More attempts at holiday merriment

On several recent occasions, we've taken a break from the usual Connect Four evening action to wonder if there might be a visual holiday treat on television. And usually, there is! We've seen some Santa, some Rudolph, some Charlie Brown, some Frosty the Snowman -- even some Muppets. We have several of these on DVD; I have no idea why it's a thrill to see that they're in the TV listings and make a plan to watch them then instead of just getting out the DVD. A throwback to childhood, when we didn't have a choice? Who knows, but I've heard we're not alone in that foible.

One night, there wasn't a holiday show per se, but some station was showing Home Alone. Which kinda counts. It's Christmastime in the movie, after all. And Macaulay Culkin used to seem festive, before he grew up and got married at age 17 and drove drunk and did drugs or whatever the heck it was that he's done.

I thought Lizzy would get a kick out of the movie, which (for those who haven't seen it) breaks down into Culkin looking cute, doing impossibly grown-up things when his family, who thinks he's a little kid and therefore worthless, fly to Paris and leave him all alone in their cavernous, though tackily wallpapered, home; and the leadup to the big shebang -- Culkin setting all sorts of traps to foil the attempts of two bungling burglars from invading his home. Oops! Did I give anything away there? Sorry for the potential spoiler. The clever-little-kid schtick is a lot more annoying than I remembered, that's for sure.

Of course, the burglars are stupid, and of course they fall for every trap, exactly as planned. But as this latter part of the movie unfolded, Lizzy began to get visibly uncomfortable. Then she said she wanted to stop watching the movie.

Matt and I asked her, why? What is it about this that's bothering you? It's okay! They won't hurt the little boy! He's taking care of himself just fine, and after all, it IS just a movie!

But that wasn't it. She felt really bad seeing the burglars getting repeatedly and rather nastily injured. Burns, falls, sharp broken ornaments on their bare feet -- they were having quite a time of it. And she didn't like to see it.

Matt and I were kind of touched. You just never know how a kid will take something. Poor Lizzy is as sensitive to weirdness in movies as I was at that age, I'm a little sorry -- yet glad -- to say. Sorry, because it means we have to be on our toes, and deal with nightmares, etc. Lizzy talked herself into my bed that night because "what if she has a nightmare?" Yet I'm glad because it means she's thinking of others, at least sometimes.

let the time stamp show ...

I keep waking in the night to remember little bits of things I want to blog about, but then I don't have time at work. Yes, as I've said, these aren't vital things, but what's a blog for, if not for near-daily non-vital things?
I often, as virtually all moms of infants do, find myself doing tiny ridiculous -- and in my mind, heroic -- things for my baby. For instance, here I am, awake at 5 a.m., when I don't HAVE to be awake until about 6:15. And, well, yes, you have an excellent point there -- Maddie is not, by any stretch, requiring me to blog. However, she IS requiring me to pump just a couple more ounces of milk at odd times. I could let her go a little hungry, of course. "You won't take a bit of formula? FINE! STARVE 'til I get there, kid!", and sometimes it inadvertently turns out that way. But, when she wakes to eat at 5 a.m. and then falls back into a blissful, sated slumber and there's, uh, one side left to go, what's a mom to do but get up, extract a pump from the sterilizer, and pump out the rest for later that day?
The point of this blog post is not meant to be how wonderful I am, but more that I feel a need to have someone SAY how wonderful I am. (no, relax; not you.) I am compelled to relate my heroics to Matt. Not all the time, but often, in the morning, at some point in our commute, I'll casually let drop -- often as he's proclaiming tiredness, which is mean, because it kind of negates his tiredness, since the implication is that it's not due to quite the selfless sacrifice that mine stems from -- how I rose at 5 a.m. to dutifully pump so that Maddie can have her three full bottles. Matt's a pretty good sport about it -- he's never called out this martyr complex, and, in the manner of good husbands, he attempts to muster up some token supportive response. But why do I need to have this exchange?
Worse yet, why do I see this flaw in myself, yet push past the self-awareness and keep doing it, anyway? I guess that's just how small a person I am.

If it's not clear, although the above is strictly true, I'm relaying it in a more whimsical tone. I'm not compounding my issues by heaping self-pity for my immaturity onto my other sins here.

P(o)C

My new computer? The one I spent my bonus money on, that I was so excited about?
Appears to be a piece of junk.
THIS is why I never owned a computer. Yes, in college, in the early-to-mid '90s, I used a typewriter. Trust me, it was pretty backward then, as well. But I just didn't trust a 'pooter with my precious midterm papers or whatever. I didn't want a crash the night before an assignment was due.
But life pretty much demands a computer, and now I'm kind of exctited about it. Also, I have a hubby around who's willing to help! He's no computer tech by trade, but he still has a lot better clue about the workings of PCs than do I.
And Macs, too. He bought himself one earlier this year. He's still pretty impressed with it. But, alas, the Apples are out of my reach, in terms of price. And I'm not altogether certain I'm 'hip' enough for one, anyway. I'm just barely hip enough for an iPod. Just b-a-r-e-l-y.
So my Dell arrived last week. I've been on Matt to hook it up, so that I could compose my already-late Christmas letter on the thing.
He did. I composed it. But sans printer or internet. These things, you see, don't seem to work.
And tech help is a joke. They, clearly, are trained in the art of misdirection, delay, transfer and blame deflection. It's a technical problem! Not a hardware problem! Hooey.
I don't know whether to exchange or return, at this point. I'm so frustrated. But I have no guarantee that any other (affordable) system would be better.
What to do? Except cry a little. :(

myth preservation

Last Sunday evening, we rolled out to embark on one of our northern Virginia Christmas traditions: The Festival of Lights. The park service throws up a bunch of lights that cars can drive through. It's kind of neat. Not sure if it's twenty dollars' (and, at times, a long wait in line) worth of neat every year, but tradition's tradition, right?
Or, as Zoe of Baby Blues would say: Maybe tradition is French for boredom.
Regardless ...

