Four Years Ago

Tuesday, October 30th, 2001

I've now been here 24 days and there are 17 days to go. Dr. Danilenko has set the c-section date for November 16th at 8am. It's great to have an end date. I want so much to hold you two and KNOW that you are SAFE and sound.

Tomorrow I get bathroom priveleges back which means I get to walk down the hall to take a REAL SHOWER (and burn the bed pan!!!!) A huge return to freedom.

Alice brought by two burb rags she sewed herself. They have cute teddy bears on them. Chris put your crib together and set it up in our room. I cried because he didn't bring a picture. I might be a wee bit sensitive since being incarcerated hospitalized.

Saturday, November 3

Well, I'm two days late on Jason's birthday present and Gaye's is tomorrow. Chris is going to bring in his computer this afternoon and we're going to see what we can find for them.

Only 13 days to go until your birthday. I can't wait. Sometime this week I should have a little work to do on the book I'm editing for Xxx. That might help time pass more quickly. I also need to finish L.R.'s scarf this week (for Christmas) so I can finish Max's.

Tuesday, November 6

Ten days to go and I'm worn out with waiting.

Wednesday, November 7

Nine days to go and sleeping is so tough. I'm so physically uncomfortable that I just don't sleep well. I don't like taking the sleeping pills they offer me, but I can't live with the consequences (no sleep at all) if I don't. It is only getting harder to be away from Chris and Max. A week from today I get the third and final shot to mature their your lungs. I pray the next nine days pass quickly.

Sunday, November 11

I've been daydreaming of all the things we'll do once you are out here in the world. The Holiday season is swiftly approaching and there is the tree to decorate, and Christmas shopping to do. Christmas cards and baby announcements to mail out. Visits to Santa (for Max) to fit in. Donna is visiting to help next week and Gaye is coming for 2 weeks in December. The next few months will be hectic [Ed: Shyah, I had NO CLUE.] A nice change of pace after all this lying around. I can't wait to be busy again.

I can't eat any more than a few bites of solids. It won't stay down. I wake two or three times a night now just to throw up. Whichever one of you is sitting on my stomach could maybe move?

Wednesday, November 14

It's very good to be so much closer to Friday, but the minutes are starting to tick by. I have enough to do--work, knitting, reading, and God bless Animal Planet. If it weren't for Animal Cops I'd have nothing to watch. I have no attention span though. Maybe the sleeping thing? It's taking me forever to get through my work folder.

I had the last shot today to mature your lungs. They like to get that in 48 hours before delivery, so they did that at 7 am. It's 10:30 am now. Maybe by this time on Friday, you'll be born.

I'm getting tired. It will soon be nap time. Muy mind makes lists of things you will need: onesies, gowns, socks, and a diaper pail . . .

Thursday, November 15

Physically, things are going downhill fast. I'm tired of throwing up all over myself. I can't breathe. I can't move. I wasn't designed to be this size. Mentally I think I'm a little over the edge. I'm saved by knowing that you will be delivered tomorrow morning.

Alice will be visiting this evening. Chris will be spending the evening with Max having a "dude" night. I finished my work project today and sent it back to California. Little by little, loose ends are being tied up and I'm feeling more and more ready for tomorrow!

I'm 50 inches around, weigh 218 lbs, and have the fundal height of a someone who has been pregnant for 48 weeks. THAT is enough. You are 34w2d gestation tomorrow. It will be your birthday.

I have waited forever for you and at last you are due to arrive.



+++++++

What a wild first year that was.

Thor had some adjustment issues. Here he is sucking on a binky.



Hard to blame him. They were eating his food.



Max adjusted just fine.



It was messy, three boys.



When they find out you're expecting twins people warn you all the time about how hard it is, as if you hadn't the intelligence to figure that out on your own. It is stressful.




But I try to warn expecting mother's of twins that they'll look back on their days before they had twins and know something was lacking. As each day passes, more and more of it will be spent with a couple of really wonderful, joyous, giving, people who understand at a deep genetic level that sharing isn't taking turns.




Thank you, again Ben and Milo. You taught me that prayers are answered, that even the undeserving can receive more than one miracle, (and yes, that I never, ever want to pee in a bed pan again).

Happy, Happy Birthday tomorrow.

++++++

And now, a scene from Monday night.

Mom: What do you guys want for your birthday?

Milo: cake

Ben: no, CHOColate cake

Milo: Yeah! Yeah!---

Ben: No, CHOColate cake with chocolate ICE CREAM.

Milo: Yeah! Yeah!

Mom: I meant, what did you want for a present?

Milo and Ben: cake!

[Ben starts to panic]

Ben: Cake! Chocolate ice cream cake! Is . . . is what we want!

Mom: I know, I know, we'll get that what I meant was--

[Milo starts to cry.]

Mom: [sighs] Sweetie, what's the matter?

Milo: I [sob] I [sob] We want [sob] THE CAKE!

[Mom gives up. It's probably my gene pool that caused this emotional reaction to the mere idea of chocolate depravation.]

Mom: Baby, we will. We will get the cake.

Milo and Ben: Now?!?!?

Mom: No. Wednesday.

Milo and Ben: oh.

[sad moment of silence.]

Milo: Okay!

Ben: Chocolate ICE CREAM cake!

Oy Vey

What has it come to when I've only blogged three times in November?

But again, I've been swamped with work and that gets old. This week I will continue to stay swamped. Next week I get to take off.

We have some leaves in the backyard. Here's a picture. Let me put it in context for you. These leaves haven't been raked yet. That's just how deep they are. Ben is burying Max at Max's request.





Ben and Milo are four on Wednesday and I'm just flabbergasted about that.

Max and I went shoping for their gifts this evening. One of the items was over-sized. Max gently nudges me away from the cart when we get out to the truck, "This is pretty big, Mom. You better let me get this."

I want to cry and hug him all at once. Don't be in too much of a hurry, kid. It's cold out there.

Emily is dreaming. I don't know what she's dreaming about, but it involved whining and barking in her sleep. hilarious. I'm so glad we have this silly over-grown, over-sized poodle girl :)

I laughed, I cried, I saved it to My Favorites Just in case I ever need such a thing . . .

http://www.knitty.com/ISSUEfall05/PATTbits.html

______________________

I'm cold and damp. I gave Emily a bath since I couldn't get her a grooming appointment until the middle of December. Poor girl. She took our recent family Recession hard. Denied trips to the beauty parlor, she's looking VERY like a sheepdog.

