more christmas decor

Well, i tried again, but i can't tell on this screen if these are any good or not. So apologies if they are fuzzy, or dark, or whatever.

This is the Swarovski star from 2003, i always put it at the top now (like that blasted song).



This is the Swarovski star from last year, and this picture looks halfway decent even on this lousy screen.



This is the star that i bought last year and had engraved with his name and date. It irritated me that C and A both have 'baby's first' ornaments with their names, and Nicolas did not have one. So this is not a baby's first ornament but it does have his name and birthday (which you probably can't see in the pic, oh well)



This is one of the two ornaments for Nicolas that Kim sent me this year, for Angel Swap. Thanks again Kim!



This is the other ornament from Kim.



This is an angel with his name on the bottom that was made for his first Christmas by a lady in my support group. We have since lost touch unfortunately but of course i put it up every year.



This is a butterfly i bought last year. I bought that koala bear in the background last year too, but that doesn't have anything to with Nicolas -- he was just cute and on sale.

Well, okay, that is all of them i think. I guess it is not as many as i thought...maybe i will have to buy some more...

We are leaving tomorrow for a week+ visiting dh's family, so i don't know if i will be blogging or not. I should go visit my mother too, but since she said not to come because she does not want to see me, i am not looking forward to that. Of course, this happens quite often, and in a few months she will be complaining *yet again* that we always visit dh's family for the holidays and never visit her. So i will have to suck it up and go, and hope that she at least opens the door when i knock on it, so that i did not drive 4 hours for completely nothing.

Well, i hope everyone has a peaceful and gentle Christmas!

good day/good news

Today we (me, A & C) went out to see S. and her new baby. He is 3 weeks old now and a real cutie pie. I had an excellent day -- in fact i don't know when i had one which was so nice. We sat around and held the baby, and the kids played and enjoyed themselves. We talked about our missing babies and our subs, and our older ones too, and it was all good and fun and just so *normal*.

I gave her oldest child his big brother gift, which is the book in the picture. Actually i bought it for A, when i was expecting Nicolas. I bought it in Baltimore in January of 2003, when i was there for a job interview and dragged it to Paris -- it not being very reasonable to find 'Captain Underpants' in France. He was a little old for this potty humor at the time, but he still loved it. When Nicolas died, i couldn't very well give him the book, so i held on to it. He was clearly too old for it when C came around, and in fact even if he had not been i didn't really like the idea of giving him something which had been meant to give to him when Nicolas was born, you know? So this book has sat in my various closets for three years now, nobody knew i had it.

Anyway, when S's new baby was born, it occurred to me that it was the perfect gift for her older son, who is 5 and thus the *perfect* age for Captain Underpants...plus it was a good way to get it out of the closet. It feels good to pass it along, like something has been resolved (albeit something small).

So, altogether it was a very nice day. In fact as i drove in to the driveway at home, i thought -- gee it has been such a good day, i had better not check the snail mail or the email or blogs, because who knows what i will find...

Well, of course i DID check the snail mail, and what do i find there but a thick envelope from the mortgage company -- this *certainly* bodes no good. I mean, i pay on time every month though so how bad can it be, i thought...i had better open it. So i open it and they say we owe them an additional $1500 by December 28th which is some kind of fee or the other (because we have a construction loan). So much for the good day eh!

Of course, they can just as well ask me for 15 millon dollars, because right now there is like nothing in my checking account and there will not be more until January. So screw them, i have no idea what this is all about. In fact i thought i already paid a fee for this and i thought it was not so much money as all that. But we are leaving for Pennsylvania on Sunday night and the last thing i want to do is to be haggling with the bank over my holidays (which are going to be bad enough to begin with). So, i was really pissed off, and so after getting C to bed i logged on to my email all upset to vent about this new state of affairs with the stupid bank.

However, in my inbox was an email about Max. Max is a little boy who is 3, and is the son of a man who works in the building next to my mother. He has been battling cancer for a while now. This same family also had a stillborn baby girl, before Max got sick. I have been watching his progress from afar, as it were. I have not contacted the family so they don't know who i am but my mom sent me the link to his web page. I have been praying for him but I have not blogged about it, i don't really know why except i feel like kind of a voyeur in the whole process.

But the good good news is that after the last chemo he is now finally cancer-free! They were not sure so they had just done some additional tests but they came back completely clean. THANK YOU GOD!

