Which one of these is not on my iPod?
Lose yourself, Eminem
Suite for solo cello 1 in G Major, Yo-Yo Ma
You were meant for me, Jewel
Personal Jesus, Depche Mode
Bookends, Simon and Garfunkel
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
I should have gotten the iPod a long time ago.
I have always loved music. The car radio blasts, and whenever I cook, the small boombox propped in the living room window serenades me. But for the last several years I’ve been reliant on local radio stations. My CD collection is in heavy black binders that are impossible to go through and besides — I usually only like one or two songs on a CD and get bored if I listen to the same album too long.
For this surgery, Cute Husband was adament. Do it right. Let’s get you an iPod, and let’s have you load it with your music. Not just because he didn’t want to share his any more, but because I needed one of my own.
He’s such a nice guy.
It’s small and purple and shiny, and it came with the gift of $100 to load it up. This is astonishing to me. Back when I was buying CDs, $100 would buy about four or five of them, which would amount to about six songs I loved and about 30 I could take or leave. I would then make mixed tapes that would take about 15 songs each.
I’ve spent $80 so far and have 100 songs, about five hours of music none of which I want to fast forward through. I walk around with one ear bud in, shaking my little preggie self to songs I’ve missed without ever really realizing I was missing them.
This morning while I was loading some old favorites from college days, Renny scrambled into bed beside me and started wiggling her little body to the beat.
“I love dis song!” she said.
“I just bet you do,” I answered. “Why aren’t you dressed for school?”
“Can dis be my song?”
“Oh my, yes. You need to get dressed, though.”
“MY SONG!!”
“GET DRESSED.” I clicked the song off and stared at her. She hopped down.
“But you turn it back on when I come back, right? It’ll be my song?”
“No one will ever doubt it.”
She scampered off and came back a few minutes later, wearing a flowered purple dress and striped pink tights, her hair a filmy cloud around her head.
“Momma you promised –” I clicked the play button, it was back on, and she was shimmying.
The song?
Bitch, by Meredith Brooks.
I wake up to a pair of blue eyes staring over the mattress at me.
“Do we have school today?” Mare asks. She’s wearing a sparkly dress and has put her hair in a pony tail.
“YES!!” I say, trying not to sound over-the-top ecstatic.
“Oh, cool!” Long pause.
“Have you checked on Hermie?” I ask warily. Hermit crabs not being known to announce their deaths.
“I did! He’s alive, Mother!” (She calls me “Mother” these days.)
“How fabulous!! We did it!” I pop a hand out from the comforter and she slaps me five.
“Actually, Mother, it was really me. I did it.” And I realize she really did. All by herself. Which is good because she can explain to her teachers what the moldy green strawberry in his bed is all about. (“We experiment with what to feed him, Mother!”)
“You did great,” I say. Beside me, rammed between my ever-widdening backside and the body pillow, a second rumpled blonde head and pair of blue eyes perk up.
“I DID IT TOO! ‘Member dat whole night when you were at Greta’s and I took care of Hermie and he didn’t die?? — You have to tell your whole class about that. Tell them all: your sister saved Hermie’s life!”
See? We just might be up to a newborn, yet.
Do you live near Amherst, Massachusetts?
Are you kind, generous, with great kids? Do you think you know how to properly care for and feed a Sunbeam?
Sunbeam has chosen her college and is looking for hours next fall to help her pay for her education. If you’d like to apply to hire her, please drop me a note with your contact information, introducing yourself. I’ll pass it along to her and we’ll see if we can find a match.
Sunbeam is back from vacay. The girls lost their minds when she came in the door, covered her in loves, and within minutes Mare was making art, Doodle was naked, Sunbeam was supervising, and all was well with the world.
And then this:
“Sunbeam? Could you please get me da scissors?”
“Oh, such nice manners, Ren. But no, Sweetie, I don’t think so.”
“I just want to cut some paper. Paper. Dat’s all.”
“No, Baby, no scissors.”
“Why not?”
With a month still to go, no one in this house is rational any more. Ren is refusing to comply with the most basic of requests, Mare weeps at the drop of a hat, Cute Husband looks like he’s in Day 5 of Basic School Bivouak, and I’m not sleeping very well.
Late night ‘net surfing, checking up on Octomom, I found this:
Rush transcript from “The O’Reilly Factor,” March 18, 2009.
GUEST HOST LAURA INGRAHAM: Now, is there any indication that Nadya Suleman now is just completely overwhelmed and can’t handle this? I know she’s getting help from a philanthropic group, an Angels group that’s coming and helping with nanny work and so forth with the kids. But has she outwardly displayed any, you know, emotion of being just completely overwhelmed? Because I can’t — I can’t imagine how she’s coping.
SHANNON FOX, FAMILY THERAPIST: No. It’s interesting you would bring that up, Laura, because an indicator of her mental health would be that she would be overwhelmed. Any normal parent would be absolutely overwhelmed at the thought of eight babies, let alone bringing two home to six more kids. But Nadya hasn’t shown any sense of overwhelm or any sense that this is a momentous occasion, and that sort of indicates that she’s still living in this land of denial, that everything is going to be fine.
Oh, excellent. I’m super-healthy then because I’m only taking one newborn home to two older kids and I am FREAKING OUT.
“I wanted it to be stylish. Like a cow,” she says, blinking piercing blue eyes at me.
“Like a cow?” I repeat stupidly.
Ren had cut the front and sides short. Not bald, but short. She had bangs. I cried. I think it was the hormones.
So I waited until I was calmer before talking to her again.
“A cow?” I begin. She nods. I let a few long moments pass. Then I remember that earlier we had looked at a publicity shot for Parenting of me kissing her when she was not yet a year old.
And Ren had said, “That me! I miss that! I miss being a baby.”
“Did you cut your hair so you could look more like a baby?” I ask. She lights up.
“YES! I want it all gone. Like a baby’s.”
“Like Eden?” She nods and hugs me happily.
I feel sad and tired. Sometimes this is just so hard.
“Okay, let’s go to the hairdresser and see what we can do,” I say.
In the meantime, some pictures.
No, Ren, can you put your hand down?
Yes, Baby, I see Diego. Could you please put your hands down and show the world your mullet?
Thank you.
I resisted for a week. First I said, “I’m not sure where we would put the tank.”
Then I said, “What about the cats?”
Last I said, “Myamah-nahah … we’llseestopasking.”
Then maybe I dropped an e-mail suggesting to Mare’s teachers that if absolutely no one else could be found, if it were down to the last possible option, and everyone swore I would not be out of the family if I killed him, we could possibly consider taking on the class hermit crab for Spring break.
When I went to pick up Mare that day, her teachers met me with a 10-gallon moss-filled tank. And a basket. Full of hermit-crab care crap.
“Oh aren’t you efficient,” I said. Beside them, Mare glowed.
“You’ll be okay!!” she whispered to him, like an anxious mother transporting an ailing child by lifeflight. “You’re going to love our family.”
Yeah, like, if we’re the last thing you ever see, you’re going to be thrilled.
Hermie came complete with a basket of care goods including a big water pitcher marked “HERMIT CRAB WATER” a thing of salt, and other random stuff I should be more familiar with by now.
“You can experiement with what things the crab will eat,” I read from the Care Book. “Hey, Mare, what does this thing eat?” I asked.
“You can experiment!” she answered. Riiight. With, like, what? Peanut butter sandwiches? Left over corned beef? Someone give me a hint.
Cheerios, it turned out. And a little jar of pellets.
“I totally know where we can get an identical hermit crab when we need to,” Sunbeam said when she saw him.
“Thanks so much for your faith,” I said.
“And they’re cheap, so we can do it more than once if neccessary. What’s his name?”
“‘Hermie,’” I answered.
“‘BJ,’” Mare said. Sunbeam raised an eyebrow.
“You have a hermit crab named ‘BJ?’ For real?”
“No, no, Mare and I both think ‘Hermie’ is better.”
“No we don’t, I like ‘BJ’ and that’s his name.”
“He’ll always be Hermie to me, honey.”
Because when we have to bury him out back there’s no way I’m writing “BJ” on the plaque.
