Please, God, Shoot Me Now

I just spent 8 hours trapped in a car.

For the last three of those, I had a two-year old talking constantly:

"Mama...memember went to car wash? Memember soap bubble? Green bubble. Pink bubble. I see towel. Mememeber see towel? 'ellow and bean towel? Memember?

Seriously folks. For three frickin' hours.

Solid.

Non. Stop.

He's still not in bed.

He's still talking. Standing here next to me. TALKING.

I thought this whole talking thing would be cute.





Not so much.

Home at Last!

Or... things we've learned about family vacations-

1. Don't go to the beach during a tropical storm unless you enjoy sitting indoors...a lot.
2. Four days is really the maximum that you should require anyone outside of your immediate family to be with you. Five is pushing it. Six and seven are right out.
3. Do buy alcohol in large quantities. Be sure that it can be blended into a fruity or creamy concoction once the kids are in bed. Trust me, there are some things that beer just doesn't work for.
4. Do bring a sharpie. Label your food. Label your stuff. Label your child if need be. It's disappointing when someone eats your child instead of their frozen pizza.
5. If a house has an elevator, you have a 50% change of not getting stuck between floors. Please see number 3 before entering.
6. Sand can, indeed, get into places you didn't know your two-year-old had. A diaper rash will make that worse.
7. Two-year-olds with southern accents are adorable. Be careful not to pick one up yourself. (The accent, not the two-year-old).*
8. Other people's children are not as cute/smart/well-behaved/clean/interesting/talented as yours. But that's ok-- sometimes the Silver is fine.
9. There should be treadmills attached to vacation food. Especially vacation food that is battered and fried or that comes with a side of melted butter. mmmm butter.
10. There's a reason that the Chevy Chase movies about family vacations are classics. Even if you don't have a Cousin Eddie.

*not that there's a thing wrong with southern accents-- you just don't want to look like you're mocking the poor thing

Thar be a Hurricane a Blowin'

Ok- so it's mostly just a tropical storm, but being mostly trapped indoors might be its own little force of nature.

It's been interesting vacationing with a family that is only mine by marriage. I am completely used to my own family's craziness and ticks. Not that they don't bother me, but at least I know what to expect. Being with another family has been a...different experience. Usually, I only spend a couple hours all year with J's fam--right around Christmas. 24-7 for a whole week drudges up past wrongs, hurt feelings, and prejudices that remain unspoken but continue to simmer below the surface.

Mix that all together with the child from hell-- a 7 year old that is one of J's aunt's partner's grandkids--and you have yourself a certifiable time.

And now it's raining-- crazy hard raining.

I just want to go to the beach and sit in the sun and listen to the surf.

Drat.

Right-Wing Beach Vacation

We're here enjoying the surf and sand at Folly Beach- and while the water isn't as blue and the sand isn't quite as white as where we go in Florida, we're having a great time.

J's family rented this humungoid beach house-- beautifully appointed with a game room up on the third floor and windows that face the ocean in every room.

Oh yeah-- and pictures of Dubbleya everywhere. It turns out that our gracious hosts are part of the republican "Inner Circle." I couldn't make this stuff up. There's apparently an inner circle and they give out little signed pictures of our fearless leader and the first lady with certificates-- you know, like the type that you get in elementary school for having perfect attendance or clapping the erasers well.

There are pictures of republicans everywhere in the living room-- all beautifully framed and matted. There's one of Regan leaving on airforce 1 for the last time. And my favorite-- one of
Bush looking over his shoulder in a cowboy hat looking, well, wrangler-y.

I wish I had a little picture of Obama. We could just sneak it in on the shelf-- as a little parting gift.

Well, At Least He's Determined

Tomorrow J and X* and I pack for a week at the beach. We have to drive to the airport tomorrow night and spend the night at a hotel because our flight leaves at the most god-awful early time in the morning.

