The Little Birthday Things

I'm not a big birthday celebrator.  I mean me, personally.  I don't mind going to a big bash or toasting with champagne with anyone who wants to throw down for their birthday.  Birthdays just weren't a big deal in our house.   We would go out to dinner and my parents would get me something for a gift when I was young.  Today, we still go out to dinner and they get me a little gift.

For the past several years, they renewed our membership to the museum of art.  I remember when I was in college and I had a little Honda Accord.  I loved my Honda, but it needed tires as the current set was in danger of rupture or collapse.  My mother said, "we could get you tires for your birthday", and I remember thinking that was the greatest gift.  I'm not sure what other gifts they got me for my birthday over the years, but I remember those tires and how practical a gift I thought it was.

I got phone calls and texts and emails for my birthday this year and a few presents.  My favorite present though was what my husband got me as a surprise.   The morning of my birthday, we had gotten the children ready to go to school and we were about to get them in the car.  He was reaching up on a high shelf for some reason and I had no idea what he was doing.

It turns out he was reaching for a little cake.  It was an eight inch cake from the grocery store with grocery store icing and no words or anything special.  He said, "I got you this cake and wanted to make sure you had it now in case you wanted some for breakfast."  What a great husband.  My favorite boring cake that I love mostly because I grew up eating those cakes and they just taste like birthday to me.

He took the children to school and when he got back we each had a piece of the cake.  When the children got home from school we had lunch and then all had a little piece of cake and sang happy birthday to me.  It was fun and the cake was just small enough for those two meals.

Thanks daddy, you know me so well.

The Big Boy Update:  My son knows the street we live on.  Today on the way home he was talking about the cities we were driving through (on our ten minute drive).  We asked him if he knew what city we lived in and he said no.  We told him he lived in Raleigh and could he say, Raleigh?  He said with completely clear diction, "I can't say Raleigh."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "Where's the poppers?"  My daughter likes to push down the little beverage type indicators on drinks from restaurants.  After she did mine at lunch, she asked daddy where the "poppers" were and then said, "I want to pop yours daddy."

Fitness Update:  Our trainer usually has us do things in minute increments and then rotate.  Sometimes he has us do several things in a loop for a certain amount of time, usually five minutes.  Today he had us doing six exercises, twenty-four repetitions each for twenty-two minutes, no stopping.  And to think I thought I was in shape.

Having Been There Helps

I had a meeting today with someone I've known for the past two years.  We're only casually friends, but he and his wife are the kinds of people you think could be better friends possibly in the future. Today, he told me something unexpected. 

We were meeting to discuss something related to a project we were both working on.  I had been concerned because he hadn't been responsive to my emails and more than one other person had become frustrated with his lack of communication.  We weren't sure if this was normal and his workload was overtaking his free time or if he just felt like it was okay to ignore our reasonable requests for communication and information.  In short, we were getting frustrated with him.

So when we sat down to discuss business, I was completely taken aback when he said he needed to catch me up on some things that were relevant to his situation.  What I didn't expect him to tell me was that for the last four months, he and his wife had been having issues, were now living separately and were getting a divorce.  

I felt terrible.  I was concerned because he wasn't getting back to me on my emails, and he was trying to hold it together while his life fell apart around him.  I told him I'd been there, as I'd gone through a divorce too, and for some reason that seemed to be a bonding thing. 

He told me more and more about the situation--more than I would have expected him to tell me given how well I knew him, but I didn't mind.  I know what it's like to feel like you've failed at something you made a commitment to.  It doesn't mean you did something terrible or you or your partner are a bad person, it just means things didn't work out the way you planned them.

And it hurts.  I suppose he needed to talk about it some and I was not only sympathetic, I was empathetic because I went through it.  Bottom line, our situations were fairly dramatically different in many ways, but feelings are still feelings and they can be hard to deal with. 

