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April 30, 2006

kangapoo

Apparently,
I'm Kanga-Pooh.

And if there's a Pooh character whose knees are crap (isn't Rabbit injured once in while?) we can add him to my list.

We did 10 miles today (should've been 12) and my knees were just CRAP. They hurt. the. whole. time. Like, right from the beginning.

What's more frustrating is that Deb is so freeekin biomechanically efficient, so freakishly symmetrical, that she can run for years in the same shoes and never really hurt anywhere. I know this for a fact because she has run in the same shoes (nearly) since we started (I'm NOT COUNTING those Geena Davis sneakers you got at a garage sale, DEB!!).

Grr. Grrrrrrrrr.

Off to shower, ice the knees, and wallow a little. I'll have to find a big jar of hunny so I can feel a little better.

Posted by mryonker at 02:41 PM | Comments (1)

April 27, 2006

for fran

Mary Chapin Carpenter's version of John Lennon's "Grow Old With Me"

Brian's sister is getting married in July and has asked my sister Fran and me to sing. This is the first of several songs we'll learn (mom will have to write a harmony for this one)--and then hopefully B's sister will be able to have some to pick from.

Posted by mryonker at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2006

what was happening in the white space

Ok, so the reason I've been rather silent here the past week or so is because I'm in the throes of some hard stuff:

This past Sunday the schedule called for our first 20-miler. I prepared myself to be crippled for a few days afterward, but things went amazingly well. I'm proud to say that I am not now and was not even near crippled yesterday. In fact, Sunday after we ran I drove into Syr to meet a few students and was pleasantly surprised that I could drive (a clutch!) without discomfort. The worst pain I endured after the run was when I got into the shower and the water hit the chafe in my gluteal fold. (I just searched for about a half hour for a good pic to link to for that, but alas, I'm not finding anything decent. Imagine.) Also, Deb and I discovered what might be the best candy to eat on a long run: Junior Mints. Soft enough that you won't kill yourself choking on them, cool enough that they don't make your mouth a gooky mess, and you'd eat 'em even if you weren't running (unlike other popular running candy like gummy savers, which I would NOT if I weren't running--blech).

The kittens grew out of the crib, so I had to move them into the laundry room. This isn't too big a deal, except the only way to get into our bathroom is through the laundry room, and now the laundry room door is barricaded so the kittens don't infiltrate the house.

And the barricade wouldn't be such a big deal, either, except now J-baby has decided it's time to do the potty thing. I figured he would be a bear to potty train, since he won't say but three words (though he does have two new words: bee-bee for train, and YEE-haw for swing). But Brian has been sitting him on the toilet every so often these days, and over the weekend he did a couple #2s in the pot, and we've been off the diaper ever since (and for the record, pull-ups ARE diapers--the best way to do the potty thing is to put them in those cloth underwear with the extra panels. Yes, I know you have to rinse them out and change their outfit if they have an accident, but good gravy-- A PULL UP IS A DIAPER!!) He is doing EXTRAORDINARILY well for a nearly-mute binky sucking 2-year-old.

I'm reading Foucault's _The Order of Things_. I am going slowly, reading carefully, and finding it not too frightening? Good, even? Like, I understand what he's talking about (granted, I'm only on chapter 2). I've read him in bits and chunks before in readers, and have always found him *useful.* I do understand, especially after chapter one and the Velazquez painting, how people might get a little frustrated with him; however, his work is fitting quite nicely into other discussions of epistemology I'm reading by Robert Scott. [blah blah blah I won't bore y'all with my exam stuff here]

Gearing up for the end of the semester, trying to stay on top of the multiple revisions I allow my students to submit (that they then wait to submit until the last week of classes). Excited for the summer which will bring warm weather and time off, not excited for the summer because I will be mostly unemployed which will require us to live off Ramen noodles and what ever I can eek out of the garden (and however many zucchini Chuck and Deb will let me steal).

Posted by mryonker at 02:12 PM | Comments (8)

April 09, 2006

kitten profile: Emmitt

Here's Emmitt. He's by far the biggest boy of the litter, with a head twice the size of the smallest's.

We have to pull him out of the crib once in a while so some of the others can nurse. He likes to lay sideways across mom's belly, blocking half the teats.

We began calling him "Em-head," because of the perfect M that his stripes form over his eyes. That evolved into Emmed, which then turned into Emmitt.

He is by far Brian's favorite, so he is in the running for being the one (or one of the couple) we end up keeping.

