope slide into the abyss of absurdity. (If you look deep enough, I think you may spot Camus.) I.e. shit got funny, fast.The rest of the week I just sort of hung on by the mehness of it all...
At some point I may or may not have done this, though really that's none of your beeswax.
And now it is pretty much Friday and I am plum tuckered, my emotions frayed, skin dry, mouth tired of moving.
As the divine Taylor says each week, I have finally found my voice and I'm not afraid to use it. Which, yeah, awesome for the both of us Taylor, the thing is, don't know about you, but I haven't got much more to say.

xo,
S

Sunday Night

I could write a bunch of pretty words here to distract you from the fact that really I just want to post a few pics of my kids like oh! Shiny thing! Insert pithy observation here, something vaguely smart-sounding here. Or I could just say this: check out how much my kids look like each other. (And how freaking delicious they are.)
Above is a photo of Zoey at 7 months. Below is a photo of Ozzy this past weekend. Like a boy/girl bookend, n'est ce pas?This weekend also saw Zoey's continued obsession with Wednesday from The Addams Family. On Saturday I told her to get dressed because she had a play date at a friend's house. When she came out of her room, this is what she was wearing, complete with a paper cut-out collar taped to her dress. Since then she has hijacked this Tibetan wooden carving of hands that I have and is calling it Thing and taking it everywhere.Needless to say, this is the napkin I drew to put in her lunchbox tomorrow...So that's that. Let's pretend I have something to say here that wraps this whole thing up with one of those bows with the curly-cue ends. Yeah, like that.

WTF Wednesday: Increasing Mass One Post At A Time

I have had Nervous Tummy for a week now, the kind that makes me pause and think is it this? That? No, it must be the Other. Everything ok with the kids, Bryan, Nacho’s fur growing back nicely. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something’s not quite right, and so I scan reports on the Solar Storm and radiation, planes being re-routed and Aurora Borealis, even though I live on the ground at Latitude 38. I can’t help but hope that the charged particles from the giant coronal mass ejection are what’s to blame, patchouli oil hoo-ha flakiness be damned.

I also read the other day that eReaders actually grow heavier the more books you download, the data stored by trapping electrons. While the number of electrons doesn’t change, it takes more energy to hold them in place than to let them free. Microjoules and attograms magical like fireflies, and this thought makes me feel funny inside.

If this is true—and it is because the internet says so—then what about our brains? What is the weight of thought?

I totally get that this is like whoa, heavy, man, too much of a fucking Fiona Apple song circa 1996 shut up already, so there is also this Kate Spade dress that I really, really want but cannot afford if you want to buy it for me. Who knows? One of these days some stranger might say sure, yeah, just let me know what size and where to send it, and I will give a twirl in my shiny new dress in this silly new planet spinning, spinning, spinning.

What's a 5 Letter Word That Starts With an E?

We're totally that couple in the restaurant that doesn't talk. You know, the ones who sit across from each other and look down at their plates silently as they eat. And when I say we, I mean you and me.

I have nothing to say to you right now. We've all been there, right? Forced to look up and across, public silence somehow a strain, to ask when's the last time you changed the oil in your car? Because that is all you can think of.

When you're the other couple--the one that laughs and kisses and feeds each other forkfuls of egg--you feel pretty smug when you see us, but I know better. I know that to sit across from someone silently while eating eggs means you love them comfortably. Even pasta. Definitely a burrito. I'm about to have an It's-It myself. And comfortable love is the best kind of all.

It's been almost 10,000 miles since my last oil change. I know, I know. Don't nag. I need to organize my closet. And then there's this, too.
Ozzy has surrendered to his crib. And the mere fact that I just blogged about it, even if it wasn't braggy at all, means that tonight he will wake up and scream until we bring him into our bed. That's just the way the universe works. I'm pretty sure that's what Carl Sagan was always going on about.

