Ralph

My week of laziness and indulgence was interrupted last night by a bout of stomach virus on Grayson's part. Poor kid, he started feeling sick around 5:30 last night and spent the 12 hours throwing up. It was a long, long night for both of us. We lay on our individual sofas in the living room, dozing intermittently between Grayson's awful bouts of ralphing. I would hear him start, and rouse myself to go wipe his face with a cool cloth, bring him ice chips to suck on and tuck him back in. Then we would both collapse onto our respective sofas and doze again until the next bout. It went on until about 4:30 this morning.

Today, Grayson is doing much better, just recuperating from the exhaustion and achiness of dehydration that accompanies a night of ralphing. For my part, I feel like I've been on an 2-day bender: groggy, stiff and dopey. We continue to hold down our sofas and stare glassy-eyed at reruns on the Disney Channel.

This is not exactly the sort of lazing about I had in mind for the holiday break.

I had to cancel our participation in the New Year's Eve festivities at Bob's tonight. He told me he'd have bad luck all week if I wasn't there to deliver the lucky New Year's kiss... which made me feel bad at first, but was sort of sweet, actually. No way I'm keeping my kid up 'til midnight tonight. We're both going to bed as early as it's dark enough to be considered "night time."

Hopefully we can make it up to the Dohrmann boys tomorrow by showing up with bells on for their football party. I'm bringing chili. Assuming I don't come down with the Ralph Virus myself between now and then.

So I thought I'd post a few pictures from the holidays.
First, here's Grayson and my dad, preparing the Christmas Turkey for the smoker.














Kobi, happily sucking on her new stuffed Christmas tree toy.














Here's Grayson with the plate of tacos and thermos of coffee he left for Santa on Christmas Eve.












And a nice picture of Grayson sharing this year's Book with his Big Mama and Papa.

It was a wonderful holiday, last night's ralphing notwithstanding.

Christmas past

Christmas. You spend so much time anticipating it and preparing for it, and then all of a sudden, it's over. And you're expected to go back to your normal life. Well, okay, not me, not really. I have a whole week off after Christmas: time spent snuggled under a blankie on the sofa, surrounded by dogs and coffee cups and stacks of books. It's a good week.

It has been a wonderful holiday. I spent way too much on Grayson, but it was so much fun to watch him open presents. He was totally not expecting the Xbox Kinect, and frankly I'm not sure he's all that excited about it, but he'll grow into it, and I'm hoping there will be some games we can play together. I sent it along with him to his dad's so that they can play with it together. Technically Gray paid for half of it, so he should also reap the fun of playing it with G. The big hit this year was the Creepy Bug Maker, which Grayson played with almost nonstop for all of Christmas afternoon and evening.

No. No, the big hit was the gift Grayson gave to me. He was so excited. He went shopping with my parents a week ago and picked out something that he was so thrilled with, he tried several times to get me to open it early. He insisted I open the first gift of Christmas morning, and brought it to me with much ceremony and barely contained excitement.

It's a beautiful white-gold pendant: two open hearts curving into one another. He had seen it on a commercial for Kay jewelers, and I guess I made a comment about how pretty it was and that nobody ever buys me "pretty shiny" things. So he dragged my parents through jewelry store after jewelry store, looking for it. My mom tried to talk him into getting one with diamonds on it, but he had made up his mind that this simple white gold one was the one he wanted. When I opened it, he explained to me that the little heart was for him, and the big heart was for me. It is beautiful, and I did admire it in the commercial...but I love it most because he loves it, and because he chose it for me with a heart full of love. I'll wear it always. What a dear, sweet, boy I have.

Our Solstice party was a great success. We had about 15 guests, which is a very full house for our little space. I bought way more wine and booze than I needed, and prepared way too much food, but it was a really good time, and so nice to have a house full of friends. I was half afraid nobody would come. The terror of the less-than-socially-adept. But plenty of people did come, and I think everyone had a nice evening. Bob brought a stack of vinyl and spun records for us all evening. I wish I had taken some pictures, but I just never got around to it.

