Life with Toogs

Only Jack and Diana and I were home this evening, and Jack was confined to quarters for yet another incident involving poop and his underwear. The Dude is a cheerfully incorrigible little guy, absolutely confident in his mother's love. At dinner, when it finally came out that he'd been sitting in what we might delicately call "a mess" for goodness knows how long, he was utterly unrepentant.

"Are you going to spank me, Mommy?" he asked nonchalantly.

"No, Jack," I said wearily. "I'm not going to spank you, because neither that nor anything else seems to produce results."

"Okay," he said. "Are you going to make me help wash out the underwear?"

"Yes. Young man, you had stand in one spot and not move so that it doesn't go down your leg."

"It won't," he said. "See? I'm moving around now, and the poop isn't going anywhere! Am I going to take a bath?"

After the bath we all shut ourselves in the bedroom and I started to clean up, again. The bedroom is often a disaster. Five children, three beds, one room -- you do the math. It's not even as if we're short on space. We have the largest house of anyone I know, and it contains five perfectly good bedrooms: the master bedroom, the front room, the back room, the princess bedroom, and the attic bedroom. Yet three of them sit empty, collecting dust and the detritus of secret clubs, and all the small people and their toys wedge into the back bedroom. While Jack perused Calvin and Hobbes from the comfort of his flannel-sheeted bed and Diana wandered and sang and talked at me, I sat down to sort the Legos from the Duplos and put each in their own bin. The Legos and their larger brethren were scattered all over the room, pushed into corners, under the crib, sifted through several random buckets of toys. The process has a charmingly progressive feel: as I took each bucket and separated out not only the Legos and Duplos, but the train tracks, the building blocks, the castle blocks, the army men, the letter puzzles, the cars, the socks, and the miscellaneous, a pretty sense of order began to pervade the bedroom. I like to engage in these futile little tasks now and then -- picking up Legos, potty training -- to remind me that all is vanity. Today you attempt hygiene, tomorrow to dust it shall return. Even as I worked, Diana was busily pulling blocks from the bin and setting up a tower, because it's always more fun to play with the toys when Mommy too is playing put things in boxes.

Diana does not answer to her name anymore, and if you tell her that her name is Diana, she will contradict you: "I'm Dudley Do-Right." (What she actually says is, "I'n Dudley Do-Wite", but we'll pay her the courtesy of big-girl orthography.) Tonight Dudley Do-Right wore a bandolier of Daddy's old belt over her fleecy footy sleeper, and a big cowboy hat over her new Ramona haircut, and Jack's six-shooter. I pity the mustache-twirling bandit who tries to pull one over on her. Dudley has assigned various people to be her sidekicks: Julia is Nell, Jack is Horse, and Isabel, in a very suitable bit of casting, is Snidely Whiplash. That leaves Eleanor, who is often writing some story or other, as the Narrator. Me? I'm Inspector Fenwick, who is "all for putting Stokey in the pokey".

Darwin is Red Wood, the logging magnate.

Even Dudley Do-Right has to get some rest, which involves nestling in the crib with a comforter, Grandma's ducky quilt, two pacifiers, and a big Curious George anthology. Jack was already asleep, worn out with his and Calvin's villainy, so Diana and I said prayers by ourselves. She stood in the crib and snuggled against me and babbled something that sounded like it could have been the Hail Mary, if you listened closely enough.
"God bless Diana," I whispered as I made the sign of the cross on her forehead under her Ramona bangs, "keep her safe, give her sweet dreams, and make her pure and holy."
And she reached up, just like she sees her big sisters do every night, and blessed me back.

Sick Daze

We are struck with the revolving cold, which is slowing going around the family. Darwin has remained (and will remain, I hope) immune, but so far everyone else is in some stage or other of invalidism. I spent yesterday in bed, sleeping as much as possible, while the kids either slept off their own colds or sat rapt in front of the computer. Thank goodness that Netflix streams entire seasons of Tintin and Phineas and Ferb.

