Home/Work

 What compels children to do things like shave off one eyebrow? Can anyone explain this to me? I know that the child in question could not. When he returned from his father's house on Sunday, 12 year old E was missing one eyebrow. Totally gone. When I asked him why in the world he'd shaved off one eyebrow, he responded simply that it has been "an accident." He declined to elaborate further.

 

E, sans eyebrow

 

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 Now that the holidays have come and gone and I've had a chance to assess the post-Santa landscape here at Casa HickJu, I've come to the conclusion that there are two gifts that came into our household this year that shine above all others. No, I am not talking about the Apple iTouch that 14-year-old J received, and that she loves like it's her long lost best friend with superpowers and a no-limit Visa card. Nor am I talking about the uber-practical Garmin GPS system for my car that my mother so kindly got for me and Jon. (Why is it for Jon if it stays in my car? Because he no longer has to take frantic phone calls from me announcing that I have somehow ended up lost in the middle of rural Union County when my intent was only to run up the street to the grocery store for some milk and eggs. The Garmin is intended to get ME where I am supposed to go and thus, to prevent Jon from having to rescue me quite so frequently from my directional misfires.)

 

While these gifts were - and are - much appreciated and enjoyed, along with a number of other excellent favorites that various of us in the family received this year, I have come to the conclusion that the two VERY BEST gifts of Christmas 2009 were - drumroll please ......... pillows and basketball.

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Two year old C looooooves her big brother, 12 year old E.  And he adores his baby sis. They are really cute to watch together. But as much as he enjoys C, E isn't too happy yet about the new baby on the way, For starters, if we were going to have another baby, he wanted a little brother - or preferably no new baby at all. Both he and 14 year old J seem to find it fairly embarrassing that their elderly mother is pregnant....yet again. One more bit of evidence that our family is far weirder and more eccentric than anyone else's family, what with the babies and our big, old house that needs all kinds of work, and the fact that their mother raises a fuss over things other parents seem to accept without question, like abstinence based education.

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Jon and I get along so well it's kind of embarrassing. Seriously, when people hear me talk about the harmonious groove that our relationship inhabits 99.9% of the time, they probably think I am overcompensating in order to mask the reality of frequent fistfights and flying dishes. But no, we just get along quite famously. Jon is very, very easygoing, and he's also super smart about picking his battles and compromising - those key relationship skills you're always reading about.  His sensible approach to life centers me in a way I never was before; I am a better wife, mother and person simply because I get to soak up his sweetly calm way of going about his days. Also, as both of us came to our marriage with painful relationship failures behind us, we both really value what we have together. We rarely disagree about anything too strenuously, and when we do,we usually find a way to split the difference so that both of us feel okay about the outcome.

 

Lately, however, we have been facing our first NON-negotiable disagreement - one upon which we cannot seem to find a happy compromise - and it's over a parenting issue. Jon feels very strongly that his way is THE way, and I feel just as strongly that he should bend to my will on this one. What's this big, important issue that's got us sniping at each other? Well, it's about whether our two year old should have bangs or not. Yes, it's just that serious.

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 Yesterday, at about 2pm, while pumping gas and getting ready to drive to a work-related meeting about 45 minutes away from my office, my cell phone rang. I could see from the number that popped up on the caller ID that it was my perinatologist's office on the line, and that could only mean one thing: the preliminary results of my CVS test were in, and the genetics counselor was calling to give the news to me - news I was convinced would be devastatingly terrible. I took a deep breath, and answered the phone.

 

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On Monday - two days ago -  I had the Chorionic Villius Sampling (CVS) procedure done at my perinatologist's office, and I have to say, I sure am sure glad to have that  behind me. I had truly been dreading it because I am a coward about needles and medical procedures in general. I did have amniocentesis when I was pregnant with E (following poor AFP test results; he was fine) and with J (because of the weird virus I contracted in the first trimester).  However, both of those amnios were over a decade ago, so I had sort of blocked how unpleasant I found them to be from my consciousness.