I'll do it again. Hell, I've got enough food and booze left over, I could do it this weekend. But I won't. It took me two days to recover! Even the dogs were exhausted.

Now all I need to do is take down the decorations and the tree, and spend the next few days relaxing and preparing for the year to come. Resolutions later. For now, just coffee and that stack of books....

Christmas Yet to Come

I'm at the stage of holiday planning where, like a little kid, I can barely sit still. I'm technically still on the job, still busily getting to work, managing the day-to-day. But in fact, there are visions of sugarplums dancing in my head, and I'm all but useless for anything but gift-wrapping, cookie baking and tree trimming. This Dr. Jeckyl has been taken over completely by Ms. Kringle.

It doesn't help that my Solstice party is tomorrow night. I spent all weekend getting ready: cleaning and decorating the house, hanging lights and clearing surfaces so people would have a place to set their drinks, breaking up sticks in the back yard for kindling for the fireplace, making queso and making lists and lists and lists. Tonight I will do the shopping and a bit of baking and preparing. I'm beside myself with excitement.

I haven't had a party like this since my 30th birthday party nearly 15 years ago! That one was an evening to remember, and this one looks to be shaping up to be an other.

I am almost done with my Christmas shopping, as well. Last night I finished the scarf I was knitting for Bob. It's the first time I've picked up knitting needles in over a year, and I had to unravel the whole thing about 20 rows into it because it was gradually getting wider and wider and wider. It was going to end up as a giant triangle if I didn't do something, so rather than attempt to salvage it somehow, I just pulled it all out and started over.



On Thursday, Grayson brought home this wonderful three-panel drawing he'd done at school of his own personal Christmas Past, Present and Future. It's so sweet. I wonder what the Very Special Gift is that he has acquired for me? I know he is very excited about it. He and my parents went out shopping together and he came back with this small wrapped package for me that could barely contain his enthusiasm. Whatever it is, seeing his excitement about giving it to me is the best gift of all.

Grayson's book arrived this morning! This is always exciting! Even though I've spent months looking at these pages over and over and over, it's still fun to have the actual artifact in hand. I love making Grayson's book each year. It's kind of a let-down when it's all done and I'm not working on it anymore. Though in just a few months, I can get started on next year's book. If you'd like to see the 2010 book, you can flip through it here. If you're one of the people who will be scoring a book for Christmas, you'll just spoil your surprise that way, but please yourself....


Today was Grayson's last day of school for two weeks! I went to "help" with the class party this afternoon. I had to redeem myself, because I missed the Halloween party. It was at 2:00 and I showed up at 2:30... just after school was over for the day. What was I thinking? I couldn't tell you.

So this time I was determined to do it right. I brought some little giveaways for all the kids, and I contributed $5 to the chips and queso the PTA moms were ordering. I even arrived half an hour early, to help set up. But there was nobody there. There was precious little there in the form of snacks, too. Just a single plate of cookies and a cooler of drinks. I peeked into the classroom next to ours, and the moms there were bustling around, setting goodies on plates on the tables they had decorated with red tablecloths. Every kid had a little gift at his or her place, and a pile of treats.

Our room was pathetic.

So I rushed out to Homeland and bought a cookie-cake with a cute snowman on it and rushed back just in time. The other moms were there, and they had set out holiday plates, doled out the chips, queso and cookies... and I realized that my cute cookie cake would have to be cut and I had no knife... AND there was no way there was enough to go around for a class of 30 kids.

So I gave it to the teacher. She was pleased.

Sigh. Well, at least I tried. I will never make homeroom mother, that's for sure.

The party was a smashing success, if a 4th grade classroom party can be said to be so. The kids played a game, transfering M&Ms from one cup to another using a straw. The PTA moms had provided prizes (including really loud, really annoying whistles, which even I know better than to hand out to a room full of 4th graders on sugar). And my little giveaways got added to the prize stack, which was fine... they were actually just leftovers I'd cadged from a Sonic event at the museum anyway.