Today different people are in different stages -- some more energetic, some laid quite low. All I've done today is sleep, break up the occasional fight, and address Christmas cards. It's not a bad life, actually, when my sinuses aren't either too blocked or too drippy.

I'm grateful, actually, that this didn't hit us in November, or I never would have reached my 50,000 words. Stillwater fans, I'm still writing, but the past week with this cold creeping upon me has been very unproductive. I'd find myself staring stupidly at the screen, wondering how to construct this difficult sentence: "She raised her head to look at him." Then I'd check Facebook, because surely someone there would know. Then I'd go to bed.

***

For your listening pleasure: Must The Winter Come So Soon, from the opera Vanessa by Samuel Barber, sung by Susan Graham:



Anna Egan and I are going to try to record this over the Christmas holidays. If it's passable (more a comment on my playing than her singing), I'll post it.

Not Stillwater

There will be more Stillwater, I promise. Events called me away from writing this week, but I am once again slogging it out at the computer. Unfortunately, what's currently on the page is about as coherent as the Hungry Birds Twitter account, but I know you all will be too kind to mention it.

Speaking of incoherence:

The neighbor gave us a big stuffed Pikachu a while back. I hate this thing. It's larger than life and twice as ugly, and it kicks around the floor collecting dust until someone uses it to whomp her siblings. The six-year-old loves it because it's soft and gaudy and a link to all the Japanimation she never sees at home. The other week, she was sent to the office for insisting to her religion teacher that I read to her from a Pikachu Bible.

"Oh?" says the teacher. "Your mom's upstairs. I'm going to ask her about it. I want to see this Pikachu bible."

"She didn't bring it," says Miss Six. "She only reads it at home."

In the car on the way home, she was utterly unrepentant, and indeed, kept digging herself in deeper.

"What on earth possessed you to tell your teacher that I read you a Pikachu Bible?" I asked.

"I said: 'It is the Nab of Pikachu translation'," she declared proudly.

"Oh, the Nab, huh?" At least she's reading, right?

The moment we arrived home, she was bursting through the kitchen door yelling, "Dad! Did you hear I got sent to the office for saying that Mommy read the Nab Pikachu Bible?"

At least I'm pretty sure that this is a first in the "Sent to the Office" files.

Here is Pikachu and the Nab Bible

Poetry Corner

The budding poetess, age 9 1/2, has been composing a book of poetry.

Introduction 

This book is the cause
Of the shake
That is said
To make
Your child
Run wild,
So preparations you make
Must awake
The banshee in style.
Give it clocks
And blocks
And your husband's best socks.
So education
Be the agent
Of the cure. 

Malcolm 

Malcolm the dragon started to see
That he had never paid his fee.
But when he tried to pay his fee,
The man in there started to pee:
"You are too scary to pay your fee."
So Malcolm the dragon quite legally
Has never actually paid his fee.

Your interpretation is as good as mine.

FrankenJack

Here's Jack with his stitches, yelling, "Fire in the hole!" That's a guy who doesn't let it get him down.

Raining, pouring, etc.

I had been hoping to churn out more installments of my serial this weekend, but life took a different turn. On Saturday I was in the ER for ten hours with my mom, who was in intense pain, accompanied by nausea, vertigo, and fever. She was about as sick as I've ever seen anyone, and it was scary. It turns out she suffered a severe attack of previously undiagnosed diverticulitis, and will be in the hospital for several days to recuperate while the infection is being treated. I came home and crashed on Saturday, and then fell asleep while writing last night, so I'm miserably behind on my word count for NaNoWriMo. Maybe all is not lost yet, though.

Also, please remember in your prayers Darwin's grandfather, who is fighting pneumonia and seems to be in his very last days.

Also, Jack went to the ER on Wednesday night after a collision with the corner of a slate-topped table and returned with three stitches in his brow. He's very pleased. We call him FrankenJack, or Jackenstein.

Hope your weekend was quieter, dear readers!