So, anyway, i did burst into tears after reading that news, and it takes alot to get the waterworks going here anymore. And then i felt like an idiot for worrying about the dumb mortgage -- it was like the universe telling me HELLO do you remember what is important!? And yes i DO know what is important and i count my blessings every day. But sometimes we do get caught up in things and forget...

other people's problems

Okay, i got an email today from a...well, a guy i know. Less than a friend, not really a colleague (though he is in math), more than an aquaintance. We met a conference in 2002, the one in Pisa just before i got pregnant with Nicolas. He is married with 2 (healthy) kids. He told me all about being unhappy in his marriage and his wife's various flaws and his unhappy childhood, blah blah blah the old story. Unfortunately for him i don't do the extramarital affair thing so he did not get very far with me. Still, we kept up an occasional email correspondence, mostly about math and the education of our children. He was very kind when Nicolas died -- sent me a CD of his choir singing Brahms requiem.

Anyway so i had not heard from him for like six months, which was unusual but i know it was my turn to email so i figured he gave up on me. I sent him an xmas card to rectify matters, but since i sent it yesterday i know he could not have got it yet. Lo and behold, in my inbox this morning was a very long email of his, aptly entitled 'long story'.

So, it appears that at some other conference he met some other math babe who had no qualms about fucking married men with children, and has for the last 6 months been having some whirlwind epic intercontinental love affair with this woman. Which, okay, is bad enough to begin with, but then he was planning to leave the wife & kids (& job, presumably??) to be with her, since she was 'the one'. Except then she started acting like a jealous wack-job and then he decided that oh woe is him she must not be the one after all. Did i mention that if he dumped wifey and married her as he was planning, he would be her third husband in five years? Uh, do ya THINK this might signal some possible problems here!? Sheesh.

Anyway, so i HAD to respond to this email of his, to just MENTION that if things were so bad with his wife that they could not be fixed then that was one thing, but jumping into bed with some home-wrecking freakazoid was probably not the best way to go about it. No, i was nicer than that, but really.

Then, okay, he emailed me back nearly immediately, explained that for the past few years he had been having on-and-off affairs on the side, sometimes three at a time, so it really wasn't working with his wife. And that he felt responsibility for his children but that he never had sex with his wife, and the only person in his household he really loves is his younger son who is 5.

And now i'm like, what the fuck? People *live* this way? They apparently don't have enough problems so they make more? And he *does* have problems -- his wife suffers from some difficult disease so she is often very ill, and the older boy has alot of problems at school and the guy does not have a proper job yet as far as i know (more like an adjunct position if i recall). So therefore you spend your time chasing tail? What is up with that? Shouldn't you just count your blessings -- one, two, my kids are still alive i had better shut up now?

But then i think, maybe i should just shut up. After all, i am (reasonably) happily married and that is no small thing. I don't really have the authority to give marriage advice, sitting from a post where me & dh tend to get along most of the time. And maybe i am just too immersed in dead-baby world here, so i can't really relate to cant-keep-my-pants-zipped world which is where *this* guy is apparently living. The thing which annoys me is, of course, that you can always choose to keep your damned pants zipped. I didn't have a choice about dead-baby world.

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Ok, to clarify -- i met this guy in Pisa but he is not Italian. He is German, in fact. I point that out because i was thinking about what i wrote and i would not want you to get the wrong idea. It is a stereotype i know, but italians do seem to have some this kind of playing around as part of their culture. For my friend, it seems that the problem is *not* playing around, i.e. simple marital infidelity. The problem seems to be that he then falls *IN LOVE* (cue music and sparkly cupids) , with this or that woman, who is not his wife. And then, it is some sort of existential turmoil involved -- should i be here, should i be there, what should i do blah blah blah. I admit i am unsympathetic. I think *IN LOVE* is a thing for teenagers -- life-shattering when you are young maybe but that is not what makes marriages work, what puts food on the table, what raises (and/or buries) the children and cleans vomit off the floor. Music and sparkly cupids will only get you so far, probably as far as the first major crisis. Then it is time for more serious things.

Christmas decorations

Okay, i said i would post pics of xmas decorations so here are some. In fact Nicolas has *alot* of xmas decorations so i will post more pics later if i can. This is just a sampling. You see, i collect Christmas tree ornaments so you can imagine Nicolas has quite a few.

The first picture, sorry it is not in focus (and bad lighting!), is actually the kid's stockings & wreath. I am very very annoyed that i cannot put them up downstairs on the actual *fireplace*, putting them on this ugly cabinet which lives behind the couch is just not right. But of course downstairs at the fireplace is a horrible ugly mess so i can't. Last year i got those stocking holders that are on pots, which i really like. So i can get each of them a plant. But the stocking problem stumped me for some time. I knitted those -- both A's and C's. Of course both kids were on their second christmas before i managed to finish said stocking. So of course Nicolas never had one. Perhaps i should have made him one but it was totally beyond me to knit a stocking for a child that was already dead. It was just too pathetic, i couldn't do it. And buying one wouldn't do, when i made the others. And what would i put in it, anyway? So he has no stocking. I guess that is unfair, but on the other hand it is really just unfair to be dead.