The Big Boy Update:  "The cars are racing after the other cars."  We were at a restaurant tonight and our booth looked out towards a large street.  He could see rush hour traffic speeding by in both directions.  I think he thought it was a big car race.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "Owie!  Owwww!  Stop!  Stooooopp!"  My daughter messed her pants up just as we got in the car tonight.  Apparently it wasn't comfortable in her pullup because she tried to exit her car seat violently the entire ride home while yelling at us the whole time.   Usually, she doesn't care.

Fitness Update:  Cold.  Congestion.  Cough.  Three C's that don't make exercising fun.  But we made it anyway.  At least I can't smell when my daughter's diaper is dirty and we're ten minutes from home.  My husband had to roll down a window.

Why They Cry

I looked over at my husband's computer screen today to see him scrolling through pictures of young children crying.  I moved closer and saw the captions on these pictures.  And then I started to laugh.  I laughed and laughed and couldn't stop laughing.  I asked him to send me a link to the page and then I sat at my computer and laughed some more.  I called my mother and told her about the site and she started laughing too.

Children crying doesn't sound funny, unless you've seen them in action.  Toddlers will cry for the most absurd reasons.  My son has cried because I moved his milk glass away from the edge of the table.  He's cried because he needed to put his shoes on so he could go to a pizza party.   My daughter's cried because I'm trying to give her the iPad (so I can get my iPhone back).

There were pictures of children crying for all sorts of silly reasons, and I could identify with all of them from personal experience.  As I scrolled down the site, I noticed the father who had started it all by posting pictures of his son online, had a book coming out.  I'm going to get that book and I'm going to put it in our powder room for visitors.  For now, I'm just going to scroll through his site and laugh.

http://www.reasonsmysoniscrying.com/

The Big Boy Update:   The sleep window.  My son has this window of falling asleep that I try to avoid.  If he falls asleep in the car just before you get to your destination, you're okay, but if he's been asleep more than five minutes, you're going to have a very cranky child on your hands when you wake him up.  Waking him up is another trick altogether.  He is the captain of Team Limp Limbs after ten minutes asleep.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The true tantrum.  My daughter had a real tantrum this evening, which isn't like her.  She was upset because she wanted juice and I wouldn't let her hold the cup (which was paper and unstable).  The tantrum went on and on and I tried not to laugh too much after all the pictures of children crying I had looked at earlier today.

Boop

After writing last night's post about my days at IBM many years ago, I remembered lots of other fun things we used to do during the work day.  We did manage to get a lot of work done, but we were fortunate to not be in a severe environment where work was suppose to be all work and not fun.

There was this phone system throughout the lab of about a thousand people.  You could dial their four digit extension and the phone at their desk would ring.  There was another thing you could do with the phones that I'd never seen before.  It was a walkie talkie-type feature.  You typed something like #7 and then their extension and you'd hear a "boop" sound and then you could say whatever you wanted. 

The thing about Boop (that's what we decided to call it), was the person you were "booping" had no control over it.  You could choose to answer or ignore a call, but if you were in a meeting with your manager and someone wanted to play a trick on you...well, let's just say you hoped your friends were kind.   They might boop you saying, "don't forget about your proctologist appointment this afternoon."

Boop was untraceable too, so if you disguised your voice you could get away with it.  Fortunately, we were mostly a mischievous versus a malicious group and even our managers got a laugh out of a well-executed joke (most of the time).

Thinking of those phones reminds me of a time when my neck and spine were first giving me problems.  I spent a lot of time on the phone while typing and holding the handset against my ear using my shoulder.  After several hours I was in a lot of discomfort.  My manager found me a headset, something that was apparently quite a search, and I was able to talk pain-free from then on.  

The Big Boy Update:  Superman.  He loves his superman shirts.  He has one that has a cape that Velcro's to the back.  This afternoon he wanted us to watch him as he flew down the hallway.  He backed up, grabbed the bottom of his cape with his hands and ran forward, making his cape flap up and down with his arms.  We laughed so much we asked him to do it again.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   Coin crazed.  She got up on a chair and figured out she could put her hand in the back of the slot machine to pull out the coins.  She played with coins for the next hour.

