Wordless Wednesday

What is That, K?

A substantive post -- complete with (someone else's) gorgeous photos and a killer recipe -- is coming soon, but for now I just had to share this.

K and I went for a run on our favorite right-by-the-lake, canopied-by-gorgeous-foliage trail today. (We're trying to squeeze in as many of those as we can before the weather really turns!) During the "cool down" portion of the workout I always pop K out of the stroller so she can walk with me, and she usually picks up acorns and leaves that catch her eye along the way.

Today she spotted (she has eagle eyes, I swear) and picked up a different nut than we usually come across.

Me: "What is that, K?"

K: Stops for a moment to look at the nut in question, then gleefully announces: "Poop!"

Me: . . .

Google has since confirmed my suspicions that the darn thing was actually a hickory nut, but -- man. Toddlers. We had a long talk about what we do and do not pick up as we made our way back to the truck.

I love her.

I'll Tell You Where You Can Put That Basket

I used to be lazy. Really lazy. Plop-on-the-couch-after-work, watch-an-entire-season’s-worth-of-DVD-episodes-in-a-row, stay-in-bed-for-at-least-12-hours-whenever-possible lazy.

I can’t do that anymore. For the most part, it doesn’t bother me. (Everything except the sleeping part. I do love me some sleep.) Parenthood makes it more difficult to be lazy. Single parenthood makes it impossible. And the transition into parenting with a new, supportive, willing-to-share-the-parenting-load partner? It’s confusing.

Operation Cohabitation (we’re only days away from getting the keys!) brings with it lots of fun little questions like, “what are we going to do about the laundry situation?” We were cruising around last week, and Bob pointed out the laundromat closest to the new house.

My stomach dropped. I hate laundromats. I. Hate. Laundromats. (Have you heard? I’m not a fan of laundromats.) I think my reaction actually scared Bob a bit.

Why? Because when you’re at a Laundromat, you’re only doing one thing: Laundry. I almost never only do one thing at a time these days. At home I can start a load in the washer, go upstairs and do dishes, keep an eye on my work e-mail in case anything urgent comes in, chop & pop dinner into the crock pot, go back downstairs and switch the clothes into the dryer, start a new load in the washer, then go back to the computer where I can get a good chunk of work in and keep tabs on other online “stuff” while I wait for that happy buzz announcing that the clothes are dry.

“I didn’t realize you were such a militant multitasker,” Bob said. After I shot him The Look (because, man, “militant” just carries too many connotations), I told him that I haven’t always been that way, but that now, I have no choice. If I wasn’t a (dedicated?) multitasker, I’d never get anything done.

He volunteered to handle the laundry.

I like this having a partner thing.

Yesterday Something Awful Happened

My camera broke. Died. Moved on to cheap technology heaven.

I just stared at it when it first failed to respond to my request to turn on. I pushed the power button again. And again. “Come on,” I begged it. “Please?” No response. No flicker of life. Nothing.

Maybe it’s the batteries! I deluded myself into thinking for a minute – but no, it wasn’t the batteries. I knew it wasn’t the batteries. When the batteries get low, the camera lets me know. It tries its best to stay alive – turning on before taking maybe one picture in a painful last gasp, then shutting itself off. This was no battery situation, as my failed attempts at reviving the camera with fresh Energizers revealed.

I even tried putting them in upside-down (negative end where the positive goes) just in case my camera had decided that maybe it liked them like that. It didn’t. It was dead.

We were getting ready to go to the grand opening of a friend’s new paint-your-own-pottery studio when this devastating discovery was made. You can’t do this to me. Not now, I pleaded. Why, of all times, did it have to die right then? We were on our way to an event that promised to combine toddlers and paint! There were going to be so many incredibly picture ops! AHH.

At this point K was standing by the door, shoes on (the right feet!), ready to go, and was looking at me like, enough, mom. Are we going or not? I have messes to make. It was with a heavy heart that I left the little broken camera sitting on the microwave cart as we left the house.

The worst part? I knew I was responsible for this. I’d been letting K play with and abuse it for a long time, just because I always said I kind of hope it breaks, so I’ll be justified in buying a new/better one. My camera – as dependant on him as I was – was slow. He was easily confused in low-light or indoor situations. He caused me to miss more than one shot with his incessant "thinking." He was a little grainy in anything but full sun. And yet, now that he’s gone, I’m feeling a little lost without him. And a little too poor to run out and replace him.