But a very PRETTY sheepdog!

I reassured her that the family financial future was looking rosy, that interest rates were plummeting (within the home) and that she'd soon get a nice hair cut (and maybe a Penn Hip test, soon after).

Today

Today in Sacrament meeting we arrived late, so we had to sit in the center, only three pews back. This put us next to a nice family with three teen-aged girls. Milo blushed and avoided eye contact for the first half of the meeting, but then the girl closest to him won him over by drawing him pictures of cats and dogs and labeling them. CAT DOG etc. Then she handed him the pen.

My kids do their best with an audience.

Milo wrote A B C in the most perfect penmenship I've ever seen come from a kid who is still "fwee."
Ben stole the pen and paper and wrote BEN BEN BEN BEN BEN in every spot left on the page.

The teenagers were charmed. It was mutual. Sacrament meeting was eaaaassyyy today.

I tried something new with my food order forms today. I put five separate copies of the order form in folders and put one in the foyer, one to pass around in Sunday School, one to pass around in primary and young women's and one to pass around in Relief Society. This worked much better than just passing it around in Relief Society. I'll do it again next week and then place this month's order. This month we're ordering macaroni, rice, hot chocolate, and vegetable oil. The ward owns a food saver, so I'll bring that home with me the week the order arrives (this one is coming mostly from the cannery in Maryland) and people can bring their own food saver bags and rebag the macaroni and rice into smaller packets.

Day passed. BLT's for lunch, except me who had a BLT salad. Healthy version of corn chowder for dinner. I worked. At one point I got up from my "desk" and came back to find a post-it note stuck to the screen.

Max's goals:
Monday: $4.00
tusday: $3.25

I was pleased on two points.
1) If you're going to save for something you want, it's good to set reasonable goals for earning the money.
2) with the exception of poor Tuesday there, it's nicely capitalized and punctuated. (We kind of skipped over that last year. heh. Much better this year.)

I Feel Boring

I feel boring right now so I don't blog.

Whadja do today?

Oh, I . . . worked.
Took the kid to piano.
Thought about doing something other than work. Decided that would be a bad idea.
Worked some more.

It's a phase. I see a slight lull in the action right before Thanksgiving. That will help. Getting paid for all this work and being back in the black will help.

Hey, you know what helped? My aunt sent me a care package. It had one of Max's shirts and some of his bionicle pieces. It had a science unit I'd left there. It had a brand new pair of socks that she must have decided were mine. They weren't but at the time I couldn't find where my socks had gone and I was standing there, opening the box, with cold feet. So I put them on and wore them every day for four days in a row (found my socks, finally, in Max's sock drawer). There were four skeins of cotton dishcloth yarn (she loves me, clearly) and a beautiful calendar that my grandmother gets me every year and which never ceases to make me feel like a grown up. Only her daughters get the calendars.

You know, I don't have one aunt that I don't want to be like in some way. Or am not already like in some way. There are elements in Caroline, Connie, Charlotte, GeeGee, and Kay that I would very much like to see in a description of me some day. That can't be bad.

Where was I? Oh yes, the care package. So that really made my week and I've been sitting here, trying to convince myself to start working again and instead all I keep doing is letting my eyes drift over to that dishrag cotton.

But then I think if I'm not going to work, I should clean. And if I'm not going to clean, I should round up the kids and put them to bed, and if I'm not going to do any of that, I should work. Or at least, for heaven's sake, get out the needlepoint stocking and see if you can't finish THAT this year.

I guess I'll go clean and put the kids to bed.

IMing

Because if you don't IM your own spouse in your own home (and even in your own livingroom, together) you're just not Geek enough for me.

Lapper808 [9:38 AM]: My guess is Max Milo Ben
Lapper808 [9:38 AM]: You have to go to your comments and tell them who won the nothing points.
BringsCrickets [9:44 AM]: Don't you think it's a wee bit early to go awarding points?
Lapper808 [9:45 AM]: Well, it's Halloween. They might want to spend their points.

I just thought that was very funny.

Chris and "Unca" Jake are right. It's Max, Milo, Ben. Don't spend all your nothing points in one place.

In Which I Prove Once Again That I'm Hideously Unphotogenic

But the blanket looks great and that's the point. This photo is just for grandma Gaye so she can see how she is helping us keep our heating bills down. And apologies--the house really is pretty clean right now. This particular corner has my work stuff spread all over it since I am, at the time of this photo, working.



Tonight's Family Home Evening. 1,000 nothing points if you can correctly name the designer of each pumpkin. I did all the carving because I'm mean that way, but they did the designing thanks to washable crayola markers and some poetic license.

It's like being smacked upside the head by reality! --herself

[If you're on dialup, just skip this one, okay?]
Okay, work has been on the vicious side recently, so by the time I sit down to blog, I really don't have two brain cells left to rub together. At this moment I have four or so, that's enough to post some pictures. Yesterday in review:

In the time it took to make pancakes, this happened:




So I tossed the puppies out in the cold most of the day. Emily was thrilled to play catch and eat the snowball.






Snowmen were made


It was dropdead gorgeous, but not without its dangers. See all those leaves?



They make the limbs really heavy. This is what you see.


Followed by:


Eventually some limbs fall on a powerline and you get:


I was worried about the roof.



Neither tree fell, but the second one played "chicken".



All in all



it was a great day. (Phone and electricity came back on around 3:30 in the afternoon, and I decided I can only put the purchase of winter coats off for another few weeks.)

"It's like a little mini-honeymoon!" -- Himself

So I warned anyone expecting work from me next week that I was actually going to take the whole weekend off (because otherwise they'll assume that of course I'll work at least part of the weekend) and I bundled up the dogs and took them off to their five star resort where they happily trotted off without looking back. It's *really* nice there. I don't blame them.

From there we headed back home where I gave the twins to Chris and then took Max to piano. That went well, and then it was back to the house to finish packing. We locked up the house, turned down the thermostat (but I checked to be sure there were wood pellets in the stove just to be safe), and headed to Baltimore.

Our first order of business was to check in, because although we were using Chris' "Oh I'm Such An Important Businessman Points" that didn't mean we couldn't end up in a sucky room overlooking the restaurant trashcans. We were in luck. We popped back in the truck, braved traffic to get to my brother's house, and delivered to them, our kids. Again with the not looking back. (Okay, trying not to start taking it personally.) Jason and Karen fed us pizza. It was really good pizza. At this point we were supposed to trade cars with J&K and take their wicked cool miata for the weekend, but the Marriot wanted to charge us $20 to park and frankly, no. So instead Jason drove us back to the hotel and dropped us off.