Posted by mryonker at 03:44 PM | Comments (7)

April 08, 2006

sex ed via pop music

So yesterday afternoon, we all piled in the car to run a few errands and grab some Friday haddock.

Short trips in the car frequently involve discussions and arguments about the radio. B and I normally enjoy car time to talk, but Hannah and Jack *love* listening to music in the car. B and I are pretty generous with our taste in music, the presets include rock, pop, country, hip-hop, and "easy-listening" stations, and we just run through them until we find something we all like.

Hannah and Jack would prefer we leave it either on the pop or hip-hop stations (frequently their playlists overlap), which is fine with us.

We have an ongoing fight right now specifically about the song "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper) by T-Pain and Mike Jones. When this song comes on the radio, I flip it, even if the station is playing the "clean" version (Wit a Dancer). Hannah protests (imagine whiney nine-year old voice): "Hey, I LIKE that song!!" Until yesterday, I would simply tell her that I didn't, and that was that.

Yesterday when it came on B had run into some welder's supply place for a second and we waited in the car. I flipped the station, and Hannah protested, this time asking me what my problem was with the song.

Great. Another lesson about sex borne out of pop music .

So I ask her, "Do you *know* what a stripper is?"

She reddens. "Yes."

"Would *you* want your job to be showing your body to people for money?"

She begins to sink into the seat, her eyes willing me to stop. "No. God, Mom."

At this point, B gets back in the car. "What's going on?" he asks.

"I'm explaining to Hannah why I don't like to listen to the stripper song." I turn back to Hannah. "When I was younger, Hannah, I had a friend who had a baby--the baby was your age; we were pregnant together. When her baby was about a year old, my friend had no job and no money. She went to work at a club as a dancer. And while she made decent money--good money, even--it was a hard life. She was always worried about the way she looked, because if she didn't look a certain way, she wouldn't make as much money. She was always worried about the people from the club following her. And even though she worked at night so that she could go to school during the day and spend time with her baby, she ended up quitting school and having a lot of horrible surgery to change her body."

Brian looked at me--he knew this friend of mine, too. He interjected: "Yes, but she made a choice to...do what she did. She didn't have to work at that club. Strippers don't *have* to strip, they choose to."

Then, I went off. I talked about what *is* choice in a culture where the options are: sell what you've got, be homeless, or sell what you've got. That circumstances don't always present themselves as options--that agency and the opportunity to make the "right" or "good" decision aren't available to everyone.

When I came down from the tippy top of my soapbox, the family looked at me. It was quiet for a moment.

And then Jack, who's 6, said, "They take their clothes off? I'd like to see that."

Posted by mryonker at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2006

fragmentation

I know I've written about this here before, seeing as this blog is *supposed* to be about motherhood and academia.

I rarely get sustained, uninterrupted time to work. Yesterday at a meeting with my exam chair, he says (after reading the katrillionth draft of my exam proposal) "It's like every sentence is a thesis statement."

Probably because everytime I sit down, I get to eek about one sentence out, so I'd better make it a good one. :) The good chair, in his infinite and kind wisdom, gave me the rest of our meeting to sit quietly and revise--without ever having to get up a to wipe a heinie, pour someone a bowl of cereal, break up a fight, or otherwise fend off small hands grabbing at my arms while I typed.

I'm not sure how long I sat there. It didn't seem like long, but I can't begin to describe how valuable it was. And the value was not simply in the fact that once I was finished with the revision he deemed it ready to go to the graduate committee. The value was in an important lesson, one that I should have learned earlier that day when it took me from 9am until 2pm to write ONE assignment sheet:

I *can NOT* get any real decent work done at home. This is a lesson that I don't think we working moms take very kindly to--which might be the reason I've been here working for nearly 4 years now and it's only REALLY occurring to me right now. I don't think it's a welcome lesson because it undermines what we (or what I, anyway) take great pride in: the ability to juggle the two most important and competing components of our lives. It makes me see clearly those trips to McDondald's, me with a backpack full of books, for what they really were: me reading a sentence, then opening a ketchup packet. Reading a sentence, then rescuing someone from the top of the slide. Reading a sentence, then wiping up a spilled drink. Etc, etc, ad nauseum. Or I'm writing, and it's, of course, the same. Fragmented. Lurching. Painfully slow.

Posted by mryonker at 08:34 AM | Comments (7)

April 04, 2006

a new mantra and bad email

Today I'm fully better. Taught a really good class this afternoon (only one kid's eyelids drooped during discussion/lecture). The sun shone! (SHINED! WHAT-EVAR!!)