Has It Been That Long?

I reconnected with a a long-ago friend from when I worked at IBM as a co-op many years ago.  We did some catching up asking the, "so what are you doing now?" type questions.  We reminisced about our days at the development lab and some of the memories we had.  Then, I asked him how his two boys were doing.

His sons are thirty-one and twenty-nine now.  He gave me an update on them and I thought, "hold on, they were just kids when I knew him back then."  At that point I did some year math.  It's been twenty-five years since those days at the software development lab.  I felt old.

Maybe not old so much as aged.  I still feel in many ways like the co-op who came in and helped the team doing something called, "object-oriented programming".  I made a lot of diskette copies (3.5") and I installed OS/2 on I don't know how many machines.  If it was mundane and an actual employee didn't want to do it, they had one of the co-op do it.

And we didn't mind.  We were having fun as college students working in the real world, making an hourly wage that is still well over today's minimum wage.  We were also given email addresses, which in 1990, most people didn't have.

And we sent instant messages.  No one had heard of an instant message back then, but the VMS mainframe we used for internal mail had something called "tell".  If you knew the person's ID that you wanted to message, you could type, "TELL DELMONTE.J MEET FOR LUNCH IN THE CAFETERIA AT NOON?"   That little message would pop up at the bottom of their terminal screen and they could respond back just as easily.  It was high-tech, even if it was on a terminal green screen.

That was also when I found out how much of a time suck instant messaging could be.  You start a conversation about the funny thing your office mate is doing at her desk and the next thing you know, twenty minutes has gone by.

I was a lowly co-op back then, but I remember those days fondly.  All the IBM-ers were friendly and I felt like a real member of the team.  Four years later when I left (after being hired out of college to work with the same group), was a sad day.

The Big Boy Update:  He loves his teacher.  He got in the car after school and announced this to daddy.  Then, his sister said she loved Kica too.  Kica is so nice, I'm not surprised they feel that way.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The potty squat.  Today my daughter needed to go to the potty and had waited almost too long to make it.  As she was climbing up on the big potty she couldn't hold it any longer and just started to go.  She was only half-way on, feet and hands on the seat of the toilet in a position I can only describe as, "bug like".  She made it though, so I'm not complaining.

Fitness Update:  That tennis elbow, or whatever it is I have going on, became worse after a lot of pullups last Friday so Don had me do a legs-only workout today.  My legs are tired.  I hope my arm feels better tomorrow because my legs may revolt if this keeps up.

The Not So Terrifying Disposal

First, I have to tell you that the way my mother and I say "disposal" bothers my husband.  He says we say, "dispose-ALL" instead of, "dispose-sul" with a big emphasis on the "ALL."  I can hear what he's talking about and I guess the thing in the sink might be able to dispose of "all" things food-related, but regardless, that's not the word it's suppose to be, he says.

When I was a child, I was warned about the terrible dangers of putting your hand or finger or anything in the disposal.  The general level of warning was that anything that's within range just might get vortexed down there and be eaten to shreds and you would be very very sorry about the whole thing--if you survived, that is.  And for reinforcement, horror movies make this point utterly clear.

I have a disposal pusher stick I use today that I like, not because it keeps my hands and limbs away from the dreaded blades, but because by using the pusher, I don't have to touch food refuse, all mushy in the bottom of the sink.

We had moved into our house and I was cleaning out the sink one day and I was trying to get the little flaps of black rubber at the drain point clean when unexpected, the black rubber part came loose.  I hadn't broken the sink, this was a feature.  You could un-stopper the rubber part and clean it out, bleach it, disinfect it, whatever you like, and then stick it right back into place.  Oh, how very nice.

And that was the first time I had a really good look at what the chewing parts looked like in a newer version of a disposal.  The one we had as a child I seemed to remember had blades when you stuck your hand down there to get the teaspoon that had errantly fallen in.

But lo, our disposal didn't look so deadly.  Surely, it did a good job of gnashing up things, but there were no blades in evidence, only dull things that spun fast.  And oh, it was a good ways down there too.  