They gave us an upgrade, found us a room WAY up high, and it had a superfantastic view. Not a big room, but that's okay, we didn't intend to dance in it. We bounced on the bed, punched all the buttons on the phone, ate the chocolate on the pillows, opened all the fancy soaps, and took a shower in a bathroom that didn't have soap crayon spelling out real and imaginary letters of the alphabet all over the walls.

We watched TV, we did spontaneous things you just can't do when your kids might walk in on you at any second, we talked, we just hung out with each other. The first night we were still tired from driving and life in general, so we crashed kind of early on.

The next morning we were up bright and early. If bright and early is 11:30 am. (Boo-yah!) After a bit we headed out to Little Italy and lunch at Amici's. Chris demonstrated the muli-spec look.



And from there to the sweets store where we got some cookies.



Check out the truffles though.




From there we decided to do some sight-seeing.



Oh, c'mon. Like it's not the first place YOU find when you hit a new city? Sheesh.

I couldn't decide on a book, although I spent a good long while flipping through books and reading some. We left without buying anything. For the time being. From there it was back to the hotel.



Where we goofed off and watched football. We went ESPN's to see if we could watch the last twenty minutes of the game there and eat dinner, but they said the wait for a table was TWO HOURS (what, were we supposed to tip them just to get a table?) so we left. Around this time I realized I kept thinking back to the first page I'd read of Passing for Thin so we stopped at B&N again and got the book. Then we went and found an inexpensive Japanese place where we got take-out and then went back to the hotel.

More spontaniety. More goofing off. Back to the sweets place for desert. Then back to the hotel where Chris watched TV and I devoured the book. I can honestly say that it's the first time in a very, very long time, that I've started and finished a book that wasn't parenting oriented. It was worth it. I finished the book this evening with a great deal to think about. I highly recommend it. Anne Lamont wrote passionately and honestly about the great difficulty and joy of her son's first year on the planet and her first year as a single mother. I'm so glad I read it before my first son was born. It just forced/permitted me to be that baldly honest with myself about my mothering. This book offers something like that for eating disorders/obesity/fundamental change.

But I digress.

At some point we both had to admit that it was pretty darn late and the next day would come whether we were ready for it or not. So we slept. I had heartburn, so I was really grateful for the gajillion pillows.



When I got home, my own bed looked tragically pillow bereft.

We woke again at 10:30, got around to breakfast at 11:00 -- we tried the hotel restaurant, but when we got the menus I was astonished to see that what amounted to a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and two pieces of toast -- $10.95. We left. Instead we found Chipolte's where we spent considerably less for considerably more. From there it was back to the hotel. We packed up and met Jason downstairs. They'd survived the day and a half with the kids nobly, albeit by feeding them every sugary treat known to kid kind (I believe they started off each day with poptarts). I was amused and no, I don't care. The kids were happy, happy to see us, and in no real hurry to leave. We took them anyway.

The ride home was beautiful.



But not as beautiful as our own backyard.



And may I say it again.

We are never, ever, ever moving again. But WOW that was a great weekend with my sweetie. Thanks again Uncle Jason and Aunt Karen. My kids will grow up worshipping your uber-coolness and the sweet availablity of chocolate pudding at your house. See you at Thanksgiving.

Inch by Inch, Row by Row . . .

Max grew again. I looked at the boy today and my "growth spurt" alarm went screeching off. Quickly, I suited up in his helmet and shoulder pads and tackled him, pinning him to the wall long enough to mark his height. Then I went to get to my tape measure. Sure enough -- another quarter inch -- bringing his total growth to an inch since March.

An inch! That's rebellion if I ever saw it.

9 more inches and he'll be my height. I'm thinkin' at this rate . . . that's the year he's twelve. You think? I'll have to ask BabaGaye. She'll remember when her little insurgent got to her height -- and she's taller than me by at least three or four inches.

Not to be outdone, we had to roll Ben and Milo's pant legs down again. Some of their pants are fully unrolled now.

Where is a good melodramatic sob icon when you need one?

+++++++++

I got some work done. Not as much as I wanted but enough so that I'll get that first lesson finished tomorrow if I skip the grocery auction at Belleville. I still need to pick up some items at Peight's for the food order, so I'll go out that way in the morning anyway, but I'll try to force myself to skip the auction. The tomato fairy left a box of tomatoes on my porch two days ago anyway. I still have potatoes from last week. I still have hot peppers from last week.

Procrastination

So I finally have a nice, big paying job and I've been procrastinating for the entire weekend. I worked on some other piddly stuff due to another company that never pays me on time. "Alaska!" you wonder, "why on earth would you procrastinate now that you have work?" Good question. It might have something to do with the guidelines:



I put the quarter on there for scale. That's a 3" binder bursting at the seams and I have to read the whole flippin' thing before I write a word. Soooo . . . .

I cleaned. I cleaned some more. I made grape jelly using 7.5 lbs of concord grapes that I got last week at the grocery auction for $2.50 (they're $4 a lb at the grocery store). You never really know what you're bidding on at the grocery auction. He's always WAY up there and you're in the back and he tends to be vague and sometimes grossly inaccurate (he had a basket of apples he was calling a "bushel" -- shyah. MAYBE a third of a bushel. The Amish ladies in the back were having a good snort over that.) Anyway, I bid and won and these were nearly perfect. As soon as I got them home I hopped online and found a different source for pectin. I'd been using the Ball canning pectin and getting, erm, syrupy results. Poor gelling to no gelling. I did have one batch of strawberry jam turn out nicely. This is because done right, strawberries have enough natural pectin in them to jam all by themselves. I'm tired of spending half the day making little jam jars just to end up with more syrup. So I googled up Pomona Pectin and ordered two boxes. They arrived Saturday, so Sunday I started on the syrup.

Now, I've never actually uncanned any of my runny jams, but one batch came out SO poorly that I decided to test the first box of Pectin on it. It came out perfectly so in the end I had a batch of new and vastly improved pineapple orange jelly, LOTS of grape jelly, and some blackberry/raspberry jelly. Now I'm out of pectin again, but I *finally* have giftable jelly.

That reminds me, I have to hit up Sarah for a link to her recipes for her Christmas goodies from last year. I think between the cookies and the jam I could be done with most of the folks on our list.



Still there.