So yeah. No biggie. Go back to your crossword puzzle.
love,
S

Unsigned

The Guilt of (this) Working Mom takes shape in many forms. In the nutella with bread Zoey gets each morning despite the fact that it's not part of a balanced breakfast no matter what the commercial says. In the way I practically make out with Ozzy the minute I walk through the door, holding him while I shuffle around the house because my lower back has seized up. In the little dance I do in front of my house each morning; Zoey watching through the picture window as I blow kisses, then hugs, then I love you in American Sign Language which always makes me feel a little like I'm listening to Metallica, the difference only in the inclusion of a thumb. Three times mommy! Do it three times today! And so I do it while cars drive past, mwah, mmmhug, a flash of fingers, mwah, mmmhug, a flash of fingers, mwah, mmmhug, a flash of fingers. As if I am going off to war and not just walking to the bus stop.

Long ago I made the mistake of drawing on the napkin that I put in Zoey's lunch box, a princess or something, I don't know. The next day she asked for a pirate, and then a spider, a bat, castle, mountains, fish, stars, rainbows. Before I knew it I could not not draw a picture on her napkin, each night thinking what should I draw for tomorrow? 10 o'clock tired and realizing shit, I forgot to draw something, pulling out a pen and sketching a skeleton in October, turkeys in November, Santa and snowflakes, my favorite: elves having a snowball fight. And then last week I found a zippered compartment in Zoey's lunch box that I didn't know was there. I opened it and found a stash of old napkins.Those are my favorites, Zoey said when I asked why they were there. I can't throw those away because you're famous, she said.
I'm not famous, I told her, but she insisted I was. Said that all her friends loved my napkins, that at the beginning of lunch they crowded around her to see what it would be that day, that I was a famous drawer and a famous mommy, and you know where this is going, right?
I am not the best artist. Not the best writer or the best person, not the smartest, most beautiful, not even the worst or the ugliest, dumbest or sluttiest. Not the estiest of anything, really. But in that moment I was super-superlative more than most and then some. Because every day while I am in a meeting maybe, or eating a tasteless sandwich dropping crumbs on my keyboard, every day while I am on the 21st floor of a building my daughter is nine miles away at noon thinking I am a famous mommy, and that right there is everything.
So yes, it seems I will be drawing on napkins every weeknight until Zoey, and then Ozzy is out of school. Bunnies and cats, maps, mice, people with very big eyes and cupcakes. I will draw on napkins until they tell me to stop, beg me, mom, you have got to stop sending napkins to my dorm, to my work, to my husband, to my wife. And I will smile the smile of someone who knows she is good at what she does. Because I am their mommy, and they made me famous.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a napkin to go draw. (I'm thinking raccoon.)

Couldn't Drag Me Away

Be forewarned: I am a quivering mass of exposed tissue tonight, nerves lifting slightly in the salt air. Zoey is having a slumber party at her Grandma DD's, our house now much too quiet. I cannot help but think of 13 years from now when she might leave to live somewhere else. True, I have PMS. Truer still, I have eaten 4 Cadbury Cream Eggs today. Still. 13 years ago I was in grad school. I wrote short stories and wore red clogs hand-painted with flowers. I still have those clogs and just the other day was thinking I should wear them again in the spring. With jeans?
13 years is a very short time.

So I will tell you this: Wild Horses is one of our Tickle Back Songs, sometimes by The Sundays, though I do prefer The Stones. This video is real and raw and lovely, even if the nodding is not so much of sleep but smack, I suspect.

Then there is this: tomorrow is the night we have set for Ozzy to sleep in his crib. A modified Cry It Out with me right there patting his back and sshhh-ing. I have had nervous tummy for the last week in anticipation, only now realizing that this may be the last night he sleeps in our bed. Because this is also True: the night full of syntactical colons and dramatic statements. The Last Night. I don't know if I can do any of this.

Remember this? Zoey was talking in her sleep the other night--she does that a lot. Mumbo jumbo nujka trah pa? And then as clear as day: I farted on mommy's face. The next morning I asked her if she remembered her dream and she said she couldn't tell me, that it would make me sad. Would it make me sad because you farted on my face? I asked, but she said no, no it wasn't that, and still hasn't told me.