So school is out for two weeks and tomorrow G goes to see his dad because his grandma is in town for a few days. I will be spending the weekend getting ready for the Big Solstice Bash coming up on Tuesday. Oh, and knitting. I'll be doing a lot of knitting. More on knitting later.

Messages to and from Santa

Earlier this week I found this website that will let you schedule three text messages to your kid from Santa. So I paid my $5.49 and set it up for G-rex. The first one was delivered Monday evening. The next will come on Friday, and the final one on Christmas Eve.

Monday's message said:

Hi Grayson! Santa here. I know you've been good this year, but I have not received your letter yet! Please send ASAP. Merry Christmas! Luv. S.

Well, it came just after Grayson left for Scouts with his dad on Monday, and I didn't remember to point it out to him until last night. He checked his messages and said "Oh my God! Santa has a cell phone!"

He was just about beside himself with joy. I asked him to read me the message and he did and then he said "I knew Santa was real! In your face, Nathan!"

He told me then that a couple of boys in his class no longer believe in Santa. This doesn't surprise me. I expect this is G's last year, as well. But I was touched by the enthusiasm with which he latched onto this "proof" of Santa's existence. It's clear he really wants to believe.

I remember when I was about ten, and some of my friends didn't believe in Santa. I remember talking to my mother about it. She was standing at the sink, washing something... her face very serious, as I told her that my friends told me there was no Santa Claus. I don't remember if I expected her to confirm or deny. But it was A Moment... if you know what I mean. There was something riding on her response. And she thought for a minute and then she asked me, "Well, what do you think?"

I thought a minute myself and answered her: "I think Santa is real."

"Well then," she said. "There you are. "

She never confirmed or denied, just asked me to look into myself and have the strength of character to believe what I believed. It was good advice: for Santa, and for a myriad of other things in life, too.

Last night Grayson sat down and finally wrote his letter to Santa. The last thing he said when he went to bed was "Don't forget to mail my letter to Santa." And he reminded me again this morning on the way to school. This from a kid who can't remember to put his number on his papers, or bring his homework home with him. In fact, he forgot to take his homework to school this morning, he was so busy worrying I wouldn't get his Santa letter in the mail.

Losing a belief in Santa is like losing one of the primary piers of childhood. I'm glad Grayson has held onto his belief for this long, though I worry just a little bit what response he'll get when he marches into his classroom this morning and announces that Santa is real and he has proof because the Jolly Old Elf is text messaging him. I may have made him slightly vulnerable in that. I hope not. I'm glad he believes.

'Cause I do, too.

The Hanging o' the Greens

This weekend I went out and hung lights on the carport and porch. It was much easier than I thought. Somehow hanging lights outside always fell to the men in the family. When I was a child, my dad engaged in a very elaborate lighting scheme which involved a staple gun, a very tall ladder, and shinnying along the roofline in the cold wind every December. It was an arduous, dangerous, all-day job, wrapping up just at dusk. Then he would come in, windblown, cold and smelling of Dad. When it got dark, my mom and I would go out to the street and my dad would turn them on from inside, and then come out with us to oo and Ah and soak up the praise we gave him for lighting another Merry Christmas.

When I was a single woman (the first time), I would put up some lights around the front porch and around the windows inside. I was always really lazy about it, though. I used clear packing tape outside and generally just draped lights over existing curtain rods inside. My father's sense of a Job Well Done was probably appalled when he saw my jerry-rigged systems. The tree was the same way. Always a tangle of lights, sometimes going all the way around, sometimes just zigzagging back and forth across the front of the tree. It was always a nightmare to take them down because they inevitably got tangled.

Then when I was married, Gray would do lights on the house and bushes. He was very particular about how they were done, too, and we never agreed on whether we should have all one color, or mixed lights or if there should be some sort of pattern. I always favored mixed lights, no pattern. He of course always wanted something more organized. I generally won.

I remember the first Christmas after my friend Jin got divorced, and she told me I should stay married just so I would have someone to hang lights for me. We laughed because of course we didn't know then what was coming a few years later for me. But when it happened, I sort of saw her point. Hanging lights outside seemed really really like a pain in the ass.

