the squibix family blog

We are just getting to the point now, after seven years of blogging, where we have real repeat visitors who we haven't met in real life. For some reason this frightens me more than the fact that all our friends and neighbors have intimate access to my breasts. I mean information about my breasts, INFORMATION about my breasts.

Anyway, I like to think that everyone gets a chuckle from the blog, but if you met me in person you'd come away with the impression of a woman who is elegant and gracious at best, and at worst at least a semi-functional human being. On the blog I may come off as a nervous political extremist with untreated OCD, but that merely underscores the most humorous aspects of my personality.

I'm really a lovely and gracious potitical extremist with untreated OCD. I won't like, come to your house and give birth all over your carpet while reciting psalms. Unless you're into that sort of thing.

This all came into my head last night when I woke up panicked that people are going to read yesterday's post about Helen coming to dinner and think that maybe I didn't have a good time or enjoy the company or even behave graciously, on account of my humorous but debilitating anxiety. Obviously this is not the case. I have anxious thoughts, but they're not debilitating. I am capable of having a lovely evening. Joy and satisfaction are indeed sensations that enter into my consciousness. I just never find them near as hilarious as the scattershot things my brain finds to worry about.

For example, leaving the house on Sunday I said to Dan: "I don't like to leave the dishwasher on when we're out, but I think it's okay this time."
"okay."
"Because we're all in the car together, all four of us, so the worst that can happen is the house burns down but none of us die."
"O...kay..."
"And it probably wouldn't burn down because it's raining so much right now. So the worst that can happen is our kitchen gets destroyed."
"O.... kaaaaaay..."
"No, the worst that could happen is the fire would start in the basement with the electrical cords running TO the dishwasher, and the basement would be on fire but we wouldn't know it, and then when we get home we smell something funny but we go in the house anyway, and right at that moment the floor collapses underneath us and we ALL die."
"o. kay. You know that's highly unlikely."
"I think I should maybe turn off the dishwasher anyway. I don't like to leave it on when we're out."

See? hilarious. Yet written by a person who is still functional enough to drive you to the airport. I'm glad we cleared this up.

Using same guidelines from the last pair of pants I made, I created a linen outside pant and orange liner pant. I sewed the first together and realized my pattern was vastly too small. So I added stripes on the sides and an extra gusset in the back.

Necessity is the mother of orange.

Of course, once the pants were finished last weekend I couldn't wait till Easter. He's a growing boy after all. He needs all the pants he can get.

Thank God he's too young to think of tradition. I loved making these pants, but I'm not jumping to make another pair quite yet. Maybe about a year is the right amount of time.

The pattern comes from some ridiculous book that Cara gave me from a yard sale. It's actually the pattern for a bear, but I added floppy ears and made it into a bunny. The book is a million and one christmas crafts all thrown together - knitting, crocheting, sewing, and paper-craft. Because there's so much crap in the book, the directions for each project are painfully brief. Cut out these pattern pieces... Fuggin.... sew em together. It harks back to a simpler time when the Joy of Cooking still included instructions for skinning a squirrel. And mothers knew how to sew absolutely everything, but they still needed help coming up with ideas that are unbelievably tacky.

The big bunny features arms and legs that rotate, thanks to a swivel system made of eyelets and buttons. I know they sell real swivel systems for stuffed animals, but the wall at Joanne's was completely overwhelming so I just went with the eyelets. Hey, the arms turn. What else do you want from me?

I was unhappy with the naked bunny - he looked too much like a bear in my estimation - so I gave him a cut-off shirt and a diaper. When I pulled the pom-pom tail out of a hole in the diaper it gave me a big chuckle.

For now I'm done with bunnies. Anyway, all we need is two, and they're supposed to do the rest. Right?

Also some time last week his hair turned curly. I don't know if it was the flood-induced humidity or the fact that we celebrated a jewish seder on Tuesday, but his mother's genes have suddenly expressed themselves. Seriously, he's crawling around like a little boy baby Shirley Temple.

Next it'll be tap dancing.

If Harvey had emerged from the womb curly headed I would have morned for him. I'm not a big fan of my curly hair, it's hard to keep it from looking messy all the time. So much the worse for a little boy dash teenager dash young man. But now that's it's been a while and my son looks the spitting image of my husband in all features facial, I'm glad to have this little bit of momma-ness reflected back at me.

Or away from me, depending on which direction he's crawling.

5 large tins of powdered formula
3 single-serving formula sizes
two boxes of baby vitamin drops
one bottle
three nipples
one pacifier
one cold compress bag
a sports-themed bib
a to-go travel back-pack
a thousand pamphlets about the importance of starting your baby off right with good nutrition.
Goodnight Moon. As if we didn't already have two friggin copies of Goodnight Moon.