 

 

 

 

 

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  A couple of blog commenters over at Mamapundit have asked this week whether everything is okay with me, given that I generally blog pretty frequently, but haven't lately. First of all, thanks for asking and caring. I really appreciate it :-)  The short answer to the question of whether I am okay is yes, sure, of course. I mean, my work is going VERY well (we've continued to gain some fantastic new clients in the past few weeks), although it continues to be insanely busy. The kids are all good; H officially finished high school in November - six months early. I would have preferred that he start college immediately, but he wants to wait until at least next fall, when his classmates will start, so he is job hunting. No luck yet, but he's trying. J and E (who just turned 12!) have started back to the second semester of 9th and 6th grades, respectively. J seems to be adjusting better to public high school, and she's really kicked her academic efforts up a notch. E is finishing up basketball season and getting ready to start his season with the travel lacrosse team. C is now fully weaned from her beloved milk boppies, and is talking up a storm. The other day she told me that the banana she was eating was "wondrous," and she also tells me sometimes that "nobody's perfect."  She's hilarious and adorable. So all is calm on the kid front.

Jon is starting tax season, and he's studying for the CPA exam (he passed half on the first try and now has to get the second half passed and under his belt). He's also been busy with various projects around our house, which turns 100 this year.  He just finished J's wonderful room remodel upstairs - meaning all three upstairs bedrooms (one of which was a large closet when we bought the house) are now restored -  and he's getting ready to dig into restoration of the giant downstairs junk room that will become a bedroom for C and Mr. Darcy. He turned 30 last week, and Dr. Neighbor and I threw him a big surprise birthday party that was a huge success.

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 Warning: this blog post is going to be VERY heavy on the whining, self pity and general depressive angst, so if that's a turn off to you, or if you just don't feel like listening, close the browser window now.

 

OK, you've been warned!

 

So I am nearing the end of my first trimester and I can honestly say that I have rarely felt worse in my life. I certainly haven't ever felt THIS bad for THIS long with no break or significant relief from super unpleasant physical symptoms. In fact, I have now been miserably ill for a month straight, and I have to tell you, it's starting to get me down. Yes, it's pretty much that bad a lot of the time. Even though I apparently don't expel enough actual vomit in any given 24 hour period to qualify for an official diagnosis of Hyperemesis Gravidarum (and I am grateful for that and feel tremendous sympathy for those women who DO end up dehydrated and on IV fluids during pregnancy), I can tell you that my level of functioning has been SIGNIFICANTLY impaired by this situation. As a working mom, it's necessary for me to reserve every ounce of energy and productivity for my job. So with a lot of focused determination and a gritty dose of, "I'll be damned if I will let this stupid nausea make me fall apart on the job,"  I am managing to do my work at pretty much the same level overall. I've made some adjustments - like trying to schedule as many of my meetings as possible in the mornings, which is my best time of the day - and working from home when I feel the worst, but I am getting the work done and staying on top of things with clients. Not an easy task right now, but that's my top priority because no one else can do my job or KEEP my job to support my family except for me.

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 I am really, REALLY starting to feel fed up with the unrelenting, ass-kicking nausea and fatigue that have come with this pregnancy. I have never experienced anything like it in previous pregnancies, and honestly, it's pretty debilitating. I know that some women vomit so much in the first trimester that they end up hospitalized, and I am grateful that this is not my situation. I only actually toss my cookies a few times every 48 hours. But I feel like I am going to throw up at any second for most of each day, and it's just wearing me out. The Zofran that other women describe as a "miracle cure" helped not at all, dammit. The crystallized ginger helps a good bit, but now I've eaten so much of it that even looking at it makes me want to retch. After 48 hours of nibbling the stuff non-stop to try to keep the nausea at bay, I just don't think I can eat any more of it.