The stress of a 6AM flight has only been exacerbated by the fact that for the last three days, my dear, sweet, lovely little boy has had a sore throat that has kept him refusing food and screaming most hours that "hurt, mouf hurt." For almost 24 hours the kid just wouldn't eat or drink anything. He sat with his little mouth open, lips dripping with the drool he refused to swallow. For most of last evening, he used my shirt as the receptacle for that drool. Yuck and double yuck. I'll give him one thing, though-- the little guy was determined not to let anything at all pass that oh-so-sore throat. It got so bad that we finally had to give him tylenol, um... through the other end.

I think we're through the woods though. Tonight he finally broke down and ate a cookie. And then he followed that cookie with about 8 more.

I'm still not looking forward to the 6 AM flight. Oh- and the airport is in a different time zone, so that flight is really 5 AM our time.

And it looks like the beach we're going to is infested with Jelly Fish.

And because of X's little sore throat, I didn't finish the work that I needed to do-- so this is going to definitely be a working vacation for me. Thank goodness it's at a beach. Because there was some talk about some sort of family retreat house in the middle of nowhere Ohio. This is much, much better.

Beach. Sunshine. Ocean.

Ok- I'm going to my happy place now.

*Little Man isn't so little any more-- we're going to a new moniker

Back

And it's 68 degrees out there. What's up with that.

I want to go back to the beach. Possibly for good.

Vacations should be at least 10 days.

More later

Start Spreading the News....

I have officially worked my way through Spring "Break." I have read the books I will teach in the next 7 weeks, made up study guides and questions, graded 34 mediocre midterms, annotated at least 20 articles, and took notes on 3.

I. Am. Done.

Which is convenient, because tomorrow we three jet off to the Big Apple. And I can't wait. We're going to see dinosaurs and butterflies, exploding cars and Jewish Delis, familiar grandparents* and new babies**. We're gonna eat dim sum, and pizza, and bagels, and brunch, and bagels, and bagels, and bagels for four wonderful days. It's going to be a welcome break.

New York is always a little special for me, because it's where we went for our Honeymoon. In retrospect, that wasn't the best choice we could have made. A beach would have been much, much more relaxing. But we had been talking about taking a road trip to NYC since we first started dating. We just never got around to it until the honeymoon.

We've been back two or three times since then, and this will be Little Man's second trip to the City. The last time we were there was when he wasn't quite a year old yet. He watched the ducks in the fountain by the Boat House and went to Times Square in his PJs. I'm hoping he has even more fun this time.


These little town blues .... Are melting away ....

More when we get back...

*J's parents are going to meet us in the city.
**We'll be meeting baby "N"- the three month old of some friends of ours that escaped to Manhattan about 2 years ago.

"It's a gritty industrial town..."

...or that's what a recent NPR report about a real estate scam called the place I grew up.

They're not really wrong. Akron is a dying city. Having spent the first 21 years of my life there, I found it funny when reading Babbit the characters thought of it as the big city, an exciting locale.

But it once was. Back in the days of yore, the canals made the town a booming industrial city. The "Oatmeal King," made Akron his home base and started the Quaker oats company. You can still go and see the grain silos--now somewhat outdated, circular hotel rooms. In the early twentieth century, the Seiberlings started the Goodyear Tire Company, the Firestone's started their own tire company and the...um, somebody started the General Tire company. Akron became "The Rubber Capital of the World." Quite a title. And one that was well deserved. Immigrants flocked to the city to work in the rubber factories. The city is divided by neighborhoods that bear the names of the companies that built them: Goodyear Heights, Firestone Park.

Sometime in the mid 1970s or early 1980s, though, all of that began to change. The city was already starting to fade--factories had begun to build tires in places where workers did not require company loyalty, pensions, or even high wages. As the rubber industry moved away, the jobs moved with it, and with the jobs went the people. For the last 10 years or so, the city has been trying to reinvent itself. New city schools, a snazzy outdoor amphitheater in the middle of downtown, even a minor league baseball team. I'm not sure how well it's working, but it's an ardent effort.