I'm practicing a new mantra:

"Let me think about it."

That way, when someone asks if I can do something for them, I will put them off. Then, they will either a) find someone else or b) ask me again and I can then say ::deep breath:: sorrybutnotthistimemaybenexttime.

What's funny about this mantra, though, is that really I've been practicing it ever since Hannah could talk. For the kids, it's been:

"We'll see."

For some reason, though, Hannah and Jack now immediately translate that into "Mommy will say YES LATER!!"

I wonder how that happened.

I have successfully said no (in the past several days) to the following requests: babysitting for the kid down the street (who used to practically live here last year), setting up a blog for a fledgling not-to-be-named-here group, and to TWO (count 'em) extra events for our Girl Scouts service unit.

In other news: in a bad move on my part (bad move = doing anything with email/server stuff w/o first consulting the almighties GR or CGB) I tried to move my email yesterday, as Syr has changed email clients.

For almost two whole days, I had NO EMAIL!! It was surreal, actually. I felt as though I had lost some essential organ or limb. And of course when it finally came back up, I had about 100 messages to wade through.

I'm still wading, so if you've emailed me in the last two or so days, I'm not ignoring you, I promise!!

Posted by mryonker at 10:48 PM | Comments (0)

April 03, 2006

let's try this again: ANEW

Funny, after I posted this weekend about April being the end of March and therefore the symbolic end of the early-spring funk, I caught the flu.

Talk about irony. But hey--isn't it always?

So I've been sitting, shivering under layers of blankets, for two days. Now, this evening, my throat finally doesn't feel like I'm rubbing my tonsils against dry concrete every time I swallow. My head is still a thumping mass of snot-making misery, but relatively speaking, I'm on the up-and-up.

I attribute my body's keen ability to bounce back to:

1. Golden seal. I take it in caplet form, which also has some echinacea in it. But I think the golden seal is what really kicks the crap out of sick. (I only take it when I feel like I'm getting sick, or when I am sick.)

2. Hot lemon water with cayenne pepper. This shit will make you RIGHT. I put a little honey in it too, but I'm not sure why; I sure as hell can't taste the honey. (A word of caution: do NOT inhale as you sip this drink!!)

3. Otto's german horseradish mustard. It was the only thing I could taste yesterday, and so I ate it on crackers with some cheese and this fancy bologna that B got for his birthday (yes, our friends are...er, creative gift givers!). I sat down now with a dab of it with some cheese and crackers, and I can hardly bare the burn of it.

4. My children. Having to care for Jack, post-op, who is the BEST little trouper in the world. He rarely complains, and after less than a week he gets into the bath with NO cajoling and lets us apply the required ointment to his sutures (which are in a very *very* sensitive spot) without a tear. How can I be pitiful and miserable when I have him for a role model? And Hannah, who is suffering with a sore throat and headache as badly as I am, stayed home today from school. The weather was gorgeous, and she spent the sunny afternoon outside playing quietly with J-baby while I did some cleaning. I am surrounded by beautiful, good-natured, kids! They asked for cream of wheat and oranges for dinner! I am a fortunate mother, I am.

I am upset that I missed a long training run this weekend, and I probably will not be able to make it up (17 miles). But sheesh. I could also say this: Hey! Since I was sick this weekend, I got OUT of running 17 miles! Woo HOO!

:)

Posted by mryonker at 09:18 PM | Comments (4)

April 01, 2006

anew

Today is April.

I had a small revelation yesterday (or, it might have been an aneurysm):

After a quick IM meeting with a beloved advisor, I realized that my recurring early spring funk is always in March. I always shun the brackets. I always ignore my sister-in-law's birthday with something akin to bitter indignance. I routinely use spring break to eat and wallow in self-pity. I have, until this year, avoided people, conferences, traveling, or anything that might brighten the gray, cold, damp hell that is March in CNY.

But TODAY IS APRIL.

So, happy birthday to my honey.

And instead of April Fool, I offer April fun:


Here is a picture of my desk. (No, really. I did NOT stage this.) Can you spot:

A crust of peanut butter toast (my breakfast)

The composition book that houses my current notes on blogs in the classroom

A bag full of schnacks from my cousin that should be thrown away RIGHT NOW since they are over a week old

My iPod cord

Two pics of Hannah, but none of any of the other kids

A toothbrush

Dead wireless hub

Cs program

Phonebook

Well. Some are easier to find than others. When life gives you a mess, make a seek-and-find.

Posted by mryonker at 08:27 AM | Comments (5)