 

Because I have a relatively demanding full-time job, I simply can't be off my game like this. My husband and family can help with the kids and the house right now, but no one else can do my job for me. I have to be productive most of the time, most days. But I have to admit that this week and last, I am truly struggling. I work for the nicest folks in the world, and my company is incredibly family friendly and accomodating, but I am extremely uncomfortable letting on just how bad I feel because of the unfortunate coincidence that this horrible first trimester nausea has come only 6-8 weeks after the weird, serious virus that knocked me out for most of October. The two medical maladies are unrelated; in fact, I am generally an incredibly energetic and productive and healthy person. But after being so sick for almost an entire month in October, I really don't feel comfortable asking for even minor sympathy for the fact that lightning seems to have struck me twice in the past four months with the virus and now with this extreme pregnancy nausea. So when people at work ask me how I am feeling, I mostly say "great" in as cheery a voice as I can muster.  If I am feeling particularly horrible, I may say I am feeling sick, but I try to do it in sort of a jokey, self-deprecating way. I just don't want to become known as that whiny, sick, underperforming employee, so I am trying to keep the extent of my nausea mostly on the downlow 'til it passes, which SURELY will be any day now, right?

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With each passing week, I am feeling a little more confident that this hugely surprising pregnancy is going to stick. I still haven't become completely invested in it emotionally because I've been disappointed too many times. However, I am now past the point I miscarried the others, and I certainly have enough pregnancy symptoms to be reassuring (I am sick as can be and exhausted most of the time, which is no fun but does seem to make a viable pregnancy more likely). Tomorrow I will have my second ultrasound. My perinatologist, who has seen me through all of these miscarriages, told me at my first appointment that he would consider it a huge milestone if I showed up for my next appointment on December 28 still pregnant. And unless something happens between now and tomorrow - totally possible, given my history - I will indeed be still pregnant when he sees me tomorrow.

 

Because we were not trying to get pregnant - in fact, quite the opposite - I am still adjusting to the idea that I am actually expecting. I had really gotten adjusted to the idea that we were done. I was kind of happy about it, actually, after a period of grieving the fact that we would not be able to have one more. Although Jon in particular was disappointed that we wouldn't be expanding our family further, we both recognized the practical benefits of ending our babyquest. After all, he and I both have busy, full time jobs, and together, we already have a 2 year old, an 11 year old, a 14 year old and an 18 year old (although H is not living at home, he still takes huge amounts of my mental and emotional energy). We have a very tight budget (!!!), a giant, old house that needs a lot of work, three dogs, two cats, lots of friends and extended family, etc, etc, etc....   In other words, we have a very full life. A good life. Why rock the boat?

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As has been noted many times before, whomever named the nausea that sometimes accompanies early pregnancy "MORNING Sickness" clearly wasn't a pregnant woman. For those of us unlucky enough to have it, it's really more like "24-7 Sickness."  So far in this pregnancy, I have been sicker than in any of the others. I've even had a few days - like all last weekend - where all I wanted to do was lie in a warm bath or my bed and moan. It's a terrible combo of nausea mixed with debilitating fatigue, and it really takes everything I've got to get through my work days. I am very grateful that my employer allows me to work from home when I feel the need ( I am often more productive at home when I feel just fine). If I feel really bad, I can work in my jammies from home, and run to my own bathroom to retch as often as I need to without drawing undue attention to myself from my coworkers.

 

Yesterday I felt so bad that I finally called my doctor and asked for something, anything to help with the nausea.I explained that if I didn't get some relief soon, I could lose my job due to poor productivity, and then we would lose our house, and my children would starve to death (yes, I was feeling a bit melodramatic and desperate after 24 hours straight of throwing up even a small glass of water.)  They called in a prescription for generic Zofran, which I began taking last night. 

 

 

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 Remember when I got so sick back in October? And remember that one time, when your own doctor mentioned to you that antibiotics can interefere with the effectiveness of certain types of birth control?

 

Well, umm, yeah...so Jon and I are, well...SURPRISE!

 

It looks like Baby Virus Amoxicillin is due sometime this summer.

 

 

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  Six months ago, I blogged about my struggle with how to handle C's extreme attachment to her bottle, which she calls her "boppy."  Fast forward to December, 2009, and we now have 29 month old C still completely addicted to the boppy, to the point that going anywhere requires a lengthy process of estimating and preparing the right number of boppies to cover us while we are out. Overnights still involve at least one drippy boppy, leaking milk all over the bed. And because she always drinks so much cow's milk from her boppy, she has been completely resistant to drinking any other fluid, including water in hot weather. Last, she sometimes fills up on cow's milk and thus, won't eat meals of real food. Oh yeah, and there's also the fact that we have been spending approximately half of our disposable income on gallons and gallons of cow's milk each week. In case you didn't know this, milk is not cheap, particularly the hormone-free, organic milk we buy for her in hopes that she will not hit puberty before preschool as a result of all of her milk consumption. Clearly, the time has come to end C's milk boppy addiction, and that's what we've been working on this week

