LB came home sick from work today, and immediately took to bed with his Vitamin Water and a large hazelnut chocolate bar. I am an attentive wife, so I rubbed his outrageously long femurs for him (this is more innocent than it sounds) and even rubbed his foot when he got that thing where the middle toe tries to break ranks and go off on its own toward the calf.
It got me wondering: if a person is short, does the point where a touch on the thigh feels suggestive rather than therapeutic begin earlier than it does for a tall person? We tested this out, and though our sample group was small it seems that the Zone is defined according to scale rather than absolute inches. My knee is no more erogenous than his, despite the fact that it's about 7 inches closer to the action.
I'm working diligently on my squares for Olive's special big-girl bed blanket, of which I got depressingly little accomplished during our long drives to and from Missouri. Apparently, knitting in the car makes me queasy, much like reading in the car, driving the car, being in the car and not driving, the state of Iowa, that amusement park ride that looks like a Viking ship and goes back and forth, back and forth until it finally goes all the way around, wearing only one contact lens, Olive's first day at a new school/camp, Olive's last day at school/camp, the smell of airline coffee, closing my eyes while I'm on the swings (especially during the back-swing)...you get the picture. Lots of things make me queasy. I don't think I have ever gone a whole year without throwing up. In fact, throwing up makes me queasy, and once I begin I have a very hard time stopping without a sojourn in triage and a bolus injection of Fenergan. (As an aside--if you're ever in the ER and you've been waiting a loooong time, ask a nurse for an emesis basin while making pulsing motions with your abdomen. You'll be seen ahead of gunshot victims.)
I knit very little on this trip, and I did not puke.
I know what you're thinking. A simple, blanket (hah) statement like, "didn't get much knitting done on the road," would have sufficed. But I set out to make many squares and did not succeed. I must lay my failure in front of you, because I'm a confessional blogger: kind of like how Anne Sexton was a confessional poet, except I have no interest in asphyxiation. (In fact, the garage poses no comfort whatsoever, with its smell of gasoline and its association with the act of driving. If you ever hear I've expired in the garage in what looks like a suicide, immediately suspect foul play.)
Now, this project requires 49 squares, and 25 are to be striped squares. Since knitting the striped squares will be more interesting, I'm depriving myself of this joy until I have finished two solid-colored squares in each color. It's a deprivation without merit, benefitting no one and having very little effect on my personal growth. And yet, I can't resist this small punishment.
When we arrived at Susan's guest house, we found the pantry stocked with Olive's favorite foods. It was almost as if Susan had found an online record detailing all of Olive's prefer...hey...
This is a horse (of course). Susan's horses look just like the ones on TV, except no talking.
Agatha and Abbi, making flag cake. It was Agatha's first time, and she didn't understand why it was supposed to be baked in a rectangular pan until it was time to decorate.
Sabina holding a kitten. In the words of the immortal Bill Baughn (indulge me--it's not every day I get to quote from The Myoelectric Myth):
A prosthetist has made claim to have developed a prosthetic hand with "the sense of touch". When a child can put his prosthetic hand through a hole in a box and tell us he has found a kitten, that the kitten is warm and furry, that it is licking his hand and his tongue is rough and wet, then and only then will it be honest and ethical to use such a term.
This is Romeo. He's 137 in dog years. Clover was unafraid of him, due to either his lack of initiative or lack of teeth.
Olive with a Bomb Pop. Remember Bomb Pops? These were bigger when we were littler weren't they? Come on, you 'member...
Susan and Christina in a mother/daughter shot. I'm sorry they're blurry; they kept making tiny, almost imperceptible movements, as if they'd had too much caffeine.
Agatha, Brett and a Roman candle.
Olive walking briskly.
Olive up high.
Abbi, Mercy Grace, Agatha, Brett and sparklers. At one point in the visit, Susan mentioned how cool it looked when Anatole did things with his little arm. Apparently, seeing people handle pyrotechnics with their toes has gotten old hat.
Gideon (Susan's youngest) watching the fireworks while gently running his toy helicopter atop Clover's head.
The holidays have a way of sneaking up on you, don't they? I could have sworn Purim wasn't until next winter, but at Camp Ramah it is being observed on Wednesday. Olive came home with instructions to bring a costume with her tomorrow, so instead of editing photos from our Missouri trip, I spent the late afternoon with a glue gun and some artificial flowers.
We're not sure what she is, but it involves a party dress that had to be let out a bit(Olive's measurements are a perfect 24-24-24 and the dress is 23-23-23) and a headband with pink and blue hydrangeas. Flower princess, maybe?
Though our visit was far too short, we did accomplish a lot. We communed with nature:
We held kittens...
...and pyrotechnics.
We're very tired.
And sunburned.
I will decompress slowly in the days ahead, sharing photos and details of our wonderful vacation Chez Easley. And I will work in a circular fashion, discussing the drives there and back, the first and last days of our trip, and concluding with the 4th of July. I'll begin with a few words about Iowa, and a quiz with a prize.