Last year I reverted to my old single-girl technique and just went out with a chair and wrapped some lights around posts and stair rails on the front porch, but it seemed inadequate. It's time to adapt, I decided. I can't leave gaps where the Man of My Life used to be. And I've got a kid now, I can't do things in the slapdash fashion I did in my twenties. I'll go out and hang my own damned lights.

So I did. I borrowed a ladder from my neighbors – who, being the sweet, grandparently pair they are, were very concerned for my safety due to the wind this weekend – and I got some fancy plastic hookie things from Walmart and I went to work. I had this image of my dad up there on the roof in the wind, wielding his staple gun. But it wasn't such a big deal. There were a few minutes of head-scratching at first to figure out how to use the hooks... but then it went pretty quickly and easily. No packing tape or staples required, and when I plugged them in they (mostly) all worked. And Grayson was delighted when we got home Sunday night after he'd been at his dad's house and they were up and on. So There.

More mortality

Well, it's happened, as we all knew it would... King is dead. I got a teary call from Grayson yesterday when he got home from school, informing me of his passing. I felt terrible, sitting there, listening to my boy sob on the phone for loss of a three-inch fiddler crab, but I was thinking "the creepy little bastard seemed fine this morning, he did it on purpose!"

Seriously, we managed a couple of weeks, and the thing was burrowing happily in the sand and eating god-knows-what just yesterday morning. Seven hours later: kaput. Damn. damn. damn.

I comforted G as best I could over the phone, and then called my parents, who were going to come over in half an hour anyway to take G shopping for Christmas gifts for me and his dad, and asked them to come early to take his mind off of it.

It's been a good year for death, let me tell you. Three chickens, one lizard (I presume he's dead, he's gone, at any rate), a handful of fish, and two fiddler crabs. No more exotic pets! Clearly we can't handle the responsibility!

Of course, it's not like we didn't see it coming. I'm sure there were those who, like Gray, winced when I said we had taken on the crabs.... people who had already talleyed up our batting average and knew the creatures didn't have a chance. I don't know why I keep trying.

On a related subject.... not death, but pets.... Roxy is losing her hair. She's itchy, and she's getting bald patches all over. She is beginning to look slightly leprous, or mangy, or something. I feel sorry for her, because it's miserable to be itchy. But I don't know what else to do. I feed her eggs on her breakfast, vegetable oil on her dinner, I have been giving her weekly baths in Head and Shoulders, and she gets pills at night to help me sleep, because she often sleeps on the bed, and the incessant scratching is like having one of the coin-operated massage beds, but not in a good way. Imagine a massage bed in a really cheap motel, that makes a lot of noise, and causes the headboard to thump against the wall. And sometimes farts.

This morning, at 5:30 a.m., she came into my room, put her face right up against my face and started whining until I got up and let her out. I dozed on the sofa until she came back in, 15 minutes later, then I went back to bed. But the whining didn't stop. She stood there, with her face in mine, WHINING this awful high-pitched whine, non-stop, for a full hour. I could gain a few moments' respite by letting her put her feet up on the bed and tuck her head down against my shoulder while I petted her head and ears. But the moment I stopped moving my hands, the ultra-sonic whine recommenced.

I got up twice to try to let her out, but it wasn't what she wanted. She didn't want water, either. In fact, I have no idea what she wanted except maybe to drive me nuts. This on the morning after I worked until 10:30 at a museum event and didn't get to bed until midnight. Finally, at 6:40, she climbed up on the bed, curled up and lay down at my feet. My alarm went off five minutes later.

If I'm grouchy today, you can blame it on Roxy.

Thoughts on Love and Not Sleeping

Couldn't sleep last night, as so often happens. So I lay here instead and thought Deep Thoughts. I thought about the Nature of Love. Next to the Meaning of Life, I think that's probably one of the Deepest.