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I love, love, love the holidays. In fact, I am a bit of a Christmas nut. I can easily see myself morphing slowly over time into one of those slightly off kilter (yet lovable!) women who have entire rooms of their houses devoted to year-round Christmas villages with lighted windows and faux snow and toy train tracks crisscrossing the floor.  For the moment, however, I have to content myself with the one month each year when I get to haul out my ever-expanding collection of Christmas ornaments and decorations and do up the house. And that's what we did last weekend. Here's the photographic evidence.

 

The weekend started out with a rare early December snow in Tennessee. E took baby sister out behind our house to check it out. She's been wearing a fleece snowsuit (among other costumes, which are now her wardrobe staple) for months, so it was nice that she finally had an actual REASON to wear what she calls her "snowbunny suit.)

 

 

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I recently ran across a Pew study I heard some other women discussing in which parents were essentially asked numerous variations on this theme: "how much do working moms, like, TOTALLY SUCK?"   Respondents were queried as to whether "the increase in working mothers" is "good" or "bad" for society, and were then asked to rate working moms of young children as "better" or "worse" than other Things Americans Hate, such as gay people having children and  - I kid you not - straight women NOT having children (for the record, working moms scored worse than those sad, sad barren women, but better than the lesbian pervert moms.)

 

 You get the picture here.

 

 Women with children were also asked whether they would "prefer" full time, part time or no paying work, and not surprisingly, most women said they would prefer part time work. Well, DUH. Wouldn't pretty much EVERYONE prefer not to work full time, if all options were actually an option? Seriously, if you asked everyone in America - men, women, parents and non-parents - whether they would prefer to work 8 hours or more a day, 5 days per week,  what percentage of people would tell you that they would voluntarily choose to work 40 hours instead of 20 hours? But when mothers say they would prefer to work part time in a study like this, it's held up as indicative of some kind of societal trend illustrating working mothers' dissatisfaction with their lots in life.

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Some background: I work full time, outside the home. My better educated, 22-months-younger sister Betsy (she has a graduate degree, while I dropped out of law school) is deemed a "stay at home mom," even though she probably works harder and works more hours than I do, ferrying her three kids to and from school, piano lessons, doctor appointments, etc.  Betsy also does most of her family's grocery shopping, laundry, pet care, birthday party planning, school volunteering - you get the picture. She also helps out with my children on days when my outside-the-home work makes it impossible for me to, say, get one of them to the orthodontist at 11am on a Tuesday. Although she has primarily been a stay at home mom since her eldest daughter was born 11 years ago, she's also sometimes worked outside the home on nights and weekends as a hospital-based childbirth educator.

 

Clearly, this is a busy woman who works a lot, and works hard. 

 

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 The most e-mailed story at TIME at the moment is the new cover feature from the issue that hit the stands three days ago.  The story takes a fresh look at a topic Babble covered 24 months ago, namely, our societal tendency in the past decade to "overparent" our children. The fact that the TIME story is already being emailed around like crazy doesn't surprise me. It's a hot topic, to be sure; In fact, the interest is high enough that my 2007 piece on overparenting remains one of the most-read stories at Babble, even two years later.

 

The TIME piece looks at overparenting from a different angle than I did, instead highlighting what their writer has christened a "slow parenting movement," and making the case that there is now an identifiable, cultural "backlash" overparenting. While I found TIME's story well-written and very interesting, I am not sure they have this one quite right. I certainly agree that there have been several excellent books and feature stories published in the past few years on how and why parents should slow down, relax and enjoy their kids. However, as thought provoking as these recent books have been - especially Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy and Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv - I don't believe the books or the writer-advocates who were interviewed in the TIME story are actually having any meaningful impact on how we are raising our young. 

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Here I am earlier tonight, talking to the very clever students who run the University of Tennessee's digital journalism showcase,TNJN. I had a great time, and appreciate having been asked.