This trip marked the end of my perfect record of never having been to Iowa. Unlike many experiences my parents shielded me from during my over-protected childhood, this one bespeaks no alarmist behavior on their part. My apologies to those of you who live in Iowa or who love Iowa, and to those of you who've never been but have, perhaps, been holding it out there as an experience to postpone and savor.
You may be thinking that having been born and raised in Wisconsin and now living in Illinois, Iowa would come as no great shock to me. You'd be wrong. In fact, the drive was painful enough drive to register as a Learning Experience. I learned that I'm waaaay more agoraphobic than claustrophobic, and that the sky looms even larger in a treeless landscape. Olive slept through as much of Iowa as she possibly could, then sat up with a gasp and a cackle when we crossed back over the Mississippi into Illinois.
On the drive out to Missouri, I still had the optimistic naivete of someone driving through Iowa for the first time and assumed that since we were relatively near a city I'd heard of, Starbucks couldn't be too far away. Yes, I'm one of those people who gets a cozy, secure feeling at the sight of that round, green logo, with its promise of slightly citrusy and occasionally burnt coffee. But I was wrong! Starbucks was not in striking distance. I don't even want to think about how far we were from the nearest check cashing place.
Now for the quiz: where in Iowa were these three photos taken?
I'm looking for the name of the one city nearest to those three pics, with the usual rules applying: you must not share my DNA or last name, no Googling, and if you're guessing with 100% confidence make sure you sound all tentative and insecure in your comment. If there's more than one accurate guess I'll do a drawing.
Early tomorrow morning (well, today--you know what I mean) we are leaving for a long car trip. This is the first vacation we have ever taken as a family in which we were not visiting Perlmans or Sullivans. Think about that for a moment: that's pretty big stuff, isn't it? We are going to see people we aren't even related to.
We're driving to Missouri to visit my pal Miss Susan and her family. Susan and I have known each other for 13 years, and have seen each other exactly three times. We met on a listserv for parents of amputees, where we discovered our shared objection to fitting congenital upper extremity amputees with prosthetics during infancy. You know, the usual. You probably remember Susan best as the person who created this beautiful book:
Susan has more than twice as many children than I do, two of her children have no arms at all, and she has grandchildren. She has lots of pets and even livestock. However, she does not have an autistic nonverbal child so I've sooooo got her beat, there. Hah!
Of course, since this vacation involves a long car trip, I have planned accordingly by purchasing a Long Car Trip Knitting Project.
Many colors of Blue Sky Alpaca...
...out of which I will knit 48 garter stitch squares to make a very soft patchwork blanket. When I get back I'll sew it all together and then do a garter stitch saw-tooth edging.
Now, if you were a small nonverbal person in possession of such a very special blanket, wouldn't that convince you that your Big Girl Bed was a superlative place to spend the entire night, and not just part of it? Say yes.
I will be back on Monday evening (Tuesday afternoon, to you) and will have many pictures to share in which Sullivan children blend right in with everyone else. I'm excited for my children. It's a rare thing to be an unusual-looking family and have another unusual-looking family you can hang with where no one will think it's Weird that you're homeschooled, missing a limb or two, and have a larger than average number of siblings.
But mostly I'm excited for me. Because when I'm hangin' out with Susan, I'm not Marginal Mom who "must be a very patient person." If anything, I'm a dilettante, a rube, a slacker at this whole mom thing.
My mother always told me that if you make just one friend in your life who truly wishes you well and wants good things to happen to you, you're lucky. I am very lucky. Nuff said.
I'll leave you with today's notes from Aliza:
Today your camper participated in:art, music, sports, tefillah, pie-making for the harvest.
Today your camper especially enjoyed : decorating her feet for walking in freedom, dancing at the fake wedding: biggest smile EVER.
We marched like soldiers to get the flag of Israel for independence. (Please send Olive with a new pair of pants; hers got dirty.) She went to a fake wedding and had an amazing time in honor of celebration day, and ended off the day with a party, snow cones, and party hats. We had a fantastic day.
If there's anything that feels more like butcher's string than unmercerized cotton, it would have to be organic, undyed unmercerized cotton. It's always amused me that the less is done to a hank of yarn, the more expensive it is. (Rowan charges much less for "dead" cotton that comes in pretty colors). I remember seeing a hank of thick-and-thin yarn hanging in the window of The Knitting Basket in Montclair, CA. It was undyed, unspun, UNWASHED wool with embedded bits of twig and dirt, scratchy as all hell with barbs that were actually visible. It may have bleated at me, and it cost $45, ten years ago. I know you're wondering: no, I did not buy it and I regretted this bitterly when I came running back into the store the next day and it was gone.