Still there.

Chris brought me back some ice cream from the store. He says he's duct taping me to my chair 'till I get through the first lesson (it gets MUCH easier after the first one).



Still there.

Not for the squeamish

Poodles are retrievers.

They are also, it appears, damn fine rodent killers.

I had no idea until we moved to So Cal and three days into things Thor killed two rats in a wild back yard rumpuss the likes of which I'd never seen. He seemed simultaneously proud and horrified.

Occasionally there we would lose a live mouse that was supposed to have been Jax's dinner. No worries. The longest it ever took the dogs to find it was three hours.

The farm house in Indiana is a farm house in Indiana. So it has had many a mouse. Thor and Emily took care of the problem for as long as we were there, though.

We hadn't seen any rodents in this house, but the last two days I'd heard what sounded like movement in the ceiling panels near my "office" -- under the kitchen.

Tonight while Chris and I were hanging out in the living room post date, the little guy got bold enough to scamper out in full view, headed, it seemed, for the oatmeal.

Chris squinted across the living room and said disbelievingly, "Is that a MOUSE?"

Said rodent stopped and froze.

"Nope," said I, "that's a ground squirrel." (Very cute, rather like a large chipmunk.)

We looked at each other for a bit.

The squirrel thought better of things and ran back in the kitchen.

I went into the hallway where Thor, fast asleep and enjoying his dream very much, was crashed out in a favorite spot on the linoleum. I woke him. He was happy to see me but a bit disoriented. I carried him to the kitchen. Squirrel was STILL kind of hoping to rush the oatmeal and wasn't in hiding. He was sitting there in the kitchen, against the baseboard, trying to decide what to do next. He saw Thor and bolted. Thor woke up and went chasing after him.

But Thor was definitely still suffering from the effects of a good deep sleep and since the fan was in the living room, he seemed to keep losing the squirrel's scent. I sent Chris down to let Emily out of her kennel. Emily was wide awake since she was put off by the fact that we hadn't let her out of the kennel when we got home, so she happily bounded up the stairs. It took her a moment to catch on to the fact that we had a JOB for her, but as soon as she saw the squirrel she gleefully took chase. The squirrel panicked and ran into the closet. That was the beginning of its end. Emily flushed the squirrel out of the closet and caught it in two bounds.

Poor squirrel. But the rules are clearly posted over the door. "All ye creatures great and small, we love and respect you all, but you on your side of the door and me and mine on my side. And if I think you might bite the kids or eat my food storage, you are SO out of here."

Poodles. Great with kids, no shedding, non-allergenic, and great mousers/ratters/rodent killers.

[pic removed as point was made and it was making my brother sad. Something about killing Rocky the Squirrel?]

Some Fridays Are Like That

Sometimes you're just wandering along in your week and then one morning your eldest who ordinarily draws rather simple drawings fills a page with crayon. Your youngest reads the entire alphabet from the wall. Your middle comes to you and says, chest puffed out to there, "All. By. Myself."



So you all head downstairs, get the eldest going on math -- and this is when the youngest reads the alphabet off the wall chart. Ben gets antsy. He demands HOMEWORK!!! You think, well, okay, why not today? So you pull out "Teach Your Child to Read in 1,000 Torturous Lessons" (I'm paraphrasing there, can't remember the exact name ;) and you read the first page about how you're going to teach him to read and he says, cheerily, "Okay!!!" So you flip the page and you go through the lesson and it's like BUTTER. Sweet cream freshly churned butter. And you get to the end of the lesson and it says you're supposed to teach him to WRITE the darn leter.

Ooohhkay, so you pull the MCP phonics book off the shelf and leaf through the book until you find an m page. So you hand the kid a pencil and let him work at your desk because by now Milo is threatening to IMPLODE all over the basement if you don't teach HIM the lesson. And you do a few m's with him and then leave him alone to -- you assume -- scribble over the remaining pages of the book in pretend "school" the way he normally does. (This is WHY you have workbooks scattered everywhere. You go through a workbook really fast with the scribble method of school.)

So you do the lesson with Milo and HE goes through the lesson like butter and you're tickled pink and you get up to go check on Scribble Ben and instead you find that he has turned the page and produced . . .



and then one of your favorite people to work with calls and offers you a small job to go with the big job you already have and

IT'S NOT EVEN NOON YET!

Da Da Dum!!!

I'm printing out emails for a work project I'm involved in. This means sitting on the floor of Chris' garage because, um, I don't get a wireless signal at my own desk (oh no, this is a GOOD thing).

He's watching LOTR 75.

I've never actually seen any of the thousands of minutes of these three films and don't intend to start now, but it does have a magnificent movie score.

Da da dum dum da dum!

Okee, here is a mitten. A likely victim of second mitten syndrome -- it's just a wee bit too wrong. It's too tight. It needed a bigger set of needles for the main part -- but hey, the next try will knit up even faster and it was just a few hours of work.



Bookshelves and jars. This is the only room I didn't paint. I have the paint, I just haven't gotten to it yet and I guess it will be spring now before I do.



Matching chairs



dresser in Blues Clues room that, um, yeah, still needs drapes. Hey! I have a year.



Okay, this movie is getting to the point where I shouldn't be watching it any more, so off to punch holes in my emails, stick them in a binder, and go to bed.

Tuesday Night

Ahhh, October. The gently falling leaves, the up and down temperatures, the shorter days. And, in my case, the end of the summer buzz.

I hate this week.

It happens every fall. A period of a few days where I wonder what the hell is wrong with me lately. Pardon my language, but for this one post I won't edit. Maybe . . . it will help someone.

What the hell is wrong with me lately?

Oh, that. It's fall. The summer with its gentle lift of extra energy, optimism, Faith I don't have to work at, ideas I don't have to reach for -- it's over. There's a period of floating. Of normalcy. I experience it some years as a gentle peacefulness, a contentedness, I stop rushing and pace myself better. I hardly notice the affiliation with the season. I think it's me. That I did something to make things more even. And, maybe I did.

But then, like a car coming around a bend, the road slopes gently down. At first it's compeletely ordinary. The road levels out in spots, but after a bit you realize that jeez, we were up WAY higher than we thought and the valley floor seems awfully far away. The slope steepens. Your ears start to hurt and you find yourself swallowing frequently so they keep popping. You're not looking out the window anymore, not enjoying the scenery anymore. You're spending all your energy manning the breaks and swallowing to ease the pain.