As you can see in the photo below, I am wearing my defacto version of adult Garanimals - black, black and then some more black. These black on black ensembles are easy to throw together without being all matchy, matchy. Or at least that's what I like to tell myself.

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 As I have mentioned, I have been working A LOT lately. The reason I am working a lot is a good one; the area of business that I oversee for our agency is booming. That's fantastic and it's especially fantastic given the fact that the economy is not booming. I am trying to take full advantage of the opportunities that are happening for the agency and for me right now, and that has meant a lot of hours in the past six months.

 

I have been looking for a new mother's helper to handle afternoon duties (school pick up, tumbling lessons, lacrosse practice, etc) for a while - and I finally found a wonderful person (YAY!) last week. But week before last, I still had no help. So that means E had to stay in aftercare at his school several afternoons a week. And he HATES aftercare. He hates it. There is nothing specific he hates about it; it's just the idea of it.Most of his friends at school have mothers who do not work, or who work part time. Almost none of them seem to work the kind of demanding hours that my job entails. So he sees them go home right at 3:30 pm when their moms arrive in a line of gleaming minivans and SUVs to pick them up. But he has to stay in aftercare when he would really rather go home, like "all the other kids." But such is life. I explain to him often that my job means we have a house and food, but right now, he only sees that my job means....aftercare.

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Lately I've been thinking a lot about being a bad parent.  Specifically, I've been thinking about ways in which I have been a bad parent. H turned 18 a few weeks ago, so I have now had ample opportunity to screw up. And I have screwed up, in big ways and small, and in important ways and in ways my kids will never remember.

 

These days, mothers are continually encouarged to ditch the guilt and to avoid blaming themselves for anything that happens with their kids. This is obviously a big switch from decades past when mothers were assumed to have complete and total responsibility for every aspect of a child's emotional, physical and intellectual well-being.  We were blamed for everything from autism to sexual orientation to whether our kids went to Harvard or prison. Basically, it was all our fault.

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 Last night C and I were driving home from the grandparents' house - just the two of us - and for whatever reason, I decided to drive around the block before pulling into our driveway. As we drove past our house, where 28 month old C had clearly been expecting me to stop, she suddenly began crying, "No, No mama! Go back to C's house! That's not C's house!"  She was really upset until we finally did arrive at C's house, less than 30 seconds later. This was the first time I realized that she now has an awareness of which house on our block is HER house, or that it matters to her.

 

C has been a creature of routine and habit (much like her father) since birth. She likes a regular schedule, with naps and bedtime handled in much the same fashion every time. She loves her white noise machine, and she howls in real grief if we ever (God forbid) forget it when we spend the night as a family away from home. She actually begs for the "noise maffine" by name. She likes me to read books in a certain way, and she notices if her toys or doll furniture change places. While C is more aware of and attached to certain elements of her physical environment and routine than many other children her age, she's no different than any other older baby or toddler in being completely enamored of the few people who care for her the most: mama, daddy and in her case, grandparents and older siblings. All of these things - her family, her house, her white noise machine - already matter to her - a lot. And she's still just a baby, really.

 

 

 

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So lately, C has been an absolute joy to me. She's 27 months old, talking in complete sentences - which are generally hilarious - and she's increasingly engaging in real play with her toys. I love watching her "cook cook" at her play kitchen, or pretend that it's time for the Breyer horses (passed down from me and her previously horse-crazy older sister's collection are ready to go to sleep in their big wooden barn. She has this fantastically entertaining and ongoing conversation happening with her hands where she says things like, "It's okay hands! Pretty soon we'll be out of this carseat and we can play!" 

 

Here is a video of C playing with her toy kitchen. Please ignore frightening animatronic monkey heads on the dining room table, next to Jon. Suffice it to say that E went through a phase about four years ago where he was obsessed with monkeys, and we now have all these wildly expensive yet creepy, lifelike elecronic monkeys that we are trying to figure out what to do with.