But I remember. And this. A video from 3 years ago. Because 3 years is the same as 13 in that you cannot hold on to either one.

Sometimes it seems there aren't enough Cadbury Cream Eggs to go around.
xo,
S

Where's Winona?

What if Angie Everhart and Kate Mara had a baby with someone really smart and funny who sits in her office chair like a pretzel? (Seriously--torques her leg all the way around.) I mean, aside from problems with the space/time continuum and actual science-y stuff, you’d get my friend slash colleague, Abbey. Wanna meet her? ‘Cause she just launched a blog and it’s rad. Whereswinona.com. Totally different and fun and pink, a fabulous read, if I do say so myself. In her own words:

Action, intrigue, hot dudes with rippling abs. What more do you want?

I’ve got huge news—I’ve finally launched my blovel! A blovel (in case I haven’t blabbed your ear off about it yet) is a novel that’s posted on a blog, which means:

A) It’s free.

B) You can read it at work and pretend like you’re working.

C) It has pictures. Woohoo!

Think of it as an interactive ebook. There are pics, audio, and the whole thing happens in real time. Every blog post is written by the main character. Readers can make comments to her in the comment section, and other characters in the story will be also commenting there so you’ll get their side of the story as well. You’ve never read anything like this before. It’s going to be off the hook!

Speaking of the hook…

This particular blovel is the heartwarming story of a teenage girl named Agnes who is forced into searching for a missing popstar named Winona Darling in order to win the heart of the boy she loves. That is the whole reason she has started this blog. The problem is the boy is kind of douchey and Winona, it turns out, might have been murdered. On top of that Agnes also has some serious competition—former-child-star-turned-celebrity-blogger Tyler Dash. Yes, he’s good-looking if you’re into tan, Venice Beach types with abs like metal siding. But Agnes is not. She’s looking for a Harvard man, and if the only thing that stands between her and summering in Hamptons is a rat-bastard-celebrity-blogger then that dirty hippy is going to go down—hard.

Did I mention, there are also pictures?

If you know of anyone else who enjoys young adult fiction, mystery fiction, humorous fiction, vampire fiction,* gay BFFs in fiction, pug fiction, reality shows, Angela Lansbury, discussing food allergies at length, cheesecake, or publishing, then please forward their way.

I’ll be posting daily Monday through Friday. If you don’t get to it right away just go to whereswinona.com, click the Start button star in the left hand corner and it’ll take you right to the beginning.

Abbey

*Okay so there’s no vampires per se but it does take place in Hollywood, which is filled with bloodsuckers so in that way it qualifies.

Did I not tell you she’s rad?

So what are you doing still reading this? I've got nothing of my own to say today. Check out whereswinona.com. You can thank me later.

xo,

S

With Love in Her Eyes and Flowers in Her Hair

It’s my favorite moment of the day, I think, when she is in bed and we listen to what we call the Tickle Back Song. It’s not just one song but many, and for weeks we will obsess together over a certain one, play it each night, sometimes twice, cuddled together in her bed as I lazily scratch her back and sometimes sing. Telling myself it’s not as hard, hard, hard as it seems…lately we’ve been getting the Led out, listening to “Going to California” by Zeppelin, and there is something so wistful about Robert Plant’s voice that speaks to me as I lay with my girl who is growing up so fast, her body long and lean and leaving me slowly. I like to think that one day maybe twenty years from now she will absentmindedly hear these songs and remember what it felt like to have her mom lightly trace daisy petals across her shoulder blades each night.

I think maybe on Fridays I might post some of our Tickle Back Songs, if that’s ok with you. I want to remember everything about everything, and this is the only way I know how.

Nigh-Night.

xo,

S

And Just Like That! It Was January.

Do you care that I resolve to drink more water in 2012? Be more affectionate with my husband? Save money, get Ozzy to sleep in his crib, sail? Cause I hardly do and I'm me.