So when i got the stocking holders for the plants, i figured i would have to hang *something* for him, and it occurred to me to make him a wreath each year. That way at least i can make it so it is not like he is getting shorted even *more*, and he has something representative. So that is my solution to that problem.

Here are some beautiful booties that another angel mommy sent me this year. They have a place on the bottom for name, date, weight, length. I *love* them!



This is just a cute ornament that i picked up, i think in 2003 but i am not sure. Actually i must confess i bought it for another angel baby but decided to keep it for Nicolas instead.



This is this year's Swarovski star which you can't really see but you can see it a little better than the others. I tried twice to take these pics but it did not really work. Oh well!

Oops, i am supposed to have left for work a half-hour ago! I will try to upload more later...

TMI

Okay, today AF showed up, for the first time in 2 years. Which is what i get for mentioning out loud that i had not seen 'er in that long. I should have just kept my mouth shut!

So i am home with a toddler in a snowstorm. A toddler without a snowsuit or hat or mittens or snowboots (don't ask) who desperately wants to go out and play in the snow. (maybe if i wrap her in plastic??) A toddler who is getting a molar and did not sleep at all last night and screamed for most of the morning. And i cannot find the f****** tampons, or even some pads.

I *know* i had, like, *boxes* of the things. I packed them when we moved. When we unpacked, i packed them again, in a box, and stored them....uh...somewhere. Somewhere in this mess of a house there is a box filled with enough girlie supplies to supply a small army. But, ah, where -- that is the question! So i have been ransacking purses and briefcase to find something....this has worked so far but for how much longer??

So, now C is taking a nap, and i will essay the basement again, to find something -- girlie supplies, or snowpants, or maybe some mittens, or who knows what? Something vaguely useful, anything vaguely useful...i mean surely i can find *something* that will help...it's like a treasure hunt! Oh what an exciting life i lead, ransacking the basement for a tampon. Maybe i will find some whiskey instead...now that sounds promising....

'tis the season...

....to lose your marbles....

Ok, like Julie i thought i was doing well but apparently not. Not that i am doing that badly, in comparison with years past, ok? But certainly i would not call it 'well' when by following this and that link i end up on some fluffy mommy blog and get so irritated that i end up jumping up and down in my office with clenched fists! Wow i need to chill out or something.

I have been fighting a slide into depression and basically losing. Nothing is done, nothing is getting done, nothing is *going* to get done. My dh is losing patience with me, so it has got to be worse than usual. I finally finished a bunch of grading today (at the last minute) but it did not make me feel better. I was supposed to go do some xmas shopping but instead i am sitting on my ass, hiding in my office, writing this crap. Thank God i have a real office. Maybe i will just stay here forever -- at least the computer has a good, working screen.

I don't even know what to say. I can't seem to get along with any adults in my life (my mother has now ceased speaking to me entirely, and dh and i cannot seem to do anything but bicker about money or lack of it), there are piles of xmas stuff to do as well as the regular stuff and i cannot even seem to clean the kitchen or make dinner or anything. Gee i did run some wash. I mean, before when dh would complain that he was doing everything i would laugh at him because he was so full of it, it was just so untrue. Now lately it is becoming more and more true -- i do not have it in me to clean up my piles of junk any more, they just get higher.

I have sent less than half my cards (i ran out of confetti and i do not have the xmas pics yet), i have not baked any cookies, i have not bought most of the presents, we have not put a tree up yet, and i don't really care. I really *should* get something for Athough. We will do the tree this weekend. Maybe that will help? Or maybe it will just make it worse.

I don't know how much of my funk is due to missing Nicolas, and how much it is due to not being able to get along with anybody IRL, but it is all kind of one big lousy slew of badness sitting on my shoulders and it all sucks.

So yes i am feeling sorry for myself today and there is nothing wrong with that.

Teddy bear drive

Well, one of the too many things i did this christmas season was attempt to organize a teddy bear drive through A's school. The idea (stolen from S.) was to go to Build-a-Bear and build bears and then donate them to the local homeless shelter, which has around 50 kids there for the holidays. I thought this was a cool way that kids could participate in doing something for other kids. It was scheduled for tonight.

Apparently I was the ONLY person who thought it was a cool idea because even though i got plenty of positive feedback when i floated the idea, only ONE person besides me and A showed up. And she is a friend of mine too....

But anyway the three of us managed to produce 8 bears, so that is not too shabby. I made 3 for my 3 kids plus one from S. who is not doing it this year (since she just had her sub baby last week!!)

Here is me holding those bears, from left to right are Hope bear (S.'s daughter -- okay Hope bear is in my armpit but you can see her in the front in the above pic -- denim jumper & red flowers in the ears), C bear (the koala with the big purse), Nicolas bear (in cutie denim overalls), and Santa bear (which is the one that A made).


And here is Alexander holding the last bear, he was a freebie (you get $10 credit for each $100 you spend). So i made him Ian bear -- Ian is the baby of a lady in my online support group and his birthday is today, so it seemed appropriate. She just joined so i don't know her well and i didn't know how to dress Ian bear at all. So we chose a basketball outfit because we thought that would probably make the little boy who got him very happy, and that's what it is all about, after all.

the purity of memory

It has been tough around here lately, for me anyway. And every time i go to post about it, blogger is down or eats my post or both...sigh. So i guess the universe does not want me to talk about it! Anyway, it could be worse....but it is becoming increasingly hard for me to keep a mental balance. I just need a break, i guess. The holidays are coming up fast.

But i was walking to the office today, freezing my ears off in the nasty wind, and letting my thoughts wander where they will. This is the good thing about being able to walk to work (the bad thing being the ears in the wind), it does give you a mental break. We are coming up to the end of the semester, our departmental xmas party is on wednesday and i have yet to bake a single cookie. I was planning on bringing cookies, at very least my popular ever-so-alcoholic armagnac balls -- i assure you that rum balls made with armagnac rather than rum are to DIE for. At least in the recipie i use. And eating more than one or two will quickly result in a most pleasing drunken state.

The thought of this led me down memory lane of course -- to the time that i was an undergraduate and my friend Becky and i crashed some department's party. I think it was the english department, and i was a freshman. Anyway we got rawther drunk on their punch and had a rollicking good time. It doesn't take much punch to make you drunk when you are 18...it's funny but i can't imagine doing something like that now, we really did have balls. We weren't even IN that department!! Come to think of it, Becky was not even in college, she must have still been in high school since she was a year younger than me. Reminders of the innocence of youth!

It does make me smile, though. And memories like this occasionally do surface when i am walking back & forth to work, and make me laugh out loud. The time in Pisa i was discussing my future with my advisor, or various things that have happened at various conferences, or the road trip with J. to florida in the new fancy car, or going trick-or-treating on the lawn at UVa with A dressed as an airplane, or picking out pumpkins or a christmas tree, or whatever. They are all from the time before i was a grieving mommy, and they all have a simple purity, a clarity like jewels somehow. I guard them carefully, those memories. My life does not have that that clarity now, for sure. It has become, well, *complex*. That does not mean there are not many joys and that i do not prize those joys. I do prize them, more than ever. Perhaps in fact the issue is that i prize them too *much*. Things are bittersweet -- what is happy is also a reminder of sadness, of what has been lost and what could be lost in the future. It is hard to just *be* in the moment and let that moment be what it is and be *enough*. No, there is never enough. I feel like i live just waiting for the next tragedy to befall me. I wonder what it will be.

Mikulas (St. Nicolas Day)

This post is a day late, Mikulas (or St. Nicolas Day but this is one of the few Slovak words i keep and have taught my kids -- needs a little accent on the s but i can't figure out the html on that one) was yesterday but that is one of the problems with having two laptops broken at home. For those of you who don't do this, we put our shoes out in the window and Mikulas comes and fills them with treats. In fact as a child it was my favorite holiday because i was *sure* to get candy (something in short supply in our house) and i never could figure out when exactly it was, except that it was before Christmas. So it was always a surprise when my mom said, 'Mikulas will come tonight, you had better clean your shoes and put them out!'

I really loved seeing Hans's and Caleb's ornaments (and Baby Alex's though i can't seem to find that post anymore?). We don't have our tree up yet so i can't share Nicolas's (though i will when i put the tree up), but here are the little crystal baby shoes that i got for Mikulas every year. I admit i keep them out all year, on the bookcase in front of his picture, but also i put them out with our shoes in the window.

These were a godsend the first year, because i was completely upset and at a loss with how to approach this holiday. It is his name day after all, so there is some greater significance presumably -- but he was not *here* and he never *had* any shoes of his own. So, what was i supposed to do, go out and buy shoes for a dead baby who would never wear them? What was i supposed to put in the shoes then? Or just leave them empty? Or just not 'celebrate' the holiday? That wasn't fair to anyone. So when i found these, i knew i had a perfect solution. (that was lucky -- this is the first year i have a solution to the christmas stocking problem).