Breast-feeding in America can be hard. Sometimes it's hard because you don't have support from your healthcare provider to begin with. Sometimes it's hard because you don't stop getting Mastitis or because your breasts are riddled with festering sores. Sometimes it's hard because other people are assholes and don't want to see your boob in any fashion other than titillating.

And sometimes it's not that hard, but quitting seems so so so much easier.

This debate is already raging on the internet, and some people have better things to say than I do. I don't have anything more super deep to say; I just look at that image and it chills me to the core. You can unsubscribe from tv and magazines but you can't escape culture when it's mailed direct to your house every afternoon. Whatever it is that the culture values, good or bad. Brain development. Doing things the easy way. Buying shit.

We've been pretty surly in the squibix household over the past week. Okay, so over the past month. Okay, so since I started my new job in March.

Job upheaval tends to bring sandpaper to our marriage. When things work out well we appreciate each other for our varied gifts and skills and financial contributions. When circumstances don't work out, or when the the mechanics of financial contribution are grating or exhausting or painfully boring, our union is not as pleasant and fulfilling as it might be. That's to say the least. To say the most would be to characterize my personality in terms of sit-com wife stereotypes.

One of these days, Alice.

So outside of drinking on the job I'm trying little things to lift my mood. The flower is a start.

Well, the statistical sample may be skewed a little bit. Towards individuals crunchy enough to use their saturday morning to walk in the woods in the rain. nevertheless...

Last night we went out for margaritas with my parents at a restaurant (appropriately titled) Margaritas. Harvey was wearing his easter pants and seedling shirt. My mom recognized the pants and said, "Look what nice pants your momma made you!"

"I made the shirt too," I said. Because I don't let well enough stand.

"You MADE the shirt?!"

"Yeah."

"Oh, you mean you sewed the leaf on it."

"No, I made the shirt."

"..."

"From cloth."

"You made this??? This is incredible! You made a whole shirt? I can't believe you made this!"

"I made the pattern too..."

And with that, my mother's head exploded.

So in conclusion, your level of outlandishness just depends on who you're talkin' too.

Why am I kind of wet? Oh yeah, because I just went running in the rain. I'm not too earthy crunchy to shower!

Please pray for any shade of miracle that you believe is possible.

UPDATE: fuck.

Sewing a baby sun hat with 12 identical pieces is a very heartening sewing project. I recommend it highly for lifting your spirits when something goes wrong. In fact, I'm working on another one right now!

Soon Harvey will have infinite choices for keeping the sun out of his eyes... provided he deigns to keep anything on his head.

Over the next few weeks it turned out we had more in common than we thought. For one, we both had no idea what was going on in earth science. We couldn't follow the scribbling on the board. We didn't hand in our homework. We fell asleep a lot, cheek resting on hand, then eyes slowly and grudgingly blinking closed. A minute later we'd both be face down, lying on an arm, drooling over a notebook. We never talked with each other about anything other than labs, but when you fall asleep two inches from someone else's face, it's surprisingly intimate. The moment when you both wake up with a start you are embarrassed accomplices.

That year Neil was reading "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac and "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs. He was also writing. Tiny scrawl lined up improbably neatly on white copy paper. One day I asked to see and he handed me a stack of ten double-sided pages. I poured over the short story later that day in study hall. I was mesmerized. The prose was on par with anything I'd read in the New Yorker fiction edition. There was sex and intrigue. Droppings of the F bomb. Downward spiral swirling around a burned-out young man living in a New York apartment. His refrigerator light was burned out, but when he put his hand in the fridge it was still cold. That detail is the bit I remember. It was so vivid and real. An observation of base reality and yet a metaphor for our entire young lives.

Neil went to college at Oberlin. My boyfriend brought back reports that he had run into him while touring the Ohio campus. He waxed awe-struck. Neil was the picture of a young man as an artist. Dressed in black. Prolific through the wee hours of the morning. The brand of cigarettes he smoked was impossibly cool.

Neil moved to New York and pursued the life you might imagine. Trips to third world countries. Drugs and drinking and profligacy - but never too much. As a writer he tried everything both 100% and as an observer. He took in each experience, held it against his cheek like tobacco. Felt its tingle. Spit.

Apart from his writing I don't know what kind of adult Neil became, although I feel justified in saying that it was something impossibly cool. What I imagine, from knowing him ten plus years ago and from reading his missives recently, is that he lived life head-on.