I do not much care for January. A cold month known more for what it is not--the holidays, spring, awesome--than for what it is. Incidentally, I think of the word "socks" whenever I hear the phrase "it is what it is" because I once thought the phrase in Spanish "es lo si que es" was pronounced as one would spell out the word "socks," s, o, c, k, s, until my Colombian friend told me it was actually pronounced "sahla-esquilalah-sexy," or something that sounded nothing like what I thought it did. I also think I've told you that story before which is apropos of January, a month made of stories you realize you've already told halfway through the telling. Socks, I say.

But I know I've not told you this: tonight on the bus I had the indescribable urge to pinch the woman sitting next to me. Hard. She sat down while talking on her phone, saying loudly that she was getting sick, had a sore throat, hack hack, fuck, sniffle, jabber jabber, phlegm, blah. So I squeezed my eyes shut and tried very hard not to breathe her in for 9 miles, thinking that surely closing my eyes accounted for something seeing as how they're mucous membranes and all. Also? When you think to yourself do not touch your face, whatever you do, just don't touch your face, suddenly your nose will itch and your lips will actually kind of quiver.

I am not good at public transportation. Or January. Or speaking Spanish.
28 days until February.

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

xo,
Camus & Susannah

Tradition: Year 4

Tonight I forced Zoey to put her hair in ponytails.
2011
Even though she hated it, said it itched and made her look like a baby, I parted her hair in the middle and pulled the two divided sections into elastic bands.
2010
Two minutes! I said, and then we can take it out.
2008 (not pictured: 2009)
It's tradition, I told her, and then explained what that meant.
2007
So when I'm a teenager you'll do this? she asked, when I am a grown up? When you are dead and a skeleton, you'll make me wear my hair in ponytails for a picture in front of the Christmas tree?

Yes, I said. Yes, yes and yes.
(Although I'm still undecided if Ozzy's hair will also be in ponytails for this pic once he gets hair.)

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

xo,
S

The Poo that Broke the Camel's Back (The Lesser Known Dromedary Tale)

If you haven't noticed the www is chock full o' sparkle right now. Sequins, sprinkles, mistletoe and merry, fa la la la la la fuck me. Yesterday I woke up in a literal pile of shit. I'm not talking Rachel Zoe every-other-word literal which is not even literal but laughable, no--actual real literal human excrement. Stay with me here. Because Ozzy still sleeps with us, and around 4am Zoey shifted in her sleep--wait--did I also mention Zoey crawls into bed with us every night around 2am? Yes. For the most part Ozzy, Zoey, Bryan and I sleep (or rather just kind of line up in a row overnight) in one bed. So Zoey shifts in her sleep and up wafts this stench of gah, but I was trying super hard to stay asleep so I just incorporated the smell into my dream in denial of the diarrhea. For the next two hours every time someone so much as moved a toe it smelled like ass death but I was so goddamn tired I pretended it wasn't happening. When the alarm finally went off I looked down at Ozzy who looked back at me with an--again with the literal--literal shit-eating grin on his face and I finally saw that he was caked in poo. It was so bad that I had to cut off his pajamas like a paramedic so I wouldn't fling yet more shit everywhere. I'm running out of words for shit here.

Which leads me to this: HELP.

This is the first and last time Ozzy ever slept in his crib. Circa September? It lasted maybe an hour.

People of the internet, this is what I want for Christmas: tell me how to get Ozzy out of my bed. Zoey is easier. I can handle Zoey. But Ozzy?

Ozzy must sleep with a nipple in his mouth. And it must be my nipple. He won't take a pacifier so night after night I torque my body to poke a boob into his mouth even though my milk dried up months ago. Needless to say my back is killing me and I have actual porn-y thoughts of sleeping alone with my knees drawn up to my chest. Oh yeah baby, I'm sleeping hard. I haven't reached REM sleep in almost 7 months.

I'm willing to slather his crib sheet with banana-flavored YoBaby if that'll keep him in there. What I'm not willing to do is hardcore Cry It Out.

So please. Pretty please flocked with fake snow and frosting to make this (literal!) shitty post fit in with the rest of the seasonal bloglandia cheer--please tell me how I can get Ozzy to sleep in his crib without any tears.