Bedtime

It was one of those evenings that was going slowly, mainly because MrsDarwin and I were trying to have conversation as if the children were already in bed before they were and this distraction was preventing us from giving the bedtime routine sufficient attention to achieve our objective.

I had seen four children safely into beds, but miss five-year-old was elusive and so in keeping with the desultory mood of the evening I headed downstairs with thoughts of an evening cup of coffee. As I reached the landing I saw a form lying on the bottom step, a form exactly as long as the step itself and clad in a brown fleece footed sleeper that would have blended into the wood of the stair had it (the sleeper) not been covered in pink hearts.

We regarded each other for a moment.

"Are you waiting for a piggy-back ride?" I asked.

She nodded quietly.

I sat down on the bottom step and she climbed onto my back to be carried upstairs. In her bedroom, I drew back the covers, laid her down, and tucked the blanked up to her chin.

She stretched and I heard a strange rustling sound.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Oh." She smiled and reached inside her sleeper. "I forgot and left my deck of cards in there."

Always something up her sleeve.

Why We Write

I feel like we keep it pretty real around here. Neither Darwin nor I has an internet persona; we write as we are. We've been around for six years, and long-time readers have a pretty good grasp of our personalities, enough so that any time we've met internet friends in person we've hit it off instantly. On a lark, I pulled up Darwin's first post on the blog, and reads much like something we would write now, albeit we're no longer under thirty and have more than two children now.

So I was surprised by a recent commenter's suggestion that posting something was "out of character". If I've posted it, it's in my character to do so, n'est pas? We've always treated the blog as a self-published magazine, and fill it with articles about what interests us at the moment. We have no overarching agenda, whether political, evangelical, or cultural, and we write to please ourselves. As a result, almost no topic is off-limits, and very few filters apply. We are as we post.

However, because we blog candidly doesn't mean that the topics don't shift over time. Darwin, to give an example, used to write extensively on evolution, but that subject has been covered here; the discussions have been had several times, the same objections answered over and over again. Time to move on. As I scanned the past several months' worth of posts to see what impression we might make on a new reader, I realized that a) Darwin does most of the heavy lifting, anymore, because I'm too lazy to sit down and pound out a post most of the time (ask him how many times recently I've said, "I should write about that," and then didn't get around to it), and b) all the fun personal stuff has migrated off to Facebook, where people know us well enough that they ought to expect quotes from Tropic Thunder, and incessant kid anecdotes, and dumb homeschooling failure complaints, and articles about beer for breakfast and Youtube videos of hip-hop economists and rapping tea aficionados, and pleas for someone to buy my dad's house (again).

And that's a loss. Because although we do discuss everything we write about (that's why I don't have to read Darwin's stuff about money theory, RL: I hear about it enough in person), that's not all we talk about, not by a long shot. We also sit around at nights yakking about why The Horse And His Boy should be made with Bollywood stars playing the Calormenes, and the boy down the street who was trying to hit our power lines with a garden hoe, and how even in my dreams Darwin manifests a mastery of markets and pricing strategies, and whether men who follow game theory are pimping mac daddies or just lame, and occasionally laughing ourselves stupid over Samuel L. Jackson declaring, "That's it! I have HAD it with these motherf---ing snakes on a motherf---ing plane!" We don't always have to share it, but don't be surprised if we do.

The Eternal Ruption of the Spotless Hind

I've realized that we don't post much family or personal stuff on the blog anymore; most of that has been relegated to Facebook. But my awesome artsy friend Bernadette has typed up most of our recent Facebook statuses for all to read, so if you want to know what goes on behind the scenes in the Darwin family, here you are. For example:

Daddy: “Boy, you need to go potty.”
Boy: “Won’t go potty.”
Daddy: “Why not?”
Boy: “The cats been peeing in my potty.”
Daddy: “What? The cats don’t pee in your potty.”
Boy: “Hate those stupid cats peeing in my frog potty.”

Yeah, that's how we rock the potty training around here.

Speaking of the potty, over dinner we had a lively family discussion of diarrhea as a result of Darwin recounting the Italian folktale about Jesus and St. Peter wandering the countryside looking for hospitality. You can read it below -- scroll down to section III, Hospitality.