Rest in peace, crappy blue camera from WalMart’s clearance section. The internet will be a (temporarily) darker place without the zillions of daily pictures of K that you used to make possible.

On Being a (Not So) Single Parent

My first official week as a single parent, the stomach flu came to visit. It hit K first, and gave me the opportunity to learn useful new skills like how to get chocolate milk-based vomit out of light colored carpet, and how to breathe through the urge to lose it yourself when someone throws up in your face.

Then, once K was relatively puke-free, I got it.

Ah, memories.

It was a trial-by-fire introduction to single parenting – it didn’t matter that I just wanted to hibernate somewhere warm and in close proximity to a bathroom until the storm passed, because Things Needed To Get Done. Capital letters. No way around it.  Diapers needed to be changed. The litter boxes needed to be cleaned. The trash needed to be taken out, and dinner needed to be cooked.  (Not necessarily in that order.) Even if I didn’t want to eat, I couldn’t keep the baby on the saltines & ginger ale diet with me, and – oh, there was my job, too! I was able to take all the sick days I wanted, but . . . I wouldn’t get paid for them, and the projects with deadlines still had deadlines. And I had bills to pay.

K survived, I survived, even the cats survived, but it was a bit terrifying in that WELCOME TO THE REST OF YOUR LIFE kind of way. There’s no one to bring you soup when you’re a single parent. It’s all on you.

I learned to deal with it. I learned to lean on friends when possible. I learned how to balance a baby on my boob and a macbook on my lap, because K had to be fed and work had to be done, often at the same time. At the end of most days, (almost) everything that needed to be done had been done, but the stress level was – well, if I’d had health insurance, I probably would have seen about getting some sweet chemical relief through anti-anxiety or blood pressure meds. Maybe both. It wasn’t fun, but it was better than the alternative.

And then came Bob.

One day last week, I had a gurgling in my stomach. I had a long to-do list for work. The house was a mess. K’s cough, which I thought we’d finally gotten rid of, threatened to come back. I barely had enough time to brush my teeth, let alone fit a visit/welfare check on my (very) elderly grandmother in between working and K’s various activities and -- I had déjà vu.

It wasn’t until I was already in full on panic mode that I remembered, now I have a partner. I may be the only adult in my house most of the time (Project Cohabitation is in the final prep stages – there’s a closing scheduled next week on a house that’s actually suitable for a family), but I’m not a single parent like I was before. I have backup. I have someone to talk to. I have someone to bring me soup, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Wordless Wednesday

Green Beans

Lately we’ve been working on the concept of making decisions with our just-turned-two year old, K. She’s not shy about voicing her opinion (hence her billing as the “opinionated toddler” in this blog’s subtitle), but when faced with a choice to make, she’ll often just scrunch her nose and repeat both choices back to you, rapid-fire style.

Me: K, would you like to wear the green shirt or the purple shirt today?

K: PurpleGreen!

Bob: K, would you like to play with your crayons or your cars?

K: CrayonCars!

. . . you get the idea.

Last night when we went out to dinner, K had the choice of two vegetables as her side dish: corn or green beans. After the waitress listed the options and I repeated them back to K, I fully expected – you know what’s coming now, right? – an enthusiastic but entirely unhelpful “CornGreenBeans!” I waited for it, but it didn’t come.

Instead she thought about it for a second, then calmly responded, “green beans.” Just like that. Like she’d been making smart, thoughtful decisions her entire life.

Bob and I shared a cautiously optimistic look – had we finally made a major breakthrough in K’s cognitive development regarding conscious choice? Well, maybe. Or maybe we’ll revert back to “ElmoDora” the next time we ask her what DVD she wants to watch. At any rate, it was one of those special little family moments that made us both beam with pride over our brilliant, perfect daughter.

Then she borrowed my lip gloss and used it to pick her nose.

K’s impressive display of decision making prowess inspired us to make a decision of our own. We’d been kicking around the idea of starting a family blog since. . . well, almost since we began to form a family. We could never settle on a name, though, or an angle, or a hosting platform, or, or, or.

Today we did. Welcome to our blog, Unlikely Origins: How a Computer Geek, a Writer, and an Opinionated Toddler Together Formed a Family. We're not promising that we won't switch things up a little as time goes by (we may someday opt for the corn over the green beans), but for now: we are here. We hope you'll follow along as we document our journey of becoming a family. We can't promise that it will always be pretty (in fact, we can guarantee that it won't -- see lip gloss-in-nose example above) but it'll never be boring.