Fitfully, Shitfully, Titfully Yours,
Susannah

Wake Up and Smell the Routine

This is how my day was: wake up at 4am because Ozzy won't sleep. My bus is late. On Market Street a homeless man yells UGLY, and although there are maybe 12 other people standing by and the sidewalk itself is covered in loogies, I feel certain he is calling me ugly. Forget my lunch. Eat handfuls of butter cookies and peppermint bark from gift baskets sitting in the office. Feel sick. Go to the bathroom and get my period, breaking a year and a half pregnancy-induced proverbial dry spell. Zoey's school calls--she has a fever. Bryan picks her up. Feel like a bad mom. Have one of those moments in a group conversation when you start to talk but realize nobody is listening so you awkwardly look around and then trail off your sentence? Start again, but still no one is listening. Stop. Start again. Stop. On the way home the bus driver yells at me when my phone rings.
My day sucked. This is also how my day was: wake up at 4am because Ozzy wants to chat. We stare at each other and smile for 10 minutes straight, and I realize it is maybe the most intimate thing I have ever done. Zoey wakes up and we cuddle on the couch to watch Babar. The bus is warm. The barista at Starbucks remembers my name and is genuine. At work I catch a typo. Free peppermint bark. On a whim I type "Last Christmas" by Wham! into Pandora and spend the afternoon listening to wonderfully terrible holiday music. At home Zoey's eyes are two glazed donuts, her temperature 101 degrees. I kiss the hot palms of each hand and she goes to sleep at 6. Because he left work early to pick up Zoey, Bryan has to go back to his office, so I eat a dinner of five Pfeffernüsse alone in the kitchen with Ozzy. Five Pfeffernüsse, five Pfeffernüsse. I say it out loud a few times and the powdered sugar puffs a bit like a dragon. Ozzy thinks this is hysterical. He eats sweet potato and peas.
My day was awesome.

Both of these are true, the cognitive dissonance of my day. Of every day, really. What happened and what I choose to tell. Neither of them the wrong answer but both of them right. How was my day? What will I say? I believe in the value of both.
How was your day?

Xox, The Lastnameheres

One boxed set of 50 with a glaring typo, a corrupted spreadsheet of addresses and later a painfully burnt palm right before having to address the final set, and I freaking did it. I sent out our 2011 holiday cards:
That's it people: my year in a snapshot. You better believe this one's getting framed.
From mine to yours,
Peace

My Madeline

I was thinking today of jelly beans, of a certain creek a few streets from where I grew up. I was thinking of Reagan and how he liked jelly beans, how I thought it mandatory for a president to endorse a food group. Carter with his peanuts and Reagan with jelly beans, each of those an actual food group to me at 10, how I knew then that I could never be president because I did not have a signature food much less a group or a political party. I'm guessing I was 10, because it was a year of rainbows and alligator shoelaces, the year of jelly beans. For my birthday my mom had bought necklaces as party favors, gold chains with a row of plastic jelly beans that hung down, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, in a rainbow like that. I don't remember anything about the party or what I got, just those cheap plastic jelly bean necklaces and how much I loved mine, how the jelly beans felt in my mouth when I pulled the necklace into my lips, the dull tink of plastic and teeth. How one day walking home from somewhere I stopped at the chainlink fence over the creek to see how far the water had risen and when I got home it was gone.Later, or maybe it was before, a neighbor said that her brother had found a dead teenage girl in that creek. She had slit her wrists, and though I did not see the girl's body I saw slick leaves stuck to white skin. The romance of something horrible that was far enough away that I only thought of my necklace whenever I passed the creek, how for years I peered over the railing to see if I could spot the rainbow I had lost.

Incidentally, in high school I kissed a boy who ate Very Cherry Jelly Bellies and then blew them out his nose on demand. He had pretty green eyes despite his soft palate being too closely connected, so once after he gave me a ride home we kissed not because we liked each other because we didn't, but because we were two teenagers in a car and I was getting out.

I wish I still had that rainbow jelly bean necklace, and somewhere somebody wishes that dead teenage girl were still alive.