It used to be impossible for me to stop the slide and I had to spend all spring fixing whatever damage I had done over the winter. Rebuilding relationships and catching up on school work or work work or whatever. That was before we got to Minnesota and met the Mayo clinic the same year that the first Minnesota winter kicked my butt.

Alaska, this is your light box. Lightbox, meet Alaska.

It's an incredible thing to find something that WILL relieve the worst of the symptoms. It stops the fall. It relieves my personal worst symptom which is anxiety and can manifest itself in terrible images drawn from every horror movie I ever forced myself to sit through because I was with people who would have taken it personally that I really just CAN'T expose myself to those things. The visuals come back so vividly and apply themselves to the people I love and it just the most horrible thing.

Regular use of the lightbox takes away the images, takes away the unreasonable fear of abandonment, of loss, of violence. It takes away the unreasonable belief that I am fundamentally flawed.

But I have not yet figured out a way to avoid the week each fall when I realize that the fall -- not Autumn, but my brain's fall -- has begun. And the disappointment that comes with it. Like I secretly hoped that this year I would find myself miraculously -- and I mean that in its original context -- miraculously cured.

Whole.

I feel angry about it. I am tired of being "cracked." I am tired of doing my homework and finding a good doctor and moving the stupid light box. I am tired of monitoring my sleep and avoiding triggers and eating right so I can feel my best and have all my coping skills in place. I am even tired of pretending that it's not that big of a deal. So tonight I am saying just once, for this fifteen minutes here, that it sucks.

I hate it! I hate it. I hate it.

and I cry, "GOD! Why have you for. . ." and then I remember that he has NOT. In the moments before his death Christ took all the pain and sorrow exactly as we feel them -- and exactly as all those who feel so much worse than this feel it.

And I STILL hate it. But at least I don't feel even remotely alone anymore. And I pick up the self-pity and crumple it in a ball like a poem that was going nowhere and toss it in the trash. And I walk downstairs and dig the lightbox out of storage. I set it up. And I put my scriptures in front of the lightbox. In the morning I will come downstairs and before 9am I will sit for 30 minutes in front of the light and read my six pages for the day. And I will wonder, as I do every year when I first turn on the light again, if maybe God didn't appreciate the analogy, too -- the bright light. The scripture. The relief from pain.

It's not so bad being me. It could be worse. Maybe next year I won't fight it. Forgive the typos. If I go back and edit, I'll erase it all.

But They Love Me Anyway

Milo works away on his magnadoodle for eight minutes or so.

He's humming.

::::scribblescribblescribble::::

"Ta da!" [no, he really said that.]

Me: Oh! What did you write?

Milo: See?? [gestures in a "spokesmodel" way at the Magnadoodle board. It says MLOMLOM.]

Me: That's wonderful, Milo! What does it say?

Milo: [stares at his notverybright mother. stares some more. Looks down at the board thoughtfully. Decides to go for flattery.] It says "Mommy!"

Me: Awww, that's so sweet! Can I show you how that word is written in books?

Milo: Sure!

[We erase the magnadoodle. I dictate. He writes. Ta da!]

Me: Want to write your name now?

Milo: Sure!

[I dictate. He writes. MILO.]

ohmyHECK. I am such an IDIOT!!!! That first board said:

Milo Milo M....[and then he ran out of magnadoodle board or he'd have happily gone on "writing" his name over and over again! Because he's in that stage of writing where there ARE NO VOWELS!!! -- okay there are o's but o's don't count because o's are CIRCLES and circles are WONDERFUL -- He doesn't have his name memorized but it's okay because he can sound it out!!!!! But people at his writing stage often only "hear" the consonants.]

::::::SMACKS HEAD REPEATEDLY ON KEYBOARD:::::::

Really. There's a reason they never let me teach anything below fourth grade. Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth -- did that. Primary? Never for more than a week (of subbing).

I'm off to eat a quart of ice cream on the PATHETIC EXCUSE FOR A MOM couch.

Blurrrrr

That's today. Woke up at some nice reasonable hour because Milo was sobbing -- turned out to be a bad dream in which he wanted to have a picnic and was unable to. I am SO glad I'm not three.

The twinkies wouldn't go back to sleep so I got them their little blankets and gave them each a big pile of books and settled them into an easy chair. And I went back to sleep. Chris got up and started getting ready for his day. I kept sleeping.

Sleep, sleep, sleep.

I finally got up around 9ish. I fed the kids. I have no idea what. I did some knitting. I think. I did some laundry -- I'm sure of that part. Then we got Max dressed and went to his football game. I worked on some knitting there and then concentrated on keeping the twins alive. The game ended. We all came home. I worked for an hour on bread making and then made us all a cheap/easy dinner of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwhiches. More time passed with rolling out the dough and putting it all in pans. Then dishes. Then a quick pickup through the house. Then dogs.

When was I supposed to work?

This coming week looks like another whirlwind of activity. A ton of work tomorrow. Ben and Milo will have preschool in the morning. Max's speech evaluation is Tuesday morning. Wednesday more preschool. Football on some of those nights. We need to get over to the Y and do some swimming for exercise. Piano, piano, and more piano. Hopefully a check and some bill paying. It's all good but I'm thinking I'm probably WAY too low on chocolate.

While I'm Blogging About Knitting

Yesterday I finally did weave in all the loose ends on those soaker pants. Lacking any confidence that the waistband would fit the child for whom I'd knitted them, I decided to wash and block them and then send them to Sarah, (who commented below about waiting for her son to make his appearance. She had that "trying to be patient but not really succeeding" sound to her voice, so maybe he's here by now).

I don't often block the stuff I knit. I didn't really GET how that was supposed to go until I saw a bit on it on the Yarn Harlot's website (this O key is KILLING ME) and suddenly the light came on.

So this time I washed and blocked and WOW! It really, really finishes the piece. DUH. See? You can knit for 15 years and really have no clue what you're doing (not that socks, mittens, and most scarves require much in the way of blocking, kwim?) So I feel better about those pants.

The kid I'd originally knit the soakers for though still will need some soakers. Good thing I have way too much of that yarn.

Belle and the Castle

Ben and Milo are in LOVE. While they've long been prone to finding a good video and watching it daily, sometimes even twice, they've never done this before with a feature length movie. A few day ago, however, they discovered the movie Beauty and the Beast. We've had this on DVD for a few years, but it was MY movie and the menfolk only tolerated it as the occasional chick flick.

