Rural Dreams

Thanks Giving

We don't eat meat but our dog is on a bones and raw food diet, which means we give him raw poultry every day. My mother-in-law doesn't cook much so since we've been living here, she eats mostly vegetarian with us. Wes doesn't have much experience with meat that's not exclusively for him. The entire time my MIL was preparing this bird, Wes expected the meal of his life.

Redesigning And Redesigning and Redesigning

I wanted to unveil a super new design for this site but it's taking me forever and now I have a cold and Thanksgiving cooking is keeping me busy. I already transferred my entries and comments from the old blog so I didn't want to keep posting there because I'd have to do the transfer all over again.

So here I am, at the party in my pajamas.

The good news is my mom got me a snazzy digital camera so there will be LOTS! OF! PICTURES! HORRAY!

Clean

Steve is sitting on the sofa, reading a book.

Steve: It's just about time for a bath Aidan.

Grandma (to Aidan): Where are you going?

Aidan: I have to make a very important phone call.

Grandma: Who are you calling?

Aidan: Someone who disappears people who are sitting on sofas reading.

While Aidan makes his phone call, Steve gets up and goes into the kitchen. Aidan returns and is alarmed, almost tearful to find that Steve has actually disappeared.

Aidan hates taking a bath. After this conversation last night, Steve brought him upstairs and managed to bathe him while he screamed and flailed like he was being murdered.

Steve handles him gorgeously, he never loses his patience. He remains gentle and compassionate throughout the whole ordeal. It's best that Steve bathes him because I don't handle it gracefully. The adrenaline starts pumping for me and I become adversarial. I get angry that he is being so unreasonable and I feel violent. Not that I hit him or anything, but my manner becomes violent. I don't know how else to handle him - it's like I can't physically force him to do something and remain gentle. It's an impossible contradiction for me but Steve is miraculous at it.

We only bathe him about once a week because it's such an ordeal. A wet washcloth often does the job until his hair gets to grimy and flaky to deny the need for clean. Of course he hates having his nails cut too and sometimes I wonder if people at the playground or the library notice how filthy he is.

I didn't worry about this as much upstate. I know plenty of kids up there who get as blissfully dirty as my boy. The kids here are squeaky clean, not unlike the leaf-free landscaping. I wonder, do they all go willingly? Or is there a nightly bath crisis in homes all over Long Island? Maybe there are dirty kids here and I just haven't found them. I'm going to start looking at fingernails.

Machines vs. Nature

I feel like I am at war with the landscapers here.

The suburb that my m-i-l lives in is a fairly prosperous one with large old well kept homes (except for hers) and immaculate lawns. The landscaping is often the instant kind - full grown plants and sod are brought in. Some houses have gorgeous older plantings and trees but they are not always appreciated. The next door neighbors here recently cut down a stunning enormous and healthy tree to make way for a renovation/addition that they might do. I'd have moved before cutting down that tree.

Most homes have landscaping companies come through once a week to keep everything just so. Until last summer, my m-i-l's house never had the benefit of these landscapers. The grass would grow to your knees and it would be spotty for the leaves that were left on it year round. However, the soil all around was rich and wonderful and there were many thriving shrubs that benefited from the decades of leaf mold.

Last summer the landscapers were hired and everyone appreciates having the grass cut regularly, but there are these things that they do that drive me crazy. Mostly the whole thing is just so overdone. They come through with lawnmowers and leafblowers and weed wackers and edgers every single week on every single house. If the windows are open, the leafblowers fill the house with gas fumes. It's all just so unnecessary. I want so badly to demand that they just cut the grass and NOTHING ELSE but it's not my house and they don't work for me.

Twice now they have weedwacked hostas that I transplanted. They looked a little spindly because they were brand new transplants, but I thought it was pretty clear that they weren't weeds. After the first time it happened I told the owner about it and he was defensive and told me that they would die back anyway. Well yeah, but not in September. Then it happened again in another place. I haven't said anything.