I still take care when using the disposal, but my fear of the swirling vortex of disposal death is somewhat less now.

The Big Boy Update:  My son went to work with Uncle Jonathan today.  For three hours he helped feed and give medication to dogs and pigs at a research facility.  He got to play with some of the dogs, including hiding in one dog's dog house and jumping out every time the dog came running back in with a big, "raaar!"  My son was very excited about, "bringing the medicine to the piggy to help with his elbow".  He is very tired tonight after all the excitement today.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "I got my fascier down", my daughter told me.  "Wait, you did what?  Hold on, I just put your pacifier on the top shelf of the tall dresser.  Not possible", I thought.  I had only put it up high five minutes before.  But sure enough, she had her pacifier down.  And I didn't see how she did it.  After talking to her and cajoling her into showing me what she did, she smiled, opened the door to the play room, drug out the small table, calmly climbed on it, then on to the shelf, stood up and reached up to the top shelf to get her pacifier.  As she was getting down I told her I was impressed.  She then decided it needed to go back on the top shelf, so she climbed back up and deposited it before coming back down.

Very Old Things

This is about some very old things I knew of as a child.  I would go visit my father's mother, grandma, several times each year.  She lived just a few hours away on the coast so it was always nice to go and see her.  Or wait, they were on the coast but now that I think of it, we never went to the beach when we went to visit her.  Still, we had a great time, even if sun and sand weren't on the list of things to experience for the day.

She lived in an old house.  I mean, OOOld.  At least to a young child, this house seemed old.  There was a wrap-around porch with a porch swing.  Paint was peeling everywhere or maybe it was more accurate to say that paint was still on the house in some places.   This was the home my father was raised in, so it was a magical place even so.

There was this enormous tree in the side yard that was climbable, although there were very few trees that thwarted me when I took a notion to climb them as a child.  Lots of times my aunt would be there too and some or all of my four cousins would be there with her.  Playing with your cousins in a large, old, creaky house with a big yard was about all the fun you needed when you were a child.

My grandmother had a sewing machine in her bedroom that was one of those very old sewing table things.  It was all black metal and there was a foot pedal you could push and things would spin.  How you would sew using this thing was beyond me, but since she did lots of delicate sewing, I supposed it was possible.

But the very best old thing in her house was something I heard about all my childhood, but never saw.  She had this huge freezer on the side of her kitchen.  She had it packed with layers and layers of frozen food.  She had, apparently, saved a piece of cake from my parent's wedding and it was most likely at the very bottom of that freezer.  I heard her or my parents tell the tale of the saved wedding cake slice many times as I grew up.

Talk about exciting to a child.  That's right, we're talking cake, and aged cake at that; and you know how much children love cake.  Surely if my grandmother saved a piece for all those years it must have been something to behold.  I wanted to see that piece of cake, even though everyone always laughed and said it would taste terrible by now.

I never saw the piece of cake.  When she died or when the freezer did, no one called to tell me they had found the long lost piece of cake.  It lives on in my memory though.

The Big Boy Update:  Locked out!  Today at a birthday party, my son needed to go to the potty.  He went in, selected a stall and I helped him get on the seat.  I could tell this was going to take a few minutes so I stepped out into the main bathroom area to check email when suddenly, I hear the door being shut and bolted.  "Well, this is an interesting development," I thought.  I told him to let me know when he was ready to be wiped.  A few minutes later another mother walks in and I explain I've been locked out for the first time and I'm not sure how long we'll be here.  She and I laugh abd talk about how funny kids can be.  Eventually, my son is done and he unlocks the door and I help him before we leave, him acting like this was a normal occurrence.  I am so glad I didn't have to crawl under the stall door.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "Where's the ca-der-pill-der?"  We were watching a short film of the book The Hungry Caterpillar.  My daughter was enjoying it to the end.  After that short was over, another story about the moon started, but we had a hard time listening because my daughter kept asking where the caterpillar had gone.