It's always a bit surreal returning to Akron for a visit. All of my family (except baby bro, who's off in sunny CA) lives there- many of them in the same houses that have been in my family for generations. Every time I go back, it's almost as though I never left. I round the curve of interstate 77 and from the top of the hill, I can see the city laid out before me. And it's like my body remembers before my brain, guiding the car towards my parents house, swerving left of center to miss the large lump in the middle of the road, coasting through the stop sign at the beginning of their block, and smiling at the sawed off telephone pole that was left up to serve as a street sign on the corner of my grandparents' property.

It's always so familiar, and yet every time I return it seems so different. There's a tattoo parlor in the small neighborhood shopping plaza now. There are instant check cashing places and "games of skill" parlors where video stores, rootbeer stands, and mom and pop businesses once stood. It always seems a little grayer, a little older every time I return.

But Akron still has its charm.

Last weekend, as I rounded that same curve as I always do, the Goodyear Blimp was above us in the sky--almost parallel to our car. It's a sight a took for granted as a child- the silver fish-like balloon that was omnipresent in my childhood summers. Only recently did I realize that most people never actually get to see the Goodyear Blimp in person--it's just something that flashes on the bottom of their TV screen during sporting events: "Sky cam provided by the Goodyear Blimp." I lived two minutes from the big hangar where the Blimps were originally housed.

"Look," I told Little Man. "Look out your window- it's the Blimp." It took him a moment--the word and concept were both new to him. But he finally saw it, just as our car rounded the bend in the road and it went out of sight.
"More Bimp!" he called out over and over.

As unlikely as it is that we'll ever live in Northeastern Ohio again, it's kind of nice to know that he'll definitely have more "Bimp" to come.

Random Bullets from Flying Solo

This last weekend, Little Man and I took a sans-papa trip back to Ohio for my Grandpa's 80th birthday. I don't have the time or energy left for a formal post right now- but here are some highlights.

• To the wonderful, wonderful woman who saw me trying to get a suitcase, car seat, and half-awake toddler to the rental car bas, thank you thank you thank you for helping me. I have no idea who you are or where you were heading, but I wish I could thank you again for taking the time to walk with my luggage so I could carry little man. I know you were probably heading out and it was completely out of your way to walk me back into the rental car terminal, but you made such a difference.
• Other than above problem, Little Man was the perfect traveler. He listened to everything I said, he held my hand all the way through the airport, he didn't cry on the plane or make a fuss even once. He was p.e.r.f.e.c.t.
  
• I do not have what it takes to be a single mother. After barely 2 days, I was completely and utterly exhausted. Even though he was perfect.
  
• People in Ohio do not know how to drive. The left lane is for passing. The right lane is for not passing. Please re-check your driving manuals and don't pass on the right.
  
• There is something at J's parents house that is like a sleeping aid for little man. The kid slept until 10 both days we were there. He never sleeps until 10! I realize that it's still 9 central, but little man never even sleeps until 9. Unfortunately, he's trained me so well to be awake by 8 AM that I was up by 7 each day.
• I'm tired. Really tired. And I have a paper to revise and submit for the conference in March and a lecture to write before 3:00 today. Blech.
  

Christmas Times Seven

I would wish you all a Merry Belated Christmas, but when the final Christmas even went down (a fairly full glass of Bailey's while watching the HD Yule log on cable) I was officially done.

Don't get me wrong--As Christmases go, it was a good Christmas. There were no major breakdowns or crack-ups. Little Man was a perfect little traveler and did more than tolerate the gaggle of new people constantly thrown at him. But it was an exhausting Christmas, probably because we celebrated it at least seven time. Count 'em:

"Christmas" morning at home on the 21st.
Hubby's Dad's family's Christmas on the 22nd.
Brief Baptismal interlude on the 23rd.
Hubby's Mom's family Christmas Brunch on the 24th.
My Grampa's hardcore Italian Christmas Eve Fest on the 24th.
Christmas morning with Jason's parents--including Mass on the 25th.
Christmas dinner with my parents and grandparents on the 25th.
Gift opening orgy with my parents on the 25th.