 

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Seventeen  days ago, I got sick with a virus. The sudden intensity of how hard and fast the virus hit me apparently gave some kind of nasty wallop to my autoimmune system and thyroid. In these past 17 days, I have been hospitalized for nearly a week, readmitted to the hospital for another 24 hours, and have spent the rest of the time in my pajamas, trying to both get my job done (my boss has been AMAZINGLY WONDERFUL about letting me work from home) and mother my children, plus be some kind of wife/friend to poor Jon, who has been stuck doing everything I cannot do (which is a lot when you are talking about 4 kids, 3 dogs, a giant old house, and - yes, believe it or not - his own paid employment at which he's actually expected to appear on time each day and do good work. 

Even after all the CAT Scans and blood tests and spinal taps and MRIs, the docs still can't tell me exactly what the virus was that did this to me. All I can tell you is that right now, I feel like I was hit by a Mack Truck and I am trying to recover. The last doctor I spoke to (during my hospital readmittance late last week) said he strongly suspects H1N1, but we will simply never know for sure. Whatever it was, it has given me a really excellent reminder of what it means to be humbled in the face of something bigger and more powerful than I am.

You see, I am used to being in control, on top of things, busy and very productive. And ever since this illness hit, I have been unable to be any of those things at even close to the level I am used to. I remain absolutely exhausted - bone tired in a way I cannot even adequately put into words. Getting dressed wears me out. Standing up for periods longer than 10-15 minutes wears me out. I am able to sit in a chair at home and work - phone and computer at hand - but even that still kind of wears me out. At this point, I have not yet returned to my actual office. I had hoped to do that today, really hoped to, but there is simply no way I was up to it today.

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(NOTE: H, J & E all gave me specific permission - yes, I asked -  to blog about this particular topic before I put my typing fingers to laptop ;-) )

 

 Before H became a teenager, I always kind of imagined that he would be willing to talk openly with me about his dating life. I am not sure what made me imagine such a thing about a teenage boy (maybe I watched one too many episodes of "The Brady Bunch," where Greg talks girl trouble with his parents...)  but I just sort of thought that if I were a good enough mother, with a good enough relationship with my adolescent son, he would want to share these important things with me. But Greg Brady he's not; there have been no late night chats about the state of his love life over milk and cookies in our kitchen. In fact, he just turned 18 (!!!), and in the past 6 or 7 years, he's only deigned to actually introduce two girlfriends to me (or to anyone else in our family). Any attempt on my part to proactively elicit specific info on any particular girl only encouraged him to become MORE clammed up.

 

So I kind of gave up, assuming that some day, should he ever decide to - let's say -  become engaged to be married or something, he will at at least send me an invitation to the wedding. (I hope.)

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In late 2002, my three eldest kids' father and I separated, followed by a legal end to our marriage about 18 months or so later.  Our kids were 10, 6.5 and almost 5 years old at the time. So for the past eight years or so, their father and I have shared legal custody 50/50 - and for the past two years or so, we've also shared physical custody 50-50. In a practical sense, this means that every Sunday night, our kids switch houses for the week.  They spend one full week at their father's house, and then they spend one full week at my house. Their two homes are only a few miles away from each othe, and to the extent we are able, their father and I attempt to keep all other elements of their lives (aside from the actual switching of houses) the same whether they are at Dad's house or Mom's house: sports, friends, time with extended family on both sides of the aisle, etc. We do attend two different churches, but we really do try to maintain consistency across the two houses ("try" being the operative word here; we do not always succeed).

 

I have a number of friends who are divorced from their kids' fathers, and each of them handles this custody sharing thing a little differently.  I have one friend who has 100% custody, and her kids rarely ever see their father (his choice). I have other friends where the kids live primarily with one parent, and the other parent is more like an "extra" than an actual parent. That doesn't mean that the kids love that other parent any less, but their relationship with him (and yes, it's usually a him) just isn't the same as the one they have with the parent who actually cares for them on a day in and day out basis. I also have one friend who essentially has a commuter relationship with her kids. She has a very high-powered job, primarily located in another city from her kids, so she flies in to see them once or twice a month. They chat and email and text and Skype every day, and she takes them on fabulous vacations in the summer. She decided that her children's need for the stability of a single home (and her ability to earn the money it takes for their father to mostly be a stay at home father and to allow all of them to remain in that stable, comfortable, single home) was more important than what she believes to be an artificial 50-50 time split.

 

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