I think a lot about Love since I got divorced. I guess I'm still trying to puzzle out What Happened. And What Happens Next. I don't know if it's healthy to think about love so much. I don't know if love can bear much scrutiny. But that may be my jaded point of view. Certainly my love for Grayson knows no bounds, and can be disected under any microscope you like with no ill effects. So maybe all my Ponderment about love applies only to that love which is not biologically rooted. Visceral. I love Grayson like I love having hands and feet and eyes. He is a part of me... yet wonderfully, amazingly separate and always surprising. If he is my hands, it's like magical hands that are suddenly playing concert violin. Wow! Who knew they could do that?

I digress. Here's what I was thinking about Love. There are two kinds of Love (all great philosophical thoughts on love begin this way): The love that is built up over time, brick by brick, through patience and familiarity and will; and the love that grows organically, putting down roots into your heart and sending up leaves and stems and flowers, seemingly of its own volition. In the end, with one you have a structure as sturdy as the stuff you made it from (or the basis on which it was constructed), and with the other you end up with a living, growing thing that may change shape over time.

I lay there pondering the relative merits of each until I fell asleep. I guess the ideal love would be a tree house: something that grows from its own seed, but which you deliberately build and improve upon, with patience and care and forebearance.

Forebearance seems to me to be vital. You have to be willing to let things go, accept and forgive. Don't you?

See? I question my own late-night conclusions. Nothing is certain in this world.

Holiday Home

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I may have contracted a rare brain disease that causes insanity, but I've decided to host a Solstice Party on the 21st. I decided yesterday morning at 7 a.m. and rushed to work to get the invitation out so I couldn't then back out of it.

Every year I tell myself I want to host a Solstice celebration, and every year I don't. This year, I have to. It's official, I've invited people!

Grayson and I went out this past weekend to choose a Christmas tree and got it up and decorated. Grayson insisted on carrying the tree to the register himself. I only had to help a little.

King is still alive. This morning I actually witnessed him eating something, though I'm not sure what. G and I had some shrimp while we were decorating the tree, and I mushed up a bit and put it in the cage near his hidey hole, so maybe he's eating that. He's alive, at least. That's all I care about.

I'm anxious over work. After many weeks of futzing about, it is now time for me to get really serious about recruiting Corporate partners for 2011. I'm behind schedule. It makes me feel sort of queasy, and I'm not sure why. I just hate the idea of asking people for money. I've found all manner of ways to put off the inevitable, and I can't avoid it any further. So this week and next, I'll be on the phone, pitching sponsorship.

Meanwhile, I'd much rather be Christmas shopping. Just this morning, Grayson announced that he has decided what to ask Santa for. I still have a few gifts to buy, and there's the house to be decorated. I love having a decorated house for the holidays. I hate doing the decorating.

I meant to do it the weekend after thanksgiving, but I just couldn't face all those boxes of greenery. Now at last I'm up against the deadline. The Solstice party serves as a goad, as well. So, starting tonight, I'll be trying to get the "hangin' o' the greens" accomplished.

Then there's Christmas cards, which we do actually have, but we haven't yet begun to prepare. We did at least get our portraits taken last weekend. I think they came out very nicely. I deliberately dressed down and let G wear whatever he wanted, because I didn't want it to be formal and stiff. There's nothing formal about either of us, or about our relationship, so I wanted the pictures to reflect that, and I think this one does. We haven't had real pictures taken in a while, and it occurred to me that I need to get that done while G still counts as a little kid. He's starting to grow up fast now, and I need to get my little boy love while I can.

I try not to be sad about it. I know I will always love him just as he is.

We did a little shopping together on Sunday after the photo shoot. We didn't have anything in particular to shop for, but it was fun to be in the mall, looking around. We went into the Brookline store so Grayson could sit in the massage chairs. It's one of his favorite things. He loves all massage chairs. It was funny to watch him try them all out. This one tickled a bit.

He was singing the praises of the foot massager, so I took my shoes off and tried it out. Ooooh my gosh, I could not get my feet out of there fast enough! It tickled so much I was afraid I was going to kick the thing across the room!

The doc told me I have unusually high reflexes, which includes unusually sensitive feet. That foot massager was worse than a torture device to me, but Grayson enjoys being tickled.