Mix all of that together with being physically drained from traveling with a baby and emotionally drained from dealing with the idea that this would probably be the last Christmas back in Akron for a long while, and I was done. I love Christmas, but after all of that I was done. Finished. Finito. Kaput.

So no Merry Belated Christmas from me.

Here's the thing: it's all just a little too much. Maybe a lot too much.

As I stood Christmas eve, trying to pacify my toddler with cookies while my grandpa said the blessing, tears streaming down my face, I realized that he got it right in the midst of all the chaos of that event. It's not about the amount of presents you get anymore -- let's face it, most of them get returned anyway. It's not even about the stress of cooking and planning the perfect holiday meal. That's all just window dressing. But when he thanked us all for coming and commented on how important it is that we (all 26 of us- all 5 generations present) do get together and celebrate. How important it is to take a moment and think about those would couldn't make it--those who have jobs that have taken then far away and those who are no longer with us. I think that part of why I feel so weary now--so exhausted about the whole thing is that all the whoop-la of gifts and cookies and food and holiday perfection often makes us miss the real reason for it all. To be together. To create moments we remember always, rather than moments that seem like a hazy blur.

And so, despite having a lovely time at each and every single event. Despite enjoying seeing everyone who we saw, I find it strange and yet not unexpected that my favorite moments were the quiet ones. Women around a kitchen table. Talking softly late into the night around a lit tree. Christmas tea in gold rimmed cups. A doll-like infant snuggled on a couch, fast asleep in the midst of chaos. And a cup of Bailey's, straight-up over ice, when the house is quiet and the windows dark.

DC with a Toddler- Part II

Little Man is a perfect little traveler. Really. I'm not exactly sure how we got so lucky. We like to travel and he doesn't seem to mind it.

I was worried about having him for two days, basically all to myself, but things went just fine.

Better than fine, really.

I'm not sure why I was so worried. We had a great time together.


We went to the National Zoo and saw the Pandas.






We saw lots of other things at the zoo, but he was mostly interested in the leaves on the ground and the pigeons.

See-- this is him going after the pigeons now.

We went to see the monuments with my parents, but really he was more interested in the water. After all, the WWII memorial looks suspiciously like the pool he went to all summer.



I'm not sure he was even paying attention to most of the sites-- for Little Man, DC was just one big outdoor playground, complete with things to climb, things to pick up, and lots of vehicles to see.







He was even good at church...mostly.





But in church, who can blame him for wanting to get out.

Especially when there's so much more to see......

DC with a Toddler- Part I

It's really the smell that hits you first. The damp, musty smell of aging leather. And then you realize that the gray heaps you're looking at are shoes--hundreds of shoes that once graced the feet of long-dead people.

The room with the shoes is on the third floor of the Holocaust museum in DC. I visited the museum once before, back in 2001 when J and I were still just dating. In the entire experience of walking through the museum's eerily silent exhibits, it was the room of shoes that made me need to reach out and clutch his hand. I had seen so many films, read so many books, seen so many pictures of the atrocities, that experiencing the train car, the torn fragments of a Torah, even walking under the gates from Auschwitz were too familiar to be truly gut-wrenching. But that room filled with shoes--some stylish, some practical, all made monotone by sixty years of decay--brought home the human aspect of the Holocaust like nothing I'd ever experienced.

This last weekend, we visited the museum again. It was my parents first time back to DC in my lifetime, and my mom wanted to see it. This time, I turned the corner, out of the Auschwitz portion of the exhibits knowing what to expect next, and with a squirming 17 month old in my arms.

