bracelets

Does anyone really find this fulfilling? I mean really fulfilling? Don't get me wrong. I love my job. I love my kids. I love staying at home with them and having these years of closeness. And I don't want to sound ungrateful. Why is it that I feel so guilty when I express a certain sense of emptiness? Like parts of me are missing? But it's not fulfilling. Not really. Not even moderately. I wonder if there are people out there whose needs are truly met by this. Who don't wish, sometimes, that they were out in the world, talking and laughing with other adults rather than at home making play-dough and banana cake. I wonder if any of this has to do with my being pregnant and feeling like a prisoner to my body just like I'm a prisoner to my world sometimes.

Leo loves to dress me up in bracelets. If he can't find any bracelets he puts hair elastics all over my wrists until my hands go numb. He likes to see me bejeweled. "Do you look so pretty?" he asks. "Will you be my best friend?"

Alright, I'm trying...

I wonder what the potentials of this blog are...

I mean, I could just use it to record some scrambled thoughts, jot down bits of life so I can look them up later, print them out and savour them when I'm old. Or maybe I could make it all snazzy and post pictures of inspirational house-fraus and quotes about living your own life, somehow, in between unloading the dishwasher, cleaning up dead mice (shudder) and wasting hours searching for lost shoes and tests that were supposed to be signed and returned three days ago.

I could post pictures of my life, I suppose. But so many of the things that look like still-life snapshots to me look strange and cluttered when I get them on to my camera. I love the still life quality of my house and my yard. The way that things separate and glow in certain shafts of light: A rocking chair in the sun that I long to sit on. A coat hanging on an unpainted plaster wall. No one else seems to see them, though. They are difficult to notice amidst the general clutter of hot wheels and lego, leftover cheerios and discarded rainboots that should probably bother me but somehow seem to escape my notice.

I'm going to have to think about how I can use this blog to its best advantage. What kind of blogger do I want to be?

It's been a while

Well, I suppose seven months is long enough to go between posts. My two year old is now one month shy of three and 'grumble bee' is a thing of the past. Now, he kills ants. He catches them between his little fingers and squishes them or, even worse, takes off their heads. It's revolting but better than ripping up my hostas. I choose my battles.

It's hot for the first time in months and it makes me afraid of the summer to come. I'm expecting another child in August. That's a third boy for us. What is it about having one gender of babies that makes people feel like they have the right to make disparaging comments about my family?
"Another boy, oh that's too bad."

"A boy again? I bet you were disappointed."

"A boy? Well, for goodness sake, go for genetic counselling next time so that you can get a girl!"

I like boys. I don't like rude people.

I cleaned a bird out of my pool cover today. It was tiny and drowned. There is a dead mouse under my dining room bench but I think I will leave that for my partner to deal with. I can only deal with so much death in one day. And small deaths are the hardest.

We also planted cucumbers and rosemary today. And a geranium that Leo chose at the garden centre to put in the middle of his special flower pot...already filled with the impatients he picked out last week. He likes to plant. Lots of dirt...and ants to hunt. We've already planted radishes and onions and garlic and raspberries, beans, tomatoes and herbs. I'm trying to encourage my kids to eat more vegetables by growing our own. And it fills our days with something growing, other than just my pregnant belly and my love handles. Little leaves and flowers to surprise us all.

All for now. Hopefully I'll be more prolific in the months to come.

Forgive me, I'm new at this.

The curtains in my kitchen are not red. In fact, there are no curtains at all in my kitchen. No windows, unless you count the top of my back door. But someday I'm going to have a wood frame window in my kitchen that opens outwards so I can leave it open and listen to the rain and it will have red curtains, patterned all over with little white poodles or maybe purple ones, with yellow collars.

Leo's been ripping up books again. Leo is the tyrant two year that I live with and I hate it when he rips up books. He can grind rice krispies into the living room carpet, throw grapes at the lamps, shove hot wheels up the hose of the vacuum cleaner and I will shake my head and shrug like the defeated mothers of two year olds everywhere have learned to do. But when he starts pulling pages and pop up flaps out of books I get mental. It's a book for god's sake. Eric Carle's blood, sweat and tears went into this. Some things have to be held sacred. So, Leo looks up at me holding shredded pages and says "caterpillow". How does one stay mad at someone who calls caterpillars "caterpillows" and bumblebees "grumble bees"? I can't.

Well, that's it. His fifteen minutes of independent play seem to be coming to an end and my moment of independent thought is about to end with it. Off to pick grapes out of my lampshades.