name that tune

I will own up to quite a repertoire of soft, soothing songs of a lullabye sort. A good number of them are in minor keys, and ever since she was little Megan never wanted me to sing them. As she got older, she could tell me it was because “they make me sad, Mommy.”

Fair enough, but I love the whole litany, so when Kira came along and enjoyed them night after night, I was thrilled. One of her recent favorites was “I Know Where I’m Going” — not exactly cheery fare, but it has a lovely tune and it reminds me of my mom, too, in a good way. And at least no one gets, uh, slain in it. I have lots of those, too: Tom Dooley, Long Black Veil, Banks of the O-Hi-O… ah, great stuff.

Recently, however, she’s begun eschewing such tender tunes, and if I open with one will immediately request “Something DIFFERENT, Mommy.” Different = rollicking and silly, I’ve learned; so we make our way through the one about Charlie and the MTA (a great little 1949 ditty about the fare increase on the Boston subway), A Horse Named Bill (sung to “Dixie”), Clementine, Hole In The Bucket, Billy Boy, and a raft of other oldie-goodies.

I learned every last one of them from my dad, who had them written (or typed, by Mom’s 100wpm fingers) in a ragged three-ring binder and would render them in about the deepest bass voice known to man, goofy songs for the amusement of himself and his kids.

Kira’s gotten familiar with the review and will ask for some specifically, and though to my mind they’re hardly soporific, I’m generally happy to oblige. Tonight, however, she was insistent on one in particular — only I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. “The six four three song, Mommy.”

Six four three? Yes; six four three. I went around and around with her, and eventually it dawned on me: “I’m In Love With a Big Blue Frog.” The chorus has the line, “It’s not as bad as it appears / he wears glasses and he’s six-foot-three.” I highly suspect that to be Mom’s contribution to my repertoire and not Dad’s — I don’t believe he ever made it, musically speaking, to the Peter, Paul & Mary era.

I sang it. I wish I could say it made her drift into slumber, but no. She had herself a righteous Burley nap today, and that means the wise course is to just let her run herself down, so after twenty minutes of far-too-lively “snuggling” and singing in the bed, I gave up, and she’s down here now playing with a pinwheel in front of the fan while I post, silly girl.

Happy birthday, sweet thing. You’re three today, and it’s about breaking my heart. I hope you’ll remember and sing those songs to your own little loves someday.

April 6

You know those statistics about men dying younger than women?  Well, I took them to heart when I embarked on my search for the ideal man to marry, and picked one three years younger than I am.  Plus I feed him lots of whole grains and cruciform veggies in my quest to beat the odds.

He turned 42 today.  Happy birthday, love.

Megan conceived of, picked out, and paid for her gift:

And mine?  Well, I have to confess it’s not the first time he’s received something that I fell in love with and had wall space already picked out for.  But I don’t do it with complete disregard for his tastes.  Honest.  It’s a landscape, or peakscape perhaps, from the Sierra Nevadas, original oil:

And he got the new U2 release.  Art and music — what more could an engineer ask for?

Oh.  Right.  Well, he’ll probably get that.  And maybe a metric socket set, too.

how Saturday went down

Woke to the thermometer reading 19 degrees, along with a kicky little breeze, leading to internal debate on a number of things like what to wear and how to get to the start line, which is all of one almost-entirely-downhill mile from my house.  It seemed a little pathetic to drive, but then again! While I know up north 19 degrees is tennis weather, we here in the mid-Atlantic region consider it ass-freezing cold. Come on, it was like 70F two weeks ago.

So when the phone rang and it was friend K saying she could pick me up, I said Yes before she even finished offering. We’d planned to run together too as long as that worked for both of us, so it was perfect. We got there not many minutes before the gun, and that was perfect too — long enough to say Hi to various friends and get situated; not long enough for bone chill to set in.  (For me at least; K has about 7% body fat, so she was at a disadvantage).

I came in just a hair under 1:54, an 8:43/mi pace.  Not as fast as I would have liked, but faster than I had any right to expect, given the overall dearth of miles in my training log and the untimely arrival of my period the evening before (yick).  And the MPM had walked down to the finish line with the girls, snugly tucked in the Chariot, so I even had a cheering section. How great is that?

Looked for K at the finish area but somehow missed her, so started walking home with the fam. Made it about a quarter-mile before some wicked nasty stomach cramps settled in and I realized the uphill trudge home wasn’t happening. Detoured past friends’ house (she of the 6-months-pregnant 1:39 finish time) and settled in on their cozy chair to wait for the MPM to return with vehicular conveyance.