Strengths and Weaknesses

There is a sheet of writing here on the desk, at which I've been staring.

frist pasin
Ariabask Ariabask
tern with your tow on your naee
forth pasisan
Peaca Peaca
Ariabask
leep and land in frist posison
Plea frist posisan

What keeps this from being complete gibberish is that I know it is the handiwork of Julia, age 7, who is a notorious speller. And an accomplished dancer. Interpreted, it reads:

First position
Arabesque Arabesque
Turn with your toe on your knee
Fourth position
Passe Passe
Arabesque
Leap and land in first position
Plie first position

It never fails to amaze me when I watch Julia dance. All three big girls have taken dance lessons from time immemorial, simply because I have no interest in hauling kids to soccer or taekwondo. Eleanor likes tap better than ballet, and I grant that she taps vigorously and with a certain aplomb. But Julia has a lithe elegance and grace that transcends her heritage from either parent.

Watching one's child excel at something, particularly in some unique discipline, is a fearful and wonderful thing. I choke up watching my pretty girl whirl and extend and leap. I envy her careless ease in movement. I worry both that I push her too hard because I see so much potential in her, and that I don't provide her with enough opportunity to train that talent. Should I be driving her in to take classes at the BalletMet? Does it really matter at age 7, anyway?

These mental gyrations will remain only thought exercises because it so happens that we live within walking distance of the local arts center, which has a perfectly acceptable dance studio. For now, it seems my time and effort would be better spent in imparting to the young ballerina something that comes easily to me: the rudiments of spelling. Even a naturally talented dancer is going to have trouble leeping and landing in frist posison.

My graceful girl

Good Friday Snippets

For many years, Good Friday was a day I successfully spent almost entirely on spiritual reading, liturgy, and manual work around the house. Now the kids are at that age where it is more or less impossible to create a sense of solemnity all day -- or even for a short period of time. So here are some realistic moments from Good Friday at the Darwin household.

---

Eleanor, our eight year old, was caught watching Electric Company on the computer when computer time was verboten, and sent to her room. "I'll show you, I'll do something terrible." Several moments later, a stuffed panda bear falls halfway down the stairwell with a jump rope tied around its neck and the "panda's" voice cries from upstairs, "Oh no, I've hanged myself."

---

Julia, (seven -- coming up on her first communion) at dinner, "I think I'd better try some wine. I need to know what it tastes like." Takes a sip. "Tastes like... wine. I better add some water." She adds some. "Tastes like... wine with water in it."

---

Jack (2.5) looking through The Last 1000 Years picture history. "Sword. King. Henry the Eighth."

We rushed over to check, and it was indeed Henry the Eighth that he was pointing towards.

He kept leafing through and identified Louis XIV as "king", Peter the Great (in armor) as "knight", the Vietnam War as "gun" and then reached a page entitled "Social Revolution" which showed rioters burning things in protest over Apartheid. "Oh nuts," says Jack, pointing to the riot.

---

A week ago, our venerable vacuum attained the interesting habit of smoking and sparking whenever connected with an outlet. We considered taking it into a repair shop and spending more on it that it's worth, but among other things it's an upright, dating back to before we put hardwood into our old house, and our new house has no carpet at all. So we got a new friend which arrived today (things had got rather dusty in the interim) and suddenly everyone wants to help with lots of vacuuming.

Finally we know how to motivate children to do chores, but it's way too expensive to do repeatedly.

---

Perhaps explaining where Jack learned to visually identify Henry VIII, Isabel (5) was going around this afternoon singing "Mommy is attracted, to Daddeeeeeeee! Daddy is attracted, to Mommeeeeeeeeeeee!" to the tune of Henry, Henry.

We cracked up, but Julia advised, "Don't kiss! Don't you dare kiss in here!"

---

But now the two eldest are engaging in some Lectio Divina with Highlights and the next two in the food chain are vacuuming the landing upstairs, so I'm going to go catch a bit of quiet.

Past Expiration Date

Every so often, as a parent, you make the mistake of trying to get one last thing done even though it's past the kids' bed time. This evening I fell into this trap in attempt to make Julia (age 7) and Isabel (age 5) clean their room before bed. The following dialog ensued:

Darwin: Julia, you're the expert on fashion. You pick up all the clothes that are on the floor and see if they are dirty or clean. Clean clothes go in the appropriate dresser, dirty clothes go in the basket I'm taking down to wash.

Julia (angrily piling clothes in the basket): I'm good at telling if clothes look good, not if they're clean.

Isabel (perched on top of the radiator -- not picking up toys as directed -- and kicking her legs): Oh, that's easy. Just smell them, and if they smell disgusting, they're dirty.

Julia: That would be all of your clothes.

Isabel (indignant): No! ... Just two or three.

Bed time for Bonzo...

Risky Business

This post, my one nod to Valentine's Day, is dedicated to Enbrethiliel, to whom I promised I would write up an account of how Darwin and I met and matched.)

I am happy to report to the organizers of campus student socials that freshmen mixers work. Darwin and I met at a dance three weeks into our freshman year. I wore a bowler hat that I'd borrowed from someone on my floor, and a flannel shirt (it was 1997, after all). The swing dance revival was in full flower, and Darwin and I attempted the form with great vigor if less polish. This in itself was notable -- I was, and remained for years, agonizingly self-conscious about any public display of learned skill, and yet that evening I threw myself into the twirls and twists with abandon. Then we hung around until 3 am, talking of matters of great import to the freshman. The bowler hat (which belonged to Molly Johnson; thanks, Molly!) must have been a lucky charm.

That was Friday. On Monday, I sat pondering both Darwin and homework. I had been assigned, for Acting class, to Take a Risk and write about it in a journal. This made less than no sense to me -- for one thing, the professor had been less than clear about what a Risk was, and so I had a hazy sense that I was supposed to set the cafeteria on fire or moon my roommate. While kicking around these uninspiring options, I pushed around the papers on my desk, saw the index card on which Darwin had written his phone extension and box number, and thought, "Maybe I should call Darwin and see if he wants to go for a walk." Almost instantly my heart started racing and I broke out into a cold sweat, which I considered positive indicators that I'd found my Risk. For several moments I planned and scripted and jotted in my Acting journal and made sure that my voice wasn't too breathy, and then I seized the phone and dialed. He, of course, wasn't in. I left a message in studied tones and jotted in my journal that the stupid Risk had been pretty anticlimactic. Upon the instant the phone rang -- Darwin calling back to say that he'd meet me in five minutes. Five hours later, I returned to my room, upgraded my Risk assessment, and collapsed in bed.

My professor scribed an approving check on my journal entry and noted in the margins, "Take more risks."

The next week consisted of fitting in classes between all the time we spent together, talking and ever talking. The amount of free time in the schedule of the college freshmen four weeks into the semester is astounding, and Darwin consumed all of mine. We exulted over mutual interests, aligned our mental libraries, developed in-jokes, and began to sync up culturally and personally. Among other topics, we bonded over unlikely romantic prospects: he had been paying mild attention to an inoffensive girl who was revealing decidedly unintellectual tendencies, and I had left at home a vestigial boyfriend of the same bent. How did one relate to these mundanes? One day in the cafeteria, the girl headed toward our table, and as Darwin waved her over, I thought, "He doesn't smile at me like that." And then I knew I was in trouble, and in love.

Before going off to college, Darwin had read Brideshead Revisited, which had (perhaps unrealistically) colored his impression of the charm of the undergraduate education. In homage to Sebastian's teddy bear, he took up the affectation of going about campus in the company of a stuffed ferret named Ignatius. You must remember that we were freshmen and by definition foolish, but it is a fact that Ignatius was wildly popular with the ladies and spent the night in the rooms of several females. One Tuesday evening (a week and a half after the freshman mixer) after we'd shut down both the dorms (closing time: 1 am) and the student center (2 am), we stood outside my building, putting off saying good night. Darwin had Ignatius in his backpack, as usual, and as I was lingering halfway through the door, he offered, "Ignatius wants to know if he can kiss you goodnight."

I packed a lifetime of analysis into three seconds: the vestigial boyfriend, my acting professor expounding upon the Taking of Risks, complex variations and analysis of the scene before me and whether or not I could save face if I made the wrong gamble. Then, declining Ignatius's kind offer on the pretext of not caring for furry lips, I counter-offered, "But you can kiss me good night, if you want to."

Fourteen years later, he's still kissing me good night.

The old reprobate, fourteen years later. Looks like he's done pretty well for himself.

Not Our Own

It's been a rougher than average weekend, perhaps in great part because MrsDarwin and I had been away house-hunting for the last three days. We don't feel particularly like we just had a three day vacation, because it was a pretty hectic three days, with work hours spent apart, and most of the time spent in a real estate agent's car. But regardless of whether we felt rested, the children felt like they'd been with relatives and off-routine for the last three days, and although grandparents and aunts and uncles are more fun than Mom and Dad, deviations in routine and personnel seem always to create extra anxiety (or at least misbehavior) in the young.

Thus it was with a sort of resigned frustration (and after having already navigated explosions related to mass and fashion) that we realized both that we would need to go get the week's groceries for the Cinceinnati household before making dinner, and that it was necessary to take the baby (who might cry if left with non-nursers), the two-year-old (who was feeling clingy after being without parents for three days), and the four-year-old (who had been blameless all day and felt that she had lacked attention as a result). Needless to say, we would much rather have spent the hour at the grocery store along together, or with only the comparatively inert baby, and our fears were justified when behavior at the store was just as antic as we had feared it would be from the two older of our three companions. They, of course, had a blast. It was just we who would have rather forgone the opportunity to spend an hour chasing small children in and out of carts and putting back things young helpers believed should be in our cart.

As we were checking out, I was thinking to myself, "We should have just left them, even if they would have been upset about it. this is madness. One of our last hours together for a week, and it's been completely frustrating."

When I realized: As parents, we are not our own. It would have been a lot easier and pleasanter for us to have taken only the baby, and faster too. But as parents, we gave that up a while ago. Sometimes we need to go the less satisfying route when it's the one which the kids need.

It certainly won't be the last time I learn that lesson. It doesn't come naturally. But although it's often most important to come up with the most efficient and low stress ways of parenting, at others it is important to do things that aren't the most efficient, or that are actively frustrating at the time, and to do them with good grace, because we are no longer our own.

Into Great Silence

If things have been rather quiet from us of late, it's in part because both halves of the Darwin clan spent the first half of the week virtually without internet. I'm now in Columbus, starting my new job and living in one of these furnished "corporate housing" apartments, and the rest of the family is in Cincinnati at MrsDarwin's ancestral home -- where the truck with all our worldly possessions just arrived yesterday and buried everyone in boxes.

One of the things I can tell is going to take the most getting used to in this divided existence we'll be living during the week for the next couple months until we find a house in Columbus is the utter silence of living alone in an apartment -- something which, now I think on it, I have never done before. Coming home to the apartment Monday night, especially after the whirlwind of preparation and moving over the last two weeks, was disconcerting. I'd only got half-way through putting away my first load of groceries and setting out food to make dinner when I realized that the silence was pressing in hard from every direction. I could hear the neighboring apartment's TV like distant voices. The rain against the windows. The quiet murmur of the refrigerator. Even the internet, which can serve as a sort of ascii-only pub at which at least some of the regulars are always in, wasn't up yet. As I sat down with food, I found myself switching on the TV and watching a sitcom (something I haven't done in years) just to avoid the utter, oppressive silence.

We're already winners!

Darwin was given a box of instant coffee by an Indonesian coworker who just returned from visiting his relatives back home. The coworker was more generous than he knew; inside the box was a packet that contained a 2000 Indonesian rupiah bill!



We've won 22.22 cents.

Seven years ago today, we received another surprise gift, unexpected but welcome. Unlike the rupiah, this gift was priceless.



Happy birthday, Julia!

Changes

They say a change is as good as a rest, and maybe it is, but a change is not equivalent to a rest. They're two very different things, and we've been long on the one and short on the other.

Darwin is off to another state for a job interview. The changes are already starting: the realtor from church is coming on Sunday to assess the place; the garage is getting cleaned out; the cell phone bill is swollen with the contact demands of not one, but three long-distance job prospects. The view alters day-to-day as we consider and reconsider real estate affordability, dream job vs. proximity to family, the latest interview call, and the dead prospect that suddenly springs back to life. The days are busy and exciting. The evenings are filled with abortive attempts to debrief each other over the roar of hungry and sleepy children.

Tonight we got in the wrong lane driving away from the airport and ended up on a farm-to-market road which ran mostly parallel to the efficient toll road. At first I sought to turn around as soon as we could, but the road stretched on through Texas countryside like the straight and narrow path, unsullied by crossroads or driveways. I didn't know where I was, exactly, but I knew where I'd probably end up. On we drove, gradually soothed and then seduced by the beauty of the hill country and intricacy of the light playing through the creeping storm clouds. Soak up the scenery now, girls, I urged; the days are growing short.

Yes, very soothing, and then the clouds opened and a downpour of diluvial ferocity attacked us as we sat in construction traffic. Change: not restful.

Too Darn Hot

Once upon a time in Texas, men and women did things. Blood feuds were enacted, brooding Gothic novels were written, railroads were built, ranches were fenced off. The men fought, drank, swung hammers, sang. The women bore children, sewed quilts, slaved over hot stoves, and glowed (not sweated). And they did it all without air conditioning.

Man, those guys were tough.

Now it's 2010, and we, hot house flowers all, huddle in our cooled enclaves and wilt when we step out into the blistering heat of a Texas summer. I don't know how the pioneers and ranchers and authors did it. We've been without air conditioning for a week now, and the heat has sapped all creativity or energy here. I can't understand how anyone got anything done. I can't fathom why any children were ever born in May.

The typical image of a Tex-Mex hacienda is a cool low-roofed adobe structure with tile roof and floors and sparse furnishings. Know why? It's because when it's hot, you just can't stand clutter. Those overstuffed Victorian living rooms are a product of the great white north -- you would go insane if you had to look at all that junk in this heat. The very idea of an antimacassar is disgusting.

Not cool.

Cool.

Some crank has recently written a book called Losing Our Cool, about the evils of air conditioning and how it's ruining the planet. Whatever, buster. If Al Gore can maintain his green cred and still have four HVAC units cooling his supermansion, I think I'm entitled to my one puny unit.

Note the four HVAC units on the left of the house.

I will lavish plenty of invective on the damn fool architect who designed the cheap, mass-produced house which I call home. Even when the thermostat upstairs is hovering cheerfully at 92 degrees, there's air moving by the windows. I can feel the breeze, taunting me. If only it would waft its way into the house, it would be bearable, if not comfortable. And yet it does not come into the house, because the house is designed to be shut up when it's hot. Even box fans in all the windows can only compensate so much for poor architectural conception. Maybe if architects and developers and builders had to work in offices with no air-conditioning, we might start to see some real advances in green building.

In the meantime, it's too darn hot.

No more heathen babies in this house

Her head still smells delightfully chrismatic.

Three Weeks Wonderful

Baby has a perpetual expression of suspicion or concern. This is the result of having four loving older siblings.

Having a three-week-old baby is just perfect. I love babies -- I just don't love the work and time it takes to get them to this state of infant gorgeousness. If the stork really did drop off children fully gestated, I'd have one every year. Too bad biology don't play that way...

Baby is at her best in pastels -- even this pink outfit is a bit livid for her complexion. We call her the Peach because 1) she looks like a peach, and 2) she's got hair.

And just for kicks, here's a three week postpartum picture: