Our Family Beginnings

I had the always wonderful N & Calliope over the other day for some kiddo-time, but sadly for the first time in over a year, the parking patrol was out.  N got a $50 ticket (which I will be paying, because, hello, it was my house and I feel bad when people get tickets visiting me), but Calliope got this put on her car (blurring out relevant details):

Of note, Calliope was parked at the very end of the block, so was not taking up more than her allotted space AND she has handicap tags on her plates.  In theory, one needs a permit to park on the block between 9-5 on weekdays, but there were MORE than ample spaces for residents to park there today, as there always are. The real ticket was totally warranted, and I just forgot to give N a parking pass to put in her window – that’s why I wouldn’t even think of letting N pay it. But the “ticket”? What kind of jerk puts that on someone’s car?  A total coward, that’s who.

The “ticket” was issued about 15 minutes off of N’s actual ticket, so it could have been put there by a parking official, but I really hope it wasn’t a neighbor of mine. I really like my neighborhood and shudder at the idea of someone within two doors of my house doing that to people.
Anyhow, I put it out on the neighborhood listserv, in hopes that someone cops to knowledge about it, or that my neighbors are as annoyed as I am.

eta: Apparently you can buy these things online, which means someone was dumb enough to pay money to do this – or they just printed them out at home.

I’ll admit, I’ve always been a sleepy person.  If I had to choose between being a morning person or a night person, I’d be a morning person.  More accurately, I’m a sleepy person.  I still remember my grandfather sweetly mocking me saying how tired I was. In college, if a paper or studying wasn’t totally done by the time I faded, I shrugged and figured that’s as good as it would get and turned in.  All nighters? Not for me. I need my (at least) 8 hours.  Fighting it is futile, and I’m okay with that.

With swimming twice a week for 90 minutes and running about 25 miles a week, I have been using V’s naptime as a nap for myself as well. And as Calliope, E’s Mama, Mel, and N can tell you, I have been REALLY tired.  I’ve since cut out the swimming for a few weeks, but I’m still pretty snoozy.  Of note, both my folks are hypothyroid.  I didn’t even realize, but apparently my mom even was taking thyroid supplements in her twenties! Having a slow thyroid can definitely do a number on one’s energy level.

One of the great things about the steps we take for adoption is that they require a full physical, and my doc always checks my thyroid levels.  As anyone who dealt with fertility issues know, having unexplained fertility sucks so much worse than having something you can treat.  So with that knowledge, I was almost hoping for a medical explanation for my fatigue.

Well, the doc’s nurse called me yesterday, and it seems that my thyroid is indeed sluggish!  I’m going in for more tests today, but hopefully, relief is on the way.  Otherwise, I might have been sleep running on my long slow runs!

For my birthday, Mr. Badger got me a gift certificate for our local photography school.  Last night, I went to my first class.  It’s an introduction to DSLR photography, and we shoot completely in manual mode – no flash. I’m hoping to teach Callie what I learn each week so that I can solidify what I’ve gotten out of class.  You know, it’s that whole “See one, Do one, Teach one” mentality.  I’m also going to try to go through what we learned in class on here, so any of you who want to play along at home can do so.  That being said, I loved the first class.  It’s one thing to read these things in a manual (or on the web), but I learn best by seeing and doing.  There are a lot of little things going on with a camera, and it’s hard to think about all of them at once.  Some people can read a manual, and boom, and I am like that sometimes. But with this? The manual just hasn’t been cutting it. I take some cool pictures, but only by accident.  This is the first step in me actually making sense out of this.

Yesterday we learned about the basics of exposure, shutter speed and aperture.

Aperture is the amount of light entering the iris of the camera.  Think of it like your eyes, how they get really small when it’s bright out, and get large in the dark – all to control the light.  The size of the opening on the camera is measured in an f-stop. The most open is 3.5 on my lens and 22 is the most closed.  So to let in the most light, I need the f-stop to be low. A bit Counter-intuitive at first, but I am going to practice this one.

Shutter Speed is controls the amount of time that light enters the camera. If you have a super fast one, you can capture a runner mid stride. If you have a slow speed, you could capture the stillness of the track with a blur of feet running by.  You could also imagine those night shots of a highway where you see the blur of lights and a perfectly focused road.

I also learned how to read the meter that shows up in the viewfinder in order to get the balance of light right. It’s all hard to explain without pointing to my camera, so just trust me on this.

We played around during class, and I had to continue when I got home. I’ll post the pix again when flickr stops messing with me.

Did you ever get a gift of a page a day calendar?  Did you ever get through the whole year?  Me neither.  I’d always forget I had it, and then pick off a whole month and eventually just toss it at the end of the year.

Last year, my friend D got me the Cute Overload page a day, and I LOVED IT. I went through each page – and it was so fun to see what cuteness awaited me each day.  I liked it so much that Mr. Badger got me the “Bad Cat” page a day for this year.  So I am showing off my old and new calendars today.

Major props to my friends for knowing just what I like.  Adorable anthropomorphized animals.

Growing up, Christmas eve was always the big deal in my house.  My folks got married on Christmas Eve, and that was always the night that we spent with my favorite grandparents. We’d listen to the top 40 station’s holiday music, sometimes go to the movies, and have a midnight snack of Froot Loops.  It never occurred to me that Christmas itself was actually a big deal, seeing as how we were all MOT.

Enter Mr. Badger.  I have spent the past 10 or so Christmases with him, including before we were married.  His grandfather has four kids, and they would all go to bed with no decorations in the house on Christmas Eve.  Santa would visit that night and put up a tree and all of the presents.  Pretty cool, no?  When I went to his folks’ house, they too put up the most amazing tree.  It’s always huge and even with that, I have no idea how all of the ornaments find a space.  Don’t get me started on the lights.  That’s just something I could never stand.  You see, there’s an art to it – winding it just the right way to get maximum lighting and all.  I tried to do it once with our own tree, as opposed to just assisting, and it was a disaster.  After about 5 minutes, I gave up.  I’m used to a Menorah. You light a match, sing a few prayers, and voila! Done.

They have lots of other traditions that really have made me, well, like a kid at Christmas. So I look forward to this time of year – the ceremony of it all, the faces when people open gifts they were either hoping for or were happily surprised to receive, it makes me melt in the happy.

This year, Mr. Badger has had a very busy year at work, and so I wanted to surprise him and bring home and put up the tree on my own.  Before I get too far, I have to mention that you have to get the right kind of tree, specifically a Frasier fir. I got to the tree place and had a massive brain fart.  I asked for the Douglas firs.  The salesman even said, “Sure, but so you know, our Frasiers are a bit fresher.”  I nodded and reiterated that I needed a Douglas.  We’ve never gotten a Douglas.  I, of course, did not get the sanity kicked back into my head until the tree was cut, on my car, and I was on the highway.

Luckily, when I got it in the house, it was very full and beautiful, and Mr. Badger loved it anyway.  I got up the lights and the ornaments and bows and…whew!  The only downside is that there aren’t a lot of strong branches on this tree, so it was hard to put some of the heavier ornaments up.  Again, you wouldn’t know just from looking at it.  I’m pretty impressed if I do say so myself.  Not bad for a 10-year-old in Christmas time!

I also don’t do well with accents.  So if you have one, even within this country, I may just nod but not have understood you.  Asking “what?” for the 50th time tends to lose its charm.

Which brings me to a story that Mel has promised to hold over my head well past my 80th birthday.

Today I was in the post office getting stamps, when an older woman gets in line behind me and V.  He charms away and she prattles on about how wonderful children are and how boring and awful my life would be if I didn’t have him.  Since she was from a different era, I gritted my teeth and laughed with her.  “Gee thanks lady! So if I were childless, I’d pretty much want to off myself to escape my boring and meaningless existence ?  Wow, that is such a refreshing thought that I have never heard before.  None of my friends could ever relate to that sentiment.”  Okay, I didn’t say that, but you know you’d be thinking it too.
Anyway, she then says in her thick accent, “is he a foster child?”.  I was taken aback so fast.  How did she even guess?  So I said, “No, he’s adopted.”  She looked confused, but she just went back to telling me how lucky I am.  Which I agree, I am.  Only after a few more minutes of speaking to her did I realize that she had asked, “is he your first child?”.

So somewhere out there, a little old lady has a story for her family, or dog, or plants, or whatever about the crazy lady at the post office that insisted on saying that he was adopted when she asked me if he was my first.  Oh yeah, that happened.  I will now go flush the wax out of my ears.

Busy day.

Yesterday I got a ticket for not having my registration sticker on the plates, so today I had to go to the DMV to prove I wasn’t out of compliance. I will say, I was impressed with how efficient the process was.  I came into the information desk, said I wanted to contest a ticket. I got a number (they batched types of issues with a letter, so all of the parking violations, for example started with F5xx), and V and I sat in a very clean and bright waiting room with the rest of the people.  No lines to worry about.  We were then shuttled off into a room for a hearing where the case was dismissed.  Woot! I saved us $100, and it only took about 2 hours.

Then we went to Mr. Badger’s office, got our Maryland adoption petition signed and notarized (more about that soon), and had lunch.  V had some of my ravioli.  It went right through him and MAN those were some nasty assed diapers.  We took a nap, and then dropped the paperwork at the lawyer’s.  After that came home and did stuff around the house, as our faucet decided to die.

I made dinner, and now am watching Grey’s.  Lemme get this straight, Derek wants to do a risky surgery and the Chief says no.  Then Arizona turns down a risky surgery and Chief begs her to do it.  Nice continuity.  I get it, it’s because of the money but still.  Maybe Arizona can repeat “tell me how great I am” fifty more times and I’ll forget about how lame the writing is.

Totally forgot about NaBloPoMo until now.

What a provocative little header I put up there, no?

Let me put out there that a) No, I do not actually think all other mothers suck b) that the story I am going to tell is unique to moms.  However, I do think that men waging wars all over the globe over the size of their dicks have nothing on catty mothers.  Mothers can be the atomic freaking bomb of interpersonal relations.

I do this workout outside and in bad/cold weather at the local mall before it opens. Moms bring their strollers and resistance bands and little ones, and we do a 1-hour cardio and resistance class.  It’s fun, and a decent workout. We sing songs to the kids as we do bicep curls, and get out of it what we put into it. Trust me, it’s a good workout.

Because V’s had this thing of napping about 10 minutes before we would leave for class, I hadn’t gone in a few weeks. I decided to capitalize on the time change and get back to class. It was a good class, and in the middle, I felt this sudden burst of energy and took off on one of our running laps. It was a total sprint.  I heard one woman snarkily mumble to another “geez, no need to show off!” and I knew it was directed at me.  I didn’t turn around because I honestly didn’t want to know who had said it. What was going through my head was, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that the instructor said that judging other mothers for working out at their workout was the holding pattern.”

My dear friend, E’s Mama, has said that motherhood is not a competitive sport.  I wish it were so.  I wish I could say that I never did similar things to others, but I am sure I do.  Anyone who thinks they don’t judge others really is in denial.

Another adoptive momma blogger wrote a few weeks ago about how she doesn’t fit in with her pre-baby friends, and she doesn’t really connect well with other moms.  I remarked that it’d be great if ALI parents could just have our own little island sometimes. I can’t tell you how much I treasure my DC blogger friends, and the extended bloggers who I’ve been lucky enough to either meet in person or talk to on the phone. I just find that as a group, there is less (though clearly not an absence of) judging and more openness to life experiences.

Thanks to all of you who, over the last three years, have held us up, hugged us in person or virtually, or even just read silently and said, “me too”.

It’s quite the endeavor I am attempting, especially since I post once every three weeks at best these days.  I can guarantee there will be many meme-type cop-outs, Show & Tells, Wordless Wednesdays, and password protected posts.  I hate pwp but at this point it’s a necessity. If you want the password, I’m happy to give it out.

It’s different, being a blogger as a parent. Hell, everything is different as a parent. Different is good, great even.  My good friend M, who is my brother of another mother (and was Mel’s NYE 2000 kiss!), he and I could be personality twins, it’s eerie. He and I worked together and often stressed about the same things.  Though we went to the same school and were in the same major, we never met until working together a few years ago. Back then he was single, and Mr. Badger and I were just starting to think about starting our family. He and I had plenty of days where we just sat and groaned about life.  Anyway, he and his fiancee came over last night for dinner, and he asked me what was new. I said, “Nothing. Isn’t it spectacular?”. He agreed in a way those with my type of neuroses immediately recognize.

A calm life has never been quite so wonderful. Makes for very little to blog about, but it is wonderful.

Boring has never been so wonderful.

About a year before we started trying for a baby, I took up knitting. I’m not very good beyond basic square shapes, but I saw this one item in the “Stitch & Bitch” book that called out to me as a challenge: The Big Bad Baby Blanket.

I started and stopped, and started and stopped. I think I finally finished it 3 (4?) years after I started it. It’s getting cooler here at night, and took a breath and grabbed it out of the hiding spot it has stayed in the linen closet. V gets to sleep with it at night, my big bad baby.