Arrived home to discover that we’d been ransacked. Or maybe just that the MPM had made waffles in the kitchen while the girls played with every toy they could find. And that the short list of Must-Do I’d left for the party prep hadn’t exactly been gotten to. Showered, a blessed hot sauna-like thing, and came downstairs to survey. Ugly. No other word for it. Two hours to party time, and the MPM off to the hardware store with girls to find a fuse to, hopefully, get the heat pump running again.

And as happens, what needed to get done got done, and the first kids to arrive had a total blast taking over the crepe-paper streamer decorating. Very artful indeed. It was 2.5 hours of bedlam and general chaos, and we made it through and everyone seemed to have a good time. After dinner — Megan was so exhausted I ended up literally feeding her in her bed — and party cleanup, I simply couldn’t face doing a major packing for our Sunday a.m. departure, so I settled for getting my list in order and putting most of Kira’s things in a bag, resolving to wake early and rested and knock out the rest of it.

Woke instead at 3a to the horribly unwelcome realization that I’d not escaped the stomach bug that’s making its way through the ‘hood. No indeed. Scratch Sunday departure. Spend entire day in bed. Eat one small bowl brothy soup 8p. Go back to bed.

So what to do? It’s a distinct possibility that should we choose to travel, we’ll be bringing not holiday cheer but disease vectors into my brother and his lovely wife’s lives… and she has spent enough of the last months in a state of unhealth that the last, the very last thing she needs is another botts. I’m thinking we’ll hunker down here, and plan that trek for December.

Heck, maybe we’ll even cook a turkey, since Megan won one in a drawing last week at our Natural Foods Co-op. Anyone free for Thanksgiving?

idiot.

I am an idiot.  Apparently a lucky one, but an idiot nonetheless.  I’m a little, okay a lot, frazzled today because I have that half-marathon thingie to run tomorrow morning, a birthday party to pull together for the afternoon, and a 7-hour Sunday-morning drive to pack for, in addition to the usual stuff I’d like to cram into 4 of my 8 weekly Kira-free hours.  Like a post for my patient readers.  (Be it known that this one will have to see you through for a while.)

Veering from lunacy back to idiocy:   I have a friend who spent time in intensive care after placing a bite of eggroll he’d been mistakenly assured was NOT fried in peanut oil in his mouth, and promptly removing it to tell the waiter to call 911.   And I have personally witnessed a full-blown anaphylactic reaction in a 200-pound adult male, which is a visual with some staying power and a story I tell with no prompting at all to anyone whom I hear say, “Oh, I have an Epi-Pen.  It’s in my (insert remote location here).”  Yes indeed, I’m fully cognizant of the life-threatening nature of allergies.

Today was, is, Megan’s birthday.  This morning, I got up and made and sent in cupcakes (see frazzled, above).  White cake, pink frosting — a little heavy-handed on the red food coloring meant a less-appetizing shade of pink than I’d hoped for, but I gave myself bonus points for the homemade frosting — and hey, let’s toss on some little candy sprinkles.  Around here we put them on oatmeal and on ice cream.  And cupcakes.

There’s a boy in her class with peanut allergies.  If you bring a peanutty snack, you eat it in the classroom next door.  Kids are shepherded to one of three lunch tables based on the peanut/no-peanut content of their lunch.  I know this.  And Megan reminded me of it three separate times this week, in re the cupcakes.

I forgot to read the label on the fucking sprinkles.

After lunchtime, I picked up the container.  “Contains traces of peanuts, tree nuts… “

Fighting welling nausea, I called the school,  knowing they’d already eaten the cupcakes.  A check in the classroom by the secretary revealed the kid answering to his own name, in apparent good health, though I had to wait 15 hours minutes for that information.

I called the mom (allowing time for the school to call her first).  Apologized up and down.  Explained to her that I wasn’t an unconcerned idiot (if you are a parent of an allergic child, you meet lots of them); just a left-my-brain-out-in-the-rain idiot.  She was very nice.  She told me the story of him being kissed, at 2, by a grandparent who’d eaten peanuts, and the harrowing epi-pen-on-the-side-of-the-interstate that ensued.  My nausea returned.  She told me that a reaction would have been immediate, so he was fine, which I knew but didn’t make me feel much better.  She thanked me for calling.  I thanked her for being so NICE about it.

I’m still nauseous.  Close calls do that to me.