A couple of times my m-i-l has asked them to trim the privet hedge that circles the house. They trimmed EVERY bush around the house and a dogwood tree. They didn't prune the tree, they trimmed it like a bush. Last summer a row of hydrangeas didn't bloom because all of the buds had been trimmed off.

I have come to see the landscapers as a destructive force.

This morning I woke up to the neighbor's house being thoroughly leaf blown and looked out at our rich collection of leaves in the yard. It was killing me to think of them all being hauled away when they would make such lovely and much needed mulch. I anxiously waited for them to do our yard so that I could ask them to not take them away, but to just blow them into a large bed (the site of the hosta massacre) around Aidan's sandbox. I was anxious because I feel like I'm talking to an adversary. I'm trying to nurture the plants and they are trying to kill them.

I had to leave the house with Aidan before they got to our yard, so I hunted down the owner to try to explain about the leaves. I told him that I didn't want them to take them away, that I wanted to use them for mulch in the beds. None of the fancy schmancy landscapers around here uses mulch so I didn't know if he would even know what I was talking about, but he agreed and I left hopeful.

When I got back, I didn't see the leaves right away and I was livid. The bed that I wanted the leaves in and a spot in the back where we had just planted a bunch of shrubs to make a sort of a woodland garden were completely naked of leaves. I ranted and raved to my sister-in-law and she pointed out a pile of sticks and debris that we had cleared away to plant the shrubs. That's where the leaves were, mixed in with all of the debris. Totally nonsensical, but at least they were still there.

I am sure that the landscapers think I'm bananas, but it would have been worse if I had gotten to them before my sister-in-law got to me.

It's A World Wide Web

Aidan crashed at 7:30 last night so I installed Movable Type and as usual, got sucked into looking at the site statistics for loudjoy.com. Whenever this happens, hours are lost. Anyhow, I came across this article in another language that features my dear son's mug - can anyone tell me who it is or what it says? Is it a Hungarian relative? Is it totally random?

Testy

Testy Test

Buzz Lightyear - The Key to Happiness

Back in September, my niece told Aidan that she was having a Halloween birthday party and as part of that conversation, she must have told him that Halloween was scary, because he kept insisting that he didn't want to have anything to do with it. We skipped Halloween last year because we thought that we would be moving into our new old house that day, so he had no recollection of the holiday.

One night, my mother-in-law asked him what he wanted to be for Halloween. He gave his usual answer that Halloween was scary and then rejected all of our suggestions which included things like Peter Pan and a bat. Then, my m-i-l went into full grandma mode and suggested Buzz Lightyear. She would have never suggested a cartoon character to her own kids, they were always animals or fairytale characters, but I'm convinced that something happens to your brain when you become a grandma. Of course Aidan was very excited about the Buzz Lightyear prospect and wouldn't entertain any other suggestions.

At the time I was still very tired and a little sick from the pregnancy. The thought of making a costume, especially something as bulky and plastic as Buzz Lightyear was totally overwhelming. My niece's party was two weeks before Halloween and I was fairly relieved when he decided the weekend before that he wanted to be Spiderman. We promptly went out and bought him a $15 Spiderman costume which he wore to her party. However, afterward, he was talking about Buzz Lightyear again and the weekend before Halloween, I began to feel inspired.

So from cardboard, masking tape, paper, glue, paint, black vinyl, green fabric, white arm length gloves, a big red plastic button, a cheap ninja costume and some puppet-making experience, Buzz Lightyear emerged. Making it marked the end of several months of not feeling like myself in a way that was depressing and immobilizing. I've been saying that I hate being pregnant, but I'm finally feeling allright now and I actually forget that I am pregnant a lot. My belly is just huge, so I get surprised by my limited mobility. Thank goodness my energy and attitude are back to normal, those are much more important to me.

I plan to post a detailed description of how the costume was made, because I couldn't find such a thing when I was planning it - but I want to move this blog to Movable Type, so I'll probably do it after that's done.