Let me just say, that this particular museum is probably no place for a toddler. It's dimly lit and exudes a funeral atmosphere that even the most jocular teen doesn't seem willing to break. I hurried him through each floor, trying not to disturb other visitors, and would wait in the brighter lobbies that waited at the end of each segment. As I sat waiting for my parents to emerge from the previous floor's exhibits, Little Man played with his new stuffed Panda, and periodically cheered for the visitors descending the steps, thinking that grandma and grandpa would appear at any moment.

When you go through the museum, you're not usually thinking about how it is affecting those around you, but having a toddler there made me acutely conscious of it. I watched people exit from the exhibits, tears streaming down their faces. The whole procession was like watching a family make their last viewing at a funeral. I was glad that most seemed relieved rather than irritated to see a jubilant toddler applauding their descent.

Escorting a toddler through the National Holocaust Museum is not something that I would recommend, and yet the experience made the museum something completely new for me. He walked through exhibit after exhibit completely unaware of the emaciated faces gazing down at him from countless photographs. For him, the room of shoes seemed an odd, and somewhat fascinating spectacle disrupted only by an inconvenient railing that kept him from trying them each on. Experiencing the museum with a toddler illustrated just how devastating the entire atrocity was. After the Holocaust, innocence like that of my son doesn't last much past the very early years. There is no way to go back to a place where pictures of piled and burned bodies don't exist. There is no way to recapture the consciousness of a time before the final solution, except perhaps in the very early years of childhood.

I'm sure it won't be my last visit. Maybe in another ten or twelve years or so, we'll take him through it once again. When that time comes, he won't be unaware. When that time comes, the smell of the shoes will stay with him, too.

Solo Parenting

Tomorrow, we leave for DC. J was invited to attend a conference for a grant he won, and Little Man and I will be having some solo fun in the city.

I'm excited, because I love D.C.-- it's my favorite American city, by far. We spent a lot of time there back in 2001 when J was working for AmeriCorp and I was living in State College. Every other weekend or so, I'd drive the 3 hours to visit him, and we'd go out and explore. It always feels, in some strange way, like coming home when we visit. I love everything about the city--except maybe its most famous resident. I love the food, and the national mall, and the low buildings and wide avenues. It reminds me of Europe in a way. New York's towering height can be breathtaking and exhilarating, but I've always felt like D.C. was a city I'd be able to live in and feel at home.

But this weekend will really be my first effort at solo parenting, and I'm a bit terrified. J and I have always shared the Little Man duties about as equally as a couple comprised of two people--only one of which produces milk--could share them. The first summer he was on the outside, I would spend three hours each afternoon along with him, but I've never had to do a 12 hour stint without some sort of back-up.

I'm glad we're going somewhere familiar to me, but the idea of 12 hours without J's tag-team assists makes me nervous. I'm not the most patient person in the world. But I've got a whole bunch of places and activities to go--the zoo, the mall, some fun indoor playground over by the Capital. It should be fun... right?

Wish me luck. I'll post pics and stories when we get back.

Little Man Travels

We just returned from four days in New York--two in Poughkeepsie to see my baby brother graduate and then two in the city. People thought we were nuts for taking a baby into the city, but Little Man was perfect--even through the dinner at the fancy-shmancy steakhouse that didn't have either high chairs or a booster seat.

We visited some friends that we met here, but left the fair prairie for the city when one of them got a too-good-to-refuse job offer. As we caught up with them, and it was so good to catch up with them, I came to the realization that we are now that couple that brings every conversation back to the topic of Little Man and what it is like to live with him. Yup. We've turned into the couple that starts into a fairly lively discussion about Hilary, Obama, or Edwards and ends with stories about labor. How that happens, I have not a clue.

Luckily, our city friends seemed ok with it. Perhaps they were just being polite. Perhaps they are thinking about maybe taking the old plunge into parenthood themselves and were genuinely interested. Perhaps they were tuning us out and mentally making plans to never procreate in the future.

Who knows. What I do know is that realizing that I am part of that couple makes me feel very ambivalent. On one hand, I don't want to be that couple, but on the other, why wouldn't I want to talk about the most perfect kid in the world?

More NY stories to come...