Maybe this was one reason i had such a lousy day on monday, i knew this one was coming. But actually yesterday was fine for me, mentally. Plus i slept alot and feel better physcially too. C was most amused at waking up and finding that her boots were filled with candy. And then she is at an age where she knows how to undo a wrapper but is surprised and delighted each time she does so -- oh wow, there is a candy inside this one! And look, there is a candy inside this one too! It is very heartwarming (and bittersweet) to watch her discover these things.

So i am okay...and the holiday season proceeds along its course...

a failure to communicate

I should in general preface this with the fact that i feel yucky. I have a cold which just showed up yesterday so i am a stuffed up achy mess, i am exhausted from a weekend of running around doing victorian christmas house tours and looking at *&^%$ tile for the *&^%# bathroom (HOW can this be so difficult!?), and i am having these extremely unpleasant pains in the general girlie area. They are not like cramps, they are these almost shooting kind of pains. I want to double over and crawl into bed, not go teach a class. I hypothesize that my body is trying to ovulate but as it has not done so for 2 years now, it seems to have forgotten how. I have liked my 2 years without AF, one of the benefits of extended breastfeeding i guess -- though it does not balance out the fact that i can't drink wine...

Anyway, but my greater issues are exactly this failure to communicate. My mother has started her annual festival of holiday hatred and as usual i am the major target. Over thanksgiving she called me and we had a long talk, with her very upset because as usual she is all alone in the cold and noone is with her. Since that talk, she will not talk to me because of all the horrible things i said. Entirely unwittingly, though. See, when she starts on the 'oh pity me, woe is me, my life is the worst it could possibly be', i really do tend to shut it out and say the wrong thing. *Last* year i did not shut it out, i instead totally wigged out on her. I was changing C's diaper at the time, and i SCREAMED full force into the phone something like '*I* am the one with the dead baby okay, i don't have any extra pity left for YOU!' I screamed so loud it scared C, she started crying, which did not do wonders for my mental state, let me tell you. And of course it took me weeks of abject apologies to get past THAT one.

So this time, let us examine what i said. I *did not* say 'stop feeling sorry for yourself'. I *did* say (or meant to say), sometimes life sucks and you should feel sorry for yourself, because it does suck. So have a good cry about it and hope to feel better tomorrow. Because there are some things you just cannot do anything about (like, for example, that your husband left you 20-odd years ago). Alright, so she is mad at me because i told her to 'stop feeling sorry for yourself', when all she wanted me to say was 'i miss you too and i wish i was with you'.

Well, evidently there is some failure to communicate on my part, because i did not realize that the proper response to "my life is so terrible because that bastard left me and my house is cold and i have no money to heat it and i have been living this way for years and you have forgotten what it is like because you are a spoiled princess and it is terrible to be old and everything is wonderful in your life because you are young so you cannot relate and you do not care what is happening to me" is "i miss you too and i wish i was with you".

So, now i know, and i will be sure to make that response in the future. Hopefully i can learn to generalize so that i make this appropriate response to other seemingly unrelated diatribes.

Okay, then there is my dh. One never thought that it would be so hard to decide on a tile for the bathroom floor and wall, right? And it is a funny thing that though we both say 'well, i really don't care', we then get into these completely protracted discussions about whether to go with matte white or glossy white, but can i get the chair rail in matte, no it is only glossy, yes i can get matte, but not from that store but from this, and i can't find it on the internet at all, but the hexagons on the floor are unglazed, no they are glazed white, no that is the wall tile, i thought we were talking about wall tile what are you talking about the floor for? And it goes on...sigh...

And then this morning he says, 'what do you mean you feel lousy because you have a cold, everyone has a cold, that is nothing'. (true enough, but i still feel lousy). And then as we are leaving we had the following discussion -- he said 'K. (our neighbor) said that we don't want a bad tile install, maybe we should not go with Lowe's but with someone who does it all the time'. And i said 'but Lowe's just subcontracts it out to someone who does it all the time', so he said 'well, that should be okay then, in any case it will not look worse that the job you did on the bathroom floor up here'. Well fuck you very much for that, if i recall i did not see HIM at the house at 3 am laying tile, or painting the walls in preparation for our moving in last spring, after watching the baby and packing all day and trying to do some research on the side. No, he was *working* all day so he deserved to sleep...Shit, he really is being an asshole.

*and* we have two laptop screens down again, i don't know what is up with that. So little internet access from home. We ordered the parts, we will see. I think we just need to get new ones. Who knows when that is going to happen!?

So i am sitting here at work, i skipped the colloquium and i am just sitting here feeling lousy. I need to walk home, get A & take him to kung fu but i don't have the energy yet...