Not Ben and Milo. They are enthralled. They watched it three times today alone. It gets 'em every time. In addition to the fact that they just adore Belle, you can tell they're trying to make sense of the basic plot. I don't know how much exposure they've had to the whole "spell on a castle" plot. We don't do a lot of classic fairy tales here. (Because I'm a rotten mom, that's why.)

It was a good day although it didn't feel extraordinarily productive. I'm on a "finish things" kick right now. I have a list of "loose ends" or "thing that I've been putting off for long enough now" and I'm slowly making my way through them. There is a sense of relief for many of them, but you know, there's a reason I've been putting them off. Nevertheless the living room carpet is a lot cleaner since I shampooed it (until the darn valve on the thingy that holds all the water broke). I mailed packages I've been meaning to mail. That sort of thing.

My goal for the rest of the evening is to knit for my own happiness. I was going to try to do work but I kept sneaking away to knit that I decided after a few HOURS of this that I needed to just get a clue and let myself knit.

Tomorrow I'll pay for that, but that's tomorrow.

Chris and I had a very nice mid-day date today (we were going to do the classic night date until a compassionate local informed us that there would be about a three-hour wait for a table since there was a late afternoon Penn State home football game which would then flood the town with post football revelry). It was beautiful weather. When we were done with lunch we went downtown and explored the artsy fartsy stores. We didn't buy anything but found a used movie/music store that looked interesting.

My "o" key isn't wrking prperly. I'm tired of ging back and hitting it a second time to make it wrk.

Mommy, How do you spell . . .

The twins have catapulted into the "emergent stage" of writing (in the lexicon of Words Their Way). This means that they know all their letters, the sounds they make, and how to write them.

I've been getting longer and longer missives from Ben this week. They say "YT A B YAT MN" and that means "Me, Ben, and Mommy." (The boys are a little more willing to use pronouns now, but still feel compelled to remind everyone they're speaking to of their correct name since dangnabbit the rest of the world can't be counted on to know a Ben or a Milo when they see one.) When they draw a picture or write a letter, they can write their own names on it -- though Milo still needs the whole thing spelled out for him. Ben is 50/50. Sometimes he'll write it out, sometimes he'll write a string of three letters and say that means Ben.

The boys were drawing pictures today and Milo wrote his name. Then he wrote another three letters and said, "I wrote grandpa!!" He was incredibly proud.

I am, too. I am blown away. They see "letters" everywhere and they have to sound them ALL out. I am surrounded by "b b b b ah ah ah ah yuh yuh yuh" (Bay, if you don't know anything about long vowels or the "ay" sound or even that y makes at whole host of different sounds.)

Now if only we could go a whole week without a daytime potty accident. They're both into holding it WAY too long. I don't want to admit how many times a day I have to say, "STOP DANCING AND GO PEE!!!"

I want to say to them, "Hon, going pee is SO much easier than reading and writing. WHAT is the deal?" But then again, I don't want to screw up the reading and writing. Maybe once they get throught this literacy spurt they'll polish up the potty skills.

One More Thing

I was looking over at Crib Chick's new clothing line and trying to decide if I should, you know, buy a long sleeved shirt with all the money I don't have. Then I got to thinking that *I* wanted my own Liberal Mormon Democrat t-shirt line. So here's my first attempt. Too long though. Will only fit on the XXXL shirts.

Top Ten Benefits of Homeschooling

10. No morning alarm.

9. Everyone qualifies for "the school lunch" program.

8. You can put all your kids in the Gifted and Talented Program.

7. You know if they have homework tonight and why.

6. "Busy work" cleans your dishes and washes your windows.

5. You can talk to yourself and call it a parent-teacher conference.

4. Conferences between the teacher and principal are *really* productive and may even result in increased enrollment.

3. You know EXACTLY how your child is doing in reading, math, history, science, P.E., music, art, any foreign or ancient languages he or she may be studying EVERY DAY.

2. They think you know everything for just a little bit longer.

1. You get to be with them in the morning when they're sharpest, in the afternoon when they're funniest, and in the evening when they're tired and kind of difficult like every other kid. You get to be there.

Wed - nez - day

Tell me I'm not the only 37 year old who still has to say it like that it spell it right.

Wed nez day

Okay, I started off the day with a bit of a post-yesterday traumatic shock syndrome panic attack but then got out of my chair and got to work. It ended up being a pretty productive day in terms of work and homeschool even if I did nearly have to resort to violence to get the boy to redo his essay. His first draft was really terrific. For a second grader. So we did a second draft today. While waiting out his simmering anger (Hey, his father and I have the same temper. BOOM!!!! grrrrrrr . . . what? everything's cool!) I surfed the internet looking at writing curiculum options while laughing at myself.

I was *really* good at teaching writing back in the day. Fourth grade writing. Even my special needs kids made a full year's worth of progress. yep. But teaching my own kid writing makes me question my sanity and makes him hate my guts. At that moment anyway.

Sigh.

Anyway, even as I was deciding that next year Calvert sounded like a GREAT idea for maybe all THREE kids, his anger fizzled out. He got to work. He wrote his four paragraph essay on his bionicle and we called it a day. Phew. No blood shed.

But I bookmarked Calvert just in case.

It was a beautiful afternoon so I sat on the front porch for another thirty minutes blogging the silly blog below and just enjoying the cool air, the feeling of porch railing under my feet, the fun of waving to all the neighbors as the drove or walked by. I can see why old people do that. Makes you feel part of the neighborhood. Smile. Wave. Smile. Wave. Feel happy.

Then it got to being football time so I started getting Max ready. About this time I checked the crockpot and realized that the dinner I thought would be ready AFTER practice was most definitely already ready. So I explained to Chris what I'd had in mind even though he was a bit put off by the term "fajita." It was wicked simple since Milo is my only kid who will eat most vegetables -- lettuce, ranch, marinated and shredded lamb, rolled in a whole wheat tortilla. I made one for Max and I while Chris helped Max finish dressing. Then I grabbed my knitting and Max and I left Chris and the twinkies to feed themselves.

We went to football. Max footballed. I knitted. Two hours later we came home. On the way I stopped at Max's friend's house. His mom and I talked some more about the tooth situation. Long story, short -- boy feels no discomfort at all, so Mom is taking things nice and easy and exploring their options to find the least expensive way to handle things. Turns out Max's friend is the youngest of three boys and the oldest is 17. Explains the whole mellow approach to all of this. It's not her first rodeo. {{{mentally hugs her}}} So we talked some more about her big boys and then I took Max back home because he's still grounded.