This yarn is so all-natural that I'm pretty sure it's biodegrading as I knit. It splits as badly as you'd expect unmercerized, loosely-spun cotton to split. And yet, I love it. What is happening to me? I am clearly Not Myself, yarn-wise, and I find it oddly worrisome to see my tastes broaden. I define myself by what I don't like just as much (if not more) than by what I do like. What next? Will I start accepting the use of "gifted" as the past tense of to give? Will I start thinking Elizabeth Hasselbeck is perky? Will I begin to like perky? I'm envisioning a huge downward slide, and when I hit the bottom I'll be reading Gwyneth Paltrow's blog while eating hemp cereal with Soy Moo.
The organic pile of vegetable matter you see above is hopefully going to become this little coat:
from Debbie Bliss' Knitting Workbook. The pattern is called "Child's Smock" and it's supposed to be knit in pieces, but I cast on all the stitches for the back and both fronts on one circular needle. As you can see on the pic below, I'm using lines of garter stitch (2 stitches wide) as phony seams, to make the counting easier when I do the gathering decreases. The body and sleeves will be in the beige/gray color, with seed stitch hem bands in green. The sailor collar will also be green.
From the age of the child in the picture you'd think this coat would be too small for Olive, but Debbie Bliss patterns run very W I D E. I can be fairly sure that adding a few inches in length is all I need to do to make the 3T size fit short and portly Miss Olive.
Olive will wear this coat on cool days in early fall. That's a little joke, for all my readers within striking distance of the Great Lakes. Of course we have no early fall; it goes right from being 83 degrees and oppressively humid to -3 windchill with snow that appears to be falling sideways. If this fall's weather follows the usual pattern, Olive will wear the coat exactly once, and that will be just as well since by the end of the day it will have grown four inches and the buttonholes will be too stretched out for future closure.
This has the unmistakable echo of a project I will never finish, and which will wrap up its time with me as the grand prize at the end of a quiz on Knitters-Knitters involving historic Milwaukee monuments. Hopefully by writing all this down, I'm reverse-jinxing the coat into becoming one of those garments that "seems to knit itself" while a pair of socks in New Jersey amounts to nothing more than a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome for the knitter.
Great. I just blew it. Now I've ruined my knitting karma by wishing another knitter bad progress. Sometime next month, expect to see photos here of the Pabst Mansion and the Spite House on Prospect Avenue.
Today your camper participated in: swimming, art, sports, playground, Judaics.
Your camper especially enjoyed: making a home run in tennis baseball.
Olive cleaned up all the paper towels in the bathroom by herself. She is an amazing helper. She enjoyed eating the ice cream we get on Fridays.
She knows her schedule really well now and can associate pictures with places. Each and every day she is becoming more and more independent from changing, putting food in the garbage and cleaning up after herself. I'm so proud. She is enjoying playing with a lanyard and key chain Rozzie gave her and having a blast at swimming with Rozzie.
Later the same day.
Monday, 6/29
Today your camper participated in: swimming, art, music, sports, nature.
Your camper especially enjoyed: dancing to Old McDonald in Hebrew.
She walked off the bus and right into camp with such a smile. She was ready for camp to begin. She is such a big helper when we need to clean up. Olive has mastered the schedule and shows such independence. I'm looking forward to another wonderful week.
Today I went to the dentist's office with the 5 big kids (Olive had already had her check-up). Two Mexican women sat next to us and began speaking to each other, in Spanish, about Sabina and Anatole's missing left arms--wondering aloud why they weren't wearing prosthetic hands. One of the women speculated that perhaps we didn't have enough money to buy them, and the other one answered that couldn't be it because the older girl had braces on her teeth. They started getting louder and more obvious in their discussion, adding hand gestures into the mix, to the point that one didn't need to speak Spanish at all to get what and whom they were talking about.
I stared at the younger woman, hard, and she asked me if I understand Spanish. I said yes (I'm hardly proficient, but I got the gist of it) . She asked me if I'd understood everything they'd just said, and I said yes again. Then the older woman said, without missing a beat, "¡Ay, qué bonitos los niños!" as if she'd been saying nice things about us the entire time. After that the younger woman made small talk with me, asking about my knitting, pretending to be interested, saying a fond good-bye when they left. I smiled like an idiot and told her about the patchwork blanket I was making, acting as if everything that had transpired was wiped from memory once the discussion switched to English.
At the time I was wryly amused and I told LB about the exchange (out of the kids' earshot). He laughed and said it sounded like something our beloved G-Lo could use in a routine. I still wasn't done telling this story so I called my mom, and in recounting what had happened I realized that I was not amused or even "over it," not at all. I was, at least temporarily, back in the land of why don't your children wear prosthetics? I have not been there in ages, since long before Olive was even born, and I wasn't expecting to end up there this afternoon. These days I spend so much time on Planet Autism that at first, I didn't get why these two women were staring at Anatole when he wasn't even yelling plah! plah! plah! or doing pincers-pincers in the air. I'm much more fluent when it comes to fielding the confrontations inspired by those types of anomalies.
I know these women didn't intend for me to understand them and did not mean any harm. But it would have been nice if, at the very least, they'd have done me the favor of looking embarrassed.