This is what Neil wrote recently about boxing:

Training twice a day can be exhausting, like my body’s held together by naproxen and Tiger Balm. But this seems like the only way it can be right now.  Sometimes I feel like I'm bored by everything but training, or else emotionally overwhelmed by it; other times I feel like if I'm exhausted and in pain, then this can't be a vacation, which is good, because a two-month vacation would be frivolous.  Because if this is a vacation, then I would feel pressure to be having fun.  I would be on a failed fucking vacation, which is the most depressing thing I can imagine.  

But it goes deeper than that, for sure.  A couple people have asked me about what it is I like about boxing... ...In boxing, even failure is something that you can hold on to.

If we can say one beautiful perfect thing about a disgusting and terrible tragedy, it's that Neil wasn't waiting on the rest of us to start living. He was effing doing it. Life doesn't make sense. It's beautiful and crappy. Sometimes it feels like it's going on unbearably long, and then it ends far too abruptly. But however it goes, you live it damnit. You live the shit out of it.

The following quote is attributed to Marvis Leyrer.

Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely, in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting "Holy shit, what a ride!"

I have this fantasy about Neil's last moments - that he looked squarely at death and felt no regrets. The hard-edged curious mystic that he was, I imagine Neil stared death down in his last slit second and said "Okay man - Let's fuckin do this."

But his mother. Good Lord, His mother.

On Wednesday night Harvey got a fever - the highest fever he's ever gotten so far. He woke up around midnight screaming. SCREAMING. His little body was so piping hot that we immediately gave him tylenol and started sponging his head. After a few minutes he calmed down and felt cooler. We took his temperature and it was 103.3 Holy shit - if it was that high after we brought it down what must it have been before? Dan and I took turns holding him and working the cold compress. He laid in my arms and just moaned. My baby. My poor little baby boy. During the day he's bouncing and playing and getting his chubby arms dirty - but when he's sick in the night, my poor little thing, he's just so small and weak and fragile.

For Neil's mom the worst thing in the world has happened. It doesn't matter that her child is 27 years older than mine. My heart is broken over the loss of a friend but for her loss it's broken open double.

Neil's mom very kindly shared details about the funeral service. It will be next Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Douglass Funeral Home in Lexington Center.

The t-shirt is soft and stretchy with room to grow in. But oh, those belled sleeves. Every time I look at them I cringe. I couldn't loosen the tension on my machine any further, so this is what I got. Jersey knit, you are a beguiling temptress. Why are you so soft and common yet so difficult to work?

But there is hope! Next week is my birthday and I have a very exciting present on the way... It's a magical contraption that combines four spools of thread with a die cutter such that future t-shirts will look twice as good with half the effort. Yes - I'm getting a serger.

The stack of "fits weird" is piling up in anticipation. Harvey is excited.

Happy boobquake. Although I have to admit, this is really more like geyser territory.

I don't know how I managed to score Michelle as my lab partner that year. Even in high school she was strikingly beautiful. Tall and graceful with dark silky hair. Headshot-perfect cheek bones that demanded the attention of rouge. She was like a comic book fantasy woman. She wore complicatedly-laced tops torn from the pages of Seventeen Magazine. Her dark jeans poured all the way down to her un-sensible heals. Her slacks ended neatly in the original hem - unlike mine which were always rolled up two or three times. Michelle was the only person in our class who could pull off oversized hoop earrings. She wore stacks of tiny bracelets that jingled. She looked like she belonged on the runway, rather than in a classroom behind an acid-stained bunsen burner.

By some feat of cosmic gymnastics, Michelle and I happened to be born on the same day. This seemed impossible to me. I sat at least a foot shorter, with unruly curly hair and a complexion that could barely abide make-up. If Michelle and I were born on the same day then it must have been on different planets. She could hypnotize high-school boys with a selectively raised eyebrow. She knew all the Spanish words to Sublime's hit 'Caress Me Down.' In 1998 she was seventeen going on twenty-seven.

Today Michelle and I are both 29 years old. I'd like to think I've caught up with her in some respects, but most likely not. Today I am wearing hoop earrings and heals, but they're both fun-sized miniature of the real thing. Michelle inhabits another planet of ease and style - where birthday dinners happen in bars brimming with loud laughter and brightly colored martinis. She won't spend the evening at home with dinner wedged into the attention span of a demandingly baby.

I'm groping for some metaphor involving high school Chemistry. You can't compare helium with neon, for example, yet both are noble gases. I apologize for the lame attempt - both because it's poor writing and also because it's blatantly untrue. I have always longed to be tall, lovely, effortlessly graceful. As my twenties come to a close, the best I've achieved is acceptance that I'll never get there. I can get saddle up next to flawless. I can write its lab report. And then it's back to my unkempt reality. Husband and baby and a snot-covered birthday. In a way, I'm really looking forward to my thirties.

So happy birthday to me and Michelle. Our faces might not belong in the same book, but I'm glad they're there anyway.