And now I'm just trying to stay conscious long enough to get the kids to bed. Tomorrow -- more work. Group piano. One day at a time.

[Hey Eliza girl -- I'm FINALLY almost through 2 Nephi! (Does my touchdown dance.) I'm just so proud of myself for staying in the game even if I do still have to read 6 pages a day to pull this off. Oh yeah, and two months since my last cup of coffee :)]

From: Department of Common Sense

August 28, 2005

To: Mrs. Herself

This note is just a friendly reminder to our customers that the fall is approaching. We encourage you to start preparing now for the upcoming season by engaging in a few appropriate behaviors such as putting on your shoes and purchasing a few long-sleeved shirts.


September 5, 2005

To: Mrs. Herself

While we're grateful for your contribution to the economy, those shirts you bought for $4 each at Target were short sleeves. Wise consumers at this time are purchasing long-sleeved shirts.

P.S. Don't forget the shoes.


September 22, 2005

To: Mrs. Herself

Happy autumnal equinox! This note is just a friendly reminder to our customers that winter is approaching. We strongly encourage you to start preparing now for the upcoming season by looking for items such as snow boots, snow pants

P.S. We realize it was probably just an oversight, but it has come to our attention that not only have you failed to purchase a single long-sleeved shirt, but you still have no shoes on. Please, Mrs. Herself. If this matter remains unaddressed we may be forced to terminate your account with us. This would be most unfortunate.


September 26, 2005

To: Mrs. Herself

We were encouraged to see you pricing pallets of wood pellets today! That's a step in the right direction! However we feel we must remind you that they must actually be purchased to count as a true measure of preparation.

P.S. Shoes, please!!


September 29, 2005

To: Mrs. Herself

We must congratulate you on wearing shoes to walk the dog this morning. As the temperatures were below sixty at the time, we feel this was a wise decision! However, since the temperatures never rose out of the sixties today, we were puzzled to find you barefoot again from 10 a.m. on. Remember, in order to keep your account, you must occasionally actually show some measure of common sense. Please rectify the situation immediately.

P.S. It was far too cool for you to be outside this morning without a jacket. What were you thinking? Go back inside and put one on, missy!

++++++++++

Okay, I'm in a wee bit of denial.

Junk Drawers and One Dumb Toss

Today I was finishing up a work project and this involved me, at one point, hunting around for an index card to write down some notes. In the process I found myself going through the two most long-lasting junk drawers I've ever had.

Is it some kind of sign that for the first time in, literally, years, I didn't pick through the top, and then in an effort to avoid knowing what's really IN there, give up, close the drawer and move on? Nope, I found myself strangely unafraid of the drawer today.

We only have one other junk drawer in the whole house. It's a long narrow one – maybe five inches. It has a depth of about three inches. In short, it can only take so much before it won't close. Nevertheless, it's enough to meet our needs as the house's "fat pants" (plagiarized directly from Jill there).

I don't need these two drawers. They were my office's fat pants back in MINNESOTA. Yep. There's about 50 cough drops scattered around the bottom of the drawer. They're only, what, three years old? They weren't new the last winter we were in Minnesota. They may be older than the twins. There's elastic left over from a sewing project, a snap-press, snaps, velcro, needes, thread, post-it notes, dead markers, broken pencils, safety pins, binder clips, etc etc.

The bottom drawer actually has some useful things in it. It has the thread for one of my incomplete needlepoint projects and its directions. Huh.

I had a Mr. Incredible moment at this point. :::picks up the bag, eyeballs the unfinished neelepoint canvas leaning nearby:::

"Yeah, I got time!"

Shyah.

About this time I found an index card. I wrote on it "clean out junk drawers" and the other two thoughts I was struggling to hold in what's left of my short-term memory (chronic sleep deprivation during the twins' first year caused, I think, some irreparable damage). Then I went back to work.

But you know, maybe when I get one of the sweaters done I could do some counted cross-stitch? If I got started now, I might get one of the twins' Christmas stockings done . . .

+++++++++++

In other news, Max had a BAD day. Was playing nicely with a friend until he suddenly lost his mind and after losing a gamecube game tossed the controller at his friend. They were only a few feet apart -- so not only did it hit the friend in the face, but it knocked off a good chunk of the kid's tooth.

What do you do?

I walked the boy home. Told him about the bond on my front teeth (me and the cement side of a swimming pool had a bad meeting), reassured him that it wasn't too bad in terms of dental experiences. He was trying to decided if this qualified as "exciting" or "potential for getting in trouble." (Obviously, we hadn't exposed the nerve with this chip -- sliced off the bottom 2mm of the tooth is what we did.) I hadn't met this child's mother before, so I'm walking over there chewing my lip.

So we met. She was bummed, but not furious. No dental insurance. I said of course we'd pay. (Internally I said, "Thank you for understanding that it was an accident.") The whole thing felt awful. She was actually really understanding. Max felt two inches tall, and that was with shoes. I let him for a good hour. I told him I didn't know what to do about a punishment. (I don't know where we're going to get the money to pay for the tooth, either.) He said he wouldn't play gamecube till the end of the year. Alright. That's a start.

I added that he was grounded AND he'd have to earn part of the money to repair his friend's tooth.

After he'd sat in his misery for awhile I told him he'd made a really stupid choice, but I still loved him and I knew that he'd learn from this and make better choices in the future. He cried in his odd Max way. We moved on.

Now, I need to make a LONG list of chores. Good thing we have three huge oaks in the backyard. That'll give us leaf (and acorn) raking for at least a month.

Getting Creative

Sometimes you want to have a little treat and not share.

Making brownies will not achieve this purpose.

Oreos -- only if you've managed to keep them hidden from EVERYONE (and I mean everyone) else and it's after bedtime and Himself is in Wisconsin or at least locked in his garage inhaling paint fumes.

But it's 7 pm and you just want a little sumfin' . . . and you don't want to have to divide in five ways.

Solution: develop a taste for stuff you just know that they're categorically opposed to.

Chris won't eat broccoli for cold, hard cash. Therefore, his sons won't either. Obviously if Dad won't eat it, it must be poison. Suits me. Drenched in butter and laced with salt it meets all my demands in a treat. Likewise, saturated in gooey fake cheese in a Green Giant box, it passes as an illegal treat. Nothing that high in fat can taste bad.

There's these tofu thingies by a guy called Pete in all sorts of wild flavors you never knew you wanted to eat like Mango Tango or some such thing. I have to be in the right mood for these things, but in the right mood I *love* them and they are ALL mine. You can always count on tofu to look brown and disgusting when well marinated. It was my first choice tonight but the last bit of it looked like it was suffering from something deadly and the expiration date was a stand-offish August 9.

So it was green giant microwave broccoli covered in gooey hot cheese-like substance. And I didn't have to share :)

I should start marking things on the calendar though because I *still* feel like sending Chris to the store after the kids are in bed for two packages of Oreos ('cause, if I sent him for one, he would come home with just the wrapper).

++++++++++

I've been flirting with Apollo lately. We've more or less stuck to our schedule. We made all our football games and did all our school work. Most astonishingly, after whipping the house into shape a week ago -- it. has. stayed. clean.

So this weekend I broadened my sphere of influence. Having successfully kept the kitchen, the living room, and the large playroom clean, I cleaned and painted the dresser my Mom brought back in July and put that in the twins room. Then I tidied IT. I scrubbed the toilets and their immediate surroundings and the sinks. Then I headed down stairs and spent :cough: 5 mere hours doing finances and cleaning off my desk.

I even got the Latin flashcard binder reorganized (too many flashcards. It wouldn't close anymore -- so I added a second one and split them alphabetically.)

Chris was willing, so I sent him off to do some banking, mail some mail, drop off some paperwork at the YMCA, and get two new piano books for Max at the piano book store.

But most of all, I cleaned my living room top to bottom last weekend. I reorganized it. I made it look great. And I kept it that way for a whole week. A whole week!

I dunno. It's very stressful this month -- not having enough work -- but God always knows what He is doing, and it may very well be that He knew I'd need the time to get the place firmly in order, establish better habits, and get some sleep.

Hopefully right before He sends me a TON of new work. Towards this end, I received a box full of [work stuff] today. That's promising. Unfortunately I don't have any directions for what to do with it yet. I don't remember praying for patience. Do you think He was aiming for Chris and missed?

In Which I Am Reese Witherspoon

In Sweet Home Alabama Reese Witherspoon goes home for the first time in many years. She thinks she's going to shake down her husband for a divorce and then go back to her new yankee home to marry her new yankee boyfriend.

None of that has anything to do with me.

But the part that makes her human (and a good actress) of course is that she goes back home and in spite of desperately NOT wanting to get sucked back in, immediately gets sucked back in. You see it coming because you a) can see that the girl is still completely southern no matter how much she may have tried to lose the accent and b) you're not her.

So I may have said before that a) I'm still a little wigged out to be back East because I never thought I would be again and b) I'm still ASTONISHED by how the simplest things bring back a flood of memories that have more than once stopped me dead in my tracks as I can suddenly hear, taste, or smell something from 30 years ago. The other day it was when Max and I took the twins into a Giant Food Store because he had to go pee and we were all STARVING to death. I walked into that Giant and suddenly I was seven years old and all I wanted to do was find the cookie counter where there was an old lady who would give my brother and I a free cookie with colored sprinkles on it.

Giant carries things that other groceries don't -- it's subtle maybe but I saw stuff in this old Giant store in a tiny town off of 322 in central PA that I haven't seen in a long, long time. So on the one hand, I was bugged because the deli lady was a little slow on the uptake -- upshot, we didn't get any deli -- and on the otherhand, I was walking down memory lane (with my cute little shoplifters in tow -- no worries, I shake 'em down at the counter -- if I don't remember then Max does).

Then last week I was sitting on the swing in the backyard and watching the darkening sky beyond the leaves . . . and it wasn't so much the trees or the leaves or the smell of an early fall but the sound of an early September evening. The bugs, the squirrels, the plop, plop of dropping acorns. No flashbacks there but a quiet awareness that I needed to come back here. The familiar smells are calming. The familiar sounds are calming. I feel like I can be more patient knowing that you just never know when things will change, when people will change, when good things will happen. That bad times are inevitable, but they do pass. Unlike God, the Enemy does tire of you.

So here I am, an East Coast girl back on the East Coast, raising my kids who will become East Coast kids. And just like you *know* Reese is going to be happier back in Alabama than she ever could be up north, I feel happier in my East Coast house (badly in need of a new roof) than I ever did in my West Coast house.

Thankfully, my West Coast husband seems to be transplanting well, albeit more slowly than a native plant like myself. And Max? Max hasn't been so happy since he was in Ginny's daycare at the age of 2. He picked up another neighborhood friend this week. I like this kid and his mom, too. How could we live so many places and have such an abyssmal shortage of regular old neighborhood boys Max's age?

:::puts violin away::::

So here's my "just when you think the world is in its handbasket and on its way" story of the day:

I called audible.com to cancel my membership. I really like this service. For less than $20/month I get two audio books a month and then I get a discount on more if I want them. But I never remember to go get my audio books. I've downloaded six of my books in the eight-ish months I've been a member. So I called to cancel.

The guy at the other end of the phone says he's very sorry to hear that, but he's happy to help me do that. He looks at my account. "Hey! You've got ten unused books here!"

Well, yeah, that's kind of my point. And if you don't use the points within a month, then they're gone. So, really, those are ten books I don't have. Okay, I have two. Two from this month.

No, he explains, all you have to do to get the books back is call nicely and ask! Tippity tappity go his fingers. There! He can only reinstate book points from the last six months, so he gives me back eight books credits.

I brace myself, knowing that next he's going to try to convince me to keep the membership since he's been so "nice" and all.

"Now," he says, "back to your request. Let's see. Reason for cancelation--too busy I guess!"

Ben is babbling happily about a foot away from the phone. The guy says enthusiastically, "Oh my! That is so cute! Who is that?"

We talk about my kids. He laughs everytime Ben says anything for the rest of the conversation. It could have been saccharine? But he was genuine. I bought it.

I then confessed I didn't remember my password. Then it turned out I *did* but for some reason it wasn't working. He resets it using personal information he's gleaned from our conversation. It was funny. From anyone else it would have been invasive.

Then he proceeds to tell me exactly when each of the book points will expire, ending with, "so basically, I'd get online now, pick out your books, and check out." He wishes me the best, hopes I subscribe to audible again in the future, reminds me that if I want I can get a book any old time anyway, just without the "member" cost, and we say goodbye.

And I hop online and get the rest of the Narnia books, the first three Bunicula books (counts as one book), and someone's autobiography (for me).

Isn't that great?