We had the Christmas tunes a'crankin', OF COURSE, and as a particular one started up, Matt said to Lizzy: "Oh! Listen to this one! It's pretty funny. You'd probably like it."
I groaned, recognizing the early strains of the song.
So Matt turns it up, just in time to hear, "You may say there's no such thing as Santa, but as for me and Grandma, we believe."
"Huh?" says Lizzy. Or something like it. And, "What's wrong, Mom? You don't like the song?" as I groaned some more.
"Uhh, never mind," said Matt, as we skipped on to the next song.

So, you ask. When DO we tell Lizzy "the truth"? Uh, ummm, errrrr, I don't know. But not this year, I guess.

Fiiiiiiive goooooolden mooooonths ...

The wee chubster is five months old today! How CAN this be possible ...
I'm thinking of my little darling more today even than usual. Trying not to stew too much in my sense of the unfairness that someone else gets to hang out with her all day. And then we arrive home in the evening, for the cluster feeds and fussy pre-bedtime.
Oh, but the weekends are sweet.

Yes -- I need to take some sort of photo to accompany this mini-post. But the days have been sliding out from under me even worse than usual for the past few weeks. I've finally composed my Christmas letter (biggest challenge -- containing it to one page), but have yet to, you know, make sure it fits on the printed paper of choice; print it out; address envelopes; mail them. So a lot of folks will be getting theirs late. I have absolutely no confidence that I have many friends' current addresses, either. Did I update them when I received last year's Christmas cards? Or when I received e-mails, letting me know of such changes? Unlikely. How shortsighted of me.
If you'd like to guarantee that you receive such a missive, please comment or (safer, I suppose) e-mail me your address. I'd be happy to spread the love. :)

hunger striker

I keep hearing about how we're all doing our part to get through uncertain economic times these days -- talking to our kids about how they'll get merely a half dozen unnecessary gifts for Christmas this year instead of the usual 20; that sort of thing.
Maddie appears to be doing her part. Granted, her biggest expense is diapers, but I can't blame the kid; not much she can do about that. A baby's gotta 'doo' what a baby's gotta do, right?
Yesterday, I left only two bottles of expressed milk at the day care. She takes three feedings each day there, but some days I've only got two bottles to give. Production varies, and not according to anything that I can really figure out. Some days, there's just less than others, for whatever reason.
So on those days, the ladies make a bottle of formula for that third feeding.
Last time it happened, last week, she refused it at first, then drank it an hour later, then waited to vomit it all over herself and her chair until just after I'd shown up to collect her -- two hours later!
Yesterday, she flatly refused it entirely. She was peacefully asleep when I showed up, and the ladies told me she hadn't eaten since 1. (it was then about 6:15.)
Sheesh. Stubborn little thing. But I guess I'll save some money on formula this way.

She's been sleeping much more erratically for the past week or so. I suspect it's weather-related, somehow. She seems a lot more congested, and wakes up more, and the only thing she seems to want is to be suckled a little bit before passing out again. It gets really annoying for me when it happens every hour and a half or so. Makes me long for the 'good ol' days' of the every-three-hour feed.
People ask occasionally if she's sleeping through the night yet. To which I reply with a hearty laugh, an eye roll, and a "don't I wish."

The Dark Knight effect

So Lizzy tells us this morning, very matter-of-factly, as we pull into the day care that also serves as her before-and-after school care, that a girl (her age, as it turns out) told her yesterday that if she didn't get up from the chair Lizzy had just sat down in, she was going to "stab her in the eye with a pencil." Hmmmm. A familiar scene, for anyone who has seen summer's charming blockbuster.
We asked what happened next, etc., etc., and Lizzy says she ignored the girl, who kept bugging her, so she told a teacher about it, who told Lizzy to "tell the girl to chill out." Lovely proactive intervention on his part. And it sounds like the girl didn't chill out. Lizzy says she eventually moved off to somewhere else to avoid the girl.
It's hard to know what actually happened in these instances -- was Lizzy more at fault than she told us, or even than she realized? -- but regardless, Matt and I were pretty horrified by the ghastly quality of the girl's threat. It's one thing to threaten someone; it's quite another to do so in such a graphic manner.
There's a reason we don't watch PG-13 movies with our kid, especially ones that should have been rated R in the first place. If only more parents followed suit. Granted, that's quite judgmental of me. But ... gimme a break with this. Perhaps at least have a conversation with your kid about how a deranged